It's like if you'd never been on a bus in your life, and then someone came up to you and said, "Please support my initiative to make people stop pissing on the bus." You have no frame of reference for these urine swamp buses, so you'd probably refuse, even though you definitely wouldn't like it if you actually trudged onto one of them.

And research, the savvy little scamp that it is, backs that up. Two economists studied data on 15,000 high school students from their teens into early adulthood, and found that those ranked less attractive were consistently more likely to end up as criminals than those ranked as having average looks. Those with average looks were more likely than those considered very attractive. The researchers speculated that since being unattractive makes you less likely to get hired for a job (and even if you do get hired, you're likely to earn less money), you're kind of being nudged toward a life of crime.

As a secondary kick in the pants for the facially challenged, there's also research that shows the less attractive you are, the more likely you are to face stiffer punishments for your crimes. As a society, we really put a lot of effort into making ugly people regret their appearance, both consciously and unconsciously.

In fact, teachers will actually put less effort into teaching kids they don't think have attractive qualities. We don't mean they find your kid attractive in a creepy way; just that if your kid has features that are generally considered unappealing, their teachers crank up not giving a shit to higher levels.

The best guess as to how all of this works is that the very ugliest among us have the highest variance in smarts -- they represent both the most and least intelligent. So if you see a guy in a lab coat with Einstein hair, you'll assume he's the most brilliant mind in the room. But run into that same person in the park, and you'll assume they're about to ask you for spare change. And to complicate things even further ...

Or put more simply, this is the scientists' way of saying: "They were studying while everyone else was making friends and having sex."

Ugly animals get the same treatment as ugly people: They're ignored and generally unloved. In terms of animal research and conservation, if you're not huge, ferocious, or cute as a button, you can go fuck a boot for all anyone cares. Even if the animal is endangered, if it has nothing going for it in a clickbaity sort of way, then you may as well kiss it goodbye. No one is making a video compilation of "adorable mussels reunited with their owners."

Australia, which straddles the fence between being overrun with adorable koalas and being overrun with terrifyingly gross everything else, is a great microcosm of this in action. Cute animals get the funding, ugly ones get bent. It's all about pandering to your audience, and if people need to support conservation efforts financially, they want to know their money is going toward saving adorable things.

That's right, animals: Natural selection isn't just about looking attractive to other members of your own species. It's about whether or not we want to nuzzle you.

Trying to kick the unattractiveness? Try starting with using a mirror.

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For more, check out 5 Scientific Reasons You're Better Off Being Unattractive and The Science Of Sexy: 5 Tips To Make Yourself More Attractive.

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