ArticleNature communications2014
Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.
Article in Nature communications, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed.
- Phenotypic integration and the organization of discrete facial variation.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Autistic Individuals Do Not Alter Visual Processing Strategy During Encoding Versus Recognition of Faces: A Hidden Markov Modeling Approach.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Rethinking the bodily self: evidence from the enfacement illusion in women at risk for eating disorders.Journal of eating disorders · 2025Article
- Positional programs in early murine facial development and their role in human facial shape variability.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Apemen Faces Database (ApeFD).Scientific data · 2025Article
- Cues of trait dominance elicit inferences of psychological ownership.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Development of a Novel Soft Tissue Measurement Device for Individualized Finite Element Modeling in Custom-Fit CPAP Mask Evaluation.Annals of biomedical engineering · 2024Article
- Sexual Dimorphism: The Interrelation of Shape and Color.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Novel online enfacement illusion for investigating self-perception in mental disorders: an experimental study protocol.Journal of eating disorders · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A commoneLife · 2024Article
- Article
- Horizontal face information is the main gateway to the shape and surface cues to familiar face identity.PloS one · 2024Article
- Facial Expression of TIPI Personality and CHMP-Tri Psychopathy Traits in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) : Evidence for Honest Signalling?Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Evidence for vocal signatures and voice-prints in a wild parrot.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Serial dependence in facial identity perception and visual working memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Shaping faces: genetic and epigenetic control of craniofacial morphogenesis.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Using data-driven phenotyping to investigate the impact of sex on 3D human facial surface morphology.Journal of anatomy · 2023Article
- What Is Written on a Dog's Face? Evaluating the Impact of Facial Phenotypes on Communication between Humans and Canines.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Specialized Networks for Social Cognition in the Primate Brain.Annual review of neuroscience · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.