Quote Originally Posted by ThisYouWillDo View Post

Are you saying beauty is about symmetry or that it is symmetry. The experiment seems to suggest the latter, and I reject that. Also, it doesn't account for the fact that I think wifey is ugly and Thorne thinks she's beautiful. And it seems to me that handsome men have more asymmetrical faces while pretty women have symmetrical ones.
Neither, I'm saying that science is able to correlate beauty to some things that are in fact measurable. I'm making the point that some of the things we attribute to the human experience, music and art and the concepts of beauty, can in fact be correllated to factors in the physical world that science can attempt to explain. Countering the specific statement you made that science couldn't explain beauty.

You may call your wife ugly and someone else may say she's beautiful and you would likely both place her in the same relative position on a continuum of faces. The words are qualitative, not quantitative. But regardless of the word, you probably would both rate her relatively similarly in comparison to other faces.

And... familiarity breeds contempt. LOL. And variety is the spice of life... so of course one tires of the same face after a while. Another reason you might use different adjectives.

No, no, no! That's quite wrong (apart from the "arrogant" bit) - I am arguing that science does not know everything. I am trying to counter the suggestion that everything can be explained by science now, or at some time in the future. Currently (I am told), science regards atoms as "unknowable".[/QUOTE]
I will always disagree with the one statement 'or at some time in the future.'
That's religion masquerading as philosophy trying to deny science.

"Science" has regarded stuff we understand very well today as unknowable in the past. That particular statement, that atoms are unknowable, is itself pretty old... before we understood protons and neutrons and electrons, let alone quantum mechanics.