The case of the real ‘incredibles’

I want to see this baby grow up looking like Zhang Ziyi one day to meet her long-lost father who is pleading her for an autograph. You would root for this baby too if you knew the circumstances that led to her losing her father and for being marked for life.

This story was picked up recently by news agencies everywhere about this extraordinarily skin-deep case that a father named Jiang Fen filed against his wife for giving him a baby that was “incredibly ugly.”  The man is from northern China and he apparently was so horrified by the looks of his baby because by his own computations, the physical factors that he and his beautiful wife brought to bear on the biological equation could not have conceived such a baby. In his mind, which could have benefited from a few broad strokes of scientific enlightenment, an “incredibly ugly” baby could have only resulted from his wife’s cheating.

He was wrong. His wife after all did not take up with another man whom Jiang Fen must have presumed to have also been “incredibly ugly” to have resulted in the “incredibly ugly baby.” But she did have a very serious date with plastic surgery before he met her suing husband. So serious that it cost her an incredible $100,000 which I could only surmise must have been very successful. She, however, forgot to tell his then fiancé about this pivotal event in her medical history. Apparently, her husband, in his incredible depth of wisdom, thought that an originally beautiful face is the bedrock of a good, solid marriage. The eventual revelation by his wife shattered this and moved him to divorce her and even sue her for getting to marry him under false pretenses. I am not sure how but he won and the case earned him $120,000 (and a good share of sarcasm from writers around the world) presumably decided by a sympathetic male judge who could have benefited from the same broad strokes of scientific enlightenment I mentioned earlier.

If Jiang Fen had relied on science, he would have known that studies have shown that our perception of babies’ faces (ugly or beautiful) do not necessarily translate to the same perception when these babies become adult faces (Journal of Infant Behavior Development, December 2011). This means that the baby he called “incredibly ugly” may surprise him one day when he meets her adult face. Yes, there is no denying that a pretty baby is so much easier to look at that in studies, males and females whether they had their own children or not, took a while longer to look at “pretty babies” as opposed to babies with “distinct facial irregularities.” This, however, did not say anything about the kind of love and caring that any baby, whether perceived as pretty or ugly, actually gets.

Also if Jiang Fen knew genetics, he could have looked a bit more beyond his beautiful wife’s face and scanned the faces of her family and relatives. They are all genetically related and would show the various expressions of their genes that would have an impact on physical appearance. They were all probably wondering why he is not even wondering why his wife looked very different from the rest of the clan.

I think the “incredibly ugly” baby should also be entitled to sue her “incredibly deep” father for failing as an adult, to squeeze as much insights about life, including from science, before doing things that will have an impact on the life of his daughter. I also think the father should get remedial science lessons with his newly earned $120,000.

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