Isn't the resemblance just uncanny?

According to Face Transformers, this is what I would look like if one of my parents is an ape. I am glad neither of them are.

The University of St. Andrew's face averager doesn't work as well as this one and I haven't been able to get the face detector to work.

But fun times aside I want to point out that the Face Transformer used two eyes and mouth (you have to manually mark them) as sort of the anchor points of a face. Indeed, :) <-- this little guy required just as little to form a recognizable face. But if we really see a nose-less man outside of the theater of Phantom of the Opera we would probably find it odd. Look up a picture of Valdemort if you are not convinced. So why is it that a nose is dispensable in recognizing a face?

But the nose aside, here are links to some other online "face transformers" and face manipulation apps:

The aforementioned University of St. Andrews's face transformer

Face of the Future which allows you to upload two pictures and predict "what will their baby look like."

Face Morpher which produces animations of smooth transition from one face to another

I want to point out that aside from the fact that it's kind of fun, it seems these face-changing apps strikes the audiences' fancy by playing on a few common assumptions:

1. Certain facial characteristics can be mapped onto race. Not ethnicity, race-- which is to say, related to genes, have a biological basis, etc.

2. facial characteristics are hereditary-- again, genes, biology, etc.

3. That underneath Asian's small eyes or African American's thick lips (if that sounds offensive, remember that these are the kind of maneuvers face transformers use) there is a universal faciality.

This is a bit of a paradox, isn't it? We are born all the same, all with a face that we are born into , but we are not quite the same, because there are biologically based differences between races.