Nice quote, but when you drill down a little further, they observe that the correlation didn't actually follow the facial features.
> But these facial characteristics were only associated with perceived intelligence. The researchers found no link between these facial traits and actual IQ scores.
> “This means that our raters accurately assessed intelligence from faces of men based on visual cues that simply are not explicable from shape variability in men’s faces,” the researchers wrote.
Try again. Or better yet, recognize that this just-so argument is a lost cause, and abandon it.
"We also showed that IQ has no statistically significant association in facial morphology in both men and women (at least as it was delimited by the landmark configuration used within this study). This means that our raters accurately assessed intelligence from faces of men based on visual cues that simply are not explicable from shape variability in men's faces. It is important to recall that our subjects were prompted to assume a neutral expression while their photo was taken and only photos of subjects with a neutral expression were included in the study. We can speculate about attributions of intelligence based on particular configurations of eyes or gaze, colour of eyes, hair and skin, or skin texture. These hypotheses should be tested in future studies."
Which means that the authors literally meant "face shape" in a narrow literal sense (such as round on elongated) , and hypothesize that other facial features
which they deem as unrelated to shape (although configuration of eyes IMO are clearly part of what usually is called facial features) are at play; they clearly are puzzled about the ability of respondents to reliably predict male intelligence from the pictures of their faces (even filtered to remove visual clues related not the faces per se, but facial expressions).
Stop pushing your agenda and engaginng in creative reading, please.
> But these facial characteristics were only associated with perceived intelligence. The researchers found no link between these facial traits and actual IQ scores.
> “This means that our raters accurately assessed intelligence from faces of men based on visual cues that simply are not explicable from shape variability in men’s faces,” the researchers wrote.
Try again. Or better yet, recognize that this just-so argument is a lost cause, and abandon it.
To rehash a top-level comment, I'd love to see your study replicated with these ten couples sprinkled in: https://www.boredpanda.com/couples-nacho-rojo/