The question she didn't answer

In today’s Science Times, Elizabeth Svoboda writes about seeing ‘faces, faces everywhere’. It strikes me she’s asking two very different questions:

Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro ...?

That's one question. The other, which she seems to treat as the same one (even by making it part of the same sentence as above), is

...and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?

We see faces because we're hardwired to. We worship them ... why? Same reason? The researchers that article is about never addresses that question at all. (They're interested in why and how we recognize faces, even in things that aren't very face-like at all - like chance alignments of beams and pieces of machinery.)

I wonder if the reporter thinks they did?

* It doesn't look like her to me. It looks more like an ugly cartoon character of some sort. I can see the face - I could never see her. Just like that doesn't look like Mary in the sandwich - it looks like some classic glamorous movie star (Garbo, perhaps, or Dietrich). (Like "Jesus" in the aspargus root looks like Hemingway to me.)

I guess if you're extremely religious, you see gods. If you're not, you just see faces... The way that if you're extremely religious you see the hand of god everywhere, and if you're not, you just see the universe unfolding as it does.