Women are getting more beautiful - Times Online, From The Sunday Times July 26, 2009, by Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
excerpt:
Scientists have found that
evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.
The
researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern. Overgenerations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had.
This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that
good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters. He suggested this was an evolutionary strategy subtly programmed into human DNA.
Kanazawa said:
“Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons.
“If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.”
Gayle Brewer, a psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, said: "Men and women seek different things in their partners.
“For women, looks are much less important in a man than his ability to look after her when she is pregnant and nursing, periods when women are vulnerable to predators ... So the pressure is on men to be successful.”
Originally Posted by ieuseerm
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