Evolutionary psychologists are at it again. This time a study showing that female physical attractiveness is a self-propagating attribute.
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.
That good-looking women are more likely to get married and breed would’ve been known to the ancient Etruscans. But not that they are (if they are) likely to give birth to daughters.
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.
I suspect the question of what constitutions female beauty raises the hackles of some. But, really now, there’s no doubt that certain women inspire the form of male adulation that we call lust far more than other females.
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.
Demographic studies are never better than the quality of the data provided allows. Imperfection in defining the respondent population, biases in the often poorly paid clerks and inattentive grad students who actually manipulate the data makes for additional limitations. Makes you wonder if the more, um, woman with a pedestrian exterior, really is less likely to give birth to female children.
What are the economic and racial biases of the studied population?
How will cosmetic surgery skew this in the future?
