Evolution making women more beautiful

Reuters

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A new study suggests that evolution is making women more beautiful, while men are still stuck in the Stone Age in terms of attractiveness.

In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, demonstrated that beautiful women had more children than their plainer counterparts and a higher proportion of those children were female.

Those children also tended to be attractive and to repeat the pattern of having more female children once they became adults, according to the study.

The Times online reported that data was gathered in America, from 1,244 women and 997 men, who were followed over four decades.

Their attractiveness was rated from photographs taken during the study.

Researchers also looked at the number of children they had.

The study found attractive women had 16 percent more children, and very attractive women had 6 percent more children than their less attractive counterparts.

But the study found that the opposite is true for men, with handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of numbers of children.

Scientists said this suggested there was little pressure for men's appearance to evolve.

Previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, found good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters.

"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." Kanazawa said.

- © Fairfax NZ News