London: There`s good news for women for a
study has found that evolution is driving females to become
ever more beautiful, while males remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.
Based on a series of studies of physical
attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in
humans, researchers found the beautiful women have more
children than their not so good-looking counterparts and that
a higher proportion of those children are female. Those
daughters, when they grow up, also tend to be pretty and so
repeat the pattern, according to a study released last week.
According to the the scientists, over generations this
process has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically
pleasing, a "beauty race", a process that is still continuing,
The Times said.
Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of
Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16 percent more
children than females who were not so attractive.
He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women
and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their
beauty was assessed from photographs taken during the study,
which also collected data on the number of children they had,
the report said.
The study builds on an earlier research 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.
"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," said Kanazawa.
In contrast, for men good looks hardly matters, with
handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of
numbers of children. It means there has been little pressure
for men’s appearance to evolve, the study suggested.
Bureau Report
