
Research says women are getting more beautiful  - peter123
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6727710.ece
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alexgartrell
Why are beautiful women more likely to have daughters? Women only have X
chromosomes to contribute to the kid, Men have X and Y, so the gender is more
or less chosen by the male. Are they suggesting that the most successful men
are both more likely to get the most attractive women and more likely to have
daughters?

Strikes me more as correlation rather than causation, but maybe I'm missing
something.

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nostrademons
The effect's been observed with a lot of traits that benefit one sex more than
the other. For example, taller parents are disproportionately likely to have
sons, because height reproductively benefits a male much more than a female.

The mechanism proposed is sex-selective abortion. Apparently, women's bodies
have the ability to spontaneously abort fetuses of "the wrong" sex early in
the pregnancy, either by preventing implantation or by cutting off blood
supply to the placenta. Many other mammals have similar mechanisms, eg. mice
will abort pregnancy if they undergo a sustained lack of food.

For that matter, human sex ratios change in a famine or ice age, with many
more daughters than sons being born. Women have significantly less
reproductive variability than men, since their ability to bear children is
largely limited by their uterus and not their socioeconomic standing. When
everybody is poor, then, it makes sense for more women to be born because
daughters will not be as unfavorably impacted by poverty as sons.

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endtime
Are you saying that, according to this mechanism, the womb tends to abort
males that will be beautiful and females that will be tall?

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nostrademons
More that the wombs of beautiful women tend to abort males, and the wombs of
tall women tend to abort females. I'm kinda curious whether this can account
for male genes at all; it seems possible but pretty unlikely.

And of course, the effect is incredibly tiny, but averaged over millions of
human beings can create noticeable differences in sex ratios.

~~~
Ardit20
does that mean therefore that there are NOT 3 billion females and 3 billion
males in the world, since, if it is not just about the sperm race and our
bodies have mechanisms to determine the chances of survival of the foetus,
then it is no longer 50/50?

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tybris
World-wide there are 107 men born for every 100 women. As women tend to get
older the overall difference is 101/100. It also differs per country, and
possibly other groupings.

Some numbers are in: [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/xx.html)

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helveticaman
My guess is that this is happening because food is not a limiting factor right
now, nor has it been in the last century or so. This meant that the canon of
female beauty changed from plump to toned, because it was suddenly more
important to reveal neoteny than to reveal resilience to famine. That's just
for starters.

With cheap food for everyone, everything changes. Men become taller
(Americans, arguably the group which has not suffered famines for the longest
period of time, is the tallest in the world, save for small populations like
Norway or the Croatians of the Dinaric Alps. IQs go up over time (Flynn
effect). I can't cite a source for this, but American men are noticeably more
muscular than men in other countries. America is also one of the countries
with the highest rate obesity rate.

So as far as men go, you have more height, muscle mass, brain mass and fat. In
fact, muscle mass, neural mass and fat are the most significant ways humans
spend discretionary calories. Height is a way to accomodate greater caloric
discretionary spending.

So what's happening to women is that they are spending more calories on
beauty. They are becoming more attractive in all the senses that beauty can be
achieved when food is not a limiting factor. Otherwise, they would already
have achieved this state a long time ago.

~~~
lucumo
_> Americans, arguably the group which has not suffered famines for the
longest period of time, is the tallest in the world,_

Untrue. The Dutch seem to be taller than Americans:
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/09/15/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/09/15/international/i132728D54.DTL&feed=rss.news)

In fact, "[a study] conducted by the University of Munich and Princeton
University, found that the United States had the shortest population in the
industrialized world". [<http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3293191>]

It seems Americans are even shrinking:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/04/usa>

~~~
lunchbox
I don't know what they mean that the US has the shortest population in the
industrial world. Japan is industrialized, and the average Japanese is shorter
than the average American.

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sarosh
[http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(09)00027-0/abstr...](http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138\(09\)00027-0/abstract)

Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the
late 20th century United States☆

Markus Jokela

Received 9 February 2009; accepted 23 March 2009. published online 12 May
2009.

Abstract

Physical attractiveness has been associated with mating behavior, but its role
in reproductive success of contemporary humans has received surprisingly
little attention. In the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1244 women, 997 men
born between 1937 and 1940), we examined whether attractiveness assessed from
photographs taken at age ∼18 years predicted the number of biological children
at age 53–56 years. In women, attractiveness predicted higher reproductive
success in a nonlinear fashion, so that attractive (second highest quartile)
women had 16% and very attractive (highest quartile) women 6% more children
than their less attractive counterparts. In men, there was a threshold effect
so that men in the lowest attractiveness quartile had 13% fewer children than
others who did not differ from each other in the average number of children.
These associations were partly but not completely accounted for by attractive
participants' increased marriage probability. A linear regression analysis
indicated relatively weak directional selection gradient for attractiveness
(β=0.06 in women, β=0.07 in men). These findings indicate that physical
attractiveness may be associated with reproductive success in humans living in
industrialized settings.

See also:

Kanazawa, Satoshi and Miller, Alan (2007) Why beautiful people have more
daughters: from dating, shopping, and praying to going to war and becoming a
billionaire: two evolutionary psychologists explain why we do what we do.
Perigee Book, New York. ISBN 0399533656

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yannis
Surely as I get older!

~~~
rbanffy
At least, they look younger.

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kqr2
These days, there's also better healthcare, makeup, and plastic surgery so
women can look "younger" and more "beautiful" for a longer time.

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jacquesm
If the male Peacock can be produced by a runaway beauty contest then of course
the same can happen in other species, including humans.

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tokenadult
Check this link, sent to me by a friend the last time I mentioned peacocks,
for some of the latest research on the subject.

[http://www.adeline-
loyau.net/publications/Loyau_etal_AnimBeh...](http://www.adeline-
loyau.net/publications/Loyau_etal_AnimBehav2008.pdf)

~~~
jacquesm
interesting, thank you!

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Adam503
I gotta be careful. I just know there's gotta be a "Do these pants make me
look fat" trap in here somewhere.

