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Are Women Getting More Beautiful?
FelxH writes "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." I just thought my
standards were changing as I got older, but it turns out it's just science!
It's called Photoshop.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As a male, let me just say that it is sometimes good to be in the minority. The downside is that unless you are a dirty old man, there is no way to take advantage of the beautification of the female portion of the human race.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Until these females develop an interest in Linux (and know that it's really GNU/Linux) plus a preference for subterranean dwelling, nobody here is likely to notice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Women get more attractive. Men develop bigger wallets.
Deleted
I'm confused, how does this help the average slashdotter? Perhaps you are just reminding the readers that an even higher proportion of women are out of their league. Salt in the wound, my friend.
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.
Except that the standard for "beauty" changes over time. I'm not sure I'm buying this.
Proverbs 21:19
This seems like the guppy phenomenon. Under a lack of predation the guppies self select to breed for beauty. Under heavy predation they breed to survive and quickly become plain. We are the guppies. We have no predators. It just takes longer to show up with us because our life cycle takes longer.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Because beauty is a subjective matter, how do you hope to measure this in an objective, scientific way.
Attractiveness has nothing to do with the number of kids you pump out. If anything attractive people tend to attract rich husbands or be rich in their own right which makes them likely to have fewer kids.
Trailer trash/chavs on the otherhand pump out loads of kids
I'm going to use this as an excuse when I break up with my 50 year old wife,
"Sorry it's not you it's evolution, younger women these days are just much more attractive".
FOR the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.
Evidently the reporter is gay, and the scientists were probably aging slashgeeks.
Women have always been beautiful enough for evolutionary purposes, just as men have always been sufficiently whatever-it-is-women-want for evolutionary purposes. Every parent of a teenager knows this, and every teenager does not.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Are beer sales up?
>while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.
Really? You mean those 5-foot-1 suits of armor at the museum were worn by the same 6-foot-5 monsters who grace our modern football fields and armed forces?
I guess men from the Renaissance were the same as us, except highly compressible.
"I just thought my standards were changing as I got older, but it turns out it's just science!"
It's called age related beer goggles. Believe it or not when you hit your 80s you'll consider having sex with 80 year old women! Homely 18 years olds over time become really hot.
It's just selection making sure that desirable traits get passed. Just like bloodhounds were selected for their ability to sniff out game, their descendants grew to have the most reliable nose of all breeds. Similarly, if intelligence was the greatest traits looked for in a mate, our race would become smarter with each passing generation... and suddenly this explains a lot, doesn't it?
Evolutionarily, you'd expect that a species would gravitate towards more attractive members due to the increased ability of those members to reproduce. But consider that the likelihood of an ugly set of people to actually reproduce is much higher than a set of very attractive people to do so.
Humans are an interesting species. We are able to actually avoid evolution. In several tens of generations, humans will likely be all near-sighted due to our glasses and Lasik technology. Likewise, very attractive people know they have an increased likelihood of mating. This mating, for many of them, is a recreational activity instead of a procreative activity. So the use of prophylactics among attractive people actually prevents evolution from taking its course.
So why do we seem to have teenage girls blossoming so early? I'd wager that it is the use of hormones in cows that has artificially accelerated the aging process among humans. Since it is very easy to determine accelerated physiological changes in girls (larger breasts, wider hips, etc) than in boys (facial and body hair, etc), the incorrect assumption may be made that only girls are being affected. However, the use of hormones in our food affects all who ingest it.
Not in Liverpool. Looking at the women on dating sites for this city is like looking at a freak show. Seriously.
Sounds like you're oggling the fresh jailbait every year because this story is about newer generations looking better, not graceful ageing of one age group.
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.
So easy a caveman can do it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If evolution is making women more attractive, does creation have the inverse effect?
While characteristics that define somebody as "beautiful" VS "plain" may vary, there are quite a number of things that are considered "ugly" to the majority of a given area. So, while women may be on average no less "plain", perhaps they're less "ugly"
Then again, so aspects of beauty have been fairly consistent over the last while as well, so perhaps evolution has had some chance to catch up on that, at least on a regional basis. My own standards are a little different than the pack, so really I'd worry about my own chances with 'regular' women, but as long as guys that look like Ron Jeremy can get some, I suppose I'll be fine.
If anything the reasons a woman has a baby has nothing to do with her looks and everything to do with her sense of well being, security along with cultural beliefs. Women are plenty attractive enough to get some sort of a sex partner and I'm trying to identify a time when that has not been the case.
In today's day and age, culture matters for birth more than looks. There are some women out there having nearly 10 children simply because they feel it is a christian thing to do. How does evolution account for that, unless it accounts for obvious social influences. On the opposite end of the scale, you have some green women who are deeply concerned that bringing too many children into the world might somehow compromise the planet.
It's almost like environment plus culture need to be considered as a holistic system in order to really understand human evolution.
This is my sig.
Re: "beauty" if people get more attractive on average will it make any difference? Is attractiveness relative or absolute?
Been to the beach recently? Looks like a mass marine mammal stranding event. Women, if you won't lose the flab, at least cover it up. Men, that goes for you, too. --
It wasn't that long ago that there was a study saying that 'beauty' was actually what turned out to be a perfectly average face. Too far in any direction and it wasn't 'beautiful' any more, and all the 'perfectly normal' faces were labeled beautiful by the study's participants.
So this new study basically says that women are getting more average.
No wait, it actually says that the concept of beauty changes with each generation. So yeah, each generation is going to think their women are more beautiful than the previous generation's.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" they say and looking at the classic portraits created over the years I can pretty much say that the idea of what is beautiful is cultural, and evolving. Although one could argue with the pervasive American Culture spreading across the globe that our current standards of attractiveness are actually starting to coincide.
The closest I have ever seen science come to defining beauty was through symmetry.
Call me a troll, but I'm going to call this junk science.
-clever signature
Beautyful wifes don't have to work, and the rich husband gets fed up with her staying all day in Prada and Dior stores .. decides she has to be occupied by other things ...
=> Beautyful wife has above average number of kids ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
There are only two physical traits with universal sexual appeal cross-culturally, symmetry you mentioned and clear skin. All of these ratios and such are measuring the current cultural zeitgeist with regards to beauty, and those standards are largely culturally plastic. Little better in methodology than phrenology.
This all depends on how you define attractiveness. Big boobs? Nice face? Long hair? The standards for attractive are social in nature and are subject to rapid fluctuations - within a generation. That makes any genetic changes moot.
Consider the "ideal" weight. If you look at models from the 1960's, they were significantly heavier than models are today. Genes are simply not able to mutate quickly enough to go from filled-in women in one generation to toothpicks the next.
Consider cultural differences. In China, small feet are attractive. In America, large breasts are attractive. Which definition of attractiveness do you use?
Being from L.A. i've seen lots of beautiful women dig some gold and let me tell you rich kids looking good is more a function of percieved status and excellent grooming than them being physically more attactive.
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.
Prettier women have a better chance of getting married and having kids then less attractive women. Yea this makes sense. Given all else equal I would rather marry the hot babe then the ugly chick.
On a personal note I think the sex icons of today are better looking then those of the 30's, 40's, 50's, etc. Marilyn Monroe was hot but I think there are so many better looking girls out there today and most of them will never get in your local newspaper ad let alone become famous as an american icon (as far as looks are concerned).
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Not to be overly sexist here... but human females tend to believe the exact opposite of nature, in this case that they are the more attractive sex. This is of course, despite the piles of scientific evidence to the contrary. I'm not saying that there aren't strange species where the females actually are the more attractive sex, but sorry ladies, when it comes to attractiveness; Mother Nature has stacked the deck with overwhelming odds going against your attractiveness.
I should add that a) of course I didn't RTFA, and b) there are women out there that have lied to themselves so convincingly that they actually believe their shit doesn't stink and that women don't fart, etc.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
This thread is useless without pics
I wonder if, post women's lib, we'll see this change somewhat.
It used to be that women depended on men to provide for them and their children, so women selected men who had the most resources. Now, with women able to provide for themselves, will women start selecting men who are more visually pleasing?
As a fat, balding, middle-aged man, I sure as hell hope not, but as long as my wife stays with me, I guess it's OK. She certainly doesn't need to for financial reasons.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
They used old photographs in the study of people from past generations and their method of "objective" measurement of beauty were to have modern-day people judge them.
It seems almost a foregone conclusion that people in modern times would find the women of modern times more attractive; standards of beauty change.
To a scientist, most women look hot... I mean, think about it, looking at women all day instead of mice has to be much more pleasant for them. :P
So, how many millihelens per century is beauty incresign by?
So, as natural selection gets on, there will only be beautiful women left on our ugly-to-become Earth in a millennium or two. Well, I cannot buy this, since I do not think there is such a concept as "absolute" beauty. There will always be ugly, average, and beautiful women.
n/t
The researcher may have come up with a nice, politically correct headline for an inconsistent and highly questionable piece of work, but common sense tells us otherwise. The number of children a woman has is hugely affected by her position in society, normative pressures, intelligence (women graduates have fewer children, on average, than those with less education - does that mean being clever makes you ugly - ridiculous idea!), amount and availability of welfare and frequently whether she works for a living, or stays at home.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Haven't looked through this thread entirely so I may have missed it but has anyone brought up the movie 'Idiocracy'? This finding would support its notion that the beautiful people procreate the most but as brains and beauty don't necessarily mix, there is another side to all of this...
> beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts
> and that a higher proportion of those children are female
Isn't gender determined by the man?
Definitely not. Sorry.
- Martin
This just means that ugly girls are more rare, thus their intrinsic value goes up and they become more unobtainable. Add to the fact that beautiful women are getting more and more picky. And this just adds up to more bad news for unattractive men.
D
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My personal experience is that the more beautiful a woman is, the less she likes to, um... procreate.
The article does not mention the participants having cosmetic surgery. If the surgery was something like breast augmentation or the like, then the genes for "ugliness" would be carried forward. I would call it genetic false advertising. This would progress into the further generations becoming dependent upon surgery to be beautiful. That is until the definition of being beautiful changes, perhaps being polydactyl will be the rage in 2100.
Huh. I had no idea that watching my wife grow in beauty over 15 years was watching evolution in process. Nice.
This discovery has lead to the solution to a particular slashdot meme.
a. Yes, this post is sappy and sentimental.
b. Yes, I am sending my wife a link to this post.
c. Yes, the kids are going to bed early tonight.
d. Profit!!!
Life is short; think quickly.
Without bothering to dig out statistics to prove it, I'll claim that we're taller on the whole and our life spans are getting longer. Does any of that measure into beauty? I don't know. I do know that unquestably as a society we're getting fatter and dumber, which definitely makes the majority of women less attractive to a guy like me who wants a woman who is fit and intelligent.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Women aged 20-29 were nearly 29 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.
Women aged 40-49 were about 25.5 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.
just, some are more beautiful than others...
-- Robert Heinlein from _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Slashdot pseudo-science! Slashdot editors prove they know NOTHING about genetics.
PDF: USA 2000/2005/2006 National Cosmetic and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery Statistics
The article claims that beautiful women have more children than the plainer counterparts...then why were all the teenage moms in my high school total dogs? Beautiful people aren't more likely to have lots of kids, stupid people are...as much as I hate to go down the recently XKCD'd thought path.
"Gee, more women appear to conform to modern standards of beauty, than at any time in the past!"
Mid 19th century beauty can be deduced by portraiture. The pre-raphaelite stuff from Rosetti does a pretty good job of this:
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/s356.repro.jpg
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/s536.repro.jpg
They'd have seen Jessica Simpson as a freakishly stretched elf - on the verge of starvation.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Sorry, didn't RTFA, but does it refer to summer? I've noticed it too.
It's much more likely that it's because more women go to more salons to have stuff done to them more of the time.
Besides, how are they measuring "beauty"? Tastes have changed - you can't compare 50's pinup girls with 2009 pinup girls.
Junk "science" at its finest.
No sig today...
I can say as an over 50, married guy that women today have much, much better technology at hand than women of the 70's and 80's.
It's called Photoshop.
http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=334
The more colourful birds, frogs, antlers on bucks, etc. are male. Plus they sng, dance, and fight to attract females.
Humans are somewhat unusual in that both genders are evolving sexual display.
I'm just getting older :-(
beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts.
If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable
Does this mean we'll eventually have a planet full of women? And good-looking women? Time to get back to work on time travel...
Women who are interested in *me* are in no way whatsoever getting more beautiful.
...the girls actually ARE getting more beautiful.
The rest of the "more beautiful" crap is just in our heads.
There is always something beautiful if you take a really close look, such as traits that are not quite apparent to a first impression, but too few of us have the chance to look for longer then a few minutes without being considered perverts, psycho, or even stalkers...stare if you will to try and find that beauty, but don't stare too long for fear of the monsters' scorn.
How can they make that sort of statement about something as subjective as beauty? If you were to take a Victorian era guy on the street and show him women today, his opinion may differ completely. I'm sure there are some dudes out there today who would find a Cro-Magnon woman attractive. As a male, I resent being lumped in with the Geico caveman.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
This article is useless without photos.
and I'm geting drunker, cheers !
I'm guessing that they didn't take a big enough selection.
Yes, in our upper-middle-class, racially homogenous study group, perhaps true.
Generally, on a HUMAN EVOLUTION scale? Ah, not so much.
Otherwise, you're asserting that Octomom is gorgeous? Theoretically...?
And at least in the US, while it's clear that beauty is an upwardly-mobile social selection trait (beautiful but poor girls have a good chance of being married to someone significantly wealthier than their parents), I'm not sure this translates into OFFSPRING.
It certainly seems here like the Jerry-Springer-watching, white- or black-trash underclass is SIGNFICANTLY outproducing the upper- and middle-class birthrates.
-Styopa
http://www.break.com/index/the-power-of-photoshop.html
men are getting taller
you could say this is a function of a better diet (but you can also say women getting more "beautiful" is a function of a better diet as well)
so while men are selecting and refining the secondary sexual characteristics they like in women constantly, as reflected in offspring, women are doing the same right back at men
women are constantly haranguing men for being so focused on shallow physical aspects of a woman rather than her character, but women are in fact just as shallow as men: they always choose the taller men, and excuse character shortcomings if the guy is tall
so men are in fact getting taller and taller, and therefore the species as well, but you see it in the height dimorphism between the sexes. height-linked genes on the y chromosome are under as much evolutionary pressure as "beauty" genes on the x chromosome in women, via sexual selection way more than natural selection
and you can see this sexual selection in its debilitating effects on health. women have a high rate of breast cancer, no doubt because there is evolutionary pressure to inflate those things regardless of potential negatives of unbridled cell growth. and men have a high rate of heart attacks, which is of course linked to all sorts of bad health issues, but height counts in this higher rate (studies have shown a significant connection between height and a higher rate of heart attacks)
extrapolating to the scifi future, men will need the evolutionary adapations of giraffes in order to maintain the physicial characteristics pleasing to the female eye, and women will evolve bright red asses/ breasts like female baboons, perhaps...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
American women are likely getting fatter, maybe submitter likes the Big Beauties?
Is that there just aren't enough women in scientific careers studying this stuff. I mean, if the researchers, which consist mostly of men, find that women are getting more and more attractive and men are getting uglier, and the researchers are primarily heterosexual men, what conclusion do you think they're going to come up with?!?!
It is impossible to affect the outcome of a random process by changing the sampling strategy. This is a basic Probability Theory 101 problem - about India where everyone wants male kids, so they continue to have kids until they have a male. The question is, how does this affect the population distribution? The answer is - it does not affect it at all. The choice between male and female is random, so no matter how you sample, you will not change the outcome.
So I'm having a hard time believing a study which says there's a substantial (they say 26% !) birth rate difference between genders of babies. Sounds like someone pulled it out of his/her ass.
One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men. The other was that the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons.
What does that say about my wife and I? We have four boys.
I found the discussion about why men prefer blondes to be particularly interesting...
Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.
I have two daughters, both of whom were very blonde when they were younger and whose hair has gotten more brown as they have gotten older. However, they and their friends have the kinds of fabulous, highlighted hair that older women pay hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to re-create.
Now I know why my wife is so obsessed with getting her hair highlighted, particularly as she has gotten older.
Average height has skyrocket. Men ARE being selected for beauty. But the scientists for this study simply were too stupid and prejudiced to find out what the standard for male beauty among women is.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
100 years from now, when plumper women are in vogue again, the starved skeletons that are universally praised today as beautiful will look ridiculous. And it will happen. As resources get scarcer, demonstrating that you have adequate food supply will become important for mating and reproduction. Not to mention that most men even now like some meat on the bones anyway.
If you want to find beautiful girls go to Hungary, Czech, Slovakia and Slovenia. Sure you might find some beauty elsewhere, but here it's hard to spot an ugly one.
As for US & UK, you are wasting your time, most of them are unhealthy fat.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
... I'm not sure I'm buying this.
Ba careful there mate! In many countries it is illegal to pay a prostitute!
But men becoming women are not.
So it all evens out somehow.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
no wonder 18 - 25 year old females that i meet in this college town that is my home are seriously stupid. not only stupid, but brought up to believe that their looks are what will get them ahead in the world. so, even if they weren't genetically predisposed to being stupid (dad married for looks not brains, like his dad did, so on and so forth), they have been dumbed down by the same huge-tits-small-ass ideology that has many american men (all i can speak for) infatuated with young girls. too bad the television doesn't promote the library as much as it promotes sixteen-year-old ass.
You can talk about "eye of the beholder" and "we have different standards for beauty" all you want, but it is mostly garbage. Today's women are more "beautiful" than past generations just like they live longer now than past generations.
In the decade 1911-1920, non-Latino Whites had an average life expectancy of 51.5 years. In the US today, non-Latino Whites are expected to live until age 78. This is a dramatic increase in a single century.
Look at pictures of your grandfather from his 20's and compare that to pictures of your father in his 40's.
I believe women could be seen as "more beautiful" today because the life we live is easier. A lot of hard, manual labor (which stresses the body and causes aging to happen quicker) has been replaced with computer-controlled machines. Yes, we still have to do "hard" work, but we can -drive- home to a nice, air-conditioned house, pop open a cold drink, and throw some frozen meal (which contains growth-hormones!) into the microwave to eat.
The growth hormones in our food most certainly plays a role. There is a surprising number of young girls that have very large breasts, as compared to the past couple of decades. How many teen girls back in the 70's had C or D cups? How about today?
Cosmetic surgery, breast augmentation, etc all play a role as well. How many girls in LA or Miami have real, un-altered breasts?
http://www.hotornot.com/ ....oh yeah.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
The number of swedish women hasn't really increased much, but the number of women from the rest of the world has increased substantially, so the ratio of beautiful women to average is much much much lower than 20 years ago
Short people (especially men) got no reason to live.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Pics or it didn't happen..
What?
Cheers!
Sean
Bad news for /.'rs since none of you are getting laid by beautiful woman...
Since my original reply is getting modded down as troll-ish, here's a citation for my comment that infants spend more time looking at attractive faces...
http://jbd.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/3/212
Beautiful people get laid more often? Who would have thunk of that?
What we call beauty, is meant to be a detector for good genes.
By the way: Beauty is relative. What we call beautiful, was not what people called beautiful, ages ago.
Just think about the times, when being fatter, was a sign that you had a rare abundance of food, which was obviously great for the survival rate of potential children.
(Nowadays, being overly fat is a sign of early death trough crappy food, psychological problems, etc, and therefore unattractive.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I think what's actually happened is that technology has allowed humans to distill physical traits down to their purest essence. Heavy makeup, lighting and skilled photography are the initial steps and Photoshop or other retouching methods complete the process. In some cases cartoons and 3D art are even influencing what is desirable, I think this is particularly obvious in Japan. So we've got people exposed to all this and ultimately influenced by it. It's gotten to a point where some people are attracted to relatively unrealistic attributes.
I suppose it could be called evolution, but I think it's merely popular entertainment shaping society.
The simple fact is that men are rate mostly on height (while gay men may rate men on the beauty of their face, we are not talking about that).
Sometimes, upon seeing some movie star heartthrob, I ask myself: "would I want to look like this ?", I guess this is my criterion for male beauty. But most times the answer is no fucking way. I could make a long list, but I'll just ask you: would you want to look like the guy from that recent vampire fad movie who seem to have so many hormonaly imbalanced followers ? Puke !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The measure was gaze time, and the conclusion was simple...
Previous studies have shown that when newborn and young infants are shown attractive and unattractive adult faces they will look longer at the attractive faces.
You cannot determine change without a solid starting reference. Beauty is a perception; perceptions of beauty are constantly changing. One thing I've noticed personally is that youth and beauty are often confused. Most girls are acceptably pretty at 18 or 19 years old but when they hit 30, the youth-appeal is gone. A true beauty will retain her attractiveness from youth into maturity. Audrey Hepburn for example.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
After scanning through numerous comments here, I see none of them addressing whether the Times Online news article was reporting credible science or not.
There is at least one very hard-to-believe assertion in the article: "the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons". This is an astonishing, immense deviation from the nearly even 50-50 split in sex ratios in births (it is actually 51-49, a consistent pattern everywhere). If you don't have some acquaintanceship with the history of attempts to alter the sex ratios, you may not realize how amazing a claim this really is. This is something humans have worked hard at manipulating since the dawn time, with essentially no success at all. The only effective means of altering "birth" sex ratios has been the extreme practice of infanticide, and now with prenatal sex identification techniques, sex-selection abortion.
If such a huge systematic deviation in sex ratios existed, one would expect to have had this to have been well established ages ago. One could not plausibly claim that people have not been paying attention to beautiful couples and their progeny.
So, I suspect this is "junk science".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Lusting after someone is different than marrying them.
Of course, in some cases lust overcomes one's better judgment (as one's friends will, or won't, point out).
while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors
Good news everybody! We still rock!
That it is the curvature which men find most attractive, the 0.7 index - women a hundred years ago were heavier, but the attractive ones still had the "right" aspect between hips and waist (ie, that which makes for best reproduction)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, to whom are women more beautiful? You? Me? The guy over in the corner?
No, makeup artists, hair stylists, and cosmetic surgeons are becoming much more skilled. Clothing styles are becoming much more suggestive (it is now socially acceptable to have your underwear showing in public... WTF?). And of course, beer is becoming more potent.
Shouldn't evolution also be driving men to become more effective at earning money? See, the men that make the most money should attract the most attractive women, have more children and... oh shit! It's the losers that have more children! We're doomed...
Girls all look so fake these days. I mean girls getting fake boobs at 16 is now more or less normal. All the image makers on TV that seem to be the self-proclaimed arbiters of how all girls should look, are entirely the result of plastic surgery, expensive dentistry, trick photography and
If you like the look of 'fake' then yeah maybe they are getting more beautiful, but IMHO they're all just the same as they ever were underneath.
We have more women with more of a bust due to all of the female hormones floating around in what we eat (think about large breast meat on chicken) and in the plastics everything is wrapped in.
What this has to mean is that men breed more often with attractive females, or attractive women breed more often (based upon the assumption that the average male will breed at the drop of a hat). In other words, it's not that males are breeding more often with attractive females driving this, but that attractive females are driving the equation (we want more like me, so breed more).
But what them is the criteria are women are choosing by? Females, any thoughts?
Have gnu, will travel.
Basically the trope of the pudgy middle class man and his hot wife is true.
Also, there aren't that many man makeup things. And my wife... gasp... spends 45 minutes getting her face on, I take 3. there's probably something there.
you sound like a flaming homo... do you like hot throbbing uncut cock up your ass?
No battle marks on them.
Those pristine museum pieces belonged to teenagers and various noblemen who never fought anything stronger than a cold, and pranced in the back of the battlefield wearing armour instead of charging at the front.
The ones used by big burly zweihander wielding men mostly ended up rusting in some field somewhere in the end.
Knights died in their armours or if they've managed to retire - were buried in them.
Those things had cost back then as much as a car would today - only they were "tailor-fitted" for each individual. Spares were an option only for VERY rich.
Also... one word... arquebus.
Nobles that trained since their teens to be knights and later charged at lines of peasants who got handed their arquebuses to them whole two weeks earlier - haven't made it home so their armour could be preserved for posterity.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I keep wondering if the use of birth control pills at an earlier and earlier age is causing this, rather than just genetics. It is probably something that many researchers are not taking into account in their studies.
you can google for it, i think you'll find research
but i remember watching a special on abc, i think, many years back, where they had two guys behind a one way mirror and they picked random women out of a shopping mall, and made up stories about the men:
guy #1: owned 3 cars (all high end models), millionaire, devotes extra time to charity and orphans, etc. the perfect guy... and short
guy #2: still lived with parents, had problem keeping a job or waking up in the morning, had run-ins with the law, etc. a horrible guy... and tall
they kept changing up the guy's stories like this, to all sorts of extremes of character, and the random women kept picking the tall guy as a better choice of mate
showing that the usual women's complaint of men being shallow for relying so much on physicality rather than character when choosing a mate is a completely bullshit complaint on the part of women. because women are just as shallow as men when it comes to physicality, except instead of ass size/ breast size/ waist size, women go for height
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We are just becoming more and more desperate...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
PEEL away the makeup and what you have left is pretty much what you think - EGADS !! Not many "beaties" do it without a lot of Max Factoring. Me, I'm gorgeous all the time !!
this is a bunch of crap. Just head outside, or to a suburban mall and check out the fat cows pushing baby strollers. Some of them leave me boggling as to who would actually have sex with them.
It's call a mili-helen and it's a face that will launch one ship. 1,000 mili-helens equal one Helen of Troy who was said to have had the face that launched a thousand ships.
You would have known this if you'd taken a classical mythology class.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The ideas that this article are based on are speculative at best, pseudoscience at worst. The premise that "beautiful women have more daughters" comes from a debunked 2007 paper by Kanazawa in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. The reason that his results do not hold up is that the sample size he looked at was too small to observe the type of sex ratio effects that one could reasonably expect to see--in other words, his data set was underpowered.
For a fascinating article on the nature of Kanazawa's statistical errors, see this article in American Scientist
They seem to have one fact: beautiful women have more children, and the also tend to have more daughters. Then they predict that it could make women more and more beautiful. But they do not seem to have the fact that they are more and more beautiful. Actually, it seems quite hard to imagine an experiment that does not involve time travel. We would take two groups of people randomly selected. Make one go step by step in the past, and another step by step in the future. And we do not tell which direction. Then they show at each step we show a random selection of women who have no attribute that shows the epoch they are (nothing like clothes, haircut, cosmetics, dirt, etc.).
American women generally only look attractive (face and breasts only - the rest of their body has no defined shape, e.g. ass, legs, belly) until they reach the age of 25. To verify this look at any teenage girl and then look at her mother. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Americans teenagers use a lot of drugs (e.g. alcohol, marijuana), get way too much artificial tanning, and live a frivolous life.
Pffffft. Like any of you have spoken to any attractive women.
isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? There could be someone I find very attractive, yet someone else might find that same woman ugly.
See Andrew Gelman's article in American Scientist that debunks the statistics behind the "having more daughters" data at least. The largest credible effect on sex ratio is around 3% differences between boys and girls among those in famine conditions... and this effect is due primarily to nonsurvival of boy fetuses in famine conditions. The more daughters from beautiful parents effect has been overstated to be on the order of 15 to 30% differences, absolutely absurd if you even stop to think about it. The original studies do not have the statistical power to distinguish between random fluctuations and a real effect and therefore they overstate any effect that you find by the size of the standard error rather than the size of the effect..
I can certainly believe that beautiful women have more children on average though....
Scientists show that even scientists rarely really understand statistics...
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Several other things have changed in the last hundred years or so. First, both genders are living longer than ever before with better food and medical care, which gives rise to more offspring. The second is the idea that women are supported after a marriage or relationship ends. And the third is the idea of children born casually.
In the old days and for most of history, when the male side chose a new mate, the old one was done, gone, kicked out or even killed regardless of whether there were offspring involved. The former wife's status depended largely on the whims of the former husband/provider or his family.
In the modern era, those women now get alimony and/or child support fairly commonly. The former husband is expected to support his former wife for life or until she remarries or dies or whatever. (of course there are reverse cases where the wife has to support her former husband but those are pretty rare)
If the husband moves on to a newer, prettier woman, he still has to support the older, perhaps not as pretty one. Thus, two women have support in some fashion and the former wife is free to have casual kids with someone else while the former husband continues to supply support.
This would seem to complicate the idea that only natural selection is involved in choosing which women get to replicate: the former husband is supporting his former wife whether he likes it or not.
There is also the factor of unwed mothers having children and society's desire to support both the mother and child. Those kids are supported because it's the thing society demands when there is no father figure involved. In the old eras, those 'fatherless' children might've been anticipated to perish either through natural causes or in dangerous occupations.
The result of all these changes is that more kids are being born and more of them make it to adulthood, to have more kids.
Sig for hire.
That's because to a large degree, there aren't many men who procreate with ugly women; that's not science, just common sense.
> "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."
I'm confused as to why this is a Slashdot article, when this has been known for decades. "Sexy women 'get totally hit' more often, producing more babies, in accordance with evolution."
IIRC, it precedes knowledge of evolution by millennia.
It's why female breasts are ridiculously large, why most subspecies of humans around the world have big lips (actually, Europeans have small lips. Think about it.) and females have tiny waists but wide hips and big butts.
One need not even rationalize it with "big butts are a sign of health." There's a reason women like Kate Winslet, Shakira, and JLo spend years if not several decades at near the top of "Men's Lists", while women like Megan Fox spend a year or two there, then drop back down towards the end, then off.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Between makeup, push-up bras, those special undies to help hold their gut in, silk stockings, high heeled shoes, plastic surgery, etc it's hard to tell what a woman actually looks like.
Women are one big lie. That's why I have no problem pretending to earn 3 times as much as I do. I figure they'll be in for a shock just about the same time I will be.
Since the advent of birth control, it won't be which women get hooked up with, but which ones want large families. Some societies will pay a significant portion of the cost or raising the kids, so the women don't even need to hook up with a rich enough guy any more.
Human evolution will favor Muslims, Mormons, Amish, any sect or subculture which strongly encourages having a greater than replacement number of kids. Smart people who only have one child per couple will breed their genes right out of existence eventually, comparative to those other more prolific groups.
Cosmetic surgery seems to be on the rise and more and more modern women elect for cosmetic surgery of some form to look more beautiful.
Was this even considered a factor in the research?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
As researchers get older they pass the drinking age, and recent data suggests that alcohol consumption is on the rise.
Maybe this is just a simple case of beer-goggles???
Hope is the currency of fools
The article states that beautiful women have up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts, and the most attractive parents are 26% less likely to have sons.
With percentages this high I wouldn't expect the changes to be gradual, just a few generations should make a notable difference. But that seems highly unlikely, we've been around long enough for all women to be beautiful and have 16% more children, in which case the difference wouldn't exist. It would be interesting to see if the same effect exisits in all cultures, perhaps in modern society lacks some disadvantage for beautiful women that keeps things balanced in other times and places.
Have you ever actually SEEN a so-called boyish girl? What about it reminds you of a boy exactly?
Their are LOTS of differences.
So called boyish figures on women do NOT resemble to young male, they represent young women. You can say a lot about the subjects of david hamiltons photographs, but calling them boys is not it.
A young girl who has an healthy weight might experience a growth spurt before she starts to flesh out in a typical womanly figure (wide hips, tits). It is this image that is being sought as the idea of a youth has become all important.
The same by the way is happening for men. No beard, no mustach, no body hair.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There seem to be boatloads of women running around with fashion model builds. As far as I know, that has always been the female definition of beauty, not the male.
Most of the guys I know want to see well defined hips and butt and the curve that goes with it along with plump firm breasts, preferably the naturally plump and firm breasts that can only exist on a girl between 17 and 23. However, the ideal we are looking for has that shapely figure but has it without the slightest hint of fat or cellulite.
The girls coming out of the younger generation seem to have the no fat or cellulite concept but they have no curves at all. Some are flat chested, some are not. More are than aren't although they usually fix that later with breast implants. Basically they have the build of a ten year old boy. They do seem to have nice skin though.
Lets look at Sarah Jessica Parker. A good example because we can see both in the same woman:
She has a hot body here (also referred to as a paper bag fuck because you'd stick a paper bag over the ugly face)
http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/051028/13457__la_l.jpg
And yet by this she has totally lost her shape (although plastic surgery has made her less of a paper bag fuck)
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/06/14/article-0-01C744D3000004B0-600_468x611.jpg
Why would she do this to herself? Well in her case its probably because she is older now and most women can't have a ripe hot body like that at her age, to keep hips that size and shape on someone over 35 means nasty cellulite in my experience. But 16 and 17 year old girls are imitating the same shapeless look and it is a waste.
I personally have relatives who DID get paid less for the same job; one was even a government employee with a PhD and had less experienced men get paid equal or more. My cousin married a coworker-- both had the same accounting job but she made 8% less than he did and she was smarter (she's now the one teaching at a college and was promoted when working at a different firm.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In the USA and in many other countries, women/girls are getting fatter (so are men, but that's orthogonal to the discussion). Fatter has at times past meant more beautiful (at least to painters who appreciate curves) but by today's standards fat is bad. Of course, fat is also known to be unhealthy, and I'd love to know how intellectual knowledge of health plays into attraction.
I suspect that this has a great deal to do with wealth. When most people had to work the fields, white skin and fat and some other things were signs of wealth, and were therefore attractive. Now that everyone works indoors and only the educated and rich bother with food made of animals and plants rather than with growth hormones and hydrocarbons, sports, travel, active hobbies, or at least fake it with gym memberships, the poor get fat and white and the rich get thin and tanned. I know that men are supposed to appreciate "fitness to bear children" rather than "wealth", but I suspect that men are also attracted to upper-class women...?
Another thing occurs to me: the link between social class/education level and number of children is well established--the upper classes have many fewer children for reasons other than how attractive they are. Perhaps the measure of "how many children you have" has some serious problems. Did anyone here actually read the study and find out whether they normalised for education level?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
oh, and there is your signature. Nevermind. No doubt you can be a proffesor for a decade at one of the most exclusive schools in the world, have the president of the world as your friend who shares your skin-color but still, the man is out to get you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Different cultures have different beauty standards. In one Western African practice, a bride-to-be is shut into a hut with metal braces wrapped around her legs to inhibit movement, and given huge amounts of food which she is expected to eat. Yes, she is expected to become quite thick by western European standards. Cultures that have to grapple with starvation often see fat as healthy and beautiful.
Before western influence penetrated the culture, the Japanese thought that the necknape was the most attractive part of the female body. When the Americans occupied their country, all of a sudden there were Japanese women getting boob jobs to curry favor (hence much-needed money and supplies) from the GIs.
The phenomenon that this article describes is well known in some species, but what it means for us is quite vague.
Well not quite... I read of a recent study that found that when you compare women and men who have taken the same number of mathematics classes, then the women actually make a little more. It is not your gender that determines the difference in salaries, it is your math skills.
No carpenter without my math skills can compete with me on the job, their gender doesn't matter. I can layout and cut stair stringers and roof rafters, calculate electical loads to size panels and wires, etc. If I am paid more it is because I can do those things and they cannot.
The article summary is sentence after sentence of assertions that contradict decades of social and psychological studies, including longitudinal studies across continents.
More attractive people tend to make more money. People with more money tend to have fewer children.
The possibility of being more attractive is heritable. Without an environment that allows it to flourish (more money or less need for it = more and better food + less strenuous physical labor) appearance gets worn and old instead.
Attractiveness changes over time within the same culture. That fact alone yanks TFA's plug. In addition, they studied people from a fairly rich group. Those people can afford cosmetics, specialized diets, surgery, and all manner of artificial enhancements to appearance available to those that can afford it.
People that conform to a predetermined concept of attractiveness are not attractive, they are merely successful at altering their appearance to conform to an arbitrary standard. That is not heritable. However, people born into families in which such conformance is possible due to being able to afford it, can themselves take advantage of that. That has the effect of heritability but is not heritability. Furthermore, these people tend to end up with the type of appearance common to their higher socio-economic class and so attract others from that class, and so perpetuate families that purchase the appearance considered desireable in their circles.
An analogy can be taken from increasing height. As a culture overall becomes richer the people can afford better nourishment. Given that, they grow taller. The genetics for their height pre-existed the availability of the environmental factors that made it possible. All along the same genetics got passed along but remained stable -- people merely become able to achieve that which was already built into them.
Lastly, the research is confounded by use of questionnaires. People answer those according to what they think they should say, or don't answer in ways that they perceive will reflect badly on them. In the subject at hand, guys will, for instance, claim to prefer thinner females. The increasingly widespread availability of BBW porn indicates that far more guys like fat chicks than will admit to it. That ending only seemed to lose its scientific attitude. Actually it just switched from the theoretical and sanitized results of research to the real world.
OK, really for real lastly. As a bit of synchronicity, the tag line appearing now summarizes much of what I said: "There is no such thing as an ugly woman -- there are only the ones who do not know how to make themselves attractive. -- Christian Dior" Add "or can afford to" and that pretty much sums it up.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
She blinded me... with SCIENCE!
Offspring are a genetic combination of their parents. If one assumes that beautiful women are more successful in generating offspring and those offspring tend more often to be female, their genes would in fact be more represented in the population over time. However, children are a combination of the genetics of their parents and given the random assortment of chromosomes it seems that male children would also get the genes of their attractive mothers as well as their unattractive rich fathers. Certainly some of these genes would only be expressed in one of the sexes. But, many of these genes that encode for looks would express in both males and females. So, I would interpret these results as saying that both males and female would be evolving towards the female "ideal" appearance. However, there are so many other factors clearly not addressed here, things like ugly people breeding in spite of studies indicating they should not.
I have two beautiful daughters. Suck it, ugly people! :)
...for nerds.
Something that should be considered: A good looking father would pass the genes for a strong chin, muscular build etc. to his sons and his daughters alike. The daughters wouldn't get the best deal here.
It might be interesting to study if good looking fathers have "ugly" daughters who in turn might have good looking sons again.
And of course the other way round too.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
If they don't look good they can't get a man to support them
Lets see, breast implants, fake nails, hair extensions, spray on tans, nip and tucks, dental veneers, and oodles of caked on makeup. I'm not sure women are getting more beautiful, just better at hiding their deficiencies
... would have told them that years ago.
The average French woman is smartly dressed, thin, (unlike most American females of every age,) elegant and capable.
The average French man is a disgusting slob.
The REVERSE is true in Britain where the men look like "Saville Row", albeit with bad teeth, and the women often look like cheap, badly dressed tarts.
In Saudi Arabia, they don't let you look at they women...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
:-)
The appear attractive because of blonde hair and/or larger breasts, but that trait is not passed onto the offspring when they are fake. The fake dye and fake boobs are hurting the normal evolutionary process.
The movie star heart throbs are chosen by men, and they use male understanding of beauty. I.E. They are what a man wants to date, not really attractive men. If they were chosen by women, the men would me taller and more rugged, less feminine.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Since that European survey posited that women achieve the greatest sexual satisfaction from sex with wealthy men, that might explain why ugly men are not selected out of the gene pool. Fortunately for us poor dudes, the female "bad boys are hot" gene is still working.
See my post upthread. Men get paid more than women because men work more than women. It's that simple.
My cousin married a coworker-- both had the same accounting job but she made 8% less than he did and she was smarter (she's now the one teaching at a college and was promoted when working at a different firm.)
Yes, because men are always paid what they are worth, and never get shorted in favor of the boss's buddies and brown-nosers.
See: George W. Bush and all the companies he was put in charge of based on his last name, despite his track record of running them all into the ground.
One issue of Pete Bagge's HATE comic had a bunch of guys discussing the theory that Los Angeles had more beautiful women than anywhere else since beautiful women move there as aspiring actresses/models/singers etc, settle down, and have kids, the inevitable multigenerational result being a city full of hot women. Not the first time ideas put forth by stoners was subjected to scientific inquiry.
no - if we select for feminine beauty, but not masculine beauty men will just get the selected for genes and all our sons will end up looking like beautiful women. If we don't want to breed a race of girly-men we need to start choosing some big butch women too to even things out
... is making women smile and appear more beautiful, this is being "recorded" in their DNA, and therefor their children are becoming more beautiful.
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I'm worried that ugly fat people are having kids at all. Hopefully the beautiful women that never have kids will clone themselves and maybe have the ugly ones raise their children.
but they certainly are getting fatter, ditto for the men, and even some pets
Yeah I agree with Seinfeild: only 5% of people are datable. And this study is skewed somehow. Mostly ugly people have the most kids by far.
Those are mostly issues of style and, like hemlines, they are extremely culture-dependent. Those style factors are also as much about sending messages of status and inclusion to members of the same gender (e.g. women dress up to impress women as much as men).
As was pointed out in "Legally Blonde", what heterosexual male (who isn't in the business) knows that much about women's shoes? I can given you color, height, and general style and that's it.
Or is this "increasingly beautiful" thing are merely reflection of the researchers' application of their concept of beauty to history.
Back in the fall of 1980 while dropping me off for college in Ann Arbor, my father said: "My God, the women are sure ugly this year". And he was right. Bad crop that year. Or something. Maybe it was Reagan vs. Carter vs. Anderson. My father was a die-hard Democrat living in the Republican Wilderness of southwestern lower Michigan.
For the next few years, Young Republicanism dominated campus. Puffy, blow-dry hair. This was the Rise of the Business School. A few hairballs in suits tried to get in to business school through the Engineering school, but (at least in Electrical and Computer Engineering), they stood out more for their incompetence. They were problably the only ones who raised their hands when asked if they thought working for an automobile company was a good career path. Of course, there were hardly any women in engineering - and the ones who were were usually disgusted by the men - either the men were empty headed hairball suits or they had no familiarity with soap and water.
It was bad during the Reagan years. Lots of look-but-don't-touch, as if they'd shatter under the slightest stress. Empty headedness became a goal of both sexes. Lots of bland, dull colors.
Bush was bad too. A hangover of the Reagan years. More dull and drab colors.
Clinton was fun. Lotsa colors. One drawback of the Clinton administration (post Monica) were the little tiny "pince-nose" eyeglasses. Real wicked-witch-of-the-west stuff. That, and plumbers pants.
Bush was bad. Really down. Little tiny eyeglasses got more popular. More plumbers pants. And the tatoos were the worst. Yuck. Perhaps the tat-wearers thought that nobody could see how bad they looked with the plumbers pants, since the eye-glasses were so useless. Colors by JCPenny.
I haven't really had a chance to look much yet this year. Things seem somewhat better, but I haven't had a chance to watch young women much yet.
I relate this as if it were political, but it could be economic too. Or maybe prions in the food supply.
Why don't they study something important like why males have 2x, 3x, and sometimes 4x the suicide rate of females? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
What does that tell you about our human society? If a women feels depressed and lonely, all she has to do is show up at a bar and wait several minutes and she'll get someone to approach her. I'm sure you'll also find that women are just as likely, if not more so, to cheat on their partners.
Indeed more beautiful, but in Europe :-) Because in North America they're getting fatter and fatter as time goes by ...
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.
C'mon, why wait?
What? Girls ...?
Come off it .. More women are now clinically obese than ever before . I think in the US more than 50% of women are obese and there is a very unhealthy proportion who are classified as Morbidly obese eg life threatening. I don't mind a few curves, but women today do so little work, they now have washing machines, Driers and dish washers to do what used to be done by hand. And do they cook at home for the family? No way .. its all microwave and processed food. Some rich women even farm out the business of being pregnant.. How lazy can you get. I am not married and unlikely to find a decent wife who WILL keep her figure *after* she snags her Bread-winner. sigh. asia here I come ...
Actually, there are objective ways to measure beauty.
kL
as long as the ugly and fat among us are still allowed to breed
I think those scientists where wearing their beer goggles. LOL. I'm not sure what their definition of beautiful is, because where I live there sure seems to be a lot of ugly men & women reproducing like rabbits. Honestly sometimes I can't believe that some of these people actually can attract a partner they're so repulsive. Thankfully, not all their offspring turn out as ugly. I guess there is some truth to it, as today women can enhance and beautify any part of their body they want. But, wipe off all that make-up, take away the tweezers & razors, waxing strips, hair dyes, and cosmetic surgeons, and yup...they are just as hairy and ugly as 3000 years ago.
that evolution could be supported based on a mere 40 years worth of "evidence" based on the following:
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.
Quite a leap I must say.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Anyway serious discussion of this issue should start with the original paper (if you have access). A quick skim will reveal that it really doesn't offer much if any support for the evolutionary claim.
The study basically took a bunch of yearbook photos (from 1956) of people for whom they already had data about reproduction. They then asked participants in the "Madison Senior Scholars program" to rate the attractiveness of these yearbook photos (so presumably US HS or college students). They then observed that attractive women tended to have more children than unattractive women (though attractive women outproduced very attractive women).
This setup should make one very leary of drawing any deep evolutionary explanations for the observed phenomenon. Indeed the authors themselves point out that they can't draw any conclusions about mechanism and seem to suggest there are likely complex causes underlying the observations. Moreover, the authors come right out and say the observed correlations between offspring gender and attractiveness aren't significant enough to warrant any conclusions. ("best interpreted cautiously before more data are available").
As far as reproductive success goes just off the top of my head I can come up with a whole bunch of hypothesizes that would account for the greater offspring effect.
One could go on but what's the point. The study just doesn't say what this ridiculous piece of science 'journalism' claims it does.
However, that isn't grounds to reject the claim that humans have been evolving to be more attractive or even that physical attractiveness in women undergoes stronger selection pressure than it does in men. Presumably, one should think that at least the first claim was true (at least before birth control). Hell, it's pretty much a tautology (by definition more attractive means ceterus parabus people find you more sexually attractive). The second claim is less clear. After all in most animals it is the male which undergoes the greater pressure to look attractive. However, in humans there are plausible reasons to think that other forms of status for men take the place of purely physical status while the need for healthy births retains that pressure for females. Of course there are probably real papers on this with real evidence and who knows what that means in the modern enviornment.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I read this story about 5 days ago, in an ink-on-paper magazine with a production cycle about 10 weeks long from another country. So it's a bit surprising to see it pop up on SlashDot like it's NEWS.
But then again, since the story is actually about how badly-done statistics can lead to unsupported claims (such as the beautiful people have more kids claim), maybe I'm not surprised that it took a week or so for the Slimes to read and misunderstand it.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
We just had an article about how men produce more fluid semen when having sex with beautiful women.
(Americans, this may blow your mind...)
In Norway, your income, personal wealth and tax paid is public information.
Example:
http://www.skattelister.no/?do=alfalist&fy=03&k=0301&postnr=0571&firstletter=b
(in Norwegian)
Click on one of the names if you like. I'm in that list, as well as every other Norwegian. (Coworkers, managers, the prime minister.)
I lost my sig.
This is not Evolution this is Natural Selection. Get it right noob sack.
This just in: Hot chicks get laid more often.
News at 11.
I'd like to dip my balls in that.
Having been born in the mid-sixties, I started looking at girls in the late 70's. Scary. Then they all cut their damn hair in the 80's and decided they didn't need to have sex. Feh. By the 90's the attractive ones were all married. Now in the 2000's the really super hot girls are all teenagers so basically I got screwed and not in a good way. My mother who grew up in post-Stalinist Russia tells a story of going to summer camp and they weighed all the kids when they got there and when they left. The goal believe it or not was to GAIN weight. And then there's the whole issue of pubes. Anyone notice that pube coverage has been steadily decreasing over the last 30 years. Maybe it's an altitude thing in that the women have elevated their positions in society so high that they're now above tree-line. Or is it Global Warming? C'mon gals, show some concern for the environment and sequester a little more carbon.
To be brief, IMO, no.
First, well over half of them, and half of the guys, are *fat*. Sorry, I don't find that attractive.
Second, well, it's clear to me that the post-Dr. Spock (NOT Mr. Spock, kiddies, look him up) generation obviously wasn't breast-fed long enough. Women whose each breast is bigger than their head doesn't ring my attraction meter, either.
mark, grown up
Not where I work.
I have seen you on c2.com or at least a link to your SCGUI work and was impressed.
Your perspective on GUIs mirrors my own and I agree with you! Would employ you in a heart beat If I were an employer!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Animal husbandry. We've been able to make selective breeeding into new races / species in as few as a couple of generations. That's why we have so many damn dog /cat breeds.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
..."the strange social stigma" against unions. Remember when Angry McCain bragged he was going to fight the unions? The attitude comes from very powerful circles. Corporate America has decided to shift its manufacturing base to China effectively destroying the power of national unions.
Yup, the "strange social stigma"s are often a matter of policy.
I can only assume that we have an entire nation that's slowly turning gay (not that there's anything wrong with that)
Nothing against it myself either. The more men who turn gay the better. Leaves more totty for me.
Simple stats are not enough to dismiss the issue on either side.
There are many real cases of women getting paid less for working the same amount. Its discriminatory to pay a woman less just because some women may take time off etc. A higher % of black men go to jail; so should we pay them less because they have a higher chance of getting jailed while on the job?
Age discrimination is even MORE common in modern times when the inhumane bean counters took over the businesses.
If we have to hurt the ass-kissers by making it fair, so be it! Most of us hate the ass-kissers anyhow.
I couldn't care less if regulation makes HR and middle managers have to actually WORK for their living. They are already quite good at screwing people out of retirement benefits without giving away their motives...or if you are SICK...
This stuff will get WORSE as big brother grows-- your opinion on facebook may cost you dearly decades from now - and that is just published info; advanced profiling will cause so much more harm than people can imagine... Buy the wrong gum one day and the computer lowers your % confidence level and you get fired.
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