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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!
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.
>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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v_azJv50KQ
Amazing what 4 hours of makeup and 4 hours of photoshop can do.
More data, damnit!
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.
Employers pay for (among other things) experience. Spending less time at work in order to be a primary caregiver reduces the amount of experience you can gain and offer to potential employers.
Its both.Photoshop erodes women's confidence in their looks, so when you add sufficient beer they look like covergirls.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Except that the standard for "beauty" changes over time. I'm not sure I'm buying this.
Standard for "beauty" may change over time, but does that also apply to standard for "ugly"?
It's called "getting older". When you're 20, almost all women over 40 are unattractive, when you're pushing sixty most of the 40 year old woman are good looking.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
For faster analysis go watch the beginning of Idiocracy.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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.
That's not my true in my case. When I was a teenager I thought a woman was beautiful all the way upto 40 (think classmates' attractive moms)
Nowadays I often think 30 is the cutoff point...sometimes even as young as 25 if she lets herself get fat... from "cute" to "porky" in just a few years. For example I might look at Britney Spears and think, 'She used to be hot, but now she has jumbo thighs and a beer belly." Ditto Ashley Simpson or that Ghostwhisper girl. I often find myself thinking younger is better.
I blame the internet. Whereas I used to think "girl == hot" and I really didn't care if she had saggy breasts just as long as she had some, now exposure to literally millions of photographs has made me prefer small, firm breasts. i.e. I'm more picky and shallow.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Warning: Sweeping Generalisation Approaching: Women aren't in it for looks beyond prehaps looks which show good general health. They are interested in the appearance of success and maybe personality traits which suggest the man might be successful such as humour (shows intelligence, social skills) assertiveness (shows leadship, possibily shows the ability to come up with new ideas although I think middle management is filled with prove this isn't always the case).
One thing I would like the reseachers to investigate is whether men are getting taller (rather than more attractive). Numerous studies show that the higher levels of business structures are over represented by above average height men. There a number of possibly explantions of this, from taller men are more intelligent (bollocks) to taller men being equated to being leaders (think we might have a winner) if only subsciously. Therefore it would seem to me that height could be a physical selector used by women as a subconscious selector of success.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I don't know - some of the 1930s ladies were pretty hot. I recall watching one scene where two girls are living together, and suddenly they strip-down to their undides. That made me sit-up and take notice.
And of course there's that infamous Tarzan scene where Janes swims naked. She looks quite nice as well.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
OK
I changed my mind.
I am SO into her new, big arse!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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
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.
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
Similarly, before the industrial revolution it was unfashionable to be tan, since being tan meant that you were working out in the fields. After the industrial revolution, it became fashionable to be tan, because that meant that you weren't in a factory all day.
Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
That's not true, and it's another flaw in the design of the study. In brief, you can *always* account for a woman's offspring - after all, she's pregnant for 9 months and gives birth rather conspicuously. It is therefore pretty much impossible for a woman to hide one of her offspring. If she has a child, we know about it.
Men on the other hand can easily have offspring that no one knows about. In other words, this whole study is predicated on the spectacularly naive assumption that all children are the offspring of their legal fathers, which is known to be false. A small, but significant percentage of all children born are were fathered by someone other than their mother's husband. This means that *attractive* men really *do* have more children. It's just that they often have them by cuckolding other men.
This means that both attractive men and attractive women have more offspring.
Well I don't know where you live but in the part of Canada I live in teachers are very well paid. They start at about $45K and move up quickly and that's for working less than 10 months of the year. And, I have to say this, at the universities I attended the education students weren't considered the brightest lights.
Interesting. I think we might have a differing opinion on what very well paid means.
My roommate in college quit his software engineering job to become a teacher in Anaheim a few years back. He started at around $60k and is now making closer to $70k.
You can look at the pay scales here: http://www.auhsd.k12.ca.us/ourpages/salary/teachers//Teacher%20Salary%20Schedule%2007-08.pdf?rn=4671590
It's more than he was making doing software engineering. He also gets 3 months off per year, guaranteed unemployment during the 3 months off, full health and dental for himself and his wife, and various other amusing perks as the result of teachers' union negotiations. If you factor all of this in, it's worth well over $100k a year. Not bad for a guy who has been teaching for about 4 years, eh?
Teachers in the district still complain about being underpaid though. While, yes, they do provide a valuable service, I personally don't think that they "are underpaid" by any stretch of the imagination.
Not really. The average marrying age for girls used to be 13-20. If you made it past then, you were either on your second marriage already or were desperately trying to find a husband.
Today's standards of beauty follow the same premise. The difference is, women are getting married later in life -- due to how much preparation is given before they are considered adults -- and thus, desire to be unnaturally skinny in order to resemble young girls in the 13-20 range.
Biologically, this makes sense. Human males are attracted to just post-pubescent girls as that is their most fertile time. I'd say that it isn't so much the standards of beauty that are changing, but rather social views of when a woman can be viewed as sexually attractive.
If you mention to someone in the 1920's that one can get arrested for photoshoping a pic of Miley Cyrus (16 years old), they'd look at you funny.
Well I guess well paid depends on the cost of living where you are and what other people make. The average family income here is about $60K/yr so starting fresh out of school at $45K (with all the nice bennies you mentioned) for 10 months work seems like it is well paid to me. Especially compared to a new Ph.D. gets in say chemistry.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
And does anyone actually follow this? I tell my coworkers freely if they ask. If either of us are being fucked, we want to know. If they threatened termination based on that, they'd find themselves on the losing side of that exchange, as being a somewhat popular employee being fired for such a bullshit reason would be a morale killer- not to mention I would refuse to do any handoff effort on my work costing them man months.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Even across different cultures today there are massive differences.
Take skin tone for example, in western society the majority of people are white so a well tanned woman is considered more beautiful. In eastern culture as many of the people are brown/tanned, white skin is prized. If you look at Jpop, Kpop, Thai Pop, mando/cantopop most of the pop stars are albino.
This is reflected in cosmetic products, in the west there is a crap load of fake tan and tanning salons in order to darken skin tones. In eastern society there are whitening creams.
The irony of this is that most of this stems from the same source. In western society, to have a tan shows that you are rich enough to spend time laying in the sun, in eastern society a tan is vindictive of working outdoors (lower class) so being white demonstrates that you have a better class of job working indoors.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.