6 ms·

Research says women are getting more beautiful

27 points by peter123 17y ago

Adam503 17y ago
I gotta be careful. I just know there's gotta be a "Do these pants make me look fat" trap in here somewhere.
yannis 17y ago
Surely as I get older!
- rbanffy 17y ago
  At least, they look younger.
jacquesm 17y ago
If the male Peacock can be produced by a runaway beauty contest then of course the same can happen in other species, including humans.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  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_AnimBehav2008.pdf http://www.adeline-loyau.net/publications/Loyau_etal_AnimBeh...
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    interesting, thank you!
alexgartrell 17y ago
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.
- helveticaman 17y ago
  Maybe their ovules are more receptive to heavier sperm or can detect whether a sperm is XX. Or fertilized eggs that are girls attach more easily. There are a lot of ways this can be the case.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 17y ago
  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.
  - endtime 17y ago
    Are you saying that, according to this mechanism, the womb tends to abort males that will be beautiful and females that will be tall?
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      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.
kqr2 17y ago
These days, there's also better healthcare, makeup, and plastic surgery so women can look "younger" and more "beautiful" for a longer time.
helveticaman 17y ago
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.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > muscle mass, neural mass and fat are the most significant ways humans spend discretionary calories. I can see the fat and the muscle, but neural mass ? Do you have a citation for that ?
  - helveticaman 17y ago
    No, I don't. But I've asked doctors, and they say the nervous system takes up between 20 and 30% of a person's caloric intake. A third is spent on maintenance and two thirds on firing synapses. Apparently it's ridiculously energy-intensive to fire those things. I was surprised too. It is also the case that humans have a huge amount of brain matter for their size. And keep in mind it does not take that much brain power to survive; in fact, there's a theory humans have evolved large brains as sexual ornamentation, as it apparently helps attract mates.
  - whatusername 17y ago
sarosh 17y ago
http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(09)00027-0/abstract http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(09)00027-0/abstr... 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

27 points by peter123 17y ago

Adam503 17y ago

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

yannis 17y ago

Surely as I get older!

rbanffy 17y ago
At least, they look younger.

jacquesm 17y ago

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

tokenadult 17y ago
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_AnimBehav2008.pdf http://www.adeline-loyau.net/publications/Loyau_etal_AnimBeh...
- jacquesm 17y ago
  interesting, thank you!

alexgartrell 17y ago

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.

helveticaman 17y ago
Maybe their ovules are more receptive to heavier sperm or can detect whether a sperm is XX. Or fertilized eggs that are girls attach more easily. There are a lot of ways this can be the case.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 17y ago
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.
- endtime 17y ago
  Are you saying that, according to this mechanism, the womb tends to abort males that will be beautiful and females that will be tall?
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    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.

kqr2 17y ago

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

helveticaman 17y ago

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.

jacquesm 17y ago
> muscle mass, neural mass and fat are the most significant ways humans spend discretionary calories. I can see the fat and the muscle, but neural mass ? Do you have a citation for that ?
- helveticaman 17y ago
  No, I don't. But I've asked doctors, and they say the nervous system takes up between 20 and 30% of a person's caloric intake. A third is spent on maintenance and two thirds on firing synapses. Apparently it's ridiculously energy-intensive to fire those things. I was surprised too. It is also the case that humans have a huge amount of brain matter for their size. And keep in mind it does not take that much brain power to survive; in fact, there's a theory humans have evolved large brains as sexual ornamentation, as it apparently helps attract mates.
- whatusername 17y ago

sarosh 17y ago

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