Women more beautiful but men remain Neanderthal, study finds

Published on Sunday 26 July 2009 22:15

RESEARCH has found evolution is making women more beautiful, while men remain as unappealing as their cavemen ancestors.

Scientists argue beautiful women are having 16 per cent more children than their "plainer" counterparts and a higher proportion of those children are female. When the daughters have children of their own, the pattern is repeated.

Markus Jokela, from the University of Helsinki, looked at data from the US involving 1,244 women and 997 men followed over the course of four decades for the study, which was released last week.

Attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study and compared with the number of children couples had.

For handsome men, research found they were no more successful than others in terms of the number of children, suggesting there was little pressure for men's appearance to evolve.

Previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters. He suggested it was an evolutionary strategy programmed into human DNA.

He said: "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."

Gayle Brewer, a psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, said: "Men and women seek different things. For women, looks are much less important in a man than his ability to look after her when she is pregnant and nursing. Historically this has meant rich men tend to have more wives and many children. So the pressure is on men to be successful."