Evolution turning women more beautiful: Study

London: There`s good news for women for a study has found that evolution is driving females to become ever more beautiful, while males remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestorsBased on a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans, researchers found the beautiful women have more children than their not so good-looking counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, when they grow up, also tend to be pretty and so repeat the pattern, according to a study released last week.

According to the scientists, over generations this process has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a "beauty race", a process that is still continuing, The Times said. Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16 per cent more children than females who were not so attractive. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their beauty was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had, the report said. The study builds on an earlier research by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters. He suggested this was an evolutionary strategy subtly programmed into human DNA. "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," said Kanazawa. In contrast, for men good looks hardly matters, with handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of numbers of children. It means there has been little pressure for men’s appearance to evolve, the study suggested. Bureau Report