It's not that simple, of course, as lead researcher Dr Satoshi Kanazawa explains: "Beautiful parents have more daughters than ugly parents, because physical attractiveness is heritable and because daughters benefit from attractiveness more than sons."
Other recent papers from Dr. Kanazawa, who is a professor of evolutionary psychology at the London School of Economics, include: "Violent Men Have More Sons", ""Big and Tall Parents Have More Sons", and "Engineers Have More Sons, Nurses Have More Daughters".
Hot female engineers were not available for comment.
Beautiful people tend to have girls, say scientists [timesonline.co.uk via kottke]
Dr Satoshi Kanazawa bio, London School of Economics [lse.ac.uk]
*sigh* sounds like the family name ends with me...
I love how practitioners of "soft" science like this like to pretend that they're in the same league as physics and chemistry, where things can in fact be objectively measured.
"Researchers rated their beauty according to height, weight and apparent age, all factors that can be used to judge basic attraction levels without subjective viewpoints."
Ah, yes, that totally removes all subjectivity. And it isolates and removes external factors as well!
Another quote:
"'We have also shown that women on average are more attractive than men, because over evolutionary history the slight bias of beautiful parents to have more daughters has accumulated, so that girls have become more and more attractive than boys.'"
Is it just me, or does this really sound like the reviewer is crying out "I am not gay! I prefer women! Scientific fact!!!"
I'm not sure how the statement they give could possibly be scientifically demonstrated without going back in time and objectively measuring that in prehistoric times, men were objectively equally as attractive as women.
[I wondered if he was just trying to find a wife. I was going to post his picture to hotornot.com, though. -ed.]