Beautiful Couples

Physically attractive couples are 36 per cent more likely than unattractive couples to produce a girl as their first child. This new study is based on a survey of 3,000 young American adults conducted during the period from 2001 to 2002, who were taking part in an investigation called, "The National Longitudinal study of Adolescent - health".

"Physical attractiveness is an objective quantitative measure, iust like height and weight. Standards of beauty are both innate and culturally universal and everybody agrees on who is beautiful and who is ugly just like they agree on who is tall and who is short.

The biggest factor is facial features. There are computer programmes that can precisely measure someone's physical attractiveness. Comparing the percentage of boys and girls born to the participants who were very attractive with the sex ratio of babies born to everyone else, it is discovered that 56 per cent of first babies born to very attractive parents were girls, while fewer than 50 per cent of the babies born to parents in each of the other categories were girls. Why does this occur? The study supports the evolutionary theory that parents tend to produce offspring who benefit from their own attributes. Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to boys, such as large size, strength, and aggression, are more likely to have boys. Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to girls, such as physical beauty, are more likely to have girls.

Men value physical appearance more than women do when seeking a partner and so beauty, in general, is a better attribute to pass on to girls than to boys. Physical attractiveness is good for both men and women, but it is much better for women than for men," said research team leader Dr Santoshi Kamazawa, a professor at the London School of Economics.

"Kamazawa's findings do seem to confirm with research on sexual evolution," researcher Dr Mark Thomas, a professor at the Department of Biology at the University College, London told reporters.