Beauty - the ugly truth.Byline: B COMBER comb·er n. 1. One, such as a machine or a worker, that combs something, such as wool. 2. A long wave that has reached its peak or broken into foam; a breaker. The female of the species, as Rudyard Kipling told us, is more deadly than the male. But are females becoming more beautiful? That question has become a matter of heated debate, following a recently published piece of research. It was sparked off by a paper for the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour by the Finnish psychologist Markus Jokela, entitled en·ti·tle tr.v. en·ti·tled, en·ti·tling, en·ti·tles 1. To give a name or title to. 2. To furnish with a right or claim to something: Physical Attractiveness Physical attractiveness is the perception of the physical traits of an individual human person as pleasing or beautiful. It can include various implications, such as sexual attractiveness, cuteness, and physique. And Reproductive Success Reproductive success is defined as the passing of genes onto the next generation in a way that they too can pass those genes on. In practice, this is often a tally of the number of offspring produced by an individual. In Humans: Evidence From the Late 20th Century United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. . As Jokela points out, our concept of physical attractiveness must have evolved as a predictor of mate quality and reproductive success. If men and women are not genetically programmed to seek partners who will produce healthy children, then their genes will not survive. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke" put differently , the attractiveness gene should be the same as, or at least closely related to, the having-lots-of-healthy-children gene. The role of attractiveness in reproductive success, however, has received little scientific attention. Jokela's research was based on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study longitudinal study a chronological study in epidemiology which attempts to establish a relationship between an antecedent cause and a subsequent effect. See also cohort study. of 1,244 women and 997 men born between 1937 and 1940. Basically, the question he wanted to answer was simple: did more beautiful people have more children? To answer it, he started with photographs of all the people in the study as 18-year-olds, asked a sample of students to rate how attractive they all were, then correlated the results with the number of children they had. The results generally confirmed the hypothesis that attractive is good, in terms of reproductive success, but in an intriguingly in·trigue n. 1. a. A secret or underhand scheme; a plot. b. The practice of or involvement in such schemes. 2. A clandestine love affair. v. variable manner that showed significant differences between men and women. If we divide the women into four groups in terms of attractiveness that we might call Very Beautiful, Quite Beautiful, Plain and Ugly, then it was not the Very Beautiful, but the Quite Beautiful who had most children, through the Very Beautiful still had more than the Plain and the Ugly. For men, however, there was no detectable difference between being Plain, Quite Beautiful or Very Beautiful, though the Uglies did worse than any of the other groups. So for women, being Very Beautiful is a good thing, but not as good as being Quite Beautiful; while for men, it does not matter if you are Beautiful or not, as long as you are not Ugly. Copyright 2009 Gulf Daily News Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
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