Conventional Wisdom Validated

Some things I have always posited as true:

• Women, in general, are more attractive than men. I.e. looking at the average woman, is a more aesthetically pleasing experience than looking at the average man.
• Men, on the whole, are more interested in appearance in a potential partner than women are, generally speaking.

And now there’s some research that seems to back this up, and shows some interesting consequences of it: women are getting more attractive across the generations.

One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men. The other was that the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons.

Kanazawa said: “Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons.

“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.”

Of course there must be some other confounding factors in there–it wouldn’t surprise me to find, for example, that attractive women tend to better economic situations, and that of course would mean their children would have potentially better nutrition, medical care, etc, all of which could affect attractiveness.