Evolution is making women more beautiful – and fruitful

You will have heard or read about the study released last week that suggested that evolution is making women more beautiful.

We men, on the other hand, are still “stuck in the Stone Age in terms of attractiveness”, as The Sunday Times (London) put it.

The study by Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, using data gathered in the USA, demonstrated that beautiful women had more children than their less beautiful counterparts. The other striking thing is that a higher proportion of those children were female.

The children also tended to be attractive and go on to repeat the pattern of having more female children once they became adults, according to the study.

The study found attractive women had 16 per cent more children, and very attractive women had 6 per cent more children than their less attractive counterparts.

But the study found that the opposite is true for men, with handsome ones being no more successful than others in terms of number of children.

Scientists said this suggested there was little pressure for men’s appearance to evolve. In other words, an ugly man (especially if he is smart and successful), will still get himself a beautiful woman.

From an African perspective, this is interesting for slightly different reasons.

First, one striking thing about Africa, especially if you go to schools where children of middle class parents study, is that these children tend to resemble, and it can be quite frustrating locating your little one in the mad house.

The result is that what you would call the “typical tribal look” has all but disappeared. This development started when, increasingly, more educated and urbanised parents stopped scarring their children with ethnic ritual marks on the forehead or cheeks.

Thus the school children today have no ethnic marks, or if they do, they are fewer than their parents had. And their parents have fewer than their grandparents.

Then, the rise of the middle class meant, for example, that nearly all their children endured the agonising, but fruitful, years of being forced to drink Cod Liver Oil, and they ate largely the same food that their parents bought from the same super-market.

If the typical tribal look is on its way out, then it is possible that tribal taste which people bring to choosing a partner could also disappear with it, increasing the prospect of cross-cultural marriage – and reduction of deadly ethnic politics.

Because Arabs will soon overwhelm Jews inside Israel and the occupied territories due to their very high birth-rate is very high, the former president of the Palestinian Authority, Yassir Arafat, once said: “Our ultimate weapon is the womb of the Palestinian woman.”

Likewise, you might say, long-suffering Africa will be saved by the wombs of its women, not the wisdom of its leaders.