The more beautiful the woman is who loves you, the easier it is to leave her with no hard feelings.
By Ben Leach 3:00PM BST 26 Jul 2009
Researchers have found that attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female.
Once those daughters become adult they also tend to be good looking themselves and so the pattern gets repeated as women over the generations become steadily more aesthetically pleasing.
As attractive couples are less likely to have boy than a girl, men, in contrast, remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the scientists also claim.
The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in human beings. In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16 per cent more children than less attractive women.
He looked at a sample of more than 2,000 men and women from around the world, following them through four decades of life.
Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during this study, which also collected the data on the number of children they had.
A study in 2006 by scientists at the London School of Economics found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive good looking daughters.
They suggested this was because of differing “evolutionary strategies” that each sex has adopted to survive over generations, and which had been subtly programmed into DNA.
Mr Kanazawa said: “Physical attractiveness is a most highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of males.
“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 thier male countaparts.”