Are people getting better looking?

Baylor

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Are people becoming more physically attractive in an evolutionary beauty race? The Women's movement has given women more selection to choose whom to mate with since women have become more financially independent. This frees them up to choose better-looking men, thus, having better looking children.

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

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710.ece

Is sexual selection driving the preference for physical attractiveness even further?

To illustrate an example. Notice how attractive the two girls are in this video


The standard of beauty is much higher than twenty years ago. Note how relatively unattractive this girls is compared to the girls in the first video.
 
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Well, can't watch the second video over here.

But based on the first one I'd have to say it looks like attractiveness, dressing foolishly, making lousy "music" and acting like an idiot go hand in hand.
 
What an interesting study. I glanced through the article and couldn't see whether the children of good looking women were more likely to be good looking themselves other than the bland assertion Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons. That is, Kanazawa says it but there are no figures to show that by the third generation people are x% more attractive.

From an anecdotal and unscientific point of view, I note that the heifers in Sea Mills in their cyan velveteen lounge suits surrounded by their innumerable offspring are considerably less attractive than the Yummy Mummies in Clifton with their one or two kids.
 
Tapio said:
Well, can't watch the second video over here.

But based on the first one I'd have to say it looks like attractiveness, dressing foolishly, making lousy "music" and acting like an idiot go hand in hand.
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I did a screenshot. This is just an example of how the standards of physical attractiveness have changed.

pic1a.png
pic21.png
 
Or standard of attractiveness in *media* changed. I am not sure they *EVER* reflected attractiveness to your average male, I think they reflect standard of attractiveness to average female.

Me in the mean time I am just happy that the female german population is slightly more overweight (means bigger breast) than the average skeleton you see in mass media or magazines.
 
It seems to me that standards of attractiveness are very much subject to cultural variation. We have, in our time and culture, a certain notion of what an attractive woman looks like, and will generally tend to find women attractive or unattractive based on how well they fit this notion. We find “attractive” women of earlier times less attractive, because they were judged attractive in their own time by a different standard than we use today. For the same reason, if we could transport photographs of what we consider to be our most attractive women of our time back to people a hundred years ago, those people would probably not find them as attractive as they find women from their own time who better conform to their notion of what is attractive.
 
I am not convinced by this article. Damien Evens hit it on the head:

Define better looking.
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The girls in the videos are just two different "kinds of beauty". In the 80's (the time period where that video comes from) the female sex symbols were people such as Kathleen Turner and Kim Bassinger. Going earlier, I think that Clara Bow (1920's) and Evelyn Nesbit (1900!) were incredibly beautiful.

ETA: Here's a link to some of the sex symbols over the years. http://bugehoobs.com/girls/top_sex_symbols_of_every_decade

The differences are not just what the media is pushing as beautiful, but also, the style of dress and make up and even how the photography was done makes a lot of differences.

I think what is really happening is that women are pretty much the same - and we've gotten better at retouching their photos.
 
Around these parts, I find that the folks seem to be sliding away from the northern european concept of beauty, and towards the pacific islands, sumo wrestler or eskimo concept of beauty, more a 'big belly roll and gold teeth' sort of look. I blame fast food and TV rather than any specific effort to maintain a certain appearance.
 
Tangentially and anecdotally, feet are getting bigger. Having had to search high and low to buy shoes for my abnormally large feet in previous decades, I've recently been noticing more and more shoe shops stocking sizes one or two increments higher than was previously standard, while the specialist large shoe people have massively increased their range as well as including many more 'youth' styles. I'd venture to suggest this is also in part due to greater reproductive choice by women.
 
jiggeryqua said:
Tangentially and anecdotally, feet are getting bigger. Having had to search high and low to buy shoes for my abnormally large feet in previous decades, I've recently been noticing more and more shoe shops stocking sizes one or two increments higher than was previously standard, while the specialist large shoe people have massively increased their range as well as including many more 'youth' styles. I'd venture to suggest this is also in part due to greater reproductive choice by women.
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Interesting... have you noticed if gloves have bigger thumbs?
 
sphenisc said:
Interesting... have you noticed if gloves have bigger thumbs?
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Mine stretch according to my level of arousal. I support Yeovil town football club. Thay are known as "The Glovers" Therefore I know about these things.
 
UNLoVedRebel said:
Are people becoming more physically attractive in an evolutionary beauty race?
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You could just as well theorize the opposite, are people getting more tolerant about beauty expectations, in an evolutionary race for producing maximum number of descendants with whomever?
 
The OP, if true, might actually be good news for me. I’m having more success working toward my beach body than I am my career right now.

Also, I read a long time ago somewhere that people’s ideas of beauty change with the times – specifically, that in tough times (e.g. draught, famine, financial recession) we prefer people who’re a little more plump than average, and in good times the ideal swings back to the skinny side of average.
 
Here's another take....Only increasingly-attractive people appear in US media. If you look around, it's pretty obvious that ugly people make babies as well...

If you look at TV and movies from other countries, it seems that the obsession with what we think of as attractiveness is perhaps not so pervasive.

I don't think the entertainment industry is a good standard to judge this by.
 
Bikewer said:
If you look at TV and movies from other countries, it seems that the obsession with what we think of as attractiveness is perhaps not so pervasive.
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Not sure that is true. I have made quite a few trips to Russia and Mexico in the last few years. Based on what I see on TV in both countries, what we think of as attractive is quite pervasive.
 
UNLoVedRebel said:
I did a screenshot. This is just an example of how the standards of physical attractiveness have changed.

[qimg]http://i625.photobucket.com/albums/tt332/JREFImages/pic1a.png[/qimg][qimg]http://i625.photobucket.com/albums/tt332/JREFImages/pic21.png[/qimg]
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I think the section process for videos may be having an effect on this comparison. The women on the right is Tawny Kitan. She was the girlfriend of the lead singer in that video at the time it was made. No idea who the other girl is.
 
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts.
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The conclusion that beautiful women had more children because they are attractive is entirely unjustified by that data. It's quite probable that healthier women have more children (for obvious reasons), and health is strongly correlated with perceived beauty.

This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters.
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That, on the other hand, sounds real and quite interesting. Does anyone know if there's a proposed mechanism? Are X sperm favored over Y sperm in the fallopian tubes of a beautiful woman compared to an unattractive one? Are male fetuses more likely to miscarry if one or both parents is attractive? It sounds totally implausible to me....

...but come to think of it, perhaps that too can ultimately be explained by health. For example one might think that in good times it makes sense to have more female babies, since more resources are available to grow the population.
 
Bikewer said:
If you look at TV and movies from other countries, it seems that the obsession with what we think of as attractiveness is perhaps not so pervasive.
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Judging by the Spanish-language channels on cable, the opposite is true.
 
How would you even approach this from a scientific basis? If you want to start from 0 BC, pictures did not even exist then to provide some objective starting point. True there are portraits but those were only those that could afford it. What about the rest of the working folks?
 
From my elderly status, yes, there are many more better looking people around than when I was younger... and had a much more limited age-group that I would consider. The low end is still the same, but the upper limit has expanded. (along with my tummy).
 
So the OP is saying that the girls in the first video are more attractive than Tawny Kitaen?


Not from this side of the monitor they aren't.
The girls in the first video look like a bunch of low class tramps.
 
Howie Felterbush said:
That's not an unattractive girl in the second video, that's David Coverdale.

It's a common mistake.
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.
Coverdale was the blond.
THAT is Tawny Kitaen!
Wow oh wow!
(Deianiera in "Hercules")
Coverdale married her after the video.
I do believe one of her later husbands, a professional football player, has a restraining order against her! :)
 
I see what you did there.

Just in case you were not having a giggle, the second video is nearly all men (and one can debate Tawny Kitaen, especially in light of later mugshots).

As an aside, I once read an interview in which Coverdale recollected that he got tired of the tall-hair-makeup-and-girl-clothes schtick pretty quickly, but the record company swore Whitesnake would lose their 14-year-old girl audience, which at that point was nearly all of their audience.

Don't quote me on this, my recollection of that era is fuzzy for various reasons.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
Around these parts, I find that the folks seem to be sliding away from the northern european concept of beauty, and towards the pacific islands, sumo wrestler or eskimo concept of beauty, more a 'big belly roll and gold teeth' sort of look. I blame fast food and TV rather than any specific effort to maintain a certain appearance.
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Around these parts, mixed-races are favored. One reason why I chose the Afro-Carribean/Puerto Rican looking girl as an example. It seems race is dissolving; humans are turning into a moca-skinned color species.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6057734.stm

sol invictus said:
That, on the other hand, sounds real and quite interesting. Does anyone know if there's a proposed mechanism? Are X sperm favored over Y sperm in the fallopian tubes of a beautiful woman compared to an unattractive one? Are male fetuses more likely to miscarry if one or both parents is attractive? It sounds totally implausible to me....
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I don't know, but I'm sure male fetuses miscarry more often than females ones.
 
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PracticalNihilist said:
How would you even approach this from a scientific basis? If you want to start from 0 BC, pictures did not even exist then to provide some objective starting point. True there are portraits but those were only those that could afford it. What about the rest of the working folks?
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Perhaps go back to the invention of the camera. I still think you'd see some difference in that short time span. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCapprio are unconvcing in roles where the characters aren't in modern times. People just didn't look like that a few generation or so ago. Even DiCapprio as Howard Hughes was unconvincing. Not because of his acting skills, but because of his looks.
 
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