Did You Know? Beautiful People Tend to Have Daughters

This just in: Beautiful people are 36 per cent more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first-born child, Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics announced last month.

Did you know? Guess why?

According to evolutionary theory, parents are likely to produce children who benefit from the parents’ best traits.

Thus, when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. Freakonomics co-author, Stephen J. Dubner, partially agrees.

On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls, such as beauty, they are more likely to have daughters.

By the way, researchers have confirmed the obvious, “People from all societies agree on who is beautiful and who is ugly.”

Have you noticed the result when you’ve out and about people-watching?

In his controversial research, Dr. Kanazawa concludes that "because physically attractive parents have more daughters and less attractive parents have more sons, over time, the average level of physical attractiveness among women increases relative to men.”

Plainly speaking (‘scuse the mild pun), that means, according to this research anyway, there’s a beauty gap between the sexes – and it will widen.

Increasingly there will be more attract women than men. Wonder how that will affect courting behavior.

It ought to start some lively conversations, especially now that Kanazawa’s book with Alan S. Miller is out, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.

Interestingly, in past research, by Dr Kanazawa found that engineers, scientists and mathematicians who have systematic "male brains", are more likely to have sons than daughters. The same was true for big and tall parents, and violent fathers.

Conversely, nurses, social workers and kindergarten teachers with empathic "female brains" had more daughters.