Weird news

First children of beautiful people tend to be girls.
Very strange.
This study uses the Add Health data which I'm in the process of analyzing for a completely different topic (predictors of civic engagement, as it happens).

The interviewers rated the adolescents on a 1-to-5 scale. Several years later, in wave 3 of the study, they asked about children born. The researchers found that those who were rated most attractive were significantly more likely to have female children than those who were less attractive.

Why does this occur? Kanazawa said that the study supports the evolutionary theory that parents tend to produce offspring who benefit from their own attributes.

Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to boys - such as large size, strength, and aggression - are more likely to have boys. Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to girls - such as physical beauty - are more likely to have girls.

Kanazawa believes that men value physical appearance more than women do when seeking a partner, and so beauty, in general, is a better attribute to pass on to girls than to boys.

"Physical attractiveness is good for both men and women, but it is much better for women than for men," he said.

Mark Thomas, senior lecturer at the biology department of University College London, told the Sunday Times newspaper that Kanazawa's findings do seem to conform with research on sexual evolution.

Kanazawa said his research also explains why women, on average, are better-looking than men.

"Because physical attractiveness is heritable - and because physically attractive parents have more daughters and less attractive parents have more sons - the average level of physical attractiveness among women increases over time relative to men," he said.

Very mysterious. I don't quite understand how this can work on a biological level, but nevertheless I thought it was interesting.