why do beautiful women marry ugly men?
[man, if this isn’t a double helping of pseudo-science: evo psych &
econ!]
Why Do Beautiful Women Sometimes Marry Unattractive Men?
It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other
compelling attribute.
But a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at
the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-
and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than
there are handsome men.
Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking parents are 36% more
likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son—
which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more
valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data
from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of
Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical
Biology.
According to this news article, “Selection pressure means 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. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are
more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”
Beauty is apparently just one “female” trait. Kanazawa has done
previous research suggesting that nurses, social workers and
kindergarten teachers—those with “empathic” traits—also had more
daughters than sons. Meanwhile, he found that scientists,
mathematicians and engineers are more likely to have sons than
daughters.
It is good that Kanazawa is only a researcher and not, say, the
president of Harvard. If he were, that last finding about scientists
may have gotten him fired.
(Hat tip: Nadine Groney)