Sorry, kiddo. Your parents must not be attractive then..... but Grandpa and Grandma (from both families) must be.
Attractive couples have girls, says expert
From the Sydney Morning HeraldShelley Emling in London, August 5, 2006
Coincidence? Perhaps not.
Research from the London School of Economics indicates "physically attractive" couples are 36 per cent more likely than unattractive couples to produce a girl as their first child.
The research - led by an evolutionary psychologist, Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, and published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology - is based on the study of 3000 young American adults in 2001 and 2002 who were taking part in an investigation called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
After hours of discussions, interviewers ranked the attractiveness of participants using a five-point scale ranging from "very unattractive" to "very attractive".
Asked whether rankings were subjective, Dr Kanazawa argued that physical attractiveness is an objective quantitative measure.
"Standards of beauty are both innate and culturally universal, and everybody agrees on who is beautiful and who is ugly just like they agree on who is tall and who is short," he said.
Dr Kanazawa then compared the percentage of boys and girls born to the participants who were very attractive with the sex ratio of babies born to everyone else. He discovered that 56 per cent of first babies born to very attractive parents were girls, while fewer than half of the babies born to parents in each of the other categories were girls.
Dr Kanazawa said that the study supported the evolutionary theory that parents tended to produce offspring who benefitted 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.
2 comments:
What in the world got you on this?!? Was it on Yahoo's front page or something? This is funny....hmmmmm, Adam and I had a girl. ;-) Hee hee
Before we found out that Peanut's a boy, a colleague predicted that Bill and I were going to have a girl because he thinks we're an attractive couple. I laughed it off at that time, but he swore there's scientific evidence to prove it (he also used he and his wife as proof 'cause they had a girl first).
I recalled what this colleague had said before When we found out that Peanut's boy, and I just thought it'd be funny to post it.
Well... parents' attractiveness aside, recently we've discovered that, in the last 5 months, the 4 teachers who had kids (or got pregnant) all have (or are going to have) sons. We actually talked about including this in our recruitment ad: "Wanna have a boy? Come work here!"
Of course, you and Adam (and Juli and her Adam) are attractive couples.
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