Is This the Worst Science Project Ever?

The Daily Telegraph, short of stories this summer now that the expenses scandal is dead, has published a picture of Angelina Jolie under the heading:

Women getting more beautiful, say scientists: (see link)

According to some work done by  Finnish Philosopher/Psychologist Markus Jokela,

…attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female…

The methodology was to look at 2000 Americans, and then decide that ‘beautiful‘ women had 16% more children.  How this ‘beauty‘ decision was derived, is unknown, save for the comment that,

“attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study”

The article continues in the same vein by quoting the results of yet more “scientists” from the London School of Economics taken in 2006.  They had the same ‘results‘.

The gaffa in charge of this, Mr Kanazawa, said…,

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

Rubbish Science

Dunce's Hat

The point is that the above statement is produced with absolutely NO backing.  It’s an opinion, that’s all. 

It could be equally well said about men.

Remember, it takes two to tango and make a child.   The fact that attractive men can rapidly spread their seed faster than any woman proves that this statement is bunkum…

Look at it like this…

• In 9 months, a woman can parent one child.
• In 9 months, with one successful shag per day, a man can parent 270 children.

Who is having the greater initial reproductive success?  Obviously, the man.

I’m sure that someone like Brad Pitt, Jolie’s husband, if let loose into the wild, would procreate many more children than Jolie could!  If he came to Bridgwater, it’d be legs akimbo for weeks followed by lots of little Brad lookalikes!  Apart from the jollity, this will seriously slew the statistics wholly against the research’s argument! It only takes one rampant male to break the ‘hard work’ of hundreds of ‘beautiful’ women taking a lifetime to improve the gene pool!

Or look at it like this…

This ‘research’ assumes that attractiveness is a one-way process and that women passively sit around waiting to choose the best mate (using what criteria, are we to wonder?).  Again, this is plain garbage.  Women aren’t passive.  If one of a woman’s criteria for mate choice is the appearance of the man, then it chucks out the research findings right out of the window.  Indeed, the ‘beauty’ gene, if it exists, could be being selected for because the man holds it (he having half of his mother’s genes, after all) without actually expressing it himself.

Note to Researchers: check out the difference between a genotype and a phenotype before spouting this muck.

Or Look at it This Way…

My Observation of many UK towns tells me that there are a lot of fat munters on the estates (call them endomorphs, please).  They all have appear to have heaps of children despite any perceived lack of ‘beauty‘.  So what does this mean to a ‘scientist‘ in this calibre of research?

A.  Using their specious logic, I could say that fat munters are the most successful breeders in the country.  I could say that only fat people breed fast.   I could make all sorts of scurrilous accusations about them and the reason(s) for the perceived fecundity.  Just like boys-nights-out on a Friday eyeing up the talent?   But I won’t….

Because Any Logic with like this is seriously flawed.

It’s not logic, it’s just opinion dressed as fact.  What the Telegraph (and other media organisations) has done by publishing this rubbish as summer titter, is to denigrate the hard work of real scientists with the mumbo-jumbo claptrap from pseudo-scientists looking for job justification.

There’s a heap of proper evolutionary and genetic research that disproves this tripe, so why do the Telegraph publish it?  A.  To fill space.

Finally

Even defining beauty with the narrow bounds of appearance is hard enough – but beauty and appearance, the attractiveness of an individual – these are all complex concepts that have provided artists and writers material for millenia

The trouble with the ‘research’ and it’s reporting, is that it demeans the real work to titillate the lowest common denominators in society, with the result that scientists, striving for humanity’s betterment, are made to look like pariahs and idiots, which in the long run, is very, very bad.

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