Quote:

 

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That's just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

To find out, Stearns and his colleagues turned to data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of more than 14,000 residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948 – spanning three generations in some families.

Pass it on

The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns's team tested whether a woman's height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.

Quite a lot, it turns out. Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906199106).

Decoding culture

It's hard to say what is selecting for these traits, and to discern whether they are being passed down through the women's genes, but because Stearns controlled for many social and cultural factors, it is likely that his results document genetic, rather than cultural evolution at work.

It is not the first study to conclude that natural selection is operating on humans today; the difference is that much of the earlier work has drawn that conclusion from geographic differences in gene frequencies, rather than from direct measurements of reproductive success. That leaves Stearns's study as perhaps the most detailed measure of evolution in humans today.

"It's interesting that the underlying biological framework is still detectable beneath the culture," he says. Analyses of other long-term medical data sets could shed more light on the interplay between genetics and culture.

Quote:

 

LOL, look no further that future woman is already here.

Quote:

 

Hollywood actresses Scarlett Johansson or Kate Winslet are considered more attractive and healthy-looking than Victoria Beckham or Paris Hilton, Scottish researchers found.

The University of St Andrews study, published in the scientific journal Perception, surveyed a group of students, aged between 18 and 26, were asked to rate photographs of female faces for attractiveness and health.

They concluded that young men rated girls in the “normal” weight range as the most attractive and healthy looking.

The researchers say the findings send a strong message to young women who believe that you need to be underweight to be considered attractive.

“We often remark on how healthy or unhealthy someone looks, but it can be very difficult to say precisely how we know this,” said lead researcher Vinet Coetzee.

“Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and have made many breakthroughs in our understanding of health and attractiveness, but until now they have tended to overlook the influence of weight."

The University's Perception Lab asked 84 female students a variety of questions on their health, took their blood pressure and photographed them.

The photographs were then shown to a group of male students who were asked to rate them for health, attractiveness and weight.

Professor David Perrett added: "A take home message for young people is that maintaining a normal weight benefits current health and will improve good looks.

"In our study, people in the normal weight range were judged healthier and more attractive than under or overweight individuals.

"This sends a strong message to all the girls out there who believe you have to be underweight to be attractive.

“The people making judgments in our study were all between the ages of 18 and 26 and they did not rate underweight girls most attractive.

“They preferred normal weight girls."

Forrester

Oct 30 2009, 11:23 PM

We're de-evolving, but the author has to pretend otherwise.

Quote:

 

LOL, look no further that future woman is already here.

Yes, immigration furthers this even more rapidly, although it wouldn't matter if the domestic selection wasn't crap to begin with. The people who breed basically are the ones who would in any system that didn't specifically target them as crap. High fertility, short-generations. Very typical of the Hispanics that come.

People tend to prefer their own (pycnomorphs preferring their own), or go to the 'opposite extreme' in a false dichotomy. I've heard many react to the over-skinny models that instead we should bring back the squat plain-faced women of the 1950s, forgetting beautiful mesomorphic and leptomorphic women.

I don't believe it's necessary to speak of much of a conspiracy, but no doubt 'those in power' to some extent recognise and welcome such down-breeding. Everything is intentionally kept to a low and degrading standard, so it makes sense.

This represents the American ideal partly: (the OP is British, obviously)
http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?p=125640#post125640

Baby Spice was considered quite ideal:
http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj63/lwgrm/Baby-Spice/Baby-Spice-25.jpg

Not that bad actually, but shorter proportions. Easier. Meciocre.

Quote:

 

Don't use my quotes for your anti-Hispanic rants. Not all Hispanic women are breeders.

Caudium

Nov 1 2009, 07:42 PM

Jeez Conall, EVERY woman on Earth looks fat and plump to you because you are used to female characters in video games that are two-dimensional.