Good looking couples more likely to have daughters

Natural beauty can act as a strong marker of reproductive success for females than for males, according to Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and author of Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature.

“Physical attractiveness is one of the strongest determinants of women’s mate value,” said Kanazawa.

"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.

Children followed till age 45
The study looked at the database of 17,000 babies from Britain born in March 1958.

The children, at age 7, were rated either as attractive or unattractive by their respective class teachers.

Participants were further asked to report the age and sex of their children when they were 45 years old.

Factors like social status and wealth were taken into account by the researchers.

The study revelations
Out of the 84 percent children who were rated as attractive by their teachers, almost all of them were equally likely to bear either sons or daughters whereas the rest were more likely to have sons.

The unattractive kids faced a 56 percent more probability of bearing a son.

However, some like David Spiegelhalter, a senior biostatistician at the University of Cambridge and Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University are highly doubtful about the exact figures.

"We only get the clever analysis and are not told the raw data - the actual proportions of girls born to the beautiful and the ugly," David Spiegelhalter told The Times today

"As a professor of statistical jiggery-pokery, I know odd things can happen when adjusting for, say, social class, which could itself be influenced by pulchritude."

Men rank a woman as per her overall attractiveness when going in for both long-term relationships and casual affairs while women rate men according to their wealth and status for long term relationships, the researchers claimed.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as well as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin are examples of attractive celebrity couples having daughters.

The study will be published in the journal 'Reproductive Sciences.'