More incentive to make lots and lots of money...

Conventional wisdom says that hot women marry rich and successful men. Not necessarily rich, hot men. Just rich men. How else to explain visually odd pairings such as Donald Trump and his trophy wives or Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova? From an evolutionary perspective, this sort of makes sense. Women want men who are successful so that they may provide for their children. So how do women ensure that their offspring are well cared for and their genes survive? According to a recent study from the University of Helsinki, they have lots of hot daughters. From The Times:

In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had.

This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters.

And not just daughters--hotter and hotter daughters:

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

“If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.”

Depending on how you look at it, this could bode well for future males, and may give them a bit more impetus to strive for greatness.