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Beauty more than skin deep

Animal Biology Professor Leigh Simmons, PhD student Hanne Lie and Psychology Professor Gillian Rhodes

Is beauty more than just skin deep? Apparently so. New research has shown that how attractive we rate a member of the opposite sex depends on adaptations to the problem of choosing a mate.

In building on the work of her co-authors and supervisors, Psychology Professor Gillian Rhodes and Animal Biology Professor Leigh Simmons at the Centre for Evolutionary, PhD-student Hanne Lie was able to peel back another layer of the human psyche to reveal that there appears to be a biological reason for why we find some faces more attractive than others.

"Contrary to common beliefs, what we find attractive is quite similar across individuals and across cultures. Gill and Leigh's previous work has focused on defining what features people find attractive in faces and bodies. Now we are taking this work further, by investigating whether such attractive features are associated with any biological markers of individual quality," Ms Lie said.

From an evolutionary perspective, attractiveness should signal mate quality, such as better health, 'good genes' and so on. The current findings, which have recently been published in the journal Evolution, show that individuals with greater diversity in their genes are rated as being more attractive than individuals with less diverse genes.

"Greater genetic diversity (in a way the opposite of inbreeding, which reduces genetic diversity) is a form of mate quality – as it is associated with a range of fitness benefits across many species, including humans," she said.

Specifically, greater genetic diversity within a range of genes important for immune functioning – MHC genes – are especially important to how women rated the attractiveness of men's faces. Men, however, seemed to preferred the faces of women who had greater genetic diversity in general.

Ms Lie said their results supported the idea that standards of beauty are not arbitrary. Rather, attractive features appear to provide visual cues to genetic quality, which could potentially be used to identify a high-quality mate.

from: UWA NEWS - 20 October 2008