Jessica Alba is going to have more babies than you

My thesis with this blog is that everything in the world is getting better. Well, now we know that the human race is even getting more beautiful. In a valiant effort to verify our superficiality, researchers discovered that women rated as "attractive" tended to have 16 percent more children than everyone else, and more girls than boys. This adds up fairly quickly.

My most-likely-wrong math tells me that if we assumed 1% of the population was beautiful at some point in the past (a very conservative estimate) and reproducing at 1.16x the rate of everyone else, after 46 generations, you'd have more than 90% of the population beautiful. Let's say it's 25 years per generation, which means this would take a little more than 1,000 years. But, in the meantime, the most beautiful people out of the now slightly-more-beautiful pool are still reproducing faster. I would need some sort of statistics or calculus class at this point, but suffice to say, I imagine women are much more beautiful now than they were 1,000 or even 100 years ago. (And that's even ignoring the fact that everyone now is healthier, taller, bathes regularly, and has all their teeth.) Isn't this solid proof that the world is getting better?

And what about the other half of us humans? Handsome men showed no difference in their reproductive rates in the study, thus proving that no one really cares what men look like, and that we should just go ahead and wear sweatpants into the office every day. I laugh at the guys on Mad Men, with their slicked-back hair and their fancy ties. Suckers.

photo: Jessica Alba on her way to having 16% more babies than you.

source: "A planet full of Angelina Jolies," The Week, August 14, 2009, p. 22.

If anyone is gooder at math, chime in.