Question Earthority!

“A new study explains why we aren’t all born with Brad Pitt’s perfectly chiseled features or Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips. A long-standing thorn in the side of biologists has been the difficulty in accounting for the enormous variation between individuals, when, from an evolutionary standpoint, sexual selection by females for the most attractive mates should quickly spread the ‘best’ genes through a population. ‘It is a major problem for evolutionary biology,’ said study team leader Marion Petrie of Newcastle University in England. For some species, females select the most attractive males to mate with. Female peacocks will choose males with the longest tail feathers — the peacock version of George Clooney. These more attractive features usually indicate some other level of genetic fitness, such as disease resistance, that the female’s offspring will then also inherit.” (03/28/07)