The first detail is that the study was carried out with 66 men and their faces were shown to 66 women. The men's semen quality was measured according to World Health Organization guidelines, which rates the sperm quality according to some parameters, such as motility and morphology.
According to such paramespermatozoidsmatozoids can be bad, good or normal. The main result of the study was that the authors took 12 men from each group and showed their pictures to two separate groups of women, which did not know anything about the men's sperm . The result was that the women rated as good looking those men with the best sperm quality.
The first criticism that one can make is the number of participating subjects. In previous articles I have told you what is a controlled study and that the size of your sample (number of participating individuals) must be representative of your total population if you want to draw conclusions from your results. It is obvious that 66 men can not represent the male population of Valencia, Spain, the city where the study was carried out. Thus, any conclusion must be taken with a very big grain of salt.
The second criticism is that nothing igenomen of the genome of the participating individuals. Even though beauty has been associated with health, there are no genetic studies demonstrating that such thing is true.
Those two criticisms are enough to disregard the main conclusion of the authors, theiBhattacharyaed by Bhattacharya: "Our study has shown that women are able to recognize reproductively fit males on the basis of their facial appearance alone." I think that with that number of participants the conclusion is that women like handsome men.
Besides, in today's world it is practically impossible to have a pure standard of beauty, since must of our opinions on many subjects are somehow molded by what we hear and see everyday in the Internet, at school, newspapers, radios, etc., since we are born.
Maybe the main prove that such conclusion can not me drawn from this particular study is that there is not a greater proportion of beautiful people in the world.
Go To Page: 1 2
