Do women just want handsome men for their sperm?

According to a recent news story in the New Scientist, 'handsome men have the best sperm'. And how do we know this? Because researchers recruited 66 women in Valencia, Spain, who looked at the faces of 66 male students and happened to identify as the most handsome those men who also have the best sperm. The authors of the study conclude: 'Our study has shown that women are able to recognise reproductively fit males on the basis of their facial appearance alone.'

   It's difficult to see how they could come to such a conclusion. In the study, 66 women made a subjective assessment of the attractiveness of 66 men; and the men they judged to be most good looking happened to have more motile and more morphologically normal sperm. All the research shows, therefore, is that in a small sample of young men, good looks seems to correlate with good sperm. What we don't know from the New Scientist story is other information that might be relevant, such as how much the men smoke or drink. Intriguingly, the study doesn't show a correlation between good looks and a good sperm count - a measurement often used as an indicator of male fertility.

   Studies such as these are becoming increasingly common in the media today. But why we are so interested in them? Perhaps drawing grand conclusions from such research findings fulfils a need in us to find causes for our behaviour that are not the result of our own free will and for which, consequently, we don't have to take responsibility. In this case, our search for causes of human behaviour that are beyond our control leads us to conclude that women are attracted to handsome men for sound biological reasons. It can't possibly be that we are simply driven by such shallow reasons as the desire to be surrounded by beautiful things, can it?