科学发现：腿长比例真的很重要

A man may be attractive because of his curly, blond hair or slick pin-striped suit, but strip everything away and one luring—maybe evolutionary—piece remains, a new study finds: how proportional his body is, especially his legs.

一个男子有魅力可能会因为他卷曲的金发，或者光滑的细条纹西装，不过抛开一切还有一种魅力—也许是进化上的—存在，一项最新研究发现了这项魅力在于：男性的身材比例，特别是腿所占的比例。

Women prefer a man with legs that are about half his height, according to previous research; scientists believe that is an evolutionary result of women wanting to choose only healthy men.

据以往研究，女性们更钟爱腿长约占身高一半的男子；而科学家们认为这是女性们只想选择健康的男性的进化结果。

Legs that are too short, for example, have been linked to type 2 diabetes.

那些过短的腿，举个例子，会跟2型糖尿病有关。

But other proportions, such as arm length to body height or whether the elbow and knee divide a limb in half, can also relate to a person’s health.

不过其他的比例，比如手臂长度跟身高的比例，或者肘部和膝盖两侧肢体是否平均，也可能会跟一个人的健康有关。

Do they influence women’s views as well?

那么这些比例是否也会影响女性们的看法呢？

To answer this, researchers collected average body proportions from roughly 9000 men in the U.S. military and used them to create computer-generated images of male models (pictured).

为了回答这个问题，研究员们收集了美国部队里大概9000名男子的平均身体比例，然后用它们来创建电脑绘制的男性模型图（如图所示）。

The scientists made the model’s arms and legs slightly longer or shorter, and then asked more than 800 heterosexual U.S. women to rank each model’s attractiveness.

科学家们会让模型的胳膊或者腿稍微更长或者更短，然后让超过800名异性恋的美国女性来对每个模型的魅力打分。

How long the model’s arms were relative to his height didn’t seem to matter, the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science.

模型胳膊跟身高的长度比例是多少好像并不怎么重要，该研究团队在今天的《皇家学会公众科学》上发表了结果。

And women cared only a little about how the elbow or knee divided a limb.

而女性们对肘部或者膝盖两侧肢体分布的比例也关心甚少。

But as seen in previous work, women noticed if the legs made up more or less than half his height—and they didn’t like it.

而正如以往研究中看到的那样，女性们会注意腿长是否超过或者少于身高的一半——她们不喜欢这两种情况。

The study’s focus on the United States and its exclusion of gay men limit its findings, but it does suggest that if looks aren’t everything, proportions just might be.

该研究集中于美国而且对同性恋男子的排除会对其结果有所限定，不过它确实表明了如果外表不是一切的话，比例还是相当重要的。

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