Having lived there and read up on problems with it, I find UK science reporting to be pretty awful, even compared to American science reporting.
The “birth defect” one is explained entirely in percentage change. Indeed, they are alarmed by the fact that deaths due to heart disease during pregnancy have doubled. They’ve doubled from .001% to .002% of all pregnancies. They don’t even mention natural frequencies for birth defects, but they all sound rather rare.
The women are getting more beautiful thing is similar—it sounds more like the product of a scientist with good PR than a scientist with good data (note the tone of the article, as if women should be celebrating. But none of them are getting any more attractive; they are thoroughly done evolving.). Also, attractiveness is positional, so if more people are less attractive, those people’s standards are likely to change to include one another. I can’t access the gated article or I’d break down their “objective measurements of beauty,” but BMI does not seem like a great proxy for beauty, particularly given the positional nature of the whole thing. And that researcher and his methodology have been criticized, for example here and here.
Height tends to correlate with both income and social class, which inversely correlate with obesity. Also note the article’s failure to say how big an effect there is. Also note that tall men don’t necessarily have more descendants, since taller women are less likely to have children, and (I’m pretty sure) taller men have taller daughters.
Having lived there and read up on problems with it, I find UK science reporting to be pretty awful, even compared to American science reporting.
The “birth defect” one is explained entirely in percentage change. Indeed, they are alarmed by the fact that deaths due to heart disease during pregnancy have doubled. They’ve doubled from .001% to .002% of all pregnancies. They don’t even mention natural frequencies for birth defects, but they all sound rather rare.
The women are getting more beautiful thing is similar—it sounds more like the product of a scientist with good PR than a scientist with good data (note the tone of the article, as if women should be celebrating. But none of them are getting any more attractive; they are thoroughly done evolving.). Also, attractiveness is positional, so if more people are less attractive, those people’s standards are likely to change to include one another. I can’t access the gated article or I’d break down their “objective measurements of beauty,” but BMI does not seem like a great proxy for beauty, particularly given the positional nature of the whole thing. And that researcher and his methodology have been criticized, for example here and here.
Height tends to correlate with both income and social class, which inversely correlate with obesity. Also note the article’s failure to say how big an effect there is. Also note that tall men don’t necessarily have more descendants, since taller women are less likely to have children, and (I’m pretty sure) taller men have taller daughters.