Are children in his future? His face may be a clue

Specialists said evolution has apparently programmed women to recognize men who might be interested in propagating the species by raising a family.

The study wasn't all bad news for men not interested in settling down. It found that the women in the study could look at men's faces and figure out which of them have the highest testosterone levels.

Those men, rated the most masculine by the women, turn out to be just the kind of guys they would want for a fling.

''Women make very good use of any information they get from a man's face," said coauthor Dario Maestripieri, an associate professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago. ''Depending on what they want and where they are in their lives, they use this information differently."

In the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers looked at a group of 39 men, ages 18 to 33, at the University of Chicago.

Each man was shown 10 pairs of photographs and silhouettes, one of an adult and the other of an infant, and asked to rate their preferences.

Meanwhile, their saliva was tested to determine testosterone levels.

Photographs of the men's faces were then shown to 29 women, ages 18 to 20, at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The women studied were asked to rate the men on four qualities: ''likes children," ''masculine," ''physically attractive," and ''kind." Then they were asked to rate how attractive they found each man for short-term and long-term romance.

The study found the women did well at rating men on their interest in babies, and those they rated masculine generally had higher testosterone levels than those that didn't.

For example, the men who indicated they liked children the most were rated as above average in liking children by 20 of the 29 women.

The men who showed no interest in children were correctly rated as below average in that category by 19 of the women.

The higher the women rated the men for masculinity, the higher they were rated as a potential short-term romantic partner.

The higher they rated men for their interest in children, the higher they were rated for long-term romance.