NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd: "I went out once with a guy who didn't care for his mother, partly because he felt she was not attractive enough. My brother Martin, on the other hand, tells our mom how proud he was when she picked him up from grade school because he thought she was the prettiest mother. And we've seen those studies showing that aesthetics is hard-wired in the brain - that even babies have an innate sense of beauty, choosing to gaze longer at lovelier faces.So it shouldn't be surprising to learn parents have the same bias. Still, the headline yesterday in Science Times was jolting: 'Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift.' As Nicholas Bakalar wrote: 'Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.'"