Being on "The Pill" apparently causes women to pick men who are not "compatible partners"
This is actually slightly scary news. I wonder to what extent women being on the pill has resulted in those women not find people to get married to or resulting in divorce once they get married and stop using the pill.
In research involving almost a hundred women, scientists in the UK say the contraceptive pill could lead to women choosing the wrong partners. . . .
The researchers say major histocompatability complex cluster of genes which helps build proteins involved in the body's immune response is also known to influence smell signals called pheromones and this leads women to use their sense of smell in helping to choose partners.
In a test carried out before and after the women had started taking the pill, they asked the women to sniff six male body odour samples and say which one they preferred and the two sets of results were very different.
The researchers suspect that the results were related to the way the pill simulates a state of pregnancy in women and once pregnant, the need for a compatible partner for children recedes. . . .
Labels: Health
posted by John Lott at 8:39 PM
2 Comments:
Could this be simply a decision making attribute of the females in question? More promiscuous females (or those form social backgrounds that promote promiscuity) that tend to seek out and use "the pill" tend to make worse decisions choosing long-term partners due to their history of "not-so-chooseyness?"
I'm not a biologist, but thought that humans, along with other old world primates had lost the ability to pick up pheromone signals.
I think mike's explanation above is much more convincing.
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