I must have been writing for this blog for a while, because I'm noticing how one study will mirror another study in one way or another. Take the "Abortion" post. In it, I mentioned a 2007 Polish study where they claimed that voluptuous women were easier to get pregnant. I wondered if it was possible to do a study on the women (and the partner that got them pregnant) to see if they are more attractive, well endowed and healthy than the rest of the population. According to this study, that's not necessarily the case.
Last month, a study from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Norwegian team of researchers found that anorexic women are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and abortions than women without the eating disorder. The theory behind the finding isn't so much about evolutionary biology as it is about simple misinformation. Doctors and gynecologists in the past may have told anorexic women that they stop menstruating and the women may have believed that they couldn't get pregnant as a result.
"Anorexia is not a good contraceptive,"Cynthia Bulik said. "Just because you're not menstruating, or because you're menstruating irregularly, doesn't mean you're not at risk for becoming pregnant." Bulik was the study's lead author and is the director of the school's Eating Disorders Program.
The numbers show that anorexic women are much more likely to have unplanned pregnancies. Fifty percent of women that claimed to have anorexia had unplanned pregnancies, compared to 18.9% of healthy women. Twenty four percent of anorexic women had abortions, compared to 14.6% of women without the disease.
None of this really answers the question that I repeated at the top of the page. The anorexic women may have a high degree of facial symmetry. It does show that anorexia doesn't necessarily prevent a women from getting pregnant like it was once thought. Mother Nature wants women to get pregnant, and this shows that she's more determined than we thought. This would make an interesting study to measure the difference in fertility between women of healthy and unhealthy body types.
Also, going back to the stories about introverts and women approaching college age men for sex. The statistic I provided in the introverts story said that 25% of the population has an introverted personality. Introverts tend to prefer calm, relaxing environments compared to excitement. Extroverts, on the other hand, need to be stimulated to relax.
The study on how many college men agree to sleep with with a woman that approached them for sex found that 75% of men agreed to sleep with the woman. That made me wonder if the 25% that declined the offer were introverts. It would make sense, as it would be seen by the introverted men as "too soon" to sleep with such a woman. The extroverts would have agreed right away, going by their need to be excited.
That's just my idea, I don't know if that's the case for sure. One of the first rules of science is "correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation." Meaning: just because you find that two things happen together, doesnt mean that one causes the other. Still, it does make sense from a evolutionary standpoint. Why are there so many more extroverts than introverts? Because they have more sex and more sex means a greater chance of passing on the extrovert genes. This is sexual selection in evolutionary biology at work.
Source:
http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/10109746/article-Anorexic-women-more-likely-to-have-unwanted-pregnancies--abortions
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