What the study shows is that women on the Pill have a different sense of smell when it comes to sweaty T-shirts. That DOES NOT mean that they are choosing different men in real life from women who are not on the Pill. The story Meghan cited is either sloppy science or journalists who want a good headline. They have not even shown a link between actual dating habits and what kind of sweat smell you prefer for anyone.

If you want to prove anything about mate selection by women on the Pill, you have to take a group of single women and randomly put half on the Pill and half not. Then follow them for a few years and see if they manage to find mates and stay with them. If they did not, you could then speculate about why and see if it was linked to smells or not.

There is a tendency to find a scientific fact (women on the Pill have a different sense of smell and like a different kind of sweat) and extrapolate wildly and say the theory is scientific. The tendency often goes with a possible evolutionary explanation that is itself just an unprovable theory that could probably be argued the other way around. Anyhow, I don't think women on the Pill need to worry that they are incapable of choosing a husband.

Lucky us, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences is open access: <link> Interesting read. In the methods section: "Women were asked to note if shirts reminded them of (i) deodorant, (ii) tobacco smoke, (iii) a partner or former partner, and (iv) a relative. Shirts were discarded after use. Following smelling, women completed a background questionnaire (e.g. current relationship status, self-rated attractiveness)." Aside from the obvious, inherit sexism at the heart of this research (and the media's willingness to promote it), just the existance of a "scientific" article like this brings up another issue I have. There are too many scientific journals and unfortunately many of them don't have very high standards. When a news article says, "scientists report" or "studies suggest," the reader is supposed to swallow it as fact. A published article or a PhD. doesn't mean much these days and I wish the public's trust in science wouldn't be so regularly exploited to make a good article.

I agree, it's one of my pet peeves how science reporters give the impression that some finding is a well-established truth when in most cases it's only the first study to be published on the subject. I understand their need to get a scoop like other journalists, but unfortunately most readers don't have the background (or the time) to evaluate these studies critically.

And when, typically, another study is published a few months or years later that contradicts the original results, needless to say it's not headline news anymore. So a lot of discredited nonsense gets retained in the collective unconscious.