"Tis a wise child who knows his own father." Very true. And said to be an old Jewish proverb.

On the thread "What scientists think about" I detailed the gists of several articles that are relevant to this discussion and that were published in New Scientist about a decade ago. THe earliest of them surveyed families with more than one child in a reasonably large English city (I forget which) and found that DNA analysis indicated a very high percentage of families had at least one child whose father was not the husband of their mum. A later article got women to, anonymously, keep a diary of their menstrual cycles and their sexual activities, including whether they "played at home or away"; they foound a high percentage of "relatively faithful" women, if they did play away, did so when the probability that an ovum would be fertilised was at a peak. The authors attributed some cogent biological reasoning to explain such behaviour.

The sequence of articles went on into other aspects that interested me (indicating, among other things, that males don't have the control over their destiny they may think) but, in the last few months, I've noticed a couple that were intended to indicate that humans had not only a menstrual cycle but an oestrus cycle as well. The bloke from New Mexico who surveyed the use of contraceptive pills among lap dancers and their associated takings has already been discussed on Mudcat but a more recent article described a (to my mind) more rigourous investigation. Women's faces were photographed more or less daily over a couple of cycles and men were invited to rank the apparent attractiveness of the photos; without fail, the men picked the photo taken when the woman was at her peak of receptivity.

It seems women are in a similar position to men, in that their control over their destiny is sometimes not quite what they think it is.

It also seems, at first glance, cats may have it sorted a bit more easily. If noisily.

Cheers, Rowan