Biology is stranger than any of us can ever imagine

Michael Egnor: “I recently called for congressman Todd Akin to quit his Senate race in Missouri because of comments he made regarding the likelihood of conception during rape. … I still disagree with his comment on rape and conception …”

I think it would be better to neither agree nor disagree. To be more precise, I think that how he phrased what he said may well be factually false (though, even there, who knows?), but [that] what he was trying to say may even be true. [Especially when one takes into account that in common usage, 'conception' doesn't mean merely fertilization of the ovum]

Biology is stranger than any of us can ever imagine.

* Medical science says that human girls raised in the same households as their biological fathers enter puberty at a statistically-significant older age than girls raised absent their biological fathers. Strange-and-inconceivable, no?

* What about the ‘Bruce effect’, which has been demonstrated in rodents and ‘proposed’ for at least one primate species? How do we know that something similar (and if so, obviously weaker) doesn’t happen amongst humans? We *don’t* know [that] it doesn’t, and morally we can’t directly experiment to find out. -

What we *do* know is that many cultures, throughout time and place, have “locked their women away” … from strange men. We, because of our strange leftist[-and-feminist]-inspired cultural taboos, attribute this to “sexism” and “patriarchy” … but, what if it was because, throughout time and place, people had noticed that pregnant women exposed to strange men tended to miscarry more often? Would not the people of a culture in which this had been noticed, desirous of children … desirous of the continuation of their own culture … rationally be expected to segregate their women from strange men?

What if one reason that so many modern women are finding it so difficult to get pregnant … I mean, aside from the fact that so many are putting off even attempting it until they are 39 … is that leftism/feminism *demands* that they “work outside the home” … constantly exposed to strange men?

[What if, one of the reasons that some women can successfully carry a pregnancy to term only with "bed rest" is that exposure to strange men increases their likelihood to miscarry? What if it's not so much the "bed reast" as the corresponding-and-accidental separation from strange men that enables these women to bear the child?]

Why do we imagine that our obviously suicidal culture is rational, much less that it is the only rational way to organize a society? What is rational about destroying one’s own culture for nothing in return? (*)

* What about the anecdotal evidence that a woman’s long-term psychological state has some bearing on a woman’s ability to conceive and carry-to-term a pregnancy? Surely, everyone knows a least one couple who had tried unsuccessfully for months, or even for years, and perhaps with many miscarriages along the way, to conceive and bear a child … and then, having resigned themselves that they were barren, and perhaps having adopted, find themselves pregnant.

Thus: On what rational ground is it so inconceivable that a woman’s emotional and psychological state following a rape may have the effect of, say, making more likely a failure to implant of an embryo conceived from the rape?

[(*) edit: Some of my ancestors -- and only four generations ago -- gave up their historical/familial pagan culture so as to integrate into the Christianized "white" Anglo-American culture. I don't give a damn what the "liberals" and other leftists will assert -- the trade was worth it! My ancestors gave to me something far better than what they had naturally received from their own fathers.]