In Lab Notes, Newsweek’s Sharon Begley has posted Hourglass Figures: We Take it All Back, a look at some of the flawed assumptions about body-shape, fertility and health that have been bandied about for years as scientific truth.

Can we please stop telling young women that if they don’t meet the hourglass ideal there is something wrong with them, that they are doomed to infertility and will never form a relationship? NEWSWEEK was complicit in that message a dozen years ago; it’s long past time to realize that it is wrong both empirically and in terms of evolutionary theory.

Interesting that the comments about posts like this always leap immediately to the conclusion that if women are not very thin they are automatically obese.