"Pheromones: The Chemistry of Attraction"
Last year, I heard about this intersting study on pheromones from a teacher of mine. In the study, men of diverse ethnicity wore the same T-shirt for two consecutive nights. Women from an isolated community then rated, while blind-folded, the smells of the shirts on familiarity, intensity, pleasantness and spiciness (spiciness?). The writers of the Nature Genetics article on the study do a better job summarizing it than I could, so I've copied their blip on it here. Just some paraphrased background info on the specifics: organisms have a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) which generates individual odors related to recognition, pregnancy, mating, and nesting. Human MHC's are called human leukocyte antigens (HLA).
"Here we show that women can detect differences of one HLA allele among male odor donors with different MHC genotypes. Notably, the mechanism for a woman's ability to discriminate and choose odors is based on HLA alleles inherited from her father but not her mother. The parents' HLA alleles that she does not inherit show no relationship with odor choice, despite exposure to these HLA-encoded odors throughout her life. Our data indicate that paternally inherited HLA-associated odors influence odor preference and may serve as social cues."
So women are attracted to men who smell like their father? Not quite. Odor preference seems to be "based upon a set of genes inherited from [the women's] fathers…women prefer the odor of men to whom they are genetically similar, but not identical, to the odor of men whose genes are nearly identical or wholly unfamiliar". These women didn't even know that it was human odor they were smelling, and rated the odors' pleasantness as a little above a 'household smell'. Its pretty amazing that a 'test' for propsective genes exists in our pheromones. With some really simplified evolutionary theory, you might argue that a female looks for a partner that will add some (but not too much, as the study shows) genetic diversity to her lineage and in the big picture, diversify the species population. With more genetic diversity come more chances for some nice and helpful new trait to pop up. A fortunate thing: through the HLA odors, the kissing-cousins custom is discouraged. Still, this discovery can't be narrowed to just mate preference. Researchers claim that this discovery also relates to social behavior and kinship ties. Such an example is a female baboon grooming her paternal half-sister due to her smell. Baboon society is highly promiscuous and using the MHC alleles received by their shared father, they can recoginze each other through odor.
"Here we show that women can detect differences of one HLA allele among male odor donors with different MHC genotypes. Notably, the mechanism for a woman's ability to discriminate and choose odors is based on HLA alleles inherited from her father but not her mother. The parents' HLA alleles that she does not inherit show no relationship with odor choice, despite exposure to these HLA-encoded odors throughout her life. Our data indicate that paternally inherited HLA-associated odors influence odor preference and may serve as social cues."
So women are attracted to men who smell like their father? Not quite. Odor preference seems to be "based upon a set of genes inherited from [the women's] fathers…women prefer the odor of men to whom they are genetically similar, but not identical, to the odor of men whose genes are nearly identical or wholly unfamiliar". These women didn't even know that it was human odor they were smelling, and rated the odors' pleasantness as a little above a 'household smell'. Its pretty amazing that a 'test' for propsective genes exists in our pheromones. With some really simplified evolutionary theory, you might argue that a female looks for a partner that will add some (but not too much, as the study shows) genetic diversity to her lineage and in the big picture, diversify the species population. With more genetic diversity come more chances for some nice and helpful new trait to pop up. A fortunate thing: through the HLA odors, the kissing-cousins custom is discouraged. Still, this discovery can't be narrowed to just mate preference. Researchers claim that this discovery also relates to social behavior and kinship ties. Such an example is a female baboon grooming her paternal half-sister due to her smell. Baboon society is highly promiscuous and using the MHC alleles received by their shared father, they can recoginze each other through odor.
posted by Katie at 1:54 PM
6 Comments:
I had previously heard something about this study in my biology class. While Hawthorn obviously had not idea of this study back in the 1800, it is pretty interesting how this topic relates to the collapsing of metaphors between the toxic plant and Beatrice. It was brought up in class that Hawthorn might be indicating that plants and humans may one day be able to inter bread. So, your post make makes me wonder if maybe Owen was more attracted to the plant than Beatrice? If humans are able to pick out compatible mates based on pheromones, wasn’t Owen really attracted to the plants poisons fumes more than Beatrice herself? To which side was he more attracted, the plant or human?
This is really an interesting study. I have never heard of this. I just knew that the sense of smell is a human's best sense in terms of memory. Sometimes the sense of smell can make you remember things way back when you were just a child. What I was wondering, however, is if this applies to men, too. If women are attracted to similar smells, what about men? Do they also have a gene that makes them prefer certain odors? AND...about "spiciness"...I looked that up and it can mean something that smells scandalous, too. But I'm still not sure what that means. :) I've personally never smelled something that gave off a scandalous aroma.
I think this is really interesting. A couple of years ago a company came out with a cologne containing human pheromones, claiming that it would trigger female interest. I guess it didn't work too well because I have not seen the cologne brand anymore. It is interesting because they said that it contained human pheromones, so it could attract females. But your study shows that different ethnicities are attracted to different pheromones, so potentially the cologne could contain pheromones that would drive females of a certain ethnicity away.
Actually, my condensing of the study sort of misrepresented the ethnicity bit of it. The women (all were unmarried and had never been pregnant, which makes me wonder if anything would change if the women were currently preganant or had been) were of German-Austrian descent and ranging in age from 13 to 56, while men were "Ashkenazi Jewish, Dutch, English, German, Polish, Scottish, Sikh and Spanish ancestry, ranged in age from 23 y to 47 y". The article never spoke of which ethnicity the German-Austrian women were most attracted to, but as the study shows, it had alot to do with the HLA alleles inherited from the father. I don't know much about the greater complexities of genetics, so I can't claim that being of German-Austrian descent means a woman will receive certain HLA alleles. Ethncity may not play as big a part as it could seem, since the attractivity is based such a minute bit the genome.
i wonder what the motivations for doing this kind of experiment might be?
This is interesting information, but what happened to the belief that opposites attract? Obviously this has never been proven but there are countless examples of it. If you are attracted to someone genetically similar to you then why are there so many examples of interracial marriage?
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