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PHEREMONES AS HONEST SIGNALS IN MATE SELECTION

It is presumable that human scent, apart from the above-mentioned functions, could - like other cues in mate selection - also signal aspects of reproductive fitness. Several studies have found that bodily and facial symmetry play a role in attraction and thus in choice criteria for human mating. Symmetry is believed to signal developmental stability, which refers to an individual's ability to cope with genetic and environmental perturbations during early development. Recent research has focused on the significance of developmental stability as mate choice-criterion. Sex steroid hormone dependent human body odor could transmit information about an individual's developmental stability as an additional, redundant olfactory signal. Since olfactory and visual cues have different physiological roots, the signaling errors are likely to be uncorrelated. Thus, taking the information of both signals into account reduces the error and allows much more reliable mate choice decisions.
Rikowski and Grammer compared ratings of body odor, attractiveness, and measurements of facial and bodily asymmetry of 16 male and 19 female subjects. Subjects wore a T-shirt for three consecutive nights under controlled conditions. One group of opposite-sex raters then judged the odor of the T-shirts, and another group evaluated portraits of the subjects for attractiveness. Additionally, bodily and facial symmetry of the odor-donors were measured. Facial attractiveness and sexiness of body odor showed a significant positive correlation for female subjects. In men, the situation was different. Positive associations between body odor and attractiveness and negative associations between odor and bodily asymmetry could only be found if female odor raters were in the most fertile phase (i.e., ovulatory phase) of their menstrual cycle. Thus, simply put, ovulatory women preferred the scent of symmetry.
This effect, replicated by Gangestad & Thornhill, could be explained by the above-mentioned female preference of androstenone around ovulation. Metabolic pathways suggest a link between a-androstenes and testosterone. It is presumed that only individuals with high immunocompetence can afford the immune-suppressing effect of a high testosterone level. Immunocompetence appears to correlate with high developmental stability. Thus, human Pheromones could indeed be regarded as honest signals for human mate choice based on the testosterone-immunocompentence-developmental stability link to pheromone production.
In humans, female olfactory preferences also seem to induce disassortative mating for components of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) as is observed in other mammals. In other words, olfactory cues may be able to reflect parts of an individual's genome, and body odor seems to influence female mate choice in order to find a partner who possesses fitting MHC-dependent immune system components. Simply put, ovulatory women seem to prefer the scent of genetic diversity. Indeed, both women who are not taking oral contraceptives, and men rate similar genetically determined odors as less attractive than dissimilar genetically determined odors.
Thus, not only are men and women able to distinguish among genetically distinct, self versus non-self odors, they prefer the scent of non-self (i.e., genetic diversity). Men and women with shared markers of genetic diversity also select perfumes that may amplify body odor that is linked to their genetic diversity.
Human pheromones have more potential than any other social environmental sensory stimuli to influence physiology and, therefore, behavior. Predictably, we will soon address other aspects of human attraction, and social confounds such as the paraphillias - and even sexual orientation in future discourse. Finally, we might even address the obvious question of how our everyday social lives and future human reproductive success will be affected by the modern striving for cleanliness and the reduction of natural body odor.