i honestly can't remember the details of the study... i have a few concerns about it, however. lets say we grant them their finding that when it comes to pheremones people prefer the scent of the people who are most genetically diverse to them. i wish they had done this in addition: they could have had pictures of the people whose scents they had taken a sample of and then asked the person to pick which person in the picture they found most attractive. it would have been interesting to see whether their choices mapped onto their pheremone choices or not. it would then be interesting to have them meet the people (so they could see and smell them) and then after that ask them who they found the most attractive. i would expect that the choice of pic would interfeare with their choice of person in meeting (people do alter their later choices in order to be consistent with earlier choices) so they would need to switch the order of pic - meeting with half the sample. this fuller study could give us the following information:

- how much do physical characteristic provide similar information to pheremones (if it is indeed genetic diversity that people are attracted to)

(the notion behind that is that just because someone is of a different racial group to you doesn't mean they are more genetically different to you than someone of the same racial group as you. there is considerable variation between members of the same racial group and oftentimes not that much variation between members of different racial groups so racial groups actually aren't - perhaps surprisingly - a good measure of genetic difference)

- how much do physical characteristics mediate judgements about pheremones

(the notion here is that people may make pheremone judgements one way and phenotypic judgements another way. meeting the person (where you have both kinds of information) would provide a way of assessing which takes priority)

> There are still some very very strong beh norms around marrying within own cultural group, though. I would venture to say Saamoan, Tongan, Niuean are particular examples of this.

yeah. this is to do with small groups wanting to preserve their culture (?) perhaps. whereas the trouble i was seeing in USA was the social stigma of the dominant group marrying someone from a less dominant group. Not quite so bad as... But more similar to... Some of the stigma around white-black marriages in South Africa...

> I guess if you are going to marry into one of those cultures there is a lot of adjustment to do.

Well... That depends on whether the person has become culturally assimilated or not, I guess. I notice this more in Australia than I did in NZ (though I know this is happening in NZ too)... 3rd generation Austrailians who look distinctively chinese or korean. I still get a little surprised when I meet them first off (because the majority of chinese and korean people I spoke to back home hardly spoke a word of English whereas here they have more of an Aussie accent than me!)

> The more pessimistic feel that there will be white flight AND brown flight

Because of the 'brain drain' do you mean? Or because of other reasons???