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From the pathology of love page, I paste

http://samvak.tripod.com/lovepathology.html




Moreover, we are attracted to people with the same genetic makeup and smell (pheromones) of our parents. Dr Martha McClintock of the University of Chicago studied feminine attraction to sweaty T-shirts formerly worn by males. The closer the smell resembled her father's, the more attracted and aroused the woman became. Falling in love is, therefore, an exercise in proxy incest and a vindication of Freud's much-maligned Oedipus and Electra complexes.

Writing in the February 2004 issue of the journal NeuroImage, Andreas Bartels of University College London's Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience described identical reactions in the brains of young mothers looking at their babies and in the brains of people looking at their lovers.

"Both romantic and maternal love are highly rewarding experiences that are linked to the perpetuation of the species, and consequently have a closely linked biological function of crucial evolutionary importance" - he told Reuters.

This incestuous backdrop of love was further demonstrated by psychologist David Perrett of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The subjects in his experiments preferred their own faces - in other words, the composite of their two parents - when computer-morphed into the opposite sex.
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> After completing the “odor test,” the researchers compared the HLA sequences of the women and the male odor donors they preferred. “A clear pattern emerged,” said Ober. “The women did not choose the scents of men with genes totally similar to their own or totally dissimilar to their own. They chose men with an intermediate level of difference.”

> This finding, Ober said, could answer an important question about mate choice. In 1997, Ober and colleagues found that young people from an isolated ethnically homogeneous population somehow managed to avoid choosing spouses that were genetically too similar to themselves, without any way of knowing each other’s genetic make-up. Marrying someone too similar increases a couple’s risk for miscarriage or for passing on recessive genetic disorders. “We had convincing data that genes in the HLA region could influence this important social choice, but until now we had no persuasive explanation for how these genes might exert this influence,” Ober said.

> The researchers also determined that a woman’s preference for male odor choices was paternally inherited. By looking at the genes of the women’s parents, McClintock said, “we found that a woman’s odor choice is based on HLA alleles inherited from her fatheróbut not her mother. Moreover, there was no predictable relationship with the HLA genes of their parents that the women did not inherit, even though they had smelled those gene products their entire lives, indicating that inheritance is a crucial part of this ability.”

> The research demonstrates a human ability that may affect family recognition and choice of friends. It also suggests a romantic notion about mating choice, McClintock said. “Our research indicates that there is not one most preferred male odor for everyone, but that odor preference is relative,” McClintock said. “It’s thoroughly unique and based on the degree of HLA differences between a man and woman.”

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020207/mcclintock.shtml

I thought it would have been very surprising indeed if evolution had selected people to prefer to have sex with people who were too genetically similar (precisely because of the increased risk of recessive disorders, birth defects, misscarriage etc).

I would be interested to know whether adopted kids factor in their adoptive fathers genetic make-up or not (which is to say I wonder if that would stuff up our bodies ability to discriminate the relevant genetic standard)

[Fuzzybear]

Thanks for sharing this!