Europeans Pick Mates By Smell More Often than Africans Do
Scientists have known for a while that humans seem to pick mates
partly based on the way they smell. That's because a person's
smell is related to their Major Histocompatibility Complex
(MHC), a cluster of genes that shape a person's immune system.
For years, scientists have debated whether people pick mates
based on scent cues that indicate a potential mate has a very
different MHC, which would give children a higher possibility of
developing a robust immune system. And now a new study published
in PLoS Genetics today shows that certain human populations are
clearly following their noses to the wedding bed. The new study,
conducted by a team of researchers from the UK, France, and
China, used genomic analysis to determine at whether married
couples were more likely to be "MHC-dissimilar." The results
showed that European couples were overwhelmingly MHC-dissimilar,
while African couples were neither similar nor dissimilar (in
other words, they were jus