Sweaty T-Shirts and Human Mate Choice
Psychology
How human evolutionary history affects the way we think today.
There's a new group of scientists called evolutionary psychologists, and they're interested in how human evolutionary history affects the way we think today. Now keep in mind that that means 4 million years of evolutionary history, a time during which we were almost always roaming the plains and forests of Africa. How does that affect the way we operate today? They've been looking at things like mate choice, different kinds of standards of beauty, social exchange. And they have a very long way to go before they can prove some of their ideas, but they're still some of the most interesting and provocative issues around today. Evolutionary psychologists begin by pointing out that, regardless of the culture in which we grow up, we all tend to respond the same way to a surprising variety of things.
Most of us find spiders unpleasant. Certain body types, sexy. And particular smells disgusting. All they say are legacies of our evolutionary past. If we ask, for example, the rotten eggs smell bad. It's just a molecule. Hydrogen sulfide gas. It doesn't have the smell. We have evolved a brain to generate a negative feeling for something that's detrimental to our gene survival. This indicates biological contamination, right? If you were a dung beetle, the smell of rotten eggs might smell wonderful to you, because the smell doesn't reside in the molecule at a resides in the evolved brain. Another deeply embedded instinct we may have inherited from our ancestors is the ability to smell a genetically compatible mate. In one unusual experiment, scientists had young men sleep in the same T-shirt for a couple of nights. Until the shirts were infused with their unique smell. It turns out, when women were asked to rate the sex appeal of the different men based only on the smell of the shirts, they consistently rented higher the shirts of men whose immune genes were unlike their own.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Choosing a mate with different immune genes gives offspring a greater protection against viruses, parasites, and other pathogens. The ability to smell good genes is a remarkable talent. But like most instincts, we don't even know it's at work. We just like the way someone smells. Or the way they look. Or because they make us laugh. People don't have sex because they want to perpetuate their genes. They don't like someone because they want to get better genes. They do things because they feel good to them. They have sex because it feels good. The relationship between those good feelings and genes revival may not even be known to them. They never think about that. They do things because it feels good, and they never think, why does those things feel good? Why have we evolved a brain that makes certain things feel bad to us, are certain things feel good to us? And that's the question that we're addressing.