Posted by: zeebees on: March 29, 2010
Can you smell the compatibility between you and your mate?
This is a series of famous “sweaty T-shirt” experiment. Clean T-shirts are given to male subjects to sleep in for a couple of nights. These T-shirts are then returned to the lab and are given to female subjects to smell one at a time. These female subjects are to rank the odor of the T-shirts according to attractiveness.
Striking results show that in general, the more complementary the genes of the immune system between the woman and the man, the more sexy do the women rate the T-shirt worn by the man. So, when you two have strong chemistry, you two may just have complementary genes.
Evolutionarily, this makes a lot of sense. The ones who can smell the pheromones that broadcast the complementary genes ended up having healthier children and thus passed on these genes. So for those of us who exist, we are naturally gifted with this talent.
In case you don’t trust your own nose, there is a matching service ScientificMatch.com does just that for you. You can send in you and your partner’s cotton swabs. ScientificMatch will test them to see whether you two are genetically matched. Sure, it takes all the romance out of love, but oh well, some times you just have to know.
PBS report of one of the experiments.
