I’m a simple chemist, I don’t look at the big picture like all you biologists. No wait, the degree says masterful chemist…
Whoa, there’s a problem there. Deduce, don’t induce.
Well these traits are all survival traits. A large skeleton structure is useful in the plains, a smaller one better in the jungle. Darker skin closer to the equator, lighter skin where there’s less sunlight. Pheromones haven’t been shown to have any role in survival of the fittest any more than male-pattern baldness or osteoporosis. I’m concerned that you are assuming that your guesswork is correct when scientific studies have been done and have yet to show any relevance.
OK, but what we’re telling you is that not only is there no evidence that humans even have pheromones, there is also no evidence that the sense of smell varies between different ethnic groups. But it’s really not necessary even to get into the sense of smell and ethnic variations because the more fundamental issue is that there is no evidence that humans produce or respond to pheromones (despite what some snake oil salesmen might want to tell you).
Nonsense. You asked an initial question, which we answered. Then you came back with this:
By initiatiing your so-called “questions” with "Are you disputing . . . " you are clearly framing them in terms of a debate. By stating them in this argumentative fashion, you make it appear that you believe these statements.
To answer succintly, most of the statements in your question have no evidence to support them. The answer to your question about “white people having a kid” depends on what exactly you mean by “white.”
However, so-called “race” cannot be predicted on the basis of most individual characteristics.
For example, people with blue eyes can be identified as probably belonging to populations that originated in northern Europe. However, people with brown eyes can belong to any race at all, including “Caucasoid.” With the minor exception noted, eye color provides no information about what “race” an individual belongs to.
Similarly, skin color is not an identifier of “race,” with very limited exceptions. People with very dark skin tones can be found among “Caucasiod,” “Negroid,” and “Australoid” groups. People of medium skin tones can be found among all “races” except “Australoid.”
While blood groups show some differences in frequency of distribution between populations, most of them are found in almost all populations.
As I said before, there is no reason to expect that an allelle for particular pheromone would be any more confined to a particular “race,” or for that matter, to a particular population, than blood groups are.
“Holding back information”???
You also said:
So which is it? Do I have superior knowledge which I am spitefully holding back, or am I incapable of answering your question?
You were offered good information, which you appeared to reject. You are not asking questions in the spirit of simple inquiry, but appear to have a position which you are looking to support. That position does not seem to have been arrived at on the basis of evidence, but is one you “induced” yourself.
Kid Chameleon You INduce to form a hypothesis, you DEduce in order to test it.
Colibri Actually KC and i were sword fighting with our dicks, so I came in here looking for seconds to see who was right. I don’t really have a whole lot of attachment to the outcome. However, I remain skeptical on the idea that every other physical feature is determined by genetics, but somehow we eliminate scent from that, it just doesn’t seem logical. I mean scent would have a lot to do with what you ingest and your environment, but some of it must be created by your physical makeup, and I think that this has something to do with genetics and procreation. Nothing anyone has said has satisfied me that this is incorrect, but I’m not that interested in reopening this debate past the answers I have received.
I’m not going to get into a semantic argument about race, I’m not trying to prove some racist agenda or anything. The Gene Pool throughout history has been isolated into smaller parts by geographical proximity, and we have labelled that ‘race’ in our modern society. I am not going to go and give subclassifications as to what I think race is, but we all know that different survival and physical characteristics formed in different parts of the world through thousands of years of genetic isolation.
My hypothesis is that scent has something to do with how we pick our genetic matchup just as face shape, eye color, hair color, etc… do. The general consensus I have found here is that there isn’t enough information to determine one way or the other on the subject.
The thing I know from having sex with multiple people is that scent has more to do with my sexual arousal than pretty much any other factor, and I generally preferred girls to not wear perfume so that it wouldn’t cover their natural scent. I was very aware that I was looking for suitable mates, and I am certain that there were instinctual cues that I am not totally conscious of that went into my decisionmaking process. So you all have provided me with useful information, but none of it has falsified my hypothesis in any meaningful way.
mswas: You keep ignoring the most fundamental issue concerning your question: Humans don’t have pheromones. It’s as if you asked which race had better wings for flying. The anwer is: none. So far I’ve been stating this in very careful terms, saying that there isn’t any evidence for the presence of human pheromones, but let’s stop kidding around here. Humans don’t have pheromones.
Ok, you say that humans don’t have pheromones, and others say the jury is still out. Yet I have heard and read that they exist. So to be ‘skeptical’ I am going to have to hold out for more evidence.
Do you deny that people have a scent that is unique to them? Maybe it’s not called ‘pheromones’.
What do you mean by “genetic matchup”? As far as I know, any human being of the opposite sex could be considered your “genetic matchup” unless it’s your sibling or first cousin or other close relative. Other than that, I don’t know of any good reason that you should have a genetic clash with someone you have children with. (Unless you’re both recessive carriers of some disorder like cystic fibrosis, in which case it’s very unlikely that your hypothetical pheromones and pheromone receptors would “know” that you were a carrier.)
People who generally have the same genetic background (like two white people from the same part of Europe, for example) mate all the time and have perfectly healthy children as long as they aren’t closely related. People who have vastly different genetic backgrounds (like Tiger Woods’s diverse recent ancestors) also mate all the time and have perfectly healthy children. I don’t understand where the concept of a “genetic match” fits into this.
Are you saying that you think that the very few people that you really shouldn’t mate with are putting out pheromones that are supposed to warn you not to mate with them? Or are you saying that, for some reason other than consanguinity, certain people just shouldn’t mate, and that the hypothetical pheromone synthesis-receptor system somehow “knows” this?
I really think your question would be easier to answer if we knew your ideas on the subject in a little more detail.
It’s not just about genetic clashing, it’s about the creative process. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think that there are other factors of compatibility that goes into the process other than just trying to avoid a mongoloid child.
You are reading far too much into this. When I say “Genetic Match” I mean we make a decision instinctually that this is a suitable mate. I have met black girls who I would consider possible candidates, asian, and I even married an Israeli. My current wife is a white person of a similar descent to myself. I think there is some intention put into the creative process that creates our children, that the choice is not entirely random, even if it’s largely unconscious. I am saying that race is factor, but not applying a pre-judgement to what kind of factor it is. Perhaps exotic is a benefit to you, perhaps you want something more close to home.
I am saying that there is some sort of unconscious attraction process that goes into the decision making process. I am not talking about should or shouldn’t, I am talking about intention, want or don’t want.
I want to clarify something. In animals that do have pheromones (and we don’t know that humans do), the pheromones are chemicals that are synthesized by certain enzymes and then released into the environment to induce behavioral changes in other individuals. The specific pheromones that an individual releases are determined by the enzymatic makeup of that individual, which is pretty much determined by that individual’s genetic makeup.
So, in that sense, if you take the thread title literally, pheromones are definitely determined by genetics because genes code for enzymes and enzymes make pheromones.
But if there’s some genetic reason that two individuals shouldn’t mate, if they have certain genes that are incompatible, there’s no mechanism that I know of that would link those incompatible genes (like recessive cystic fibrosis genes, for example) to the genes that code for the enzymes that synthesize (hypothetical) pheromones.
In order for pheromones to be able to communicate the information that another individual was or wasn’t genetically compatible with you, the enzymes that make those pheromones would have to somehow be tied to the problem genes that might make you incompatible with another individual.
If this was the case, we would have a very complicated genome in which the specific contents of each of our tens of thousands of genes would somehow influence the expression of enzymes that synthesized pheromones that would communicate the contents of our genes to another individual.
The human genome has been sequenced and analyzed to some extent, and no one has found any evidence that one half of it is devoted to the synthesis of specific pheromones that communicate the contents of the other half of it. I think this is a very strong argument that we don’t have pheromones that signal our “genetic compatiblily” to other people.
But, and this is the important part, are these “others” (who say human pheromones exist) scientists? Have they done the science, have they published their results, and have those resultes been repeated and accepted by the scientific community? If not, then there is no more reason to believe they exist than to believe that Bigfoot exists.
I don’t know. Again, what does the science say about that? I mentioned earlier about a study of women who were asked to smell the undershirts of a number of men. In that study, the women were generally attracted to the men whose immune system was most different from their own. That would imply that they were attacted to genetic diversity, not genetic similarness. And this certainly makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: the more genetic diversity in the population, the better. If any instict is at work, it’s an instict to give you child a mix of alleles, not a bunch of alleles that are the same. Here’s what I could find about the “T-shirt study”. It doesn’t appear to be much more than preliminary findings-- I’d hardly call it established sceince.
Also, you seem to be conflated “scent” with “pheromones”. When you walk into a barnyard and smell the animal scents there, you’re not smelling pheromones. And just because something has a scent doesn’t make it a pheromone.
I’m afraid you are taking your personal experience and extrapolating to all of humanity. Your anecdotes simply don’t constitute science. Sorry.
There definitely are, but they have a tiny genetic component, if any. Maybe I’m not understanding you right, but it sounds like you’re talking about things like whether she likes Quentin Tarantino movies as much as you, or whether she minds getting up at 5:30 to make you scrambled eggs. A very big part of the things that go into that kind of compatibility (which is entirely different from the “genetic” compatibility you were talking about before) are determined by culture and environment. If she likes posters of fuzzy kittens as much as you, that’s determined by a complicated process that involves a lot of factors outside of genetics, and there’s no way for the “I like fuzzy kittens” state that her brain happens to be in to influence the hypothetical pheromone-synthesizing enzymes in her apocrine glands to make pheromones to signal that fact.
I’m not trying to insult you by oversimplifying what you’re saying, but there’s really very little genetic basis for the kind of personality compatibility that you seem to be talking about. Personality traits have their basis in complicated configurations of cells and molecules in your brain that have a huge non-genetic component, and a mechanism to communicate those configurations to the enzymes that would make your hypothetical pheromones would come as a huge surprise to science, to say the least.
I would say that as you are the one arguing that these hypothetical pheremones exist and are important, the burden of proof is on you to find some sort of evidence to back that statement up.
I think mswas has a fundamental misunderstanding of what pheremones in other animals actually do. All a moth’s pheremones do is say “Here is a female moth of the Luna species”, not “I am a female moth of the Luna species that carries the recessive club-antenna gene”
All you can tell about the genetics of an animal producing a particular pheremone, is that they carry the gene that codes for that pheremone. No more.
I’d like to congratulate all of the participants in this thread for realizing they’re in General Questions and changing the course of what seemed to be the beginning of a trainwreck into a rather hopefully beneficial discussion. Let’s keep it that way.
Indeed, it would be evolutionarily disadvantageous for the moth to be too picky about which Luna species moth it mated with. Sure, it wants to mate with a genetically fit moth, but “has genes similar to me” is not the same as “geneticall fit”. If a moth seeks out only those moths which are similar to it genetically, it is less likely to breed than one which is less picky about that particular fetish.
IIRC there was a study done on Amish people, which showed something about women picking the sweat soaked shirt of the Amish man who shared fewest HLA groups with her. In other words, the scent of the person most attractive to the woman was the man with whom she shared the least amount of DNA, i.e. the man with whom she was most likely to have healthy offspring.
It was used as an example in an Immunology lecture I had 5 years ago, but I can’t find anything about on Google, so either I don’t remember the details right or the lecturer was pulling it out of their ass.
John Mace For the third or fourth time I would like to humbly point out to you that I never ONCE used the word ‘similar’. I used the word ‘Compatible’. A penis and vagina are not SIMILAR but they are compatible.
Bob Scene Don’t worry about me taking offense at what you say, you were one of the least condescending people in this thread. Your posts have been among the most helpful.
And as for conflating pheromones with scent, I’d like to point out that I clarified this distinction about halfway up this thread when people explained to me that what I thought pheromones did is not what pheromones did, and that’s why I switched to the word ‘scent’.
Again, what everyone has said is that the evidence is not conclusive, though what evidence there is does not support my hypothesis. I am willing to go with that. However, I don’t find ‘That would drastically change our conception of this area of science’ as a compelling argument as to why it cannot be true. Lots of ideas change our understanding of an area of science. I was just reading last night in The New Scientist and they were talking about this physicist Heim who was working to reconcile Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and came up with a way to calculate the mass of a particle, and they talked about how even to this day his theories were very exotic to the Physics establishment. So his discoveries would certainly twist the conception of the Physics establishment, but that doesn’t make his work incorrect. And for those of you most willing to jump down my throat because ‘That’s not real SCIENCE!!!’, I am not using this as evidence to say that I am correct. Simply that I am not convinced that my questions have been fully satisfied, so I am keeping the door open for now.
I did get a lot of good answers though, thanks guys.
I did define it. This board could do with a little more precision on the whole. It would be nice if you people would learn the difference between, not defining it adequately, and not defining it at all. It would speed up the process of speaking to you immensely.
Compatibility is whatever the person selecting the mate decides is compatibility, based upon factors that I do not necessarily understand, which is why I am asking these questions here in this thread. We clearly don’t choose to breed with just anyone on the street. I have had sex with multiple people, multiple times each, many times without a condom, and I have yet to breed with any of them. So clearly there is a selection process going on. What the mechanism for that selection process is, I do not know necessarily. I don’t know what all the factors that go into compatibility are. For each person compatibility is unique, so I can’t come up with some universal definition due to it’s uniqueness on the one hand, and my limited knowledge of genetics on the other. I really need to finish “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature”
