But WHY?? were our bodies set up to stink in the first place?
What could he possibly have been thinking!!? What is the purpose of stinking???
Over a very short time, hair stinks,underarms stink,breath stinks,feet stink,the list goes on…
Don’t get me wrong, I love and adore baths and showers.
BUT, the time involved in personal hygeine is astronomical!!
At least it is for the female persuasion…
If I ever get the chance… that will be my very first # 1
question to ask…
WHY did you make us stink???
What were you thinking???
Body emits odor, caused by bacteria. Man washes. Smell is gone, as well as harmful bacteria.
It is better to be “clean and harmful-bacteria-free”, so… the worse you smell when you are dirty, the higher the motivation to get clean. The cleaner, the healthier…the healthier, the longer you’ll be around to reproduce, the more you’ll genes will be around…and so on…
Think of this example:
It pays to clean your mouth when it stinks, and your teeth last longer and you live longer and you reproduce more. This is a key part of natural selection.
When humans were mainly cave people, few washed and few noticed. That’s just the way we smelled.
Our stinkiness is a side-effect. In nature, dead organic things need to be removed. Bacteria decompose them, but need a certain temperatures and humidity range. They also have to be pretty much endemic, so they can start working as soon as they’re needed. They happen to live benignly on your skin. But in your armpits is where they thrive, because the conditions are ideal. They eat whatever they find in your sweat (which is excessively produced there because of the warmth) and make offensive gases, or at least to civilized noses.
You have answered your own question. It’s not us, it’s the bacteria. It just is. I realize that is not your full question, but you seem to be assuming there is a higher “meaning to life”. Maybe there is, but it certainly isn’t known.
FWIW, humans also have a smell aside from bacteria & dirt/scum on the surface of our skin. Maybe some consider it stinky. Others may find it to be attractive.
I’d also like to point out that Americans have a different idea of what “stink” is from many other parts of the world. My mentor teacher when I was student teaching often talked about his trip to Kenya. He would tell the students about how hardly anyone in Kenya used deodorant or antipersipirant, and of course all the students would yell, “EWWW!” But then he would explain that the natural odor of the body is not offensive in and of itself; rather it is the odor that develops when someone has not washed for a couple of days.
In this country (America, I mean), we’ve grown accustomed to completely eradicating our natural body odor, so that any hint of odor is thought of as offensive. In many other parts of the world, this is not so. A clean body odor is not terribly offensive to the nose; a three-day-old stench, on the other hand, is.
the fact that we find the smells of bacteria offensive has definite evolutionary benefits: we get rid of dangerous ones, we live longer, we attract mates, we reproduce.
“stink” is most definitely a culturally determined concept - not universal by any means. There are any number of people who truly like the smell of sweat. Perhaps this, too, is connected to evolution. Hard workers, good warriors, assiduous hunters, etc. may not have the time to stop to tidy up - but they also might make for good providers, making them mighty attractive.
don’t overlook the role of odor in bonding. children can recognize mothers, and vice-versa, by smell. If your mom couldn’t find you because you DIDN’T smell, you’d be in a sorry state. (Maybe Mississippi, for instance).
one other reason that YOU think you stink, darlin’, may be that American advertisers have convinced you of it. Pay close attention to the text of the commercials and you’ll hear them discuss these odors in the specific context that ASSUMES that they are unpleasant. There is not a question that you stink, it’s just a question of how you’re going to get rid of it. I’m particularly struck by the feminine hygeine ads, which must make women feel as if they’re not much more than a festering gob of stink. (Let’s not get too far into the pheremone thing, but some female smells are terrifically attractive, including THOSE smells.)
and that’s the truth brbrbrbrbrbrbppppppt!
This may already be a dead, beaten horse. If it is, I will run as soon as I hear the sirens…
You stated you understood the mechanism for odor, but were unclear as to it’s functional purpose.
Some previous posts have offered some interesting conjectures on the matter:
Don’t overlook the role of odor in bonding. Children can recognize mothers, and vice-versa, by smell. If your mom couldn’t find you because you DIDN’T smell, you’d be in a sorry state.
However, I feel it is important to note that any such analysis is pure speculation. It is akin to stating that the reason our noses are constructed as they are is to provide support for our glasses. Not everything in evolution has a specific purpose. Generally, if a trait (such as odor) doesn’t result in lowered chances for producing offspring, it doesn’t get “bred out” of the species.
Unfortunately, it is also possible for a trait to remain in the species if it offers an advantage with regards to producing offspring.
Therefore, a trait may remain in a species for one of two reasons: Either it does not hinder the reproductive success of the species or it provides a significant advantage with regards to reproduction. Which of these two reasons odor owes it’s continued existence to is an argument best suited for long evenings in warm pubs…
For what it’s worth, I add this personal observation. I have found over the years that women whom I consider to be soul mates seldom stink to me. Few of them wore any artificial scent, but all tended to bathe regularly and thouroughly. Each had a definite natural scent, which was heavier when they perspired, and which I found pleasing. It’s tempting to suppose that I was attracted to them because I liked the way they smelled. However, because I am a typical (well, sort of) american male, sight and hearing came into play long before smell did.
This reminds me of a visit to San Francisco’s Exploratorium about ten years ago. There was a countertop with a small plastic bottle, apparently empty. The sign said that it had certain chemicals found in sweat, and most men couldn’t smell it, but most women could, and might even find it pleasant.
Several of us squeezed the bottle, smelling the air that came out, with no effect. We thought that this display must be in a state of disrepair, as are several of the Exploratorium ones. Then the last of us (all males) sqeezed the bottle and reeled backwards, fanning his hands in front of his face and cursing. He said that to him, it smelled like a locker room. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any females with us to report their experience.
So I am not aware of any odor from a clean body. Body odor to me means the smell the bacteria make when they feed off sweat, and that ain’t good. I’ve been to Europe, and apparently the people there aren’t as taken aback as I am, since most of them seem to leave a trail behind.
I come down on the side of blame the bacteria. The normal functioning of our bodies means that we secrete oils and other substances that make dandy food sources for bacteria. We are walking apartment complexes for all kinds of bacteria (some of us are veritable luxury penthouse suites), and they move in and start producing all the smelly stuff as byproducts of their metabolic processes. Why haven’t we developed defenses against them? Well, (A) we have - it’s called washing, and (B) they’re really not all that harmful unless they get to excessive levels. Besides, can’t we all just get along?
Years ago on an old Tonight Show (Bob Newhart was the guest host that night) Dr. Joyce Brothers stated that body odor of humans was an early defense mechanism.
It grossed out our predators?
Hmmm…I remember hitting puberty and suddenly realizing that after playing outside and sweating that I really stunk!
It hit me like a truck. It was my first memory of BO. Got me some deodorant real fast.
My next memory of BO was stadning next to some people in Disney World that summer, and some of them stunk. Pew!
Hey, Philosophisers out there who think we have been brainwashed into thinking certain things smell bad: The brain reacts a certain way to certain scents. Like, a friggin skunk can STINK. No one taught me that. No ad campaign has to convinve me they stink in order to sell me some Batman Anti-skunk spray if they made it. If they made it, I’d buy it because skunks in my hood STINK, just like I stunk to myself when I got a wiff.
:)People stink sometimes. And people who live in nations where body odors are too common are just not exploring the better smells which would just make them realize there stink.
You can philosophize all you want, but you lose the arguement because the more advanced we get, the better we control our stench. SOMETHING DROVE MAN TO MOVE HIS POOP AWAY FROM HIM. Something tells me that STINK played a key role in finding ways to discard of poop, not Johnson & Johnson!!!
:):)When given the option of sitting in poop or getting away from it, man chooses to get away from it, because it stinks…and it ain’t no marketting plan that made that happen.:)
Just to actually add something to the thread, I read (in a newspaper) about a study that showed that there was a correlation between a person liking the natural smell of someone of the opposite sex, and the compatibility of their immune system genetics. So there might be another evolutionary advantage to liking or disliking the way someone smells.
Philster - when people talk about marketing induced dislike of body smells they are not talking about poop. They are talking about people disliking the normal smell of a healthy human being. Evolution is going to select for people who don’t care to roll around in the poop, but there lots of people outside of the U.S. aren’t bothered by the smell of a person that hasn’t washed in a week. This can be explained by combining marketing with acclimitization (or a lack thereof), i.e. ads tell people that they have to bathe and use deoderant or people will think they stink, so a lot of people do just that and people get used to the smell of people who bathe everyday and use deoderant, and get unused to people who don’t. There is no obvious evolutionary advantage to deoderant usage (it hasn’t been around that long); OTOH, since natural human smell is rather musky and can be strong it can be off-putting to people who aren’t used to it, in much the same way that garlic is an unpleasant smell to people who aren’t used to that.
Note however, that I mentioned healthy. In addition to teeth rotting, I have noticed in myself that my BO is much stronger and more unpleasant when I am sick. There seems to be a lot of evolutionary attractiveness factors that boil down to evidence of disease-resistant genes, and this can explain the unpleasantness of the smell of an unhealthy body and teeth.
The version of this story that I heard (from a very unreliable junior high science teacher) is that one of the Leaky’s woke up in the middle of the night during a scientific expedition in Africa one time. He saw some lions nearby, but rather than scaring them away, just watched them. They came close to some sleeping workers, smelled them, and then walked away in apparent disgust.
Hey, Philosophisers out there who think we have been brainwashed into thinking certain things smell bad: The brain reacts a certain way to certain scents. Like, a friggin skunk can STINK. No one taught me that. No ad campaign has to convinve me they stink in order to sell me some Batman Anti-skunk spray if they made it. If they made it, I’d buy it because skunks in my hood STINK, just like I stunk to myself when I got a wiff.