Comments on: Taking the pill might make your brother hawt?

By: Vielle

Vielle — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:27:45 +0000

Very interesting discussion. I just have one question though, what does all this have to do with Natalie Portman and why is her picture posted here?

By: windy

windy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:29:51 +0000

taking the birth control pill seems to have resulted in a shift of women toward greater preference of those with immune profiles similar to themselves
Sorry for the late comment, but before generalising from this study, please look at the methods more closely. The much-publicised effect only brought the test group more or less to the level of the control group! In other words, many women naturally had the same preference as the pill group! In addition, the study failed to replicate the findings of most previous studies about women preferring (moderately) MHC-dissimilar men:
“In contrast to some previous studies, there was no significant difference in ratings between odours of MHC-dissimilar and MHC-similar men among women during the follicular cycle phase.”

By: CheyneAllenLeVesseur

CheyneAllenLeVesseur — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:50:49 +0000

In a study done by Dr. Weisfeld (Olfaction based mechanisms in human kin recognition and inbreeding avoidance), mutual olfactory aversion occurred only in the father-daughter and brother-sister nuclear family relationships. Recognition occurred between opposite-sex siblings but not same-sex siblings. Thus, the results indicate that olfaction may help mediate the development of incest avoidance during childhood (the Westermarck effect).
Birth control may change female olfactory preference but to what degree and is it strong enough to change the westermarck effect? In other words, will sisters find there brothers odor so desirable that they will resist years of incest avoidance development? It seems to me that since “data from Iceland suggests that 3rd and 4th cousins who marry are the most fertile,” birth control may mediate female attraction towards there distant family and could be a good thing in a world were diversity is the norm and differences in MHC are far too great for a perfect match anyways. As weird as it sounds, birth control may be a good thing in a diversified country. Lucky for me i am not on birth control, but maybe I should look out for any changes in my adolescent cousins behavior towards me..hum..lol

By: Lab Rat

Lab Rat — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:18:43 +0000

I would say that smell most definatly has a large part in the choice of a partner, both consciously and unconsciously. However, one big thing seems to have been left out in the wild worried extrapolations from this survey (oh noes! woman will marry their brothers! populations will divide! quick, get them off the pill etc) which is that women who go on the pill tend, on the whole to be already *in* a stable relationship.
Woman who just want to have fun in nightclubs, or who are single and searching tend not to be on the pill as a) it takes a week of use for it to start working properly b)condoms are easier and c)if they’re single there’s usually no need. A more useful follow-up survey would therefore be to look at how many women change partners after getting on the pill, and if so who they change in preference for.

By: bgc

bgc — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:10:52 +0000

I have always felt that smell has very little to do with sexual attraction in the sense that the basic shape and nature of sexual attraction has been robust to absolutely massive changes in the smells of humans over the lifespan of people now alive.
As recently as 80 years ago many people virtually never bathed, were louse-ridden, pickled in woodsmoke, were sewn into their clothes each year etc – yet now in the same cultures (maybe the same people) most shower daily, change clothes daily (or more often) shave their armpits and wear scent and antiperspirant.
Even in the past couple of decades, the massive decline in tobacco smoking including bans has made smells of all sorts much more obvious to many people.
Yet over this timespan men are attracted to visual cues of youth and health; women attracted to status etc. No change there.
Maybe smell has a minor role in sexual attraction, maybe not, but even if it does I suspect the effect is swamped in the real world. And with such a small effect it is hard not to be measuring confounders by mistake.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:10:17 +0000

Looking at the intellectual justifications for Catholics sexual morals -- they're generally rooted in a concept of teleology: sex is meant to involve a procreative aspect; marriage is meant to be between members of the opposite sex and thus capable of reproduction, etc. Pop environmentalism, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in more of a romantic attachment to "untouched nature" and is thus arguably more conservative. there is something to this, but if you scratch the surface many "new agers" are pretty teleological. i think this is probably due to the fact that humans are naturally teleological; browse the cultural creatives for what i'm talking about.

By: Pierce R. Butler

Pierce R. Butler — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:05:39 +0000

Connect these dots with the reports of biological impacts from estrogen-mimicking chemicals in the environment, and we get, um, total breakdown of the family unit in mad incestuous orgies!
Therefore, ah -
A) Extrapolation is fun!!!
B) For the first time, I find reason to regret being an only child…

By: DarwinCatholic

DarwinCatholic — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:49:11 +0000

I’ve gotten a few emails inquiring about this paper, and Darwin Catholic pretty much baited me into posting on this.
When it comes to getting a sane take on something having to do with the evolutionary aspects of mate selection, you’re the first person I think of. (Though I’m disappointed there wasn’t a way to tie this in with some good picture of inter-racial ancestry babes.)
Darwin alluded to the popularity of this paper in the Catholic blogosphere. I assume part of the reason is that Darwin and his fellow travelers, traditionalist Catholics, reject birth control for normative reasons and appreciate that there may be other more directly utilitarian implications in the choices they make. That’s fair enough, and the bigger picture at the heart of this is I think conservatism and respect for the organic development which precedes us historically and which we take for granted. First rule, do no harm! This sort of rhetoric is generally assumed to be Burkean conservative, but it really isn’t. A great swath of the modern Left embraces this principle in the form of environmentalism and a general predisposition to not meddle with Mother Nature’s handiwork.
It seems to me (speaking from the biased vantage point of the inside) that there may be something of a difference between these two — though there are also some conscious blendings as with Rod Dreher’s “Cruncy Conservatism” thing.
Looking at the intellectual justifications for Catholics sexual morals — they’re generally rooted in a concept of teleology: sex is meant to involve a procreative aspect; marriage is meant to be between members of the opposite sex and thus capable of reproduction, etc. Pop environmentalism, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in more of a romantic attachment to “untouched nature” and is thus arguably more conservative.
However, a lot of individual people’s attachment to traditional morality is probably conservative in the Burkean sense, in that many successfully convince themselves (with some truth and a great deal of illusion) that “back in the old days” everyone followed this approach to sexual morality, and the rebellion against them is “new”.
There’s a lot of truth to arguing that the US and Europe have moved from being a Christian culture to a post-Christian culture over the last 200 years, but looking at the wider swath of world history I think it’s reasonable to argue that few cultures have (if looked at in detail rather than by what they profess their ideals to be) actually lived up to those precepts to any great degree. So I’m not sure that asserting them is ever exactly “conservative”. (I seem to recall some interesting primary source stuff in a book called Tom Brown’s World — about the context of Tom Brown’s Schooldays — from the 1840s, when the modern trend which led towards Evangelical Christianity was in its infancy, essentially making a Burkean argument that it was unreasonable to expect people to actually live according to what is now called “traditional” morality.)

By: Matt McIntosh

Matt McIntosh — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:43:29 +0000

Libertarians have more “respect for the organic development” of society than conservatives do.

By: agnostic

agnostic — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:24:06 +0000

From FuturePundit:
But doesn’t the MHC attraction mechanism work for men as well? They won’t be on the Pill. Are men finding that funny-smelling women who are on the Pill are hitting on them? Someone should do a study on this.