It stinks so sweet

One of the more controversial concepts in behavioural science is that attraction between two people may be chemical.  It may be hard for people to admit that they do not have complete conscious control over who they are attracted to.  Well, a recent study links a person’s genes to their perception of the smell of androstenone, making it a little harder for people to deny that the sense of smell plays a role in attraction. 

Androstenone is known to be a key mating pheromone for pigs, but whether it serves the same functions in humans is still up for debate.  What the current research demonstrates is that depending which variant of the androstenone receptor gene you have determines whether androstenone smells pungent, sweet or if you can even smell it at all.  It would certainly seem there would need to be a good reason (like determining attraction) for there to be such variations in how we perceive the scent of a single compound.  However, no matter how it may seem, there’s still research to be done to establish androstenone as a sex pheromone in humans.

In the end, any of the commentary I could provide about where these findings could lead pheromone research, I couldn’t think of anything better than the simple yet profound words of the single, 45-year-old neurobiologist Jeffry Isaacson:

“They’ve sure got to beat online dating.”

Amen to that, brother.