This is a spin-off from the Black Guys in Movies thread, where we had begun to discuss the implications of smell.
Vladimir mentioned that some dogs get weird around certain ethnic groups; I supplied a real-life story about a Rottweiler I owned who freaked out around Italian-American men and nobody else; Louis brought up humans and their documented reactions to smells.
To continue, I've read plenty of stuff about how humans react to each others' smell, all of it subconsciously, if you believe the reports. There's a study that says it's all about immune systems. But my favorite has to be the study conducted concerning lap dancers and tips ...
Hidden charms
Oct 11th 2007
Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile
“BECAUSE academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus.”
No doubt readers of The Economist are equally unfamiliar with this sub-culture, but for Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who penned the words above in a paper just published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, such clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr Miller is an evolutionary psychologist—and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock's tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory. This is that in people, oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—has been lost, so that men cannot tell when women are fertile.
This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.
However, this should result in an evolutionary arms race between the sexes, as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility. Dr Miller thought lap-dancing clubs a good place to study this arms race, because male detection of female fertility cues would probably translate into an easily quantifiable signal, namely dollars earned. He therefore recruited some of the girls into his experiment, with a view to comparing the earnings of those on the Pill (whose fertility was thus suppressed) with those not on the Pill.
The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185—about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.
I still maintain that not having a dog's level of smell sensitivity is a good thing. I don't know how subways or crowded elevators would be bearable if you could parse who ate what for lunch and which females are in what part of their cycle. Too much information!
What do the Orgahs think? Are we swimming in a sea of unseen pheromones, reacting to chemical clues that our higher monkeybrains cannot understand?
Well of course smell comes into play when dating. If it smells like trout, get the hell out.
Dogs on the other hand identify people based on smell. Instead of "I like her breasts" it's "her butt smells good." It works in reverse too. Lemur's horror story works just as well on the eyes as the nose. Think of all the nasty, kittens in a blender, baby poop, and whatever sights that can make you sick. If it's how you perceive the world, you get used to it.
When you look at a dog's brain:
Wait, wrong one:
You'll see a large olfactory bulb.
TASTE AND SMELL
Dogs have far fewer taste buds than do humans, approximately one for every six. Although their limited number of taste buds register sweet, sour bitter, and salty tastes, it is probably more realistic to think of the dog's response to taste as pleasant, indifferent, or unpleasant. Smell is the dog's most advanced sense - a large part of its brain is devoted to interpreting scent. In addition, it has a sex-scent-capturing vomeronasal organ in the roof of its mouth. This scenting apparatus transmits information directly to the limbic system, the part of the brain most intimately involved in emotional behavior.
Dogs also have their scent receptors located toward the tip of their nose, while ours is at the top of the nasal passage. If you're breathing hard enough, most of the scents may not register. That's why it's best to gently inhale if you're trying to detect a scent; like that of a particularly fertile feline.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
This is a spin-off from the Black Guys in Movies thread, where we had begun to discuss the implications of smell.
Vladimir mentioned that some dogs get weird around certain ethnic groups; I supplied a real-life story about a Rottweiler I owned who freaked out around Italian-American men and nobody else; Louis brought up humans and their documented reactions to smells.
To continue, I've read plenty of stuff about how humans react to each others' smell, all of it subconsciously, if you believe the reports. There's a study that says it's all about immune systems. But my favorite has to be the study conducted concerning lap dancers and tips ...
Hidden charms
Oct 11th 2007
Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile
“BECAUSE academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus.”
No doubt readers of The Economist are equally unfamiliar with this sub-culture, but for Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who penned the words above in a paper just published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, such clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr Miller is an evolutionary psychologist—and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock's tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory. This is that in people, oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—has been lost, so that men cannot tell when women are fertile.
This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.
However, this should result in an evolutionary arms race between the sexes, as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility. Dr Miller thought lap-dancing clubs a good place to study this arms race, because male detection of female fertility cues would probably translate into an easily quantifiable signal, namely dollars earned. He therefore recruited some of the girls into his experiment, with a view to comparing the earnings of those on the Pill (whose fertility was thus suppressed) with those not on the Pill.
The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185—about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.
I still maintain that not having a dog's level of smell sensitivity is a good thing. I don't know how subways or crowded elevators would be bearable if you could parse who ate what for lunch and which females are in what part of their cycle. Too much information!
What do the Orgahs think? Are we swimming in a sea of unseen pheromones, reacting to chemical clues that our higher monkeybrains cannot understand?
Actually, the importance of smell to partner choice has been blown out of proportion by journalists. Immune system compatibility/complementarity is just one of many things to measure in a potential partner. For starters, there are plenty of other compatibility/complementarity traits to measure, not to mention general traits such as physical and mental strength and capabilities.
One funny thing, they actually had a few women smell t-shirts from male monkeys and male humans in a TV show, and it turned out many of the women said they got more sexually aroused by some of the t-shirts that had been worn by monkeys, than by some of the t-shirts worn by men... Which kind of demonstrates that smell alone can't decide partner choice, as the mass medial misconceptions of these publications on smell incorrectly implied (unless we have a major latent zoophilia problem among our female populations)...
Under construction...
"In countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Norway, there is no separation of church and state." - HoreTore
The Nose Knows
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Re: The Nose Knows
Originally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
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