This is not news, and it is somewhat puzzling why the topic has come up again purporting to be news.

For example, search at NewScientist for
MHC smell mice
and you will find articles dating back to 1995 regarding even earlier research.

When a female mouse is choosing among mates, it is advantageous, in terms of the potential immune system diversity of her offspring, to mate with a male that has an immune system substantially different from her own. She can determine this by smell, and mating choice is strongly influenced by smell.

When the mouse is ready to conceive, she prefers the smell of mice with different immune systems (that is, the smell of nonrelatives); when she is pregnant, she prefers the smell of mice with similar immune systems (that is, the smell of relatives, because her parents and siblings may help her).

One of the things that everyone knows, but few dare say, is that if you don't like the smell of your date, the relationship is off. Conversely, you can run your nose through a date's hair, inhale deeply, and it is Love.

This whole process is quite complicated, and what is being detected is not body odor but molecules that have no perceptible odor themselves mixed in with body odor molecules.

Human males and females should choose mates when the female is not pregnant so that she will choose a mate that has a substantially different immune system. Taking birth control pills changes her hormones to be similar to that if she were pregnant, and her odor preference changes to prefer similar immune systems. In other words, if a female chooses a mate while on birth control pills, she is likely to find the odor of that mate to be undesirable when she goes off the pill.

There are many things like this about human behavior that seem unbelievable if you assume that humans are not animals. But we are giant mice (or more exactly, giant tree shrews).

Ideas like this are threatening to the maintenance of the illusion that we are completely free agents, and I suppose that is why they pop up in the news when a new generation of readers comes along.

I did not know this. This stinks. I mean really. No wonder we have such roller coaster love affairs and marriages.

yea I've heard of this before too. Like the mate preference has something to do with when you want to have babies you want someone with different genetic makeup for obvious reasons but when you're pregnant you want people with similar genetics around you to protect you, i guess because that makes them kin, although thats obviously not really always the case. I can understand how it might be a factor, when you love someone you love everything about them so if you hate their smell you aren't loving everything about them and I suppose that would make it easier for the other little things that happen in every relationship to seem more signifigant. It is noticable if you smell different boys with this in mind. There is a difference in the way I feel about the smell of my friends that are boys and my boyfriend. Its pretty fun to compare the smells of the boys in your life though, its almost scientific...

Also, most women are attracted to the smell of money and jewelry. Can retailers get a fragrance like that out before Christmas?

Have they figured out why people keep falling for the cheese in the people traps?

You may spout like an expert, but you're full of garbage. People are not mice.

People are not mice. And that's not a facile statement. You can raise mice in a lab, you can allow them to breed, and you can get more mice. In fact you can get generation after generation of mice. All you have to do is provide food and water.

But you can't do this with people. Again this is no joke. It is a fundamental fact. Even if you were an alien species, with a lifespan relative to humans as humans are to mice, you couldn't raise naked people in a people maze just by throwing food and water at them. To raise and breed people in a lab enviromnet, you would have to provide a specific cultural environment that would at the very least include education on basic child rearing and baby care. Otherwise, your naked people will die out. And in fact, there's even more to it. Without a culture, people die, period. Without education, without speech, human brains are stunted and don't develop. Without brain development, humans will very likely not even know how to mate.

Something like this is in fact a serious problem in zoos. Gorillas are difficult to raise in zoos because they've lost contact with their enviroment and no longer 'know' how to raise their babies. As it happens, gorillas can only 'learn' how to take care of their babies if they themselves have been raised by gorilla moms. It's a chain of instinctual learning that depends on experience.

However gorilla babies that have been taken from their mothers in the jungle to reside in zoos do not know how to raise their babies and cannot be told how to raise their babies. The knowledge of how to care for gorilla babies did not get 'imprinted' into them. The instinctual chain has been broken.

Humans are exacly like gorillas in zoos except that we can use culture to tell us how to raise our babies. But without our culture we would know nothing. Our instinctual 'chain' has been broken for hundreds of thousands of years and has been replaced by culture. As far as we know, it has been TOTALLY replaced by culture.

This completely borks your idea that what mice do in breeding is necessarily similar to anything that humans do. Mice are not like gorillas. They are able to take care of their babies without regard to their experience. They don't have to 'learn' anything, they just do it, the knowledge is already 'imprinted' in them. That's why it's so easy to raise mice in labs.

It may very well be true that mice moms react properly to their babies by the scent of their babies. But this obviously no longer works for gorillas. And it even more obviously doesn't work for humans. So the fact that mice use scent to select their mates isn't at all an indication that humans use scent to select their mates. People are not mice.

While these studies may have started with mice, they have certainly been conducted and replicated with humans (hence the T-shirts). Obviously scent is not the only factor, otherwise we would be attracted to EVERYONE who smells different from us. We have plenty of other things that influence our decisions as well. But obviously we do not mate with people simply because we wish to exercise our free will in a carnal fashion. Things turn us on about other people, and if we admit it, we often don't exactly know what those things are.

But the t-shirt study is a long way from being established as true.

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It isn't even established that mice use MHS to distinquish between near relations and not:

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Least of all is it established that human beings prefer specific other human beings on the basis of innate biologoy, such as that we can somehow can tell via our noses or other means if another person is sufficiently genetically 'different' from us.

What IS established is that, unlike mice, we are highly dependent on culture to do just about anything at all. Unlike mice, we can't feed ourselves without culture. Unlike mice, we can't take care of our young without culture. Without culture, we could be as utterly helpless as mice without instincts. These are facts.

Likewise our preferences for specific mates may also be based on cultural or even on random factors rather than on biological factors. IN fact I believe that would likely because as far as I know, it has yet to be proven that we do ANYTHING based on biological factors rather than on cultural factors. Even studies that purport to show universal preferences among humans, such as supposed preferences for hip/waist ratios or blondes, may be reflecting universal cultural traits rather then biological traits.

The fact is, we are just not 'giant mice' as the original poster opined. We behave in fundamentally different ways. Just because mice may use biological factors to select their mates doesn't mean that we might do the same, any more than the fact that dogs can track scents though woods and fields means that we can also track scents.

Bit of a nitpick here, but... "instinctual chain?" No such thing. If it's instinctual, it's genetically hardwired and doesn't depend on upbringing. What you're talking about, with human-raised gorillas not knowing how to raise their own young properly, is gorilla culture.

What you're talking about, with human-raised gorillas not knowing how to raise their own young properly, is gorilla culture.

Not really. Culture exists outside of human beings. It's not coded in our genes. And culture based behavior is extremely flexible and varied. Instinctive behavior OTOH is very rigid and specific.

An instinct is a very specific behavior evoked by specific physical stimuli. When a duck hatches and sees a big thing moving around, it's hard wired to follow the big thing as its mother, whether the big thing really is its mother or just a dump truck. And it can't help itself, it has to do what the instinct tells it to do.

If a duck is born in the dark or born blind, it doesn't see anything and it doesn't follow anything. If you let it out in the light again, it won't follow anything because the instinct only acts for a very specific period of time, for minutes after hatching, as I recall. This is the classic example of what an instinct is.

Apparently gorillas raised in zoos by humans are not experiencing the exact stimulus which is needed to evoke their instinctive caretaking behavior later in life. We know this because they are not 'learning' anything at all from their human caretakers, even though their human caretakers are trying very hard to emulate in every way the same behaviors as gorilla mothers. Something is missing and it might very well be something as subtle as a scent.

If gorilla babies were learning gorilla 'culture' from their mothers, then it should be possible for human caretakers to pass down at least some caretaking behaviors to baby gorillas, just by taking care of them. But apparently this doesn't work at all. So it's not a matter of the babies somehow 'learning' what their caretakers are doing. It's a matter of missing the stimulus, exactly similar to the duck born in the dark.

I can only find one thing in Google even remotely about the gorilla problem: a USA Today video story claiming that only one gorilla in captivity has successfully managed to raise a pair of twins. Unfortunately I can't hear the story, so I don't know what it says.

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I called it an 'instinctive chain' because I thought was descriptive. It is a chain that is dependent on each link, and once broken it can probably never be restored.

Humans have a similar thing with language. If any humans are born without access to language, and isolated from other humans, they will not have language. The chain of language would be broken. That's why we think the languages we speak today have to go all the way back to the very beginnings of language, because the chain could not have been broken at any point.