Bio thought of the day

I was completing the extra credit assignment, the last I will completely for general biology, and here is what I came across.

From Matt Ridley's Genome.
Chromosome 9: Disease

Now consider a bizarre discovery that would have made little sense before the discovery of the association between susceptibility to cholera and blood groups. If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite kinky. If you then ask a total of 121 men and women to sniff the armpits of these dirty T-shirts and rank them according to attractiveness of smell, you will be considered, to put it mildly, eccentric. But true scientists should not be embarrassable. The result of exactly such an experiment, by Claus Wederkind and Sandra Furi, was the discovery that men and women most prefer (or least dislike) the body odor of members of the opposite sex who are most different from them genetically. Wederkind and Furi looked at MHC genes on chromosome 6, which are the genes involved in the definition of self and the recognition of parasitic intruders by the immune system. They are immensely variable genes. Other things being equal, a female mouse will prefer to mate with a male that has maximally different MHC genes from herself, a fact she discerns by sniffing his urine. It was this discovery that alerted Wederkind and Furi to the possibility that we, too, might retain some such ability to choose our mates on the basis of their genes. Only women on the contraceptive pill failed to show a clear preference for different MHC genotypes in male-impregnated T-shirt armpits. But then the pill is known to affect the sense of smell. As Wederkind and Furi put it, 'No one smells good to everybody; it depends on who is sniffing whom.'

Isn't it really interesting to think that maybe the men and women we find ourselves attracted to have a genome is that is completely different from ours? It explains so much, really, as Ridley continues. Genetic variability is important to evolution and natural selection, and as a species, natural selection aka differential survival and reproduction is, as Dr. Mostrom puts it, "the name of the game."

We could stretch this in a sociological perspective here. (Bear with my sarcasm/late night brainstorming). If we are looking for a genome that is very different to ours, perhaps this is the reason that us independent, smart women seem to find these lazy, stupid men. We could even go so far to say that this is the reason the good girls always want the bad boys. And the reason those really sexy guys sometimes pick the most horrifying girls to go out? Genetic variability, of course.

Good night, good luck (to me on my biology final).

And if you are my genetic opposite and would like to mate, but you're attractive, intelligent, and enjoy playing tennis, just like me, look me up. (Haha).