WOMEN seem to be drawn to men who smell like their father. In a test that
involved women sniffing unwashed T-shirts, they appeared to unwittingly prefer
the odour of men who have genes similar to their dad’s.
This is no Freudian Oedipal complex. Instead, it appears to be a tactic in a
poorly understood evolutionary game, where the prize is either greater
resistance to disease among offspring, or an unconscious ability to spot distant
relatives in a sea of strangers.
The genes in question form part of the major histocompatibility complex, or
MHC, which encode parts of the immune system.…
