【经济学人】最佳配偶：眼睛和气味透露出怎样的性吸引力 [英国媒体]

Best mates

最佳配偶

What eyes and odours reveal about sexual attraction

眼睛和气味透露出怎样的性吸引力

One hypothesis is supported. Another not

一种假说得到支持，另一种却没有



DO MEN, in essence, marry their mothers, and women their fathers? And do they also choose mates by smell in a way that is likely to result in healthy offspring? These are both old hypotheses and both have been tested by studies published this week. Only one of them, however, seems to hold up.

本质上男人娶的是母亲，女人嫁的是父亲？人们根据气味选择可能产生健康后代的配偶？两者都是长期存在的假说，本周发表的研究报告对它们进行了检验，但看来只有一个假设站得住脚。

Janek Lobmaier of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, and his colleagues, looked at the question of smell. Their work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Lisa DeBruine of the University of Glasgow, in Britain, and her colleagues looked, in a paper posted to bioRxiv, an online database, at eye colour—specifically, whether the eyes of someone’s lover match those of a pertinent parent.

瑞士伯尔尼大学的雅内克•洛布麦尔及其同事研究了气味假说，英国《皇家学会报告》发表了他们的研究报告。英国格拉斯哥大学的丽莎•德布琳及其同事研究了眼睛颜色，即配偶与对方父母的眼睛是否相似，在线数据库bioRxiv发表了她们的研究报告。

Dr Lobmaier and his team were testing the idea that people literally sniff out partners with appropriate major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes. Individuals with more diverse sets of MHC genes have stronger immune systems. Mates with different MHC genes are thus likely to have healthier offspring. MHC genes also affect body odour, so it is no surprise that many species of animal choose, on the basis of odour, mates with dissimilar MHC genes.

洛布麦尔博士及其团队检验人们是否通过气味寻找伴侣，以确认对方身上拥有合适的“主要组织相容性复合体（MHC）”基因。携带多样性MHC基因的个体拥有强大的免疫系统，因此MHC基因存在差异的配偶可能产生更健康的后代。MHC基因还会影响人体气味，所以许多物种根据气味寻找MHC基因不同的配偶也就不足为奇了。

Whether people follow suit, though, is unclear. Experiments have produced equivocal results. So, to nail things down, Dr Lobmaier recruited 42 female odour donors and 94 male odour raters, all of whom gave blood samples that he analysed to determine which versions of six different MHC genes they possessed. Every man was asked to rate the smell of eight women, collected on a cotton pad held overnight in the armpit of the woman in question. Crucially, which had not been the case in previous work, these samples were all collected at the point in the volunteers’ menstrual cycles when their fertility was at its peak. Four of the eight were from women with similar MHCs to the man doing the sniffing, and four were from women with dissimilar MHCs.

人类是否如此尚不清楚，以前的实验没有得出明确结论。因此为了弄清真相，洛布麦尔博士招募了42名女性和94名男性气味捐献者，通过血样检测确认他们携带六种MHC基因中的哪个变种。8名女性将化妆棉整夜夹在腋下收集气味，再让所有男性给气味评分。重要的是，女性志愿者在收集气味时，正处于月经周期中生殖能力最强的时候，以前的研究没有这种情况。其中4名女性与闻气味的男性有相似的MHC，其他四名有不同的MHC。

Dr DeBruine’s experiment, meanwhile, involved 150 men and 150 women, half of whom in each case had long-term lovers of the same sex. She asked participants their own eye colour, that of their lover and that of their parents. She then sorted these colours, for statistical convenience, into two groups: light (hazel, green, blue-green, blue and grey) and dark (black, dark brown and light brown). Her aim was to test three conflicting hypotheses: that people are attracted to mates similar to themselves; that daughters genetically inherit preferences from mothers, and sons from fathers (so they will prefer the eye colour of the other parent); or that preferences are learned by imprinting on a parent.

与此同时，德布琳博士的实验招募了150名男性和150名女性，两组各有一半拥有相同性别的长期配偶。她询问了参与者本人及其情侣、父母的眼睛颜色，然后为了便于统计，将所有颜色分为两组：亮色（淡褐色、绿色、蓝绿色、蓝色、灰色）与暗色（黑色、深褐色、深棕色、浅棕色）。她的目标是检验三种相互矛盾的假说：人们偏爱外表与自己相似的配偶；女儿从遗传上继承母亲的喜好，儿子继承父亲的喜好（因此喜欢与自己单方父母有相同眼睛颜色的配偶）；对配偶的喜好来自单方父母的影响。

For heterosexuals, however, the outcome of the second and third hypotheses would be the same. It was by including gay men and women in her sample that Dr DeBruine thought she might be able to distinguish between them. A gay son, she hypothesised, would imprint on his father, and a gay daughter on her mother.

但对于异性恋者来说，后两条假说得到的结果是相同的。她的志愿者中包含男女同性恋者，德布琳博士认为也许能将他们区别开。她假设男同性恋受父亲的影响，女同性恋受母亲的影响。

And so it proved. When she crunched the numbers, she found that gay men and straight women were both twice as likely as chance would predict to have a lover with a similar eye colour to their father’s. Likewise, straight men and gay women were two and a half times as likely as chance to have lovers of a similar eye-colour to their mother’s. Though eye-colour is but one of many features that may attract romantic interest, in its particular case, that attraction seems likely to be imprinted.

结果找到了证据，她在统计数据时发现，男同性恋和女异性恋的配偶眼睛颜色与父亲相似的概率高出一倍。同样，男异性恋和女同性恋的配偶眼睛颜色与母亲相似的概率高出1.5倍。但眼睛颜色只是吸引对方谈情说爱的诸多特征之一，在特殊情况下，这种吸引力可能来自单方父母的影响。

As to Dr Lobmaier, he found that, though the men in his study expressed strong likes and dislikes concerning the odours he asked them to smell, these bore no relation to the MHCs of the women involved. On that hypothesis, then, it is back to the drawing board.

洛布麦尔在实验中发现，虽然男性志愿者根据闻到的气味表达出强烈的喜爱和厌恶，但气味与女志愿者携带的MHC基因没有关系，看来该假说需要重新思考。