Yes, the sweat keeps you cool and the smell attracts others with different immune system.
I think all humans have some kind of natural scent that can be used to “find a mate”. Not everyone will find that scent attractive but your potential partner might. It’s basically a way we evolved to find a partner to reproduce and get stronger as specie. Of course someone who better understand can correct me.
I want to ask for help to deal with the cognitive dissonance I am experiencing. This information is proof that I (if this study applies to me) will discriminate people based on something they cannot control… which is wrong, correct?
My partner’s sweat smells so fucking UNFFFFF and has for the last decade and I cannot get enough of it aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
You’re a girl I imagine? I feel like girls are more likely to experience this than dudes. Anecdotal of course
Hormones are weird. We can smell things we don’t think we can smell.
Did you mean pheromones? There is no evidence that humans are affected by pheromones.
About the stinking, you would better look for these bacteries advantage :)
Just as a reminder, it’s also good to ask “is there any big disadvantage?”. Sometimes, a thing evolves traits that don’t help but don’t cause enough harm to stop being passed on.
It’s interesting how many people don’t realize this. We were having a casual discussion one day and one of the smartest people I know, who has been educated in a lot of science, didn’t realize that neutral or even outright negative traits can occur and persist in evolution. Evolution doesn’t create a perfect being. It’s just creates those that can survive long enough to reproduce better than those that can’t do it as well.
“There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Another good one:
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
We don’t have the organ to sense pheromones, but we weren’t going to lose the ability to produce them first.
But also, it’s an armpit. A big slab of meat touching one of the hottest parts of your body. It’s going to trap heat which stimulates sweating.
