14 DAY TRIAL // A new study, conducted by Brazilian experts, has proven that people, indeed, tend to choose their mates depending on their genetic traits, even if they only do so at an unconscious level. In fact, this makes things a lot more interesting to analyze. The new research looked at the genetic materials of married couples, and cross-referenced them with those obtained from randomly matched pairs. The scientists learned that, on average, the married men and women tended to have more different genes than those in the control groups. The differences were more obvious in the genes that governed the immune system.
The conclusion of the research is not really surprising, considering the fact that we are now at the forefront of millions of years of evolution, during which time the human race has leaned how to better transmit its genes and how to create healthier offspring. In fact, we, as a society, even have rules in most countries that specifically prohibit members of the same family making babies. These legislations are mostly aimed at stopping the spread of the same genetic material in the same population. Children that come from tightly related parents tend to be sicker and are also more prone to suffering from a range of genetic disorders.
“Although it may be tempting to think that humans choose their partners because of their similarities, our research has shown clearly that it is differences that make for successful reproduction, and that the subconscious drive to have healthy children is important when choosing a mate,” Reuters quotes University of Parana expert Maria da Graca Bicalho and colleagues as saying in a statement. The team also adds that, at this point, it's still unclear what type of mechanisms attracts people with different genetic traits to each other, but they hypothesize that hormones of even face structure may be involved.
The experts also share that, in the married couples involved in the experiments, the most differences were observed to be between levels of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), an immune system factor that also played a very important role in creating healthier offspring. “Parents with dissimilar (genetic regions) could provide their offspring with a better chance to ward infections off because their immune system genes are more diverse. If MHC genes did not influence mate selection we would have expected to see similar results from both sets of couples. But we found that the real partners had significantly more MHC dissimilarities than we could have expected to find simply by chance,” the experts conclude.