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Asked by thingone to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 29 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by saida123.
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Emma Trantham answered on 29 Jun 2012:
Oooh this is a tricky question, which is I suspect no one has answered already.
As was discussed in a different question (here: /niobiumj12-zone/2012/06/29/why-do-we-have-emotions/ ), many emotions have probably evolved to help us react to different situations in the best way.
I think that part of the reason people attract each other and fall in love is because it helps produce the next generation of humans. If humans long ago hadn’t been attracted to each other and fallen in love there might not have been any babies produced and so we might not be here today.
I guess that there are a lot of biochemical reactions that happen inside us to make us feel attracted to other people but I don’t know what they are (I don’t know if any scientists fully understand them yet).
I’d be interested to see what the others know/think…
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Blanka Sengerova answered on 29 Jun 2012:
Emma has done a good starting point of the discussion and I am also interested to read about why we have emotions.
I would add that there is some evidence that we use something called pheromones to attract mates. A pheromone is a substance that is produced by either males or females and is somehow detected by the opposite sex to make the individual releasing it more attractive to the other one.
There is some research that was done with sweaty T-shirts from different males to see which one a female would prefer and it turned out that she would favour the ones with an immune system as different as possible from her own. This may result in offspring that have got an immune system as wideranging as possible because they inherit parts of it both from the mother and the father. This is where the pehromones discussed above could certainly help…
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