In article < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it (Anthony West) writes: | Discussion in this thread of the impact on human mating of | pheromones, pro and con, has tended to assume that long-term | mating is the only kind of intercourse that has a significant | role to play in genetics and evolution. | | But in fact, progeny also results from promiscuous and | adulterous sex. Good point - and I would argue that human kinship systems reflect that fact. | Taken as a whole, human beings are middling in their bonding | behavior. They are neither 100% promiscuous nor 100% | monogamous. Even when strong cultural factors encourage either | promiscuity or monogamy, people display yearnings toward the | opposite condition. I believe it is helen fisher who has suggested that pair-bonds experience a chemically-mediated four-year-itch. This is long enough for a pair to get their child over the vulnurable period of infancy, then opening the door to find other partners for the next child. Within the fluid social structure of hunter-gatherers, particularly during our long hominid prehistory, such a system makes a lot of sense. | Women are more inclined to stable pair-bonding than men. But | they too seek variety in partners at times. One study (citation | escapes me) showed that among women, the frequency of *married* | sex remains constant during the estrus cycle but the frequency | of *extramarital* sex increases toward ovulation. | | So even if pheromonal attraction cannot explain durable marital | bonding, it may still have an impact on non-marital sex and | reproduction. The bundling-hypothesis suggests that culture attempts to subvert the instinctive chemically-mediated processes of attraction-repulsion to increase the viability of long-term pairing. Of course, all regulatory systems intended to guide human behavior are effective only in a statistical sense; humans are ornery and unpredictable. Neither culture-rules nor instinctive reactions are completely effective (luckily for us!).