Those following this forum are familiar with the debates about visual vs. olfactory influence in human sexuality. JVK and others have certainly opened my eyes to the influence of pheros on human sexual development and mate selection. It is also clear there is a correlation between the traditional concept of male and female beauty, and the hormone levels of these \'beautiful\' people. Good looks are a visual cue of the person\'s elevated levels of sex hormones and superior genetics in general. Further, those higher levels of sex hormones will naturally express themselves in the person\'s scent/phero signature - good looking people smell good as well as look good, and this is all tied to their superior hormone/genetic status.

But I have a bit of reluctance to say that the visual concepts of good looks are solely conditioned by people\'s olfactory experience. That argument holds that we only think gooklooking people are attractive because we have unconsciously associated their looks with their desirability that has been triggered by our lifelong olfactory experience of these superior folk. That is, they have seemed desirable to us because of our sensing of their pheros, and we have associated that desirability with their visual markers of superior hormone status - their \'good looks\'. Or, you could say they unconsciously \'smelled\' good to us, so we associated that desirability with the conscious look of those people, which is distinctive, controlled by their hormones like their pheros, and which happens to conform to the classic ideas of \'beauty\'. But I don\'t think that argument tells the whole story.

I think there is an innate ability to visually recognize the \'look\' of desirable people apart from olfactory experience. I think this ability is present prior to the final sexualization at puberty. Taking nothing away from olfaction/phero-detection, I think that at puberty our phero detection system comes online in a sexual way, and begins to reinforce our previous concepts of beauty, in terms of the opposite sex. In short, I think we have redundant channels to detect desirable mates - visual and olfactory. And since sexually superior people present both visual cues (facial features driven by hormone levels @ puberty) and olfactory cues (higher hormone levels equate to more ;powerful phero production, since pheros are metabolites of sex hormones), it makes sense that we might be able to process both these cues as redundant signals of mate desirability.

I present a few ideas to bolster this claim, and invite the inevitable explanations of why it is wrong.

BACKGROUND:

The ability to detect human faces is in place essentially at birth, and is not subject to conditioned plasticity of the brain like some other functions. [Farah et. al., Early commitment of neural structure substrates for face recognition. Cog. Neuropsychology Feb-May 2000].

In fact, within an hour of birth babies can reliably imitate numerous adult facial expressions. This occurs so early it is implausible to think they have learned it - this facility with facial \'understanding\' is somehow in place from genetic encoding [Meltzoff, Infants understanding of people and things, 1995 The Body and Self]

Infants already recognize and prefer traditionally attractive faces [Facial diversity and infant preferences for attractive faces, Developmental Psych 27 (1991)]

MY POINT

From infancy we have the ability to detect and mimic faces, and have an innate preference for traditionally attractive faces. Further, the area of the brain committed to facial recognition is not particularly \'plastic\', and therefore not as prone to lifelong conditioning as other areas of the brain. To me this all suggests we are born with an innate and relatively fixed visual perception of what constitutes an attractive face.

At puberty our previously inactive scent glands activate, and at that time I think we begin to sense sex pheromones of the opposite sex, and feel resulting sex attraction. We begin to associate that attraction with visual concepts of beauty, already in place. People with the most attractive phero signature will coincide with those exhibiting attractive facial/body markers (both are produced by hormone level), so the two channels (visual and olfactory) reinforce one another. What we have always known was \'pretty\' or \'handsome\' will now have an added component of sexual attraction, fueled no doubt by the unconscious phero effects the \'beautiful\' people have on us.

To me this tracks with common experience. 1) Very young kids can visually point out a pretty girl or handsome man, long before they are capable of sexual attraction to them. 2) Heterosexuals can identify and appreciate the beauty/sexual attractiveness of those of the same gender, without feeling any attraction to them. If we only perceived beauty from olfactory-driven desireassociations, we could not identify the \'beautiful ones\' of our own gender, having never felt desire for them. 3) Our phero system relating to sexuality & desirability appears to activate at puberty. We have a concept of attractiveness of both genders well before that.