Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth
It is widely believed that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals, especially rodents and dogs.
Reported as:
The human sense of smell: It’s stronger than we think May 11, 2017
See also our award-winning review from 2001: Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology
The ‘affective primacy hypothesis’ [5] asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. Olfactory signals seem to induce emotional reactions whether or not a chemical stimulus is consciously perceived. We theorize that the importance of human non-verbal signals is based upon information processing, which occurs in the limbic system, and without any cognitive (cortical) assessment. Affect thus does not require conscious interpretation of signal content. Underlying this fact is that affect dominates social interaction and it is the major currency in social interactions [6]. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding. They are made with greater confidence than cognitive judgments, and can be made sooner [5, 7]. Olfactory input from the social environment is well adapted to fit such assertions. For example, chemical cues allow humans to select for, and to mate for, traits of reproductive fitness that cannot be assessed simply from visual cues.
See also: Cutting and pasting — with DNA
“Nature is so beautiful,” he said. “This system came from bacteria.“In order to protect itself against viruses — because when a virus attacks a bacteria, it injects its DNA into it — the bacteria can copy a small piece of the virus’s DNA and keep it in its memory. So the next time the same kind of virus attacks, the bacteria will have an image of the sequence of the DNA virus.” It will know what to attack — according to NPR’s RadioLab, which did a show on CRISPR, that image is basically a mug shot, a list of viruses that are the bacteria’s most wanted public enemies.That bacteria defense is ancient, far older than human beings, but it was discovered in the 1980s. “Then we adapted the system from nature, and we use it in medicine to cure genetic disorders,” he said.
We did not adapt the system. It prevents genetic disorders. Researchers bastardized the details of systems biology and used viruses to edit disorganized genomes. That forced the genomes to protect themselves via energy-dependent autophagy.
Energy-dependent changes in an endogenous substrate, which is common to all cell types, links atoms to ecosystems in all living genera via changes in the microRNA/messenger RNA balance. The physiology of reproduction must then be linked from supercoiled DNA to protection from virus-driven energy theft and the degradation of messenger RNA that links mutations to all pathology.