I know I got warned about believing what the media says but I thought I’d share the latest article, seems they’re fairly interested in the subject lately!
Well, looks like a reasonable and non-hyperbolic account of the academic research, I’ve seen some those studies referred to elsewhere on my googling… and there are a couple I had not heard of before, I’ll have to look 'em up.
From the article: “We may never find a real human pheromone - our free will gets in the way,” says Professor Tim Jacobs, of Cardiff University’s School of Biosciences.
Well, this to me is a little like saying “We may never find a really compelling advert - our free will gets in the way.” of course we have free will, and with that individualisation, and, as the old maxim goes, “there’s no accounting for taste.” But that IMHO doesn’t discount the existence of a human pheromone however… well Professor Jacobs does subsequently qualify his statement with the term “influence”
Unless “pheromone” is defined as something which causes a predictable, automatic response, harking back to those early studies with moths, silkworms or whatever. I don’t know the answer to that actually! A question of semantics, I guess.
Interesting… Maybe the degree of “predictable, automatic response” is correlated to whether the species has a mating season, and things like the size of that “window of opportunity”. If the mating season is 3 days out of a year, evolution might provide the species with a pull-out-all-the-stops barrage of, among other things, pheromonal signals* Whereas a steady-state, all year round pheromonal strategy might be expected with mammals that are more up for it all year round, like bonobos and humans. Disclaimer: I’m no biologist, I just read the Naked Ape by Desmond Morris once 
(*and, in fiction, don’t the Vulcans in Star Trek mate once every 7 years or something?
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