Of course, when we find a way to suppress the rhinoviruses the side effects may be surprising. See "Hyperpilosity" by L. Sprague de Camp.

I just read Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," a history of the (1950) Korean War. He noted that many American soldiers were repulsed by the characteristic, pervasive odor of Korea in the warmer months: that of human excrement, which was spread on the fields as fertilizer.

I wonder if more investigation might discover ethnic differences. There are big ethnic differences in apocrine sweat gland density and activity. Perhaps there are complementary ethnic differences in olfactory perception.

Okay, I'm an idiot. I didn't read the study carefully enough to see that they did give instructions in Mandarin. I won't bother to quibble over the translational details, since I don't speak Mandarin! 
 
For all of that, I still don't think they've discovered what they think they have, and perhaps I'll try to explain that when I've a little more time. 
 
Sorry, Razib.

From the story: 
 
"The director would then ask the subject to 'move the wooden block to a higher square in the grid.' 
 
"Chinese students would immediately understand which wooden block to move ? the one visible to both them and the director. Their US counterparts, however, did not always catch on. 
 
"'They would ask "Which block?" or "You mean the one on the right?",' explains Keysar. 'For me it was really stunning because all of the information is there. You don't need to ask,' he adds." 
 
Hold on a minute. The direction is intentionally ambiguous. Keysar's statement is completely bogus, mocking tone and all. As reported, "all of the information" is not there. The director knows there are two blocks, because he (or his associates) set up the grid! So when he fails to specify which one he wishes the subject to move, that properly draws a question. 
 
This experiment may reveal nothing more than Chinese students' imperfect fluency in English. To get valid experimental results, the director should have given orders to the Chinese students in Mandarin or Cantonese, as appropriate. 
 
Consider that there is no simple equivalence between English articles and Mandarin's constructions of similar function. 
 
Perhaps in China, English learners often fail to master the distinction between definite and indefinite articles in English--I really don't know (and it wouldn't imply any want of intelligence). If a Chinese subject hears "move a wooden block," then he might choose the one visible to the director just to make his obedience more obvious. 
 
I can think of many other explanations for this behaviour which the reported experimental design does not rule out. 
 
The researchers should be ashamed of themselves (either for designing a poor experiment, or for explaining it so poorly to the reporter).

There may be, for every community, some "natural rate" of incest (inbreeding?), which would obtain if everyone chose mates freely. Some cultures may hold the incest rate above or below the natural rate. Perhaps the pre-Reformation incest rate in Europe was below the natural rate--Catholic societies certainly applied sanctions to discourage incest. Some modern Islamic societies (not exclusively; I'm just calling up a convenient example) may be forcing an incest rate above the natural rate with arranged incestuous marriages. Those societies seem to apply very stiff sanctions to discourage unarranged pairings. The evolutionary pressure against incest may be stronger than pressure for it (I do assume that some incidence of incest/inbreeding is adaptive). If so, that may help explain why in modern societies it seems to require somewhat less coercion to prevent incest than to enforce it. I'm not sure this been true throughout history--in the premodern world far fewer people travelled and much premodern incest may have reflected the difficulty of finding unrelated mates. 
 
For consideration, I note that many modern Islamic leaders rail all the time about their people's promiscuity and lust for strangers. Perhaps people in their societies lust after strangers because their assigned mates are too closely related to inspire lusty feelings. 
 
By contrast, pre-Reformation Catholic leaders sometimes railed against properly-married spouses lusting for one another! Of course, they railed against other lusts as well.

Let's see. Does this finding help to explain aspects of certain cultures, like, say, the dominant culture in Arabia? A culture that promotes uncle-niece or cousin marriages would pair a lot of people with similar MHC. Some of them might prefer partners with different MHC. To discourage extra-pair mating, the society might resort to methods such as sex-segregation, veiling, and severe punishment for attempts to stray. 
 
We've a lot of data to suggest that marriage customs like those I've mentioned promote various kinds of inbreeding depression. The variant-MHC-preference phenotype may be an adaptive mechanism to avoid the bad side effects of inbreeding.

That essay is really weak, because the word "cooperation" does not appear in it--nor do any synonyms. The author sets up a false scale with impatient sociopathic greed at one end, selfless altruism at the other, and nothing in-between. 
 
Lots of readers will think the word "altruism" means a kind of gift given with no expectation or even hope of recompense. Of course it is hard to reconcile such altruism with "selfishness." (Throwing in obscure phrases of art such as "mutual altruism" won't help the lay reader.) By contrast, it's easy to show anyone that selfishness and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. If I believe I will gain more, in a particular situation, by cooperation than by conflict, I may selfishly cooperate. I may cooperate often and extensively. I may even do things that have only a statistically-positive payoff. That's not to say I will never defect from any cooperation, but my genes need not express a sociopathic phenotype to reproduce. 
 
FWIW, I don't personally believe that organisms display much "altruistic" behaviour (and I prefer the term "cooperation" to "mutual altruism"). When we do observe what appears to be true altruism, I suspect we have seen non-adaptive behaviour (which, to rephrase, evolution will not conserve--although, if it's just a side-effect or accidental overexpression of some otherwise adaptive phenotype, the occasional maladaptive sport may recur indefinitely). 
 
However, we see cooperative behaviour all the time. Since cooperation over longer time intervals and more complex interactions may be socially mediated, we naturally observe social mechanisms to train young organisms to cooperate. Indeed, as a parent, I wish to train my offspring to cooperate when they can garner more resources (or avoid injury) by doing so. They don't need training to desire things (call that "selfishness"), but they do need training in the more sophisticated ways to acquire them.

Rikurzhen: "False positives are due to genotyping errors." 
 
Sometimes. They may also result from error in sampling, labelling, and processing; data-entry or storage; etc. 
 
When you collect a "trace" DNA sample, there's some probability that it bears no meaningful connection to any crime committed in the vicinity. If the sample is actually irrelevant, then even a quite valid match of the sample to a DNA database entry results in an investigative error, a false positive indication of connection between the investigative goal and the DNA database subject. 
 
Rikurzhen: "the problem will become easier to quantify (and thus control) with a bigger database." 
 
The "problem" to which I referred was not that of laboratory DNA matching error (which in any case would be easier to control with a smaller database), but rather the problem of police laziness. 
 
Given a DNA database covering more people, the police will make less effort to discover evidence that could point to people unknown to the database. Given a "universal" DNA database, the police will neglect virtually all non-DNA evidence. 
 
It would be nearly impossible for innocent investigative subjects identified by DNA to acquire evidence neglected by the police. Neither they nor their agents will have timely (or perhaps any) access to crime scenes or witnesses. 
 
As for people becoming disenchanted with a high error rate; well, how will they ever learn about it? Especially when the police gather DNA, look for database matches, discard some false matchees on discretionary grounds ("no white guy who drives a Lexus could have been there--the neighbors would have noticed"), then prosecute the remaining matchees on "DNA match" alone, with the burden of proof reversed ("what, you have no alibi? Your DNA was found at the scene--you must be guilty!"). 
 
Sometimes we talk about stories like those of police looking for a rapist who left a semen sample behind. In that kind of situation, we have more than "trace" DNA, and just from where we found it we think it likely has to do with the alleged crime. 
 
We have to consider other scenarios, though. DNA extracted from dandruff found on the victim's clothes is likely less probative than a semen sample, yet police will be matching that sort of sample much more often. What if a matchee had merely danced with the victim in a nightclub a week before she was murdered--by someone else?

There is always a false-positive (match) rate. It compounds poorly with people's strong tendency to focus on the most obvious evidence. Given a DNA database and modern PCR amplification techniques, police will try to collect DNA and find a match. They will neglect other forms of evidence, assuming they are less probative and therefore unnecessary. The police will then arrest any matchee, and when he is prosecuted the only evidence available (due to police insouciance) will be the DNA match. If the matchee is not, in fact, guilty (false-positive) he will be left with the unenviable task of proving a negative ("I didn't do it! I always chew on pens and I think I left that one on a bus by accident! I don't know how it got into the girl's car!") 
 
This problem can only get worse with a bigger database. It's not that taking DNA only from those arrested would prevent false-positive injustices--but that taking DNA from everyone will inevitably increase false-positive injustices. 
 
The problem is worst with "trace" evidence (that is, tiny amounts of DNA swabbed off of random object and assumed to have been shed by a visitor to the scene--or anything other than semen or visible blood evidence), because our ability to detect DNA now extends to detecting amounts small enough to wander anywhere. Step on someone else's sidewalk-spit and you may leave traces of his DNA everywhere you walk for hours. 
 
I think we need an evidentiary rule that "trace" DNA evidence can only be used to corroborate other evidence--and may not be introduced at all without some threshold showing of other (often circumstantial) evidence.

African women generally exhibit more lordosis (curvature of the spine) which tends to accentuate their rumps. Also they tend to have "deeper" rather than "wider" pelvises. So perhaps those produce some booty advantage.