Well, no, not quite, people don’t actually marry their parents. Rather, women marry people who look like their fathers while men marry people that look like their mother.

That’s the way the story is reported at least.

The report concludes that heterosexual men and women are more likely to select a mate whose faces are similar to their “opposite-sex” parent. The researchers state that this mate-selecting process is deeply entrenched in biological processes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

OK, I can understand the thinking there. After all, if you’ve reached fertile age then we’ve got reasonably good evidence that people who look like your parents are going to be able to raise people to fertile age. However, however, I’m not really entirely sure here.

That state in the abstract to their paper, “Our results support the sexual imprinting hypothesis which states that children shape a mental template of their opposite-sex parents and search for a partner who resembles that perceptual schema. The fact that only the facial metrics of opposite-sex parents showed resemblance to the partner’s face tends to rule out the role of familiarity in shaping mating preferences.”

They conclude, “Human couples who are similar in physical and psychological characteristics are more likely to remain together than dissimilar partners, possibly leading to an increase in fertility.

As I say, not entirely convinced. If this really were true then we’d never have across races (OK, not that there are such things as “races”, but human genetic groups) marriage and of course the thing that we do note in human societies is that when there is a mix of such groups then a great deal of inter-group marriage does take place.

So we’ve got two things. This paper, which says that people preferentially marry what is familiar (in both senses of the word) and our experience of the wider world which is that people often pursue the exotic.

It could just be that the place where the study was carried out (Hungary) just isn’t very racially diverse (as it isn’t) and that thus people are marrying people who look like their mother/father simply because most people around there do so look.