A smell only a mother could love

[Alex]

I can think of several intesting lines of inquiry it opens up. I'd be interested in seeing the differential using women who were the biological mother of the child but had not been involved in the care of the child.

Similarly do fathers show the same factor? Even if they are providing the "typically mother" level of care?

From an evolutionary perspective human babies are pretty interesting. They are both physically much less developed than most other mammalian species but physically more separate than in other species with such immature births (such as marsupials where the physically immature infant is physically attached to the mother). Anthropologically it is interesting from a behavioral evolution point of view but it is also interesting from a straight biological point of view as it indicates there is something that the mothers are able to identify as unique and more tolerable in own their own baby's poop.

As for funding, it very likely wasn't. A lot of small studies like these are done without any, or very little, external funding. That is the great thing about doing research at a university full of students who can get extra credit for participating in such studies.

Another follow-up question would be whether we would all rank the smell of our own excrement as superior to that of anybody else. In Lake Wobegone everybody's **** smells like roses, you could say.