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Here's the wiki intro:
``A pheromone (from Greek phero "to bear" + "hormone") is a chemical that triggers a natural behavioral response in another member of the same species. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Their use among insects has been particularly well documented, although many vertebrates and plants also communicate using pheromones.
[edit] Background
The term "pheromone" was introduced by Peter Karlson and Martin Lüscher in 1959, based on the Greek pherein (to transport) and hormone (to stimulate). They proposed the term to describe chemical signals from conspecifics which elicit innate behaviours soon after Butenandt characterized the first such chemical, Bombykol (a chemically well-characterized pheromone released by the female silkworm to attract mates).[1]''
I think the basic idea is a pheromone is a hormone produced for external signaling, and a hormone is an internal chemical signal.
What I was describing is the interaction. The pheromone produces `innate response' by communicating with the internal hormonal system in the recipient.
I think the use of the word in popular press is just styling. I am sort of surprise perfume makers haven't come up with some line designed around the word or concept. That's what they are sort of doing anyway, trying to build an art around the basic idea.
Incense, bbq, smoked, are all related cultural productions along the same idea. Sure and the whole nouvelle cuisine. Done right, they indeed act as pheromonal production that product internal signally of some sort---probably not hormonal---but something. Mouth watering? That qualifies as an `innate response' with learned modifiers. I think thats what babies are doing, licking the world, putting disgusting things in their mouth and having different responses, than adults would doing the same thing. It is interesting stuff to speculate on...
It's interesting that there is a sub-text of class war between say bbq and nouvelle cuisine, and then merging and adopting each other in various ways, then suddenly various traditional cheap, good eating ethnic places, chinese, italian, mexican are all dividing out into this class war idea. Where regular say mexican food places decide to go up-scale. Re-fried beans become a delicacy? A big slab of ribs and hot links dumped in a plastic basket lined with paper over white bread goes to the working class. Then the same ribs are chopped in small pieces with a tooth pick on a mint leaf or something and its nouvelle cuisine...? I don't know. Funny stuff with a political aspects..
Here's an article on the idea that humans produce pheromones:
http://www.junkscience.com/news/wphor.htm
The bio-science crew might get picky, because the traditianal idea is the external chemical messenger in other species is a hormone, not just any odd molecule. Haven't read the above. Just found it..
CG