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Does 23andMe Have a Future as a Dating Service?

Molly Fitzpatrick recently suggested that perhaps 23andMe has a future as a dating service. While her proposal probably involves a bit too much incest for the average single, there’s another proposal I recently dreamed up that may be even more promising.

Here’s the 3 steps that could turn 23andMe into a turn-key OkCupid:

1. It’s been scientifically demonstrated that people prefer mates with highly dissimilar HLA types. The effect is tied to variations in body odor and directly correlates with who people find most sexually attractive.

2. While 23andMe lacks high-resolution HLA data, they still have at least 109 SNPs that correlate with HLA types.

3. Either 23andMe or an enterprising 3rd party developer could create a lightweight app that compares the HLA data from 23andMe and mines it for anti-correlation. You can at least check people on a case by case basis and see if for instance, you and your current partner have the genes for robust, magnetic compatibility.

I fully expect that this kind of screen would reject close relatives as “subjectively unappealing to you” and would also find most people who found each other attractive could be identified correctly too.

The real question is whether the incomplete HLA data available via 23andMe and the currently limited knowledge of HLA/oder data has enough power to discriminate and reject most of the people who you’re only so-so matches with. If someone starts working on this, let me know. Online dating is a wasteland of faux-innovation but this kind of “OkCupid meets 23andMe” idea is the kind of startup idea revolutionary enough that even I would invest in it.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

11 Responses to “Does 23andMe Have a Future as a Dating Service?”

  1. April 14

    Misha Gurevich

    Id be really curious as to whether a relatively blind genetic matching service would compare well to the life history ish comparison of okcupid.

  2. April 14

    Robin Brandt

    I had been thinking about this for a while as well

  3. April 14

    Corey Yanofsky

    I think you mean “faux innovation”, not “pho-innovation”.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho

  4. April 14

    Louie Helm

    Thanks Corey!

  5. April 14

    Simone Syed

    Once upon a time, it was called genebook.me… 😉

  6. April 14

    William Eden

    I’ve always wondered if the HLA thing was overblown. We are surrounded by extremely dissimilar people all the time, why aren’t we magically attracted to them? Why would two white people, say, ever breed when we have Asians, Indians, African immigrants, etc, easily accessible?

  7. April 14

    William Eden

    Has someone actually checked the papers? Do they include a wide variation of people, or does the HLA dissimilarity only hold up within a very small sample variation?

  8. April 14

    Simone Syed

    Scott and I have pretty similar HLA, actually… more similar than ~80% of the people that I share my genetic data with (about 50 ppl).

  9. April 14

    Evan Gaensbauer

    Simply marvelous! Who ever said eugenics couldn’t be romantic?

  10. April 14

    Evan Gaensbauer

    *positive eugenics.

  11. June 16

    Taurus

    BTW, an update:
    Now a reality.
    http://instantchemistry.com/faqs/