The relatonships between HLA (and similar) heterozygosity, genetic quality and attractiveness has become dogma and fodder for the popular press on the most flimsy evidence. Such work is among the worst examples of contemporary just-so-storytelling in modern evolutionary biology. This is a very solid study that not only shows an advantage of common alleles and no advantage of heterozygosity, but also show neither are related to attractiveness. The former should cause us to critically examine the Red Queen metaphor and the latter is a much-needed dose of common eveidence-based sense. Whether this pattern holds up or not remains to be seen, but it is an important counterweight and reason for further testing for now.
