luvluv

So evolution can only select against negative traits, it cannot select for positive traits?

Philosoft

Of course not. Oral sex is more-or-less a neutral-to-positive behavior with respect to selection. The likely benefits (increased partner satisfaction) appear to outpace the possible drawbacks (I dunno, distraction?) Thus, if the behavior appears, there's not going to be any pressure to make it disappear.

luvluv

So in other words evolution could not select for something like intelligence, it could only select against stupidity?

philechat

luvluv:

It is restricted in the first place because "the man want HIS gene to pass to the woman's offspring, not the other men's genes." It takes a woman 9 months to produce a baby, and in the past childbirth was very dangerous to the women. It's evolutionarily advantageous for the man to restrict a woman to him and him alone. Therefore there are more polygynous societies than monogamous ones.

There's also the issue of power. When a lion defeats his enemy he actually KILLS the enemy's children as to possess the lioness alone. Then the lion will pro-create with the lioness again to obtain his own offspring.

Please read my last thread a little more carefully.

Philosoft

Again, no. I guess I'm not being clear.

If a behavior confers an increase in reproductive fitness, all else equal, it will be selected for. A behavior that results in less reproductive fitness will be selected against.

Oral sex is probably a weakly positive behavior. I doubt it confers such great reproductive success that selection pressure will soon have us performing oral sex in the streets, but there don't appear to be any drawbacks that would yield its removal from the population.

For this reason, it seems unlikely that adult feelings of guilt are evolution's way of eliminating oral sex. Indeed, coupled with the aforementioned childhood lack of inhibition for such behaviors, it makes a strong case for socialization.

K

luvluv:

I've got to agree with you on this one. I believe that church laws are attempts (sometimes horribly misguided) to codify human instincts that were naturally selected because they aided in the development of strong communities. I believe that monogamy (or at least the pseudo-monogamy that we humans tend to practice) is among those instincts.

Now, this creates an interesting situation for a Christian or anyone who believe that a god dictates morality. If morality has a natural explanation with no need for God, Ockham's razor (which you used yourself earlier) shaves Him completely out of the morality picture. That leaves a god much more like that of the deists or pantheists - if it leaves any at all.

I apologize, I don't mean to turn this into an existence of God discussion.

tronvillain

luvluv:
Humans appear to have evolved to be a highly sexual animal - most external signals of ovulation have been eliminated and females are essentially always sexually receptive. In other words, if reproduction is the point of sex, humans are extremely poorly designed. The rather obvious conclusion is that reproduction is not the primary purpose of sex in humans, or rather, reproduction is not directly the purpose of sex in humans.

The increased intelligence of humans comes at a price of increased parental investment in offspring. Chances of an infant and/or mother surviving may be drastically increased by increased paternal investment, and "recreational" sex may have been one of the mechanisms which evolved to secure that investment. Think about it: outward signs of fertility are hidden so that a male has to have a lot of sex over a long period to ensure fertilization, and as as result the desire for and enjoyment of sex may increase in both men and women to drive the need for more sex, which in turn results in an opportunity for women to exploit sex for longer term patental investment (though probably driven by their own sex drive rather than conscious intent). A just-so story, but plausible enough to deal with your own rather narrow interpretation of evolution and sex I think.

Is it actually quite apparent that people often naturally have guilty feelings about oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation? What is apparent to me is that people have to be told (either directly or by what they are taught about genitals) that these things are "wrong" or "dirty." Guilt itself is probably an evolved mechanism which acquires behavioral rules by learning rather than by hard wiring, but since that implies children can be raised to be guilty about almost anything, it says nothing about whether children should be raised to be guilty about something.

southernhybrid

Luvluv, I think you often miss the point of human sexuality when you try to put it into the very limited box of it's for reproduction purposes only. Several of the other posters have mentioned that the human female is ready for sex throughout her cycle. What is dreadfully missing from most of these discussions by our younger members is that human sexuality is present throughout our lifetimes.

Those of us who are well past child bearing age, continue to be sexually active and quite enjoyably so. Men and women who have been voluntarily sterilized continue to enjoy active sex lives. I've worked as a nurse with elderly clients since 1975 and I've had more than one 80 something couple express concern regarding their sex lives and how their medical treatment might interfer with it. I've known of elderly people who regularly masturbate, and/or engage in sexual activities with partners while living in long term care facilities. In fact there are even academic courses on human sexuality in old age. There are legal considerations of patient rights regarding privacy and sexuality in nursing homes. We are very sexual beings from childhood exploration to very old age. Reproduction is one small aspect of our sexuality.

A few examples of why sexuality is important are: It tends to help bond long term relationships. It satisfies our need for touching and affection. Orgasm itself releases endorphins which have a very pleasant effect on the individual. Sex is fun and it's good exercise. Many times my partner and I have had fits of laughter during sex. Laughter has been proven to be very beneficial to our health. It even relieves the pain of arthritis, better than many NSAIDS. It's been used by females to obtain material things from males, much like our Bonobo relatives before us have done, when they obtain their favorite foods in exchange for sex. So, perhaps prostitution itself has an evolutionary influence. Don't get excited, I'm just speculating on that one.

I think good sex is important to good overall mental health. It helps us deal with stress by calming and relieving us of tension. If one isn't fortunate enough to have an available partner, our hands are quite capable of performing that function. It all seems very natural to me.

There may be many reasons why many people prefer monogamous relationships but don't confuse them with feeling guilty over the performance of specific sex acts.

dangin

I think the multiplication table is an excellent comparison. What is 2 times 2? Did you sit there and do the math in your head, or do you know, because it has been drilled into you by repetition that the answer is 4. Oh, and by the way, that math problem you just solved is a "chemical" response. The exact thing you claim cannot be "taught" in your quote above. Every freaking thing we do with our brains is a chemical procedure. Most of which is taught.

OK, I am going to refrain from telling you how hard this made me laugh. It's the first outright foolish thing you have said. First, have you read
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a short story and a collection of short stories, but the only one you need concern yourself with is the actual brief tale of the christian who takes his kids to the zoo on Easter Sunday and the monkeys are masturbating. He gets so offended that he invents a pill that makes all animals numb from the waist down so that there can never be any pleasure in sex again. The whole world is legislated to be on this pill so that we can finally have an upright and moral society.

You kill me. You didn't even mean too but you not only propose the continued sexual warping of humans, you'd have us inforce it on innocent primates the world over. Then we'd have to figure out what to do about all the apes killing themselves. A rash of sexually deprived primate suicides.

And second, learning about the behaviors of our nearest animal bretheren is the best way to understand our own current behaviors, and the behavior of our species back in time. It is not exact, obviously, but chimps, gorillas, and man share so much that it is foolhardy to think we can't learn about ourselves from them.

Third, we are not more successful evolutionarily than apes. We share the planet at the same time, we have the same success level. I guess you said "our ways are more successful than their's" this is gradiose bombast of the worst sort. We are choking this planet to death with our "successful ways", more species are becoming extinct than at any time since the KT boundary 65 million years ago.

We evolved intelligence, yes, massive, unprecedented intelligence within the animal kingdom. This is not the same thing as success. If the goal is the preservation of a viable planet, we are the largest failures in the animal kingdom to date. Other species have probably died out because of poor stewardship of their biomes, but none has threatened to take everyone else with them.

This is purely a guess on your part based on your own feelings of guilt. It has also been discredited by those in this thread who express no guilt because of sexual practices, and the illustrations of non monogamous cultures among mankind. You make statements like this repeatedly, and don't back them up with anything at all.


Nature doesn't give a shit what I do with my seed. Particularly since nature gave me the ability to produce enough to populate a planet by myself (with enough female recipients) in one lifetime. I can waste my seminal sperm cocktail into a tissue 20 times in one week, and still get an ovulating woman pregnent. Nature gave me all the ammo I need to masturbate as often as I am able. A fact that I take guilt free advantage of regularly, as do millions of other males.

Astoundingly wrong again. Females select for desired traits. Intelligence is obviously one of those traits. Smart, healthy, and big, gets men into more knickers than stupid, small, and sickly every day of the week.

Yes, let's utilize ockham's razor on innate vs. learned guilt. All things being equal, is it more likely that man evolved to feel guilt over sex because it afforded evolutionary advantage, even though it doesn't for any other species on the planet, and did not for our species for the first 950 million years of our communal existence.

Or, all things being equal, is it more likely that the development of guilt came along with the development of our brains as a socializing tool that covers a vast number of social behaviors, including but not limited to sex.

Another excellent example of why everything we are, is taught. We rely less on instinct that any other animal. It is the double edged sword of our big brains. Phenomenal cognitive power, incredibly long childhood. (compared to all other species) And this decade + of intensive learning and training is the font of all morality. Once again, the child raised in a vacuum would have to have moral sense for your argument to even wobble onto it's own two feet. But, alas, it lays there prone, providing more poorly thought out quotes, allowing me to kick it some more.

My goodness that was fun, let's do it again.

dangin

I just thought about single celled creatures reproducing. A cell splits into two cells. Cell A says to cell B, you know it's not the splitting that hurts so much, its the guilt.