Comments on Evolution 101: The Female Orgasm

Humans in Space.I do think speciation of the human...

2008-05-08T04:13:00.000-07:00

Humans in Space.

I do think speciation of the human race will happen in the future, but I don’t see natural selection as the main influence behind it, but instead I see sexual selection as the main drive behind it. One of the main criteria for Natural selection to happen is that it needs a selective pressure by the environment on the individuals in question, but as long humans modify their environment to suit their needs and not the other way around, that selective pressure is very low or nonexistent. Thus the main force behind the somatic changes in humans would have to be through sexual selection, that be from small changes, as eye color, to more drastic changes, as severe body change as to satisfy a group of individuals fetishes, like elfish looking humans for example. You only need a small group of individuals with a common ground on what’s beauty and sexual attractive and positive feedback would do the rest.

Btw I was thinking about using this kind line of though in small Sci-Fi short story I wanted to write, so any comments about it would be much appreciated.

Wouldn't "positive reinforcement" have something t...

2007-05-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't "positive reinforcement" have something to do with female orgasm? I mean, that's kind of basic, but if a female isn't getting anything out of having sex, why would she continue to have it? Humans are a very rapeable species, but...

Considering that humans have a relatively camouflaged ovulation, we're sexually available all the time (not just during our fertile periods), and we can't have always known that sex created babies (not that babies are such a big incentive to have sex anyway, or humans wouldn't have been devoting copious time and effort since before the beginning of recorded history trying to have sex and avoid having babies), it only sort of makes sense that there would be some kind of mechanism inducing female humans to keep having sex.

I get what that author was saying about the "happy accident," though. That erectile and ejaculation-inducing tissue has to come from somewhere, and the clitoris is a lot bigger than it looks...

Tangentially speaking, why would whales not have individually-recogniseable voices? I've lived around animals all my life, and they all sound different to me. My cat has a different voice from any of my mother's cats (and I can ID my mother's cats by voice over the phone, reliably); horses have distinctive voices, and so do dogs. On the other hand, I may very well be borderline propagnosiac, and I've always been better at recognising voices than faces (and animals than humans by sight), so your mileage may vary. I'm willing to bet I could learn to pick whales out of a vocal lineup, though.

curio,Sorry, just saw your comment. You could ema...

2007-05-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

curio,
Sorry, just saw your comment. You could email me at anthrosciguy@yahoo.com and I'll see if I have any of my old stuff on this around.

Amusing that I just jumped on the female orgasm to...

2007-02-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

Amusing that I just jumped on the female orgasm topic recently, but haven't read Lloyd yet. I've tended to be dismissive of the vestigial notion because of the increased fertilization rate (whether due to upsuck or not) with orgasm (a la qrazycat), the parallel use of orgasms for social bonding in Bonobos and, possibly, dolphin, and hidden estrus changing the dynamics for mate pairings.

qrazy qat, I'm curious about your comments regardi...

2006-11-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

qrazy qat, I'm curious about your comments regarding the "upsuck" theory. I'm currently working on a paper that is exploring the idea of whether the female orgasm is an adaptation or a byproduct. You said that the upsuck theory is silly and I would like you to expand on this idea and wonder if there is any citable research that I could use in my paper.

curio

Good show, Zach. I remember I had wanted to ask y...

2006-10-31T06:10:00.000-08:00

Good show, Zach. I remember I had wanted to ask you about the super soldier idea myself. I think I may have simply forgotten to ask at some point. I'm glad it came up again.

Surely morality is a product of civilisation. Hija...

2006-10-31T01:35:00.000-08:00

Surely morality is a product of civilisation. Hijacked by religion to help recruit the superstitious.

Re humans in space. Your listener might be intere...

2006-10-30T18:12:00.000-08:00

Re humans in space. Your listener might be interested in a book, not quite on the topic of speciation, called "Interstellar Migration and The Human Experience" which is an easy to read volume that came out of a conference at Los Alamos with anthropologists, astrophysics, et al. My late wife was involved in that, also other anthropolgists like Richard Lee and J.B. Birdsell, Carl Sagan, and a load of others -- and one of the guys who organised it was a NASA anthropologist (did you know that NASA had anthropologists? I didn't before that) Edited by Ben Finney and Eric Jones.

I also did a talk at a sci-fi/anthro conference some years ago on the subject of speciation and got into a bit about the ossibility of speciation in the future, assuming we get into space big time. I think that because of the immense times involved in space travel, we're likely to see speciation, possibly by some adaptation to conditions
different from what we have on Earth, but also just due to genetic drift. The most interesting part of this, again assuming we last that long, is when these speciated humans get back together. This could happen because of some technological advance that lets us figure out a "loophole" in the physical laws we deal with in speed of travel, but would perhaps more likely be because things got "crowded" enough that we'd see genetic interchange from one system's people to another's, which allows for mixing throughout a wide range of places. The possible hybridization would cause some really interesting mixes. Now hybridization in hominids was considered a weird idea when
Nancy Tanner suggested it 25 years ago, but it's now not considered very weird an idea at all.

Re female orgasm. The "sperm upsuck" idea is silly, IMO, although when I pointed out
why to one of its proponents some years ago he didn't take it well. :) Basically, the tiny amount of suction is nowhere near enough. However, that doesn't mean that there's no possible connection between female orgasm and getting pregnant. During the period leading up to and during the time of greatest fertility the cervical mucus changes, becoming more stringy -- it's called spinbarkeit. The interesting thing about this is that sperm moves faster up the strands of spinbarkeit mucus than sperm travels on its own. This is where the orgasm comes in (no pun intended). During orgasm
there's a fairly powerful expulsive force in women just as in men; in women what is (partially) expelled is cervical mucus. Also at that time the shape of the vagina
changes and forms a depression toward the back of the vagina in which sperm can pool; the partially expelled cervical mucus also dips into this as the woman's system
relaxes after orgasm. It's during this time that you get the small amount of suction in the cervix -- it's apparently due simply to the fact that there's been an expulsive force and after a slight suction as the system relaxes. This isn't enough to suck up the sperm but does tend to straighten out the stringy, elastic cervical mucus. The sperm then travels up the cervical mucus at a speed which, as mentioned before, is faster than sperm can travel on its own.

Now it's important to note that all this isn't required for pregnancy, but almost certainly helps it. In evolutionary terms, it would tend to make it more likely that males who aroused females would be more likely to have children, and over time this would tend to create a population of males who were... well, less like apes and more like humans. The reason it's important to note that it isn't required is that the general idea of female orgasm aiding in any way the possibility of pregnancy is often invoked by misogynistic idiots to claim that women can't get pregnant if they're raped unless they enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it's another thing in evolution that can be, and is, hijacked by whackos.

I'll have to read the book you mention, but the info I just provided is not, to my knowledge, often seen -- it's stuff I researched and wrote up almost 20 years ago but never published (long story).

BTW, I don't remember if I emailed you when you did the podcast on hair and mentioned the "aquatic ape" theory, but I have a web site critiquing it (it fares poorly when you look at the facts and also the methods of its proponents). The web site is Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim? and it's been used as a source for several articles as well as in several college courses I've noticed. I've also recently written an entry on it for the Sage Encyclopedia of Anthropology -- which is sadly so expensive I don't know when I'll actually see one myself :)

Apologies for the awfully long comment.

Participating in mutual orgasming can be used by s...

2006-10-29T19:55:00.000-08:00

Participating in mutual orgasming can be used by species to reenforce bonds. A woman will bond with the guy who makes her come, or with the guy she hopes will make her come, or with the guy who owes her a few orgasms.

Apparently, women will find any excuse to bond.