The Power of Sex

Back from my break visiting family I thought I’d also have a (short) break from talking about covid. So today I want to talk about sex.

Not gender, or the impossibly difficult question of whether someone in possession of a trouser truncheon is, in fact, a woman. No, just plain old-fashioned fornication. Hiding the salami. Rolling in the sack. Bonking. Call it what you will.

When we learn about evolution it’s often couched in terms of survival in environments - if the environment changes negatively then the species has to adapt or it will die out. If the things that eat you get that little bit faster you’re going to have to speed up a bit too, otherwise you’re toast. Any change in predator behaviour/ability is a change in the environment you face.

This emphasis on external environments is typified by phrases like ‘survival of the fittest’, but what is less often emphasized is the existence of a sexual environment. Evolution isn’t all just about escaping from that big hairy snarly thing with claws like razor blades, it’s also about a bit of good, honest, rumpy-pumpy.

I’d go further and suggest it’s pretty much all about this. The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is true, but what is really meant here is reproductive fitness. With my usual penchant for schoolboy humour I can explain this very simply. Rigger’s 1st law of sexual evolution states :

if you become dinner, you can’t get it in her

Well, that is perhaps straying a bit too far into the schoolyard, even for me, but there’s a serious point. If you don’t survive long enough to actually have sex then, as far as evolution is concerned, you’re a dead end.

Rigger’s 2nd law of sexual evolution can be stated as :

if you don’t get laid, it don’t get made

You’ve proved worthy enough to survive your environment and you’re ready to pass on your precious genes. Now what? You have to get down to it and actually have sex. For this to occur, generally speaking, someone has to find you attractive.

It’s rather obvious, but if species don’t indulge in the required amount of judicious fucking then their long-term future is somewhat bleak. Reproduction is critical. If you don’t make babies it’s game over. For most animals the sex bit is a rather necessary first step on the road to reproduction.

Last time I looked, the reasons why evolution had pushed most animals down Fornication Boulevard were a bit of a mystery. Biologists puzzled over why sex existed at all. It has kind of come full circle these days, at least as far as the human species is concerned. In the bad old days of rampant sexism and when patriarchy loomed like a loomy thing with extra loomy bits, you could often hear some bloke opine that “women are a bit of a mystery”.

Today they’re a freakin’ enigma. Nobody, including biologists, seems to have the faintest idea what one is.

This curious drive to entirely decouple ourselves from our biology is puzzling to me. It’s as if we’re trying to pretend that millions of years of evolution are entirely irrelevant to who we are and how we behave. But evolution has had a profound impact on our behaviour and this is captured by Rigger’s 3rd law of sexual evolution :

orgasms are not a social construct

If reproduction is important and sex is the means by which reproduction is achieved, then evolution will have built in a desire for sex into the species. In the human species one mechanism to engender this desire is that of pleasure. The pleasure aspect is definitely a big factor in driving the behaviour of your typical male - although if your girlfriend asks “have you slimed yet?” she’s probably not enjoying the proceedings quite as much as you.

Sex is a very powerful evolutionary driver. You need look no further than the male peacock. It is hard to imagine how that spectacular display enhances the male’s survivability against a predator, say, but when Mr. Peacock gets horny and struts his stuff, your average Mrs. Peacock says “Cor Blimey, look at the plumage on that”, and goes all gooey-eyed.

It is ridiculous to suppose, as some appear to do, that all of the behaviours that constitute the eternal dance of the sexes in humans have nothing to do with any evolutionary drivers. No, to these buffoons all our behaviours are just “social constructs”. Our eyes, lungs and hearts (but not our sex organs if we adopt the absurd position that our sex is independent of our biology and merely ‘assigned’ at birth) - oh, yes, that’s all evolution wot dun it. Our behaviours and ways of thinking? Nah, nothing to do with evolution at all - it’s just social constructs wot dun it.

And so today we’re fast moving towards the infernal dance of the genders and blissfully ignoring millions of years’ worth of evolutionary influences that are screaming at us, hey, just hang on a blessed minute.

Those evolutionary influences were critical to our survival as a species. When all your offspring can do for the best part of a year is to eat, sleep, piss and poop, you’d better make damned sure there are good protective mechanisms in place to ensure their survival.

And then you’ve got a few more years after that where the little buggers can actually move, but are still essentially useless. So you’re going to need someone, probably with a strong bond, to watch out for them, feed them, fight off the odd dingo or other aggressor that wanders by, and so on. If you’re female, and for a good fraction of the day those little buggers are clamped to your chest, you’re probably going to need some dependable, caring, strong, high-status individual around as a bit of extra security.

You really don’t need much of a brain to see that you’re going to have a decent tendency towards differentiated behaviours (and, in particular, in mating behaviours) in males and females as a result. The issue is that the young are very vulnerable for a considerable length of time and whatever ‘solution’ evolution drives towards is ‘designed’ to ensure the survival of the species.

Now, none of what I’m saying here should be taken to mean that we’re somehow programmed by evolution, that given inputs X we will definitely do Y. Human beings are very complex and we have the capability to moderate and even override those evolutionary drivers. But those influences are still there - they still push and pull us in certain ways (on average).

Sex, the desire for sex, the desire to procreate, the instinct to protect, are all examples of powerful evolutionary drivers - and they’re not just “socially constructed”. These drivers have shaped our behaviours, thoughts and emotions. They have also shaped our societies.

I’ve already mentioned there seems to be a mode of thought that says evolution is fine when it comes to all the physical, warm, wet, squishy and jiggly things, but when it comes to how we feel and think and behave, or how we identify - that’s all just “socially constructed”. Yet societies themselves, animal or human, have been shaped by evolution and the necessities and desires of sexual reproduction. An environment, in evolutionary terms, is the totality of anything that’s going to impact reproductive fitness.

Ten thousand years ago you weren’t eating 3 meals a day, or popping down to the local corner store to get your food. And that food didn’t come in cans, boxes, or shrink wrap. You might have popped out to the local nut tree for a snack, but there was a decent chance some lion would be eating your nuts instead. The human environment has changed massively.

As a result of these massive changes, both technologically and societally, we have essentially decoupled sex from procreation. The desire for sex, of course, is as strong as it ever was, but we can pursue that now free from any awkward consequences like chest feeders. Our sexual environment has changed almost beyond recognition but we haven’t had time to properly adapt. It’s like the Great Spirit of evolution blinked and 10,000 years flew by and She saw what had happened and said, “Oh Shit”.

So what happens when you take a population that is evolutionarily optimized to succeed in one environment and plonk them in another? We might get some pointers here from a fascinating set of experiments performed decades ago. The experiments were performed on mice and so not trivially extendable to human societies, but, nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that just because humans are much more complex we have entirely escaped the kind of influences and pressures exposed by these experiments.

These famous experiments became known as the “mouse utopia” experiments. I’m not going to give you any references because it’s well-worth doing your own bit of judicious ducking and firing up DuckDuckGo (or Google, if you must). The purpose of these experiments was actually to study the effects of over-population on mice societies. The idea was that if you took a population of mice and gave them plentiful food, shelter and initial space, and removed any threat of predation (so, a kind of mouse ‘utopia’) then the population would quickly grow. How would this affect them?

What happened in one of these experiments (known as “universe 25”) was fascinating, to say the least. As the experiment progressed the mice developed all sorts of aberrant behaviours; behaviours that were not at all typical for mice. A subgroup of mice became extreme narcissists, spending all their time preening themselves and doing little else. Another subgroup became massively sexually over-active, humping anything that moved. Mothers stopped looking after their young. And these were just some of the aberrant behaviours observed.

Mouse society broke down, and this happened well before it could be attributed to any effect of crowding, or over-population. It was as if all the drivers of mouse behaviour, finely honed over millennia to be optimized for a certain environment, were no longer relevant for the new environment the mice found themselves in, and chaos ensued. There was a kind of society wide misfiring of evolutionary drivers that manifested itself in a variety of aberrant behaviours.

Do these experiments have any relevance for our own, human, societies? I think they do. Many make the argument that humans and human behaviour is much more complex and so we can’t just simply extrapolate the results. I agree. But mammals share many of the same fundamental drivers and biochemical pathways etc. Just because we can’t simply extrapolate does not mean the kind of things that badly affected mice will not affect us at all.

Although halted somewhat by the ludicrous responses to the “pandemic” we’ve experienced, in evolutionary terms, an extremely rapid and massive, rise in prosperity for the majority. Overall, for an increasing proportion of the world’s population, things have dramatically improved in material terms. All of our basic needs have been met, and often grossly exceeded. I don’t want to ignore the struggles of those in more impoverished circumstances, but the general trend has been upwards in terms of material comforts. But all of our evolutionary drivers were shaped during millennia of much harsher times.

We are adapted for a resource-impoverished and harsher environment, but maladapted for a plentiful and less severe environment. I think we’re a bit like the mice. Suddenly, in evolutionary terms, we’re in an alien environment where it looks like we have everything we need, and yet all of the behavioural ‘blueprints’ we have are just not quite right anymore and we haven’t had time to process that, and there’s going to be some affect.

Sex is endlessly fascinating. People, these days, are turned on by some quite, erm, surprising things. It’s not my thing, for example, but some people enjoy squashing themselves into latex and getting all squeaky with one another - and that’s a rather mild eccentricity these days.

I doubt very much whether Mr. and Mrs. Ugg, thousands of years ago, were sitting in their cave dreaming of latex. It’s hard to imagine the evolutionary advantage a desire for squeaks would confer upon one. Might it, however, at least partially, be arising from a kind of evolutionary misfiring where some of our basic evolutionary drivers are incompatible with our new environment?

If this kind of misfiring is, as I suspect, an issue for us humans, then what other things are going a bit tits up for us?

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