Re: [Marxism] Clitoris, orgasm and Darwinism

[Ken Ranney <kranney@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:16 AM 28/01/2005, Brian James wrote:
> Ken Ranney wrote:
>
> > Orgasm is not required for procreation; hence it could not have come from
> > Darwinian selection, which produces only the bare (pun not intended)
> > essentials....
> > Birds, dogs and other mammals do it quickly, why should we not?  I seem to
> > recall that Darwin said that  natural selection wastes nothing, and orgasm
> > is clearly a waste.
>
> This is silly and reductionistic to the point of absurdity.
>
> A female who actually enjoys sex is far more likely to be enjoyed by a
> male of the same species on those long nights around the fire after the
> necessities of survival have been accumulated.



Females enjoy sex even without orgasm, which is for both sexes simply icing
on the cake, and has the look of a gift from nature or??? rather than an
essential part of reproduction.  Arguably females need not enjoy sex and
many conceive without enjoyment

> I somehow don't think the
> simple in-out in-out, just here to read the meter, wham bam thank you
> mam, would have been satisfactory for our intelligent ancestors any more
> than it is for (most) modern humans.

"Satisfactory" has no place in survival.  What counts, as in capitalism,
(amazing the correlation between capitalism and survival a la Darwin, as
Jeremy Rifkin loves to point out!) is outdoing the competition, in this
instance in the number of progeny produced.  If Darwin was right, the
wham-bam man would have had more time for the arduous business of survival
and should have produced more off-spring than the man who took time,
provided that he could ejaculate frequently.  Such men do exist.  We are
informed by Kinsey that "a scholarly and skilled lawyer has averaged over
30 [ejaculations] per week for thirty years".  The combination of wham-bam
and prodigious sexual ability would have demanded polygamy to increase the
genes of our hero, and this is exactly what should have occurred.

With polygamy, the relative scarcity of women would inevitably produce
competition, another feature of Darwinism, among the men.  The result of
the competition would be to improve the features of men which are desirable
to women.  If women, as is commonly alleged, (usually by male writers of
television comedies)1 like large penises, then competition among men should
have developed men with humongous penises eons ago rather than the
relatively small penises observed in Greek statues.  What is alleged to be
a woman's greatest disappointment on the wedding night would no longer
(though no doubt it would be longer) be disappointing.  Similarly with
handsome faces, tallness, muscular bodies, etc.  The less successful would
leave far fewer children to carry on their genes, so would be eliminated
from the world.  Competition among men for wives would be fierce..  Only
the men most attractive to women, probably even charismatic, and the
physically strongest, would be successful.  Darwin has anticipated this
with his statement:

With animals having separated sexes there will in most cases be a struggle
between the males for possession of the females. The most vigorous
individuals, or those which have most successfully struggled with their
conditions of life, will generally leave most progeny. But success will
often depend on having special weapons or means of defence, or on the
charms of the males; and the slightest advantage will lead to victory.


> Human intelligence after all
> co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years with all sort of complex
> behaviours that don't directly represent a survival or strictly
> procreational instinct. May as well argue that the human drive to
> produce art and religion is anti-darwinian!

"The human drive to produce art [not religion] is [indeed]
anti-darwinian!  You might have included mathematics, humour and music in
your statement, for there is no Darwinian explanation for these either.

Religion is quite different.  As far as I can tell, all religions have
their basis in the state, though the Jesus was an anarchist, and it took
several centuries before the perversion of his ideas into what we call
Christianity today.


> > I will be even more convinced than
> > I am that this is a chink in the armour of Darwinism.
>
> Not at all, though it may be a chink in the armour of evolutionary
> psychology and selectionist reductivism, which the mainstream of
> darwinism rejects.
>
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