Orgasms and evolution

This article (linked in title) isn't bad, but reinforces for me something that's been on my mind lately. I've even mentioned here that a lot of, and probably most, evolutionary psychology research involves looking for some measurable presumed correlate (i.e. brain scans, hormone levels) of some presumed evolutionary mechanism ("the fight or flight response," sexual jealousy) that we assume was useful in some imagined past (when we were being chased by saber-toothed tigers, or when men were out hunting all the time), that shows us something we "know."

As a way of generating hypotheses or heuristics I don't see anything wrong with it, but when it becomes the only way that a field is represented in any popular way, it leads to a lot of bad thinking. (I don't know enough about evolutionary psychology to say whether this is the main way that things work in this field, but usually when I cross a popular or borderline-popular evolutionary psychology argument, it seems kind of stupid, and often reinforcing of of faulty concepts like biological bases for "race," or just really basic "men are like this, women are like this" standup comedy material.)

So one of the things I like about the research described in this article is that it looks at both "emotion," which sounds like they mean the sentimental attachments held for partners, and more general levels of fear and exitation, and "pleasure," i.e. the orgasm, in both men and women, instead of the common heuristic (men=aggressive/visual/pleasure and power driven; women=sentimental/emotional/relationship driven).

What I don't like is the implicit assumption that sexual reproduction is primarily "pleasure"- and orgasm-driven. Why? First, I don't think pleasure is a very useful construct for an evolutionary argument, being, I believe, too tied to historical and environmental context. The notion that sex is about mutual orgasm for both (in this argument, inevitable male and female) partners might be a very nice idea, but it's likely not one that has driven human behavior for the last few millenia. If it is, it certainly went away until the Kinsey era, at least by my reading. Men and women get all kinds of things out of sex- social relations, chemical effects, economic benefits, etc. Certainly, orgasms are interesting, even from a more evolutionary and less phenomenologically-based perspective, and maybe they really are where the action is for sex research. (I don't know if those were really lame jokes or what.) But by assuming sex="pleasure"=orgasms, we're only going to learn things that we already believe. I think it's likely that other mechanisms, evolutionary and psychological, impact sexual relationships, and we might learn more by thinking more carefully about what sex behavior brings people other than orgasm.

(*of course, the big point I'm not addressing here is that reproduction would not occur without male ejaculation, and that female sexual arousal also greatly facilitates reproduction. all I'm going to say about this for now is that sexual arousal isn't neccessarily, and certainly in the past might not have been, orgasm-directed, and that I wonder if orgasm and ejaculation have always been as directly connected throughout human/hominid history. While simultaneous ejaculation/orgasm is the prototype and ideal in our social world, even within this social world we are aware of premature ejaculation and other non-orgasmic mechanisms for transmitting sperm.)

(** sorry for all the scare quotes.)

The Limits of Neuro-talk (from New Atlantis)

An article by Matthew B. Crawford concerning the misapplication of neuroscience in psychology and popular culture. I was glad to read this article (and its use of "scientism"), particularly after damage done to my brain while watching sports commentator Skip Bayless hypothesise on Sportscenter that LeBron James lacks a "clutchness gene." Sigh.

Anyway, this was a particularly interesting paragraph to me:

[Arizona State University psychologist William] Uttal suggests that the
perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters—“pattern
recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and
the like—has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms,
whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of
mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the
collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their
specific loci in the brain.

There are many more great things said in this article concerning what the author refers to as "scientism," many of which can be applied to evolutionary psychology and its popularization, and the author specifically addresses the attempt to locate "emotion" squarely in the brain, disconnecting it from the conceptual, ethical (as he says) and social (as I'd say) networks of meaning that give it life.

I'm also quite fond of this move made by the author:

I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human
experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference
may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work
of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms”—such
as “reflection” and “deliberation”—with terms that describe brain states.
Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective
experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide
between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not
map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer
of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely
epiphenomenal.