What would you rather have: sex or a baby?
If you're childfree, the answer is obvious. But this terrific column from the L.A. Times titled "Sex is Essential; Kids Aren't" provides some fascinating explanations from the field of evolutionary biology that explain and validate the choice to make love, not babies:
People are inclined to eat when hungry, sleep when tired and have sex when aroused. But in most cases, we remain capable of declining, endowed as we are with that old bugaboo, free will. Moreover, when people indulge their biologically based inclinations, nearly always it is to satisfy an immediate itch, whose existence is itself an evolved strategy leading to some naturally selected payoff. A person doesn't typically eat, for example, with the goal of meeting her metabolic needs but to satisfy her hunger, which is a benevolent evolutionary trick that induces the food-deprived to help out their metabolism.
For more than 99.99% of their evolutionary history, humans haven't had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition. But then something quite wonderful arrived on the scene: birth control. Because of it, women (and men) can exercise choice and, if they wish, save themselves the pain, risk and inconvenience of childbearing and child-rearing, indulging themselves rather than their genetic posterity.
It's worth reading the whole column, especially if you need fodder for those silly arguments over whether humans are biologically programmed to procreate.
[LINK]
People are inclined to eat when hungry, sleep when tired and have sex when aroused. But in most cases, we remain capable of declining, endowed as we are with that old bugaboo, free will. Moreover, when people indulge their biologically based inclinations, nearly always it is to satisfy an immediate itch, whose existence is itself an evolved strategy leading to some naturally selected payoff. A person doesn't typically eat, for example, with the goal of meeting her metabolic needs but to satisfy her hunger, which is a benevolent evolutionary trick that induces the food-deprived to help out their metabolism.
For more than 99.99% of their evolutionary history, humans haven't had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition. But then something quite wonderful arrived on the scene: birth control. Because of it, women (and men) can exercise choice and, if they wish, save themselves the pain, risk and inconvenience of childbearing and child-rearing, indulging themselves rather than their genetic posterity.
It's worth reading the whole column, especially if you need fodder for those silly arguments over whether humans are biologically programmed to procreate.
[LINK]
1 Comments:
"the trend toward childlessness is neither particularly German nor strangely "un-biological" but profoundly human"
Thank you! I am human after all.
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