Friday 16 March 2012

Human sexual promiscuity (...in comparison to that of our ape cousins...)

A while ago I heard an interesting statement from a guest on a BBC programme... I think it was the 'The Big Questions' show hosted by Nicky Campbell on Sunday mornings?

The suggestion was that human beings were 'designed by God' to be naturally monogamous, to pair up for life and to remain faithful... and immediately I felt my bullshit antennae twitching...

As I've said before, when considering these big social questions about our species, I like to look at social structures in the ape world, which can offer clues about our more animalistic behaviours, the stuff going on in our unconscious, and of course the compulsion to have sex and produce offspring is one of our most basic drives, perhaps THE most primal instinct we have.

Traditionally in our culture, we have tended to believe that while men do find it tempting to sleep around, women are on the whole faithful to their partners. And even though young women now do seem more sexually promiscuous than the generations who came before, once they marry or settle down with a man the general presumption seems to be that they are far less likely to have an affair than their husband. But human biology doesn't really back this theory up...

Let's think about our ape cousins then. A male gorilla has a harem of females dedicated to him and him alone. There is very little chance that his females will be impregnated by another male and consequently his testicles have evolved to be very small in comparison to the size of his body. He doesn't need to produce a lot of sperm because there's no competition from other males to fertilize the female gorilla's eggs...

Female chimpanzees aren't remotely faithful and males have evolved to ejaculate as much as possible into as many females as possible to try and ensure their sperm creates a baby. And consequently, male chimpanzees have huge testicles in comparison to those of gorillas...


A human male's testicles are somewhere in between the size of a chimpanzee's and the size of a gorilla's, suggesting that while female humans are not as promiscuous as female chimps, unlike female gorillas, they're not entirely faithful either......

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