sexual desire, evolution, and the inner city
ByI attended a recent lecture entitled the ‘evolution of human sexual desire’, by Lawrence Josephs, Ph.D., professor at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies of Adelphi University. Part of the talk discussed the sexual life of the bonobo chimps, the closest relatives of humans on the evolutionary tree, and why there are similarities and differences in the two species. Bonobos and humans engage in similar sexual behaviors and play, but the Bonobos and chimpanzees in general are ‘open’ about sex, meaning sex and sexuality are practiced and displayed publicly, without any guardedness or public censorship. However, human sexuality developed with repressions. The question of why humans evolved a standard of having private sex was attempted to be related to the only situation where chimps have private sex-when females have sexual contact with sub-dominant males. Chimp females hide their sexual relations with subs from the alpha male. This is theorized to be related to females’ attempts to insure a healthy, numerous gene/sperm pool for their offspring. Females attempt to become impregnated with younger/more virile sperm from sub-dominant males (chimp teens have sex with older females and their mothers, and this is tolerated by the alpha male as long as females are not ovulating) and have alpha male assume role of protector. Josephs related this to prevalence of inner city teen pregnancy-from this evolutionary psychological perspective, the quality of life in the inner city, combined with absence father-figure, alpha male caretaker results in females programmed through evolution to develop promiscuous sexual behaviors to insure the success of their offspring, i.e. the greater the exposure to a variety of genes/sperm, the greater the likelihood of success for their offspring. So what are the implications of this? Are teenage sexuality and pregnancy in these situations motivated by an evolutionary biological instinct? Can the ongoing existence of the determinants of this instinct result in it becoming fixed and transmitted in successive generations? Can this occur despite changes in the environmental determinants, or does the development of this instinct prevent environmental changes?
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3 Comments
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Hey,
Just curious. Who is “kalka?”
November 7th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Curiouser and curiouser.
Regarding those chimps, was that ‘Bonobo’ or ‘Bono’? Given the aging rock singer’s off-kilter views on a lot of foreign policy issues….
As for the lecture, Kalka, I cannot believe the good professor at Adelphi University could actually compare the mating habits of—excuse me: chimps??—with those of blacks living in the inner city. Somebody call the “Anti-Defamation League” committee of the NAACP–and pronto!
The good professor Josephs needs some schoolin’ in basic sociology. The reason for teenage pregnancy in “the ‘hood”—which has been falling over the past decade, as most people know—is, indeed, resulting from the lack of father figures in residence, i.e., loco parentis.
But what is the El loco professor implying?
In the wild, those female chimps mate with younger chimps secretly, when the alpha male isn’t around. (On the Upper East Side, I think that’s called “having an affair”). But back in “the communitaaay,” as it were, young girls aren’t having sex with their (very temporary) same-age boyfriends IN LIEU OF mating with their alpha males, unless black girls having sex with their fathers (the alpha male) is the norm there–and it isn’t. (Then again, I haven’t read the novel, “Push,” or seen its recently released film version, “Precious”).
No, those girls are having sex with their 14-year-old peers because Poppa isn’t around to whupp their little behinds! Without parental discipline, without a father in the house, the boys have to “prove their manhood” by having sex with girls at younger and younger ages, and the girls are looking for affection and love—both of which they SHOULD have gotten from their fathers in a chaste, paternal manner.
Josephs sounds like a perv. And a racist. To paraphrase Led Zepelin (with apologies to Jimmy Page): Professor, “uh, we ain’t foooolin’—gonna send you back to, uh, schoooolin’…..”
Bret Randall
New York, NY
November 14th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
“Curiouser and curiouser”? Are you an Alice fan??! Why, that is my favorite! The best part is (from the book, Through the Looking Glass) when Alice first meets the Red Queen and she’s running in a circle around a tree, and little Alice astutely points out to the Queen that she is running around quite fast but not getting anywhere, and Queen laughs and says something like, ‘Why my dear, why would want to get anywhere, sometimes it takes all of one’s energy to stay in one place’ or something of the sort-I have to look that up.
As for Bono…I have always thought that U2 is mediocre band (there I said it!); hence their longevity! Only mediocrity can last 20+ years unchanged, but omnipresent. The truly creative ones, like Nirvana, Hendrix, even The Doors, die fast—see it is difficult to sustain that level of genius…unless you are Freud or Einstein.
I do not think the good prof. is a perv or racist-He is considering a theory to explain certain behaviors. The lack of alpha males is referring to lack of strong parents figures as you say, but also to the absence of strong, responsible young men, that females can relate and identify with—as you say, the young men do not have the discipline or guidance, so have to “prove their manhood”. If that is the case, then do the behaviors of the boys and the girls fit into the evolutionary drive? That is, to prove one’s manhood, propagate one’s genes, in any feasible way? And besides the instinctual drive to procreate and insure the continuance of the species, why else do people have children? And in certain societies, besides not having had discipline and good-enough parenting, what else is motivating the multiple births?