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When frontal sex cost women the automatic coital orgasm (i.e., induced by penile stimulation), natural selection culled those whose only sexual reward was the climax itself. Personal preference has always been a primate mating cue, and by default it now was a key lure to coitus. This created an environment where more-affectionate women enjoyed sex for intimacy's sake, and reproduced more successfully. As orgasm waned, this selective force finally created females who would couple even though they knew they would not climax. |
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Driven by selective pressure, personal preference evolved into obsessive focussing. When directed at another person, we call it "love" or "obsession", depending on our judgment of its appropriateness. When directed at nonhumans, obsession gives rise to workaholic behaviors, overly engrossing hobbies, etc. Evolved for purely reproductive reasons, obsessiveness expresses itself in many ways, just as we find beauty in paintings, music, computer programs, gymnastics, or aircraft. |
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Obsessive focussing sets us apart from our cousin apes, and is a key to our survival. When combined with language, it lets us sustain focussed interest over generations, giving (among other things) science. When combined with a knack for imagining, it lets us converse with our gods, and bargain with them for our success. Byproducts of passion, these derived behaviors make us resilient in adversity, able to set and achieve goals, and to imagine order and meaning in the universe. |
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We're sexually dysfunctional, the only primate lacking a consistent female coital orgasm. Yet we thrive while our cousin apes go extinct. My thesis is: We evolved passion to replace orgasms, and passion gives mental strength. Other apes don't share the feeling, and are dying. |
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Fifteen million years ago lived the ancestor of gorillas, chimps, orangutans and humans. All its descendants are large (for a primate) and grow slowly. Our ancestors were promiscuous; males and females had consistent orgasms. |
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Between twelve and six million years ago, the Pliocene drought pushed our lineage into the sea for survival. In water we evolved smaller canine teeth, our spine curved for streamlining, legs strengthened for speed, and our pelvis deepened for leverage. Pelvic deepening made rear-entry sex awkward. Water hid estrus odors, so aquatic males evolved to get excited about even an odorless female. |
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Aquatic ape adults began retaining the pliant lips of infants, helping us deal with our awkward marine foods. Brain cells evolved from fat cells (and fat floats), so buoyant heads helped prevent drowning. This caused infants to grow slightly larger brains. |
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Our swimming style gave us an increasingly deeper pelvis, making rear-entry sex awkward. We converted to frontal sex, and our pelves continued to deepen and shorten, supporting swimming muscles. The vagina tilted to align with the penis that now entered from the front. |
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This removed the deep-touch response, and coital orgasms became rare in women, so women's skin-hunger strengthened by default, creating a diffuse frontal eroticism. Frontal contact with an adult male is inherently threatening, so women evolved to suppress this fear. Women selected partners by preference alone while orgasms declined, until preferences had grown more important than climaxes. |
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Aquatic men found new barriers in persuading women to mate with them, because male dominance no longer sent the messages that females recognized. Men courted by gaining attention without evoking fear, leading to singing, then language, driven by competition. Intellect evolved along with language. Because aquatic life made female body language difficult to read, males became intuitive and highly tuned to women's smallest signs. |
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Women evolved to enjoy confronting men (like sky diving) giving a "fear-thrill" that is part of love. Women evolved an ability to obsessively focus on one man and ignore others, because that mental trick was all it took to convert an average male into a desirable mate. |
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Pleistocene rains replaced the Pliocene drought about four million years ago. We returned to land by accident, where conditions were good. Our opposed-leg swimming made us slow as aquatics, but also maintained the stout pelvis that enabled our return. |
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Children playing led the way, boys stayed on beaches into adulthood, and grown men liked being on the beach. Women hated the beach, particularly when pregnant. New mothers and pregnant women stayed in the rivers. Also, sex on the beach was scary. |
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Love came from strengthening the personal preference that had already replaced orgasms, and the land-move culled all but the most passionate. Women who cared less for men stayed in the rivers, but a few females liked their mate enough to join him on land. Women also evolved instinctive self-repression, because babies were made only by women who thought inorgasmic sex with a man was better than masturbating. |
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Only the brave females could make this move, and we all inherit the courage it took. The resulting tribes contained passionate, self-repressed, monogamous females and promiscuous males. The move itself was difficult for any one group, but the distribution of groups made it virtually inevitable that at least some aquatics would make the move. |
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Women's new passion made men's promiscuity seem infuriating. Promiscuous men lost reproductive advantage because monogamous women saw wandering as betrayal. So men evolved to be oblivious to female ovulatory odors, and to any subtle signs of female availability. To women, duller men seemed faithful, but mostly were just confused. |
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When women bred men for dullness they also bred out glibness, in which men had once surpassed women. Men still needed to court, so duller men began to seek the easiest target: young and gullible females. We evolved to see young women as attractive, because they have always offered reliable gullibility for the few men who needed it. |
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Men's preference for girl children depends on an inherited, hard-wired sketch of a girl's face. Most men could court women their own age, but a few could mate only with the most vulnerable. Each man who did so left his obtuseness and his preference to his sons, with the instinct building slowly in us all. |
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When men evolved an instinctive preference for girl-children, women evolved in response. By continuing the brain's high growth-rate of early childhood, girls retained characteristic juvenile skull/face ratios farther into life. This eventually gave us the very large (but inefficient) human brain, and greatly retarded our maturation. |
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Child rape comes from instinctive girl-child interest, combined with bad training. Raping women comes from disabled sexual signals and men's dullness. Men are corralled in a limited space of permitted sexual behavior, forming a confining wall where fringe individuals collide with rape. Not a reproductive strategy, rape is merely inevitable given the conditions our evolution created. |
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Sexual boundaries hold men as in a wedge, facing female barriers of doubt. Brain growth reflects pressure in that space, and indicates we are still sharpening the male focus on the most accessible females. Our rejection of sexual violence is the track of our evolution's direction. |
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All apes are haunted by instinctive fear, coming from retarded maturity. Primates need parents, but retarded maturity pushed adulthood off the lifespan's end, so we never gain a fully adult mentality. Our minds have not yet evolved to ignore parents, so we look for them. Gorillas, chimps and orangutans cannot find theirs, and are lonely, shy and dwindling as a result. |
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Humans alone evolved mental tricks to conquer orphancy and fear. Courage, obsessive focussing, and image-wiring all let us imagine gods to replace parents. We give form to unseen beings, focus obsessively to make them clear, and confront them to bargain for their support. Like religion, romance counters the illusory orphancy that apes share, because love gives focus and purpose to life. |