[Fis] Emergence of Human Sexual Behavior

[JOHN TORDAY]

Dear FIS, I am always leary of biologic explanations for complex properties
like sexual behavior because they are vulnerable to anthropomorphic 'after
the fact' interpretations. The evolution of sexual behavior is a good
example, bearing in mind that asexual reproduction preceded sexual
reproduction, and in that context cells don't divide symmetrically,
providing a context for differences between daughter cell 'A' and daughter
cell 'B'. That difference is probably the origin for sexual reproduction.
There appears to have been evolutionary advantage to sexual reproduction
over asexual reproduction in the combination of genetic traits based on
male/female phenotypic behaviors, particularly as they relate to epigenetic
inheritance. We see this is the effect of cigarette smoke on childhood
asthma, for example, male and female offspring showing differential rates
of asthma. This phenomenology speaks to 'The Male Disadvantage' (Naye et
al., 1971), males more often than not exhibiting more deleterious genetic
consequences than females. The reason for this 'disadvantage' is thought to
be due to deleterious genes on the single Y chromosome lacking
'counter-balancing' genes like the X chromosomes have. The evolutionary
consequence of this is that the Y chromosome is slowly vanishing, so
perhaps we'll regress to asexual reproduction again? .....and then there
was the comment about the role of bipedalism in human sexual evolution. I
have hypothesized that bipedalism was the impetus for the evolution of the
human Central Nervous System (Torday JS. A central theory of biology. Med
Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), so our consequent fertile imagination
has fostered our embellished human sexual activity, such as the absence of
seasonality.
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