Platonic Procreation

As Kaitlin Mulhere reports on how asexual college students across the country have made gains for greater visibility, evolutionary psychologist Michael Woodley suggests that geniuses tend toward asexuality:

[Geniuses] are, he says, often asexual, as their brains use the space allocated to urges such as sexual desire for additional cognitive ability. “You have a trade off between what Freud would have referred to as libido and on the other hand pure abstraction: a Platonistic world of ideas,” he said. The evolutionary reason for this may lie with the theory that geniuses have insights that advance the general population. “It’s paradoxical because you think the idea of evolution is procreation, and that might be true in a lot of cases,” he explains. “But what if the way you increase your genes is by benefitting the entire group, by giving them an innovation that allows them to grow and expand and colonise new countries? ”The lack of common sense is in keeping with the idea that a genius exists as an asset to other people, and so: “They need to be looked after,” he says. “They are vulnerable and fragile.”

Lots of previous Dish on asexuality here.