Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin?: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory

by Griet Vandermassen

An example: People like to have sex because sex is fun. This is a very good proximate answer to the question: Why do people have sex? The pleasure we experience while having sex, however, evolved “in order to” ensure that we would do what is necessary in order to propagate our genes. This is an ultimate answer to the question why people have sex. Both answers are right; they are just complementary. With our modern methods of birth control, sex and reproduction are no longer automatically linked. Sex, however, is still fun. Our bodies and minds have evolved over millions of years in an environment without birth control and they have retained the traits that were adaptive then, although these may no longer be adaptive now. Because evolution occurs slowly, existing humans are necessarily designed for the previous environments of which they are the product. Thus the currently nonadaptive or actually maladaptive character of some traits (such as our desire for fat and sugar) does not imply that they cannot be adaptations.