Does Ovulation Change Women’s Sexual Desire, After All?:

So yes, women do increase their sexual desire during ovulation. And yes, this is important because most women do not know when they are ovulating. When these findings are added to the evidence that men show increased interest in ovulating women, and other findings that testosterone influences sexual desire in both sexes, it is clear that the extreme versions of the Blank Slate social constructivist views of human sexuality, such as Gagnon and Simon’s script theory, were wrong.

with the advent of more effective contraception the reproduction and the desire for sex are separable — Janus

Well, yeah.

It seems likely that some have an instinctive desire for children and others not. — Janus

The question is not whether we want children and whether that desire is instinctive or not.

Our interest in and capacity for sex is down to its reproductive function, and hence an obvious result of natural selection. We don't choose when and whether and how to be sexually aroused, we just are. It's your hormones. And we are that way because reproduction matters. Natural selection didn't make sex pleasurable and all but goad us into acting on the impulses it arranged for us to have so that we could unwind after a long day of surviving and adapting. It did all this so the surviving and adapting would lead to reproduction.

Thank you. I've done no googling.

Our interest in and capacity for sex is down to its reproductive function, and hence an obvious result of natural selection. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems we part company here, as I don't believe our interest in sex is entirely down to its reproductive function. Sexual interest can be cultivated or allowed to languish, like any other habit. I agree that the existence of sex in the first place is down to reproductive function, but that is almost tautologically, and hence trivially, true. I think we also agree that sexual desire is in part hormonal and in part conditioned by socio-cultural influences.

It seems we part company here, as I don't believe our interest in sex is entirely down to its reproductive function. — Janus

Fair. That was poorly expressed. With the word "interest" I was trying to point at the physiology of sexual desire, why these arousal effects were selected for in the first place, not to say that we have a specific interest in and desire to reproduce. The way you have an automatic response to someone in your environment who may present a threat, without any awareness of what about them triggered that, without necessarily even being aware that your awareness of them is threat-awareness, that's the kind of thing I was going for, the response to potential sexual partners that you don't experience as voluntary, noticing someone, finding them attractive, etc.

I'm also hungry right now and trying to ignore those signals to finish this post. I'm not forced to act on what my body is encouraging me to be interested in doing.

I agree that the existence of sex in the first place is down to reproductive function, but that is almost tautologically, and hence trivially, true — Janus

I would have thought so, yes.

I think we also agree that sexual desire is in part hormonal and in part conditioned by socio-cultural influences. — Janus

Yes, of course, and obviously culture plays a huge rule in the range of behavior open to us as acting on those desires. But I think of culture primarily as channeling desire, controlling it, leveraging its existence for other purposes (selling things!), and so on. I'm not at all sure culture can reach deep enough to be a source of desire itself, directing your attention without your permission, quickening your pulse, releasing hormones. Your body has its own ideas about who you ought to be interested in right now and why, and I don't think culture is nearly so powerful or reaches so deep into your physiology.

As I've said, I think the big lesson of the last hundred and fifty years is that we're apes that wear clothes.

@Srap Tasmaner
Eek, that article is EXACTLY the kind of EP I am talking about. And of course becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Cringey.

The picture gets more complicated because some evolutionary psychologists, including Steve Gangestad, Martie Haselton, and their colleagues, have presented evidence that women might not only increase their sexual desire during ovulation, but might sometimes direct those desires toward men other than their current partners. They theorize that this is especially true for women whose current partners are not highly physically attractive, dominant, and muscular (these traits are taken to be signals of good genes, in the peacock style). — psychologytoday

Yes, of course, and obviously culture plays a huge rule in the range of behavior open to us as acting on those desires. But I think of culture primarily as channeling desire, controlling it, leveraging its existence for other purposes (selling things!), and so on. I'm not at all sure culture can reach deep enough to be a source of desire itself, directing your attention without your permission, quickening your pulse, releasing hormones. Your body has its own ideas about who you ought to be interested in right now and why, and I don't think culture is nearly so powerful or reaches so deep into your physiology.
@Janus

As I've said, I think the big lesson of the last hundred and fifty years is that we're apes that wear clothes. — Srap Tasmaner

But you are steeped in these tropes from the beginning! Functionally speaking, it all results the same. Who is to say what you might be attracted to "naturally". Maybe there is a baseline, but cross-cultural studies are always going to have the problem that is in the name itself, it's studying people ALREADY steeped within a culture. Not only this, but some of this stuff is truly subjective. "Dominant" means people like them? That they are loud? That they are prone to fight? That they take charge? You can start making lists, but then that just becomes arbitrarily picking things out. Who determines who is dominant and how? And no, this isn't "self-evident". It is human-made categorization that fits assumptions that then fits conclusions.

The problem is, we have very little we can test for adult behaviors that are not already pre-determined culturally. Because by the time you test someone, they are already in the culture. And to say, "But if ALL cultures do this". That still only proves that there is cultural value in various behaviors that are preserved. That doesn't mean necessarily that something is genetically/biologically driven beyond culturo-social learning. For sure, cultural mechanisms are working on more basic biological mechanisms, but in that case, the whole conversation is moot because we are not arguing whether things like concepts and brains and complex behaviors aren't correlated with physical substrates, but rather the nature of how "if/then" the biological "programming" is driving the behavior from socio-cultural elements.

I agree with everything you've said there, particularly this:

As I've said, I think the big lesson of the last hundred and fifty years is that we're apes that wear clothes. — Srap Tasmaner

If that lesson were more generally taken on board, with the realization that we are not as god-like as we like to believe, I think we would have a better chance of dealing with the real problems we currently collectively face.

The problem is, we have very little we can test for adult behaviors that are not already pre-determined culturally. — schopenhauer1

For that we need to look at the few primal cultures still around and at animal, particularly primate, behavior in order to get an idea of what is predominately culturally determined and what is not. Of course, the other aspect of this question is as to whether it really matters very much, and whether it is not a distraction from what does matter.

I suspect your underlying motivation for wanting to believe that sexuality is entirely culturally conditioned is your attachment to anti-natalism. In a couple of ways I'm a kind of anti-natalist myself: firstly, for myself I never wanted nor had (as far as I know) children, and secondly, I think overpopulation is a huge component of the problems we currently face, so I would encourage people not to reproduce, but to adopt children from the less prosperous regions, for that reason. But, that a whole other can of worms.

I agree with everything you've said there — Janus

Cheers. Let's hope I said what I was trying to say then.

Let's hope I said what I was trying to say then. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps that's all any of us can reasonably hope for.

For that we need to look at the few primal cultures still around and at animal, particularly primate, behavior in order to get an idea of what is predominately culturally determined and what is not. Of course, the other aspect of this question is as to whether it really matters very much, and whether it is not a distraction from what does matter. — Janus

To be fair, I don't really care either way too. I'm just providing an alternative to the EP assumptions. To me, it just seems too simplistic. It's the inherent problem of studying our own behavior. Are we reading "if/then" into things because it makes sense in other animals? We want to find those determined factors but it seems like it might be straining.

I suspect your underlying motivation for wanting to believe that sexuality is entirely culturally conditioned is your attachment to anti-natalism. In a couple of ways I'm a kind of anti-natalist myself: firstly, for myself I never wanted nor had (as far as I know) children, and secondly, I think overpopulation is a huge component of the problems we currently face, so I would encourage people not to reproduce, but to adopt children from the less prosperous regions, for that reason. But, that a whole other can of worms. — Janus

I mean we discount a lot of reasons for our motivation. Can sexuality be a case where we "overlay" on top of non-biological reasons, biological reasons so that we can have a narrative?

There are a ton of reasons we do things that other animals might not. Boredom is a big one for us. You have something that is pleasurable and you have a stressful day.. You can do a bunch of things to make the day "worth it". Sex might be one of them amongst a whole bunch of other things. Is that evolution at work? I guess in the fact that something is pleasurable. But the drive to seek out and have sex, that again, that all could be cultural edifice. Mating strategies could be self-reinforcing.

It's like you see mating strategies in birds and mammals and you say, "We are mammals, so therefore we must have mating strategies like the other animals." But no, our whole way of life is very different, not just in degree even. We are very much a culturally-driven species. There is our big niche. But being culturally driven in such a large way changes many things. One of these changes may be that we have a sort strategy that can mimic (superficially mind you) other animals, and since we can make analogies pretty easily, we look for those similarities and then say, "Look, see this behavior is like that behavior."

To be fair, I don't really care either way too. I'm just providing an alternative to the EP assumptions. — schopenhauer1

Going back to the OP, I agree that EP, in its extreme from is implausible. I don't buy the idea that the genesis of every social phenomenon can somehow be comprehensively explained in terms of its being reproductively advantageous.

It's like you see mating strategies in birds and mammals and you say, "We are mammals, so therefore we must have mating strategies like the other animals." — schopenhauer1

Right, but I haven't been saying that; I have been, more modestly, saying that given our animal ancestry and our hormonal commonalities with animals, it is plausible to think that there remains a basic, animal, instinctive component to human sexuality, which would mean that it is primordially other-oriented. In just the same way as our basic sociality is not plausibly thought to be, by me at least, to be entirely socio-culturally constructed.

Alleles (variants of DNA sequences) can go to fixation (every individual in a population gets the same allele) in various ways.

1. Genetic drift. This is most important in small populations. Genetic drift can overcome selection if the selection coefficient s is less than 1/N, where N is the effective population size. For humans over the past 200,000 years or so, N has been estimated as around 10,000. In very crude terms, this mean that if a bad allele kills less than 1 in 10,000 it can go to fixation despite being deleterious. We don't know what N was for human ancestors for earlier times.

2. Hitch-hiking genes. Selection acts on a gene (with a relatively large positive s), and drags along a nearby gene (which has a smaller but negative s) to fixation.

3. Pleiotropy. Genes often have multiple functions. It may be that selection in favor of an allele for one function impairs another function.

4. Natural selection.

A lot of people don't seem to know about anything except 4. @Srap Tasmaner did mention genetic drift, but does not seem to understand what it can do. The important thing is that 1, 2, and 3 can all result in an entire population acquiring a trait which is deleterious. It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial.

An example involves vitamin C. Humans cannot make vitamin C, so if we don't get enough from our diet, we get ill. Our close primate relatives have a enzyme which does make vitamin C, and you can find the region in our DNA, where our gene for this enzyme used to be. Somehow (probably 1, 2, or 3) it got broken. There are typically many mutations which can stop a gene working, but only a few (perhaps only the exact reverse of the one that caused the damage) that can repair it. So once every copy of the gene in the gene pool is broken, it can stay that way for ages, acquiring more damage by drift.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see. For example, cultures in different societies and periods vary widely in their attitude towards homosexuality, but the percentages of people with various sexual orientations do not. If sexual orientation is purely determined by culture, why do homosexuals continue to exist in very homophobic cultures? Why don't societies occasionally become 'very gay', with a large percentage of exclusive homosexuals?

It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial. — GrahamJ

Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to keep the focus on reproduction rather than adaptation.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see — GrahamJ

This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove procreative behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see. For example, cultures in different societies and periods vary widely in their attitude towards homosexuality, but the percentages of people with various sexual orientations do not. If sexual orientation is purely determined by culture, why do homosexuals continue to exist in very homophobic cultures? Why don't societies occasionally become 'very gay', with a large percentage of exclusive homosexuals? — GrahamJ

This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove productive behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research. — Srap Tasmaner

So lots of things here. First off, cool post as you do explicate other genetic mechanisms for species' change besides natural selection and it's good to be reminded of those.

Second, what you say there about attitudes towards sexual orientation and culture is a bit of a misrepresentation of what I am saying. I am have not really made any position as to why homosexuality (or any other orientation) exists. For the sake of this argument, I am leaving that as it simply differs with the individual. You can perhaps pinpoint why some children don't like chocolate but their parents do, and one could imagine this might be the same thing. But is it fully genetic? I don't know. But either way, that would be besides the point of my argument, though I can see how that is being used as a sort of "control" or analogy.

Rather, I am saying that other-oriented sexuality (i.e. wanting to be sexual with a partner(s), who presumably one finds attractive) is largely cultural. Think about all the steps from point a to point z.

1) The other person's physical appearance (and perhaps their personality traits) has to arouse, excite, or incentivize you in some way.
How can we isolate this to be purely innate or genetic and not something that the culture instills over and over and thus is so foundational that it seems innate? No one has to explicitly teach you anything for early connections to be made by "This stimulus should bring on this response".

2) People can get off even without being "attracted to anything". With the right stimulation, presumably, organs can still produce the same results of pleasurable sensations.
How do we know the connection from "finding someone attractive" and then "the desire to get off to/with that person because they are attractive" is not itself a culturally/conceptually created phenomenon?

It's impossible to tell to any real degree without isolating people in their own island without any awareness of sexuality and see how it plays out. Of course, there's the whole chicken or the egg thing. Obviously people who got to the island were reproduced, so.. that would have to be indeed an extreme experiment to cut all ties with what came before it.

This is to say that, all of this is very complex sociological interplay going on. Evolutionary Psychology's (with uppercase EP) premise is that, not just global brain mechanisms (generalized features like language, long term potentiation, and such) are evolutionarily selected, but specific conceptualized behaviors. So for example, there are EP theories on leadership, mating strategies, capacity for morality, etc. etc. But this link has to be proven to be innate and not cultural. Does simply doing "cross-cultural" studies "prove" any of that? I am not so sure. Culture itself, can have evolutionary-like qualities akin to natural selection, but that isn't natural selection. Rather, "cultural tropes" can stabilize such that it makes sense to act in such-and-such way. For example, women generally menstruate monthly if left without other factors like birth control, etc.. Might this affect how men and women act in a cross-cultural fashion? Perhaps, but even this reality still creates cultural strategies around it (perhaps men can journey longer because of this or end up becoming praised for their "resources" they bring back). But the biology is not selecting the behavior directly through some selective genetic mechanism, but rather the culture is compensating for the bio-physical realities of their situation.