The Evolution of Sexuality

In our latest set of readings, the topic covered was sexuality. In them, I found the article "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" perhaps the most thought-provoking. The article underscores one of the critical fallacies of the social sciences: that certain behavior is "normal," that other behavior is "abnormal," and that anyone guilty of the latter must be reconditioned to the former. Irrespective of biology, irrespective of personal feelings towards one's "condition," irrespective even of the overall impact on one's quality of life, all too often the mission of the social scientist is to attempt to establish or engineer a standard of normalcy when it is either fallacious or non-existent. Even in the face of logically irrefutable evidence, some of the most logical minds in a discipline are still inclined to reject anything that is contrary to what they've been conditioned to believe. This is perhaps rooted in the logical fallacy known as the self-serving bias, the unspoken statement made by many professionals is, "it's not that my idea is wrong, it's just I can't find any of the right evidence."

These beliefs are so engrained in our society that it's perhaps to be expected that even people who make their living off of objectivity and scientific thinking are impeded by it. Indeed, social science in our society doesn't merely reflect certain fallacious assumptions about sex and life in general, it actually helps perpetuate it! That a man such as Freud, whose approach to psychology revolutionized the way people look at the human mind, found much of his research on sexuality reduced to pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo is indicative of this.

It is unfortunate that the social scientific community is so blatantly ostracizing clear evidence of its own historical and contemporary inconsistencies with biology, but there is also a good deal of hope in this regard. That we are examining this part of our social fabric at all, which is nearly 3 millenia old, shows an important first step in addressing our own unscientific assumptions about reality and what we are as a species.