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By Root 946 0

the line dividing putative adaptation from products has been the subject of extended, sometimes hot dispute. One unacknowledged source of strong feelings in this area involves connotations of the very term “by-product” itself. In ordinary parlance, by-product” means a secondary, perhaps minor or irrelevant side effect something more primary. The very idea of a by-product implies effect that does not have a life of its own but is essentially “about” the thing that produced it. Try telling the believer or the patriot that convictions or patriotic feelings are by-products of Pleistocene can lead to controversy, as Elisabeth Lloyd found out when published her research on the female orgasm.

Beginning her work in the 1980s, Lloyd evaluated twenty-one different theories of the female orgasm and came to the conclusion that the most plausible was Donald Symons’s 1979 view that while the orgasm a primary reproductive function with human males, in females it nipples in males, a by-product of a shared embryonic physiology. the first eight weeks of life the human embryo develops the neural pathways that, once sex is determined, become either the penis or clitoris. Lloyd allows that the highly pleasur able male orgasm is adaptation for reproduction. She argues, however, that the female which is for many women not even a regular feature of sexual is not an adaptation but a by-product of an effect designed evolution for male plea sure. She shows that thirty-two studies undertaken over seventy-four years indicate that fewer than half of women regularly experience orgasm in intercourse. If you remove from these figures orgasm aided by manual clitoral stimulation during intercourse, then the percentage is lower still. Lloyd’s feminist credentials and criticism of what she regards as sexism in the history of male-agenda-driven research on the female orgasm did not shield her from being herself subjected to a shower of attacks, especially from feminists who regarded her as trivializing women’s experience and—shades of Adam’s rib—making it derivative of male experience.

Lloyd was encouraged in her research and speculations on the female orgasm by Stephen Jay Gould, who picked up her by-product thesis used it as a topic for one of his essays in Natural History magazine 1987. This connection with Gould is fitting, because of his systematic to downgrade the importance of adaptation in evolution, replacing it with his notion of by-products. In fact, so far as psychology concerned, Gould came to regard the whole realm of human cultural conduct and experience as a by-product of a single adaptation: the oversized human brain. “Spandrels” is his chosen meta phor for what he calls “nonadaptive side consequences” of adaptations. The word is taken from architecture: it describes the triangular space that is created inside building where rounded arches or windows meet a dome or ceiling. spandrels; the spaces called spandrels are a by-product of having designed into a building arched or rounded windows.

For Gould, “spandrels define a major category of important evolutionary features that do not arise as adaptations.” His supporting examples for the spandrel analogy are taken from animal physiology: clams, snails, and the tyrannosaurs. His application of spandrels to human affairs, however, is claimed only for by-products of the evolution of one tic ular human organ: the brain—which, he remarks, is “replete with spandrels.” In fact, it “must be bursting with spandrels that are essential human nature and vital to our self-understanding but that arose nonadaptations, and are therefore outside the compass of evolutionary psychology.” These epiphenomena, he simply proclaims, may account “most of our mental properties and potentials.” Gould is given to punch-pulling use of “may,” “most,” and “might” in making his claims, while he fluently details a variety of spandrels in evolved animal physiology, he is exasperatingly vague when he turns to patterns of human behavior. In fact, on the question of which behavior patterns spandrels but adaptations, he is entirely