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By Root 1021 0

human mind and its products, from primitive adzes to comedies of Shakespeare. At the same time, gain a better understanding of the limitations of the mind: those domains in which it is destined always to work imperfectly, with toward, for example, useless emotional reactions or counterproductive biases. Here too, a good procedural model is reverse engineering. Just as the person who knows that it is excess heat from the engine supplies the car heater will understand why the heater does not immediately work on cold mornings, so the person who understands evolutionary origins of artistic preferences has a better chance of understanding why the history of the arts plays out the way it does.

Neither writing nor reading nor cheesecake nor Cadillacs are Pleistocene adaptations. But no adequate grasp of their genesis and popularity can be achieved by ignoring the evolved interests and capacities that serve or extend. Human beings derive plea sure from travel, freedom of the open road”; they are a social species that likes to communicate, and a relatively omnivorous species that enjoys sweet and such factors explain technologies and cultural forms both prehistoric modern. Exploring such connections is a job for evolutionary psychology and, in the case of the arts, a Darwinian aesthetics. As pointed earlier, E. O. Wilson describes incest taboos not as by-products Westermarck effect but as enhancements and codifications of it. I have spoken of “extensions.” Wilson’s choice of words is entirely correct, Pinker’s further description of the arts as ways that human beings achieve plea sure by catering to cognitive preferences that were adaptive the ancestral environment. Cheesecake speaks to innate plea sure preferences, but so does Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, though ways that are rather more emotionally and intellectually complex.

IV

On the basis of this argument, I therefore side with opponents of the Symons/Lloyd/Gould view of the female orgasm as a nonadaptive byproduct of an adaptive male process. A direct link between female orgasm and pregnancy, Lloyd demonstrates, cannot be established, and she uses this fact, in agreement with Gould, to conclude that the female orgasm is not an adaptation. But this analysis implies, in my opinion, a paltry, limited view of human sexual experience. In this regard, it is directly parallel to arguments about whether artistic pleasures might be adaptive. Lloyd makes much of the fact that clitoral pleasure is so often self-induced and experienced in the absence of a partner. But the same might be said of most male orgasms over a lifetime—and this presumably does not call into question the status of the male orgasm as an adaptation. Biologist John Alcock has attacked Lloyd’s thesis by arguing that an adaptation such as the female orgasm does not have to be present in every act of intercourse in order for it to be adaptive, and surely he is right. In against a standard set by the ejaculative orgasm of the male—exactly the of masculinist agenda Lloyd elsewhere rails against.

Consider for a moment the huge repertoire of mental imagery and sensual feeling women and men are capable of in erotic experience. Any of these elements can contribute to sexual plea sure, and virtually all heritable, that is, persis tently present in certain percentages of populations but unlikely to be found in every individual. So for some women breasts are a sensitive erogenous zone, a welcome object for male fondling, for others not. Some women achieve so-called vaginal orgasm, others clitoral, others both, and still others take plea sure in sex but never experience an orgasmic peak. Consider the variety of sexual positions, orality in sex, including first and foremost the kiss. While erotic kissing does not cause pregnancy, and is not even a reliable cross-cultural universal, who would say that the kiss is a nonadaptive by-product of sexual intercourse? The erotic excitement of human lips meeting is an evolved adaptation. Only an impoverished view of erotic sex could grant adap-tiveness exclusively to the male orgasm