stinking functionalists

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>t byfield wrote:
>>
>> it's neither more nor less of a stretch than to fit any other
>> organ or variation thereof into a theory of adaptation. i mean,
>> if you can't find an ideological 'purpose' for a physiological
>> phenomenon, then (a) the phenomenon is contingent, (b) your
>> theory is contingent, or (c) both are contingent. answer: (c).
>
>The question is finding a physiological purpose for a physiological
>phenomenon. Some, like Donald Symons, even argue that the female orgasm
>itself is non-adaptive because most female mammals do not experiece
>orgasm in ordinary copulation. They only experiece orgasm through
>clitoral stimulation.
>
>or
>
>"clitoral orgasm is a paradox not only for the traditions of Darwinian
>biology but also for the bias of utility that underlies all functionally
>based theories of evolution and,in addition, the much older tradition of
>natural theology, that saw God's handiwork in the exquisite fit of an
>organic form to function."
>
>"We (men) simply cannot abide by the idea --though it flows from obvious
>biology-- that a women's sexual pleasure might not arise from our own
>coital efforts."
>
>"the clitoris is the homologue of the penis--it is the same organ,
>endowed with the same anatomical organization and capacity of
>response...the clitoris and the penis are one and the same organ,
>identical in early form, but later enlarged in male fetuses through the
>action of testosterone. Similarly, the labia majora of women and scrotal
>sacs of men are the same structure, indistinguishable in young embryos,
>but later enlarged, folded over and fused along the midline in male
>fetuses."
>S.J. Gould, "Tits and Clits".
>
>Sam Pawlett

It seems that in the original form that Darwin came up with, the theory of
evolution had something of a divided mind in its explanation: (1) on one
hand, there is the 'struggle for existence,' which is a universalist
principle; on the other hand, there is 'sexual selection,' which is based
on the modern two-sex, two-gender model of biological differences -- hence
anti-universalist (and further, what's 'good' for the individual 'struggle
for existence' is not 'good' for 'sexual selection'); (2) on one hand,
there is the 'struggle for existence' on the level of individual organisms
-- an individualist & universalist explanation; on the other hand, there is
a desire to speak of the 'success' of a species, the hierarchy of genders,
races, etc. -- a group-oriented and basically anti-universalist explanation.

Darwin couldn't well reconcile these divergent tendencies in his
explanatory preference, so he 'explained' gender differences and hierarchy
by arguing that 'sexual selection' depended 'not on a struggle for
existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions,
but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males,
for the possession of the other sex.'  As Cynthia Eagle Russett argued, for
Darwin 'Men lived at the cutting edge of the struggle for existence.
Women, removed from that struggle, led lives so sheltered as to amount to
life in a different environment altogether' (_Sexual Science: the Victorian
Construction of Womanhood_ 84).  In other words, Darwin ended up
naturalizing the social, reading the Victorian social convention of the
middle-class female exemption from labor back into the evolution of human
beings.

Our contemporary Darwinists, unlike Darwin, seem on the whole inclined to
argue for a more egalitarian explanation, making 'reproductive success' a
universalist principle.  However, with the exception of people like Stephen
Jay Gould (who argue against trying to find an 'evolutionary advantage or
purpose' behind every single trait that an individual organism happened to
develop), they tend to reconcile individualist and group-oriented
explanations by relying on sexist assumptions.

It seems that there is no necessity to assume what's 'good' for an
individual organism (pleasure) is also 'good' for the species that it
belongs to ('reproductive success' or 'species preservation') in order to
theorize the evolution of human beings, but people are perhaps not
comfortable with the idea that pleasure is only _contingently_ related to
reproduction _both_ for human males and females.

Yoshie