> 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')
Some biologists argue that 'sexual selection' is part of the struggle for existence, the genes struggle to spread themselves. Sexual selection does explain a lot of things like why males are larger than females, how the peacock got its feathers etc.
; (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,
Absolutely.
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')
Darwinians believe that what is good for an individual or a species is what contributes to its fitness i.e. its ability to survive and avoid extinction.Period.
Remember Darwin was heavily influenced by Smith and Ricardo. George Williams distinguished between an "adapted herd of deer" and a "herd of adapted deer." The idea being that if each individual deer is adapted to outrun the wolves then the herd as a whole or as a species benefits. Group selection is not necessary and can be dropped for reasons of parsimony. Elliott Sober has put up some strong arguments against these ideas.
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.
Well, any theory that has empirical content will be contingent unless you're Richard Dawkins who believes that natural selection is necessarily true i.e. wherever there is life it must have evolved by natural selection. The problem with his story is where chemical processes get transformed into biological ones (quantity into quality).
Male sexuality is more problematic because the orgasm is not seperated from reproduction, the height of sexual pleasure occurs during ejaculation a primary and direct adjunct of intercourse and reproduction. Maximal pleasure is linked with the greatest possibility of fathering offspring so it is adaptive.
Sam Pawlett