On Sat, 28 May 2005, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> A bad joke, Mike, the female orgasm is it is in fact a
> long-standinbg sociobiological puzzle and I don't knwo
> any good theories of it. But just because something
> doesn' have an evolutionary function doesn't mean that
> it isn't real or even valuable. Gould and other anti-
> Panglossian adaptationists have a term called
> "spandrels," derived from something architectural that
> is nonstructural, to refer to traits that are
> inherited but not adaptive. Could be the female orgasm
> is one.
I agree that this is a plausible example of Gould's spandrels. As Darwin emphasized and most of his modern day acolytes forget, many factors--not just evolutionary adaptation!--can explain the existence of a trait in a species.
Miles