I've been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms.
Philosopher of science Elizabeth Lloyd just published a new book in which she rejects the idea that they are an adapation. Then a paper was just published tying variation in the experience of orgasms to genes.
Unfortunately, I've been hideously overworked this week. Fortunately, Elizabeth Lloyd herself is no stranger to the blogosphere, and she's written an interesting post on the paper. Her conclusion: heritability does not equal adaptation, and some scientists need to think more carefully about the evolutionary implications of their work.
More like this
Evolution of Female Orgasm is one of the ever-recurring themes on blogs. This post was first written on June 13, 2005. There were several follow-ups as well, e.g.,
here, here and here. Under the fold.
The discussion about the recent studies on female orgasm, first about its adaptive function and…
One of my favorite science books ever is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm, which does a beautiful job of going case-by-case through postulated adaptive explanations for female orgasms and showing the deficiency of the existing body of work. It's a beautiful example of the application…
I criticized the Zietsch and Santilla paper on the female orgasm. Now one of the authors has responded.
One response he makes is that some of the limitations to the study that I pointed out were also explicitly recognized in the paper. This is true; however, my purpose in mentioning them was to…
It isn't at all unusual for the authors of scientific papers to leave a comment at a blog discussing their work — it's happened here quite a few times, and it's a good thing. It's a plus when they confirm what you've said or add more information to the discussion, and it's also wonderful when they…
Oh Carl, I think you mean "adaptation", instead of "adapation", although many people will by default "correct" the word when reading.
If quantity and quality of female orgasms are genetically controlled, the tantalizing idea would be that drugs could manipulate the phenomenon.
Can't do trackbacks, so here's the URL:
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/06/more-on-female-orgasm.html