DB: I haven't read the book yet. However, I've read her earlier work on female orgasm, I've seen her give a couple of talks on her research, and I've discussed her work with her briefly. I'm not completely convinced that Lloyd is right that female orgasm has no evolutionary function, although my mind could change once I read the whole book. She presupposes that male orgasm has a direct reproductive function--namely, to inseminate. But this conflates ejaculation and orgasm. Insemination is the function of ejaculation. Ejaculation and orgasm are actually distinct phenomena subserved by separate and dissociable physiological mechanisms. Ejaculation is all that's necessary for the function of insemination. So there's a problem about male orgasm: Why has it evolved? Clearly, the mechanisms subserving the sensation of orgasm are the evolutionary latecomers. So at some point in our evolutionary history, well before the emergence of Homo sapiens, there may have been non-orgasmic ejaculators and orgasmic ejaculators. Given where we've arrived, clearly the latter outreproduced the former. One possible reason is that orgasms drove the orgasmic ejaculators to have sex more often in order to induce the pleasurable sensation. The common early developmental pathway of males and females would have endowed females with the mechanisms for orgasm as well, as Lloyd herself shows, following [evolutionary psychologist] Donald Symons. Once so endowed, orgasm could have performed the same motivational role in women. In that case, in both sexes, orgasm would be an adaptation for a higher frequency of sex--hence, presumably, a higher rate of offspring production relative to our ancestors without the pleasurable sensation of orgasm. Of course, this is highly speculative, and--to repeat--I haven't made my way through all of Lloyd's arguments. But at first glance, I'm skeptical.
JRM: Do you think people tend to resist any evolutionary account of human behavior because it seems to reduce important aspects of our emotional lives--romantic and parental love, for example--to an impersonal desire for reproductive success?
DB: When we introspectively focus on the proximate cause of our behavior, we tend to think it's sufficient explanation of my getting married that I love this person, and that I have no desire to have children. So the idea that [reproduction] is a complete explanation sets up a resistance in a lot of people [to questions such as] why is it that these emotions have evolved, and what evolutionary function do they serve? That's actually a different kind of explanation. It's not an explanation of how proximate mechanisms function, but an explanation of why we have those kinds of proximate causes driving our behavior.
Even an evolutionary biologist like [the late Stephen Jay] Gould was prone to this slippage between proximate and ultimate explanations, and then to rejecting an ultimate explanation because of thinking a particular proximate explanation was sufficient. In Gould's critique of Evolutionary Psychology, he said, "I don't think that males are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us. A man may feel love for a baby because the infant looks so darling and adorable." Gould was slipping there between the proximate and ultimate explanations. The ultimate explanation is female sexual selection for care-giving males. The proximate explanation has to do with what causes males to respond that way to children, and that can be entirely because they look so adorable. That's not incompatible with an evolutionary account.
JRM: At the end of the book you spend a chapter arguing that there is no universal human nature. Can you explain what you mean?
DB: I go by what others have used the term to mean. If by human nature all you mean is whatever humans do, then absolutely there's a human nature, and an evolutionary perspective on human beings will inform us about human nature. But traditionally the concept of human nature has [been] a much more theoretically loaded concept, which is that there are certain things that it's normal for humans to be, and that constitute human nature. The concept of human nature [therefore] only refers to a partial subset of all of the manifest diversity that we view among human beings. And I think that notion has no foundation in evolutionary theory. That notion is in fact a vestige of 19th-century natural theology.
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Add CommentSee "Reply to David Buller by Martin Daly & Margo Wilson"
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Also see Delton, Robertson, and Kenrick (2006) "The Mating Game Isnt Over: A Reply to Bullers Critique of the Evolutionary Psychology of Mating"
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep042622732.pdf