Love and Instinct (Routledge Revivals)

Glenn Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317916307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1981, this title takes a 'sociobiological' approach to the exploration of sexual habits, looking at the fundamental biological nature of humans. The book covers the spectrum of human sexuality, considering love and marriage, variant sexuality and social influences. This is a valuable reissue for any student of sexual psychology or cultural and evolutionary anthropology with an interest in the fundamental influences on human sexuality.

1

Introduction

 

When Charles Darwin put forward his theory of evolution in the middle of the last century, it was greeted not just with scepticism, but with emotional resistance. It seemed to threaten people’s self-esteem, based on the view of themselves as a unique and special creation. The wife of Bishop Wilberforce was most dismayed at the news of Darwin’s blasphemy. ‘Descended from monkeys?’ she exclaimed. ‘My dear, let us hope that it isn’t true. But if it is true, let us hope that it doesn’t become widely known.’

This ostrich-like posture is seldom encountered today in such unsubtle form. Most of us have accepted the fact of our evolutionary origins, at least with respect to our anatomy and physiological functions. But it still comes hard with many people to acknowledge that our thoughts, feelings and social behaviour are also powerfully influenced by an animal heritage – the struggles of our remote, prehistoric ancestors to survive and reproduce themselves successfully in hostile and competitive environments. We have a strong inclination to regard our own behaviour as following a path of ‘free will’ or rational choice, in contrast to the brutes, who are pushed and pulled by compulsive survival instincts.

This is a misleading conceit. No doubt the animals we think of as inferior near-automatons also have an illusion of free will and think of themselves as making reasonable choices, if only we could ask them. If we can bring ourselves, at least temporarily, to put aside understandable pride in our superiority, we may be surprised at the extent to which the complexities of our behaviour can be understood as arising out of instincts which at some time in history have conferred an evolutionary advantage upon us. This book deals with the application of such evolutionary explanations to human sexual and romantic behaviour.

The concept of instinct is admittedly unfashionable in modern psychology. It initially fell into disrepute because it sometimes gives an illusion of explanation where none in fact exists – as when we attribute the sociability of people to their ‘gregarious instinct’ or wars to the instinct of aggression. Of course such statements are circular, but the idea of social learning has been used in an equally sterile way. Explanations of social behaviour in terms of modelling our activities upon patterns prevalent in the culture are just as simple-minded; they beg the question as to how and why these behaviour patterns were adopted in the first place.

Another reason why instinct-based theories of social behaviour have lost popularity in recent years is to be found in the work of the cultural anthropologists. These researchers have tended to observe and document differences between one cultural group and another, while ignoring many important uniformities. This is perfectly understandable because the differences are a great deal more interesting than the similarities. The process is akin to that of the tourist who selectively recounts those aspects of a foreign country which are different from what he is accustomed to at home. There is no reason why he should be impressed by the things that are the same.

The result is that anthropologists have, over the years, led us to believe that human social behaviour is very largely ‘culturally determined’. There are, they maintain, very few biological imperatives beyond the most obvious physiological functions like breathing and sleeping. For almost any type of behaviour that we think of as natural, the anthropologists have come up with some obscure cultural group that does not conform to the usual pattern, and the conclusion they have reached is that our behaviour is virtually free from instinctual control.

Yet cultural exceptions do not really prove the absence of an instinct. As Desmond Morris notes in Manwatching, nuns and priests supposedly live out non-sexual lives, but this should not be taken to mean that sexual intercourse is a non-biological, cultural invention on the part of the rest of us. Exceptional communities do not disprove any rules, they merely illustrate the range of social control and modification of our instincts that is possible.

Although almost taboo in some branches of psychology, the instinct concept is by no means lost and forgotten. Psychoanalysts, as well as most laymen, regard it as inescapable that much of our behaviour is motivated by primitive, often unconscious, biological forces which burst through our civilised veneer on occasions with irrepressible force (sometimes to our guilt and embarrassment).

There is also a thriving branch of biology, called ethology, which is in effect concerned with the study of instincts. Recently, interest has focussed on the explanation of complex social behaviour such as altruism and courtship in terms of optimal strategies for survival. A conceptual breakthrough occurred when it was recognised that the unit of natural selection is not the individual animal but the individual genes, and this was the basis for the whole new discipline of ‘sociobiology’. It is my belief that social psychologists can no longer afford to ignore the insights produced by these approaches.

An example may show how the evolutionary perspective can sharpen the examination of social behaviour. It has often been supposed that animals (particularly female animals) have an instinctual need to produce offspring, and that such an instinct would inevitably confound efforts within human society to implement programmes for population control. Yet if we assume that instincts have to evolve just like anatomical structures, it is in fact very unlikely that we have any drive to reproduce or have children per se. Non-human animals have no awareness of the link between copulation and reproduction, so even if they wanted to have offspring they would not know how to go about it. The same would apply to certain primitive human societies who, until recently at least, had not discovered the copulation-reproduction connection.

For effective reproduction, nature required the development of only two biological drives: (1) a sex drive that would lead male animals to copulate with the females, and (2) a parental care instinct that would motivate adult members of a species to protect their offspring once they have been born. There is no need for a bridging instinct of any kind, or indeed any means by which animals with such an inclination could be selected for. The sex drive and the instinct of parental care can operate quite independently, and have a separate neurological basis, yet both serve the evolutionary end of reproduction.

Of course, in modern human society the position has changed. We now have a fairly full awareness of the natural consequences of sexual intercourse and we have effective means for preventing them (contraception and abortion techniques). Therefore, conditions have been established which would allow for the evolution of a new instinct to bridge the gap between sex and child-rearing- an instinct that might be called ‘child-acquisition’. But while this new drive may be built into human nature many generations hence (as a result of the breeding advantage of people who desire children) there has not been sufficient time for this social change to have filtered through to the level of our genes.

At the present moment it is most unlikely that humans have any need to acquire children, at least not one that is deeply rooted in biological instinct. There may be social learning experiences that would lead young couples to think it might be nice to have children, but it would be equally possible for experience to operate so as to deter couples from starting or adding to a family.

And if there is no biological instinct for acquiring offspring beyond a simple sex drive, what will happen to the human species once we are perfectly able to separate recreative from procreative sexual activity? It would be no surprise if the much feared population explosion were to give way to a population ‘implosion’. Indeed, there are signs that this is already happening in many advanced Western societies.

This example has been discussed in some detail because it shows how biological instincts may be distinguished from learned needs, and the social implications that may be drawn from that distinction. Instincts can only evolve if there is some logical way in which a feeling can be translated into a behavioural pattern that will confer some selective advantage. By studying the conditions prevailing at an earlier stage of our evolutionary development it is sometimes possible to deduce that a particular aspect of human behaviour could not readily have arisen out of biological forces.

A case in point that will be discussed more fully later in the book, is that of female ability to reach orgasm. Since the females among our mammalian and primate ancestors do not seem to have experienced orgasm at all, it is difficult to see how it could have been selected for. And if there was an evolutionary advantage to the human female orgasm, then it is hard to understand why its appearance should be so variable and elusive. Later in the book it will be argued that the human female is not biologically distinguishable in this respect from any other primate. They will all achieve orgasm if given a sufficiently long period of suitable clitoral stimulation but there is no particular biological advantage in their doing so. Female orgasm appears to be a socially learned pleasure, like playing the piano or smoking marijuana. However enjoyable, it is not, in the biological sense, a ‘natural’ function.

An almost opposite state of affairs is that of the loss of a marked period of sexual receptivity or ‘heat’ around the time of ovulation in the human female. Throughout the evolutionary chain there seems to be a progressive relaxation in the grip that ovulation has on female sexual copulation, so that in the human female it is difficult to detect any cyclic fluctuations in libido at all. The so-called ‘rhythm method’ of birth control is of course notoriously unreliable, and some theorists have suggested that its ineffectiveness might be due to powerful female sex urges emerging at the time of peak fertility. But the fact is that, despite concerted attempts to do so, no one has yet produced any unequivocal evidence that women are driven to copulate at the point of ovulation. There is evidence that men find women more attractive at this time of the month than others, but no real reason to suppose that women’s defences are down.

At first sight this seems paradoxical from the evolutionary point of view. Copulation in mid-cycle ought to be more productive (that is, reproductive) and should therefore have a selective advantage. The only way to resolve this paradox is to think of some way in which a powerful peak of female libido at ovulation might bedisadvantageous to an advanced primate. Fortunately, such a drawback is readily apparent. If a woman were to ‘lose control’ every time she became fertile, she would no longer be in a position to choose carefully which man was to be the father of her child and at what point in her life conditions were most favourable to child-rearing. It is this need to retain a degree of rational control over her sexual favours that has led to progressive emancipation of the higher primate females from the cyclic control of their receptivity. Primate females are able to select males of superior breeding stock to sire their offspring and become impregnated at times when they are well-equipped for successful parenthood (for example, when they are assured of food, protection and other forms of support).

Interestingly, these concerns that we recognize as being characteristic of the human female are usually thought to be socially learned. It is true that they are taught, but evolutionary analysis suggests that, beyond that, female caution and control has evolved in higher primates in the form of a biological instinct. Social factors alone would not be enough to account for its slow, progressive development from one species to another.

Similar control over the sexual urge is of course less relevant to male primates, since getting the ‘wrong’ female impregnated does not preclude getting the ‘right’ one pregnant later on. It may even be to the genetic advantage of males to distribute their seed widely, even if some of it falls on stony ground. Females only have a certain number of eggs in their basket and need to use them very carefully in order that their genes will survive in the next generation. Males have virtually unlimited opportunities for reproduction and so can afford to scatter their shot. This is called ‘parental investment theory’ and it explains a great deal about human courtship and mating behaviour that previously seemed very mysterious.

Consider the eternal sex war. Men and women have been aware of certain incompatibilities of thought and feeling throughout history, at least since the days of Lysistrata. There has never been a time, as far as we know, when men and women have seen exactly eye to eye, and the present is certainly no exception. A commonly expressed feeling about women in male circles is that ‘you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them’. No doubt a high proportion of women feel just the same way about men. Men find women too often indecisive, unadventurous and clinging, while women frequently find men over-aggressive, irresponsible and unfaithful. Each sex may appreciate certain virtues in the other, but the differences between them seem almost inevitably to lead to conflict in the course of an extended relationship.

It is becoming increasingly fashionable at the moment to regard these gender differences as unnecessary effects of social training which could be eliminated if little boys and little girls were raised identically. Some people see men as having acquired their aggressiveness and lustfulness through social learning, and believe that in an ideal environment they would become civilized, like women. Others see women as being rather like repressed men, who given sufficient opportunity would prove to be just as assertive and sexually playful as men are today.

A central theme of this book is that men and women are by no means the same animal dressed up differently and that an evolutionary study of their separate development explains why. There are very good biological reasons why men and women should think and feel differently from one another, just as there are good reasons why they should have become physically differentiated in the way that they have. In fact, the mental and emotional differences between the sexes may be very much greater than most of us have previously supposed. For diplomatic and strategic reasons men and women throughout history may have pretended to share more of the motives and ideals of the opposite sex than they really do. This argument will be taken up particularly in Chapters 2 and 3.

On the other hand, it is important to bear in mind that there is a considerable overlap between the sexes in all traits, whether physical, mental or emotional. Throughout the book we shall be discussing differences between average or typical men and women, but that is not to deny that there will be many exceptional individuals to whom the rules do not apply. No doubt those most atypical of their gender, especially when surrounded by like-minded friends, will find the evidence for instinctual differences between men and women most difficult to credit.

It was earlier stated that instincts became unfashionable in psychology because of certain scientific difficulties with the concept. But there is another reason why they have not readily been restored to favour. The current zeitgeist in social science favours environmental explanations of behaviour because they are politically and philosophically more comforting. They fit better with the egalitarian and self-help attitudes which are prevalent in the modern world, especially the United States. There is a fear that biological theories of social behaviour will engender a kind of fatalism – a feeling that we are unable to escape or supercede our animal origins. There is even a tendency to confuse explanation with justification. If it is ‘natural’ for men to be more promiscuous than women, for example, this might seem to imply that sexual control is neither possible nor desirable for them, that the double standard is normal and inevitable.

This fear is quite understandable, for there is an element of truth in it. Humans are partly the victims of their biological instincts, but not entirely. Ethical considerations, arising from the needs of social living, also have power to modify our behaviour. If it is possible for biological theories of the kind discussed here to be invoked in such a way as to diminish the effectiveness of ethical injunctions, it is also a truism that any scientific knowledge can be applied for good or ill – just as atomic fission can be used to generate power or destroy cities. The truth is that brutal instincts are a significant factor in our mental and emotional economy but cognitive and moral control is usually still possible. Promoting recognition of the true power and role of instincts is not the same as advocating the total abandonment of social restraint. It is better to know the Devil than pretend he does not exist.

2

Male and Female

All of what we call sexual and romantic behaviour occurs because, roughly speaking, we are divided into two sexes. Without gender differentiation none of this pantomime would be necessary. We would not feel that ‘incompleteness’ which moves us to seek long or short term partnerships. A discussion of the origins and reasons for sexual differentiation is essential for an understanding of the instinctual basis of sexual behaviour.

Why two sexes?

Why is it that the vast majority of animals (and plants) are arranged as two sexes? Would it not be a great deal easier just to split ourselves in half like amoebas? Most people take this gender division for granted, or if moved to think about it at all, will usually offer some pseudo-Biblical explanation like the idea of men and women needing each other as companions. This, of course, is a circular argument, since if we were complete in ourselves we would need no companion.

A satisfactory scientific answer to this question must involve evolutionary principles and in particular the concept of ‘reproductive success’. All living creatures survive through history and gain ascendancy in accordance with the extent to which they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Male and Female
• 3 The Double Standard
• 4 Attraction and Arousal
• 5 Love and Marriage
• 6 Sexual Responsiveness
• 7 Variant Sexuality
• 8 Social Influences
• References