Two speakers explore why women experience orgasm despite it not being necessary for reproduction. In rabbits, orgasm triggers ovulation, but humans evolved differently. One theory: female orgasm strengthens pair bonds, keeping partners together and boosting reproductive success. Another suggests orgasms may serve a transcendent, non-reproductive purpose.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
Do you think that human penises actually are evolved to cause orgasms, or is that kind of a side effect because they really evolved to get the sperm where they need to go?
Yeah, it's an interesting question because one of the things that evolutionary biologists fight about is why female orgasm exists at all. Why do human women have orgasms? And there's one little study that I found that's not in the book that show that suggests that in rabbits, of all things, that there used to be a direct connection between the stimulation, the orgasm and ovulation. So you could see those two things being really clearly connected and lasting, you know, being passed on and being important anatomically, where we register for orgasms has now been separated from where the penis goes in. And so now those two things are not anatomically linked, like they seem to be in rabbits. And so everybody's like, well, why do women orgasm? And you can't just say, well, because it's super fun. It's not an optimal explanation, you know, for evolutionary biologists. So it remains kind of a mystery. But it's not about the penis being able to do it. Ask bonobos.
I had a guest on recently who had extensively studied Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, read every paper published, unpublished, probably slept in his bed, for all I can tell, and found unpublished work that was near publication when he died about the hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter, safety, et cetera. But his final unpublished thing was transcendence. And that that's actually a basic human function and a basic human need. And I definitely know a few people who would describe some of their orgasms as transcendent. Maybe it's there for that. Okay, if it's done right, as you're saying.
I think that if for evolution to work on, it has to give you some kind of reproductive advantage. And what my take on it is, the advantage is a bonding advantage. It helps you bond with the. If somebody can do that really well for you. Yeah, that kind of thing. But if they can do that really well for you, you might want to stick around with them as a partner, and that might actually boost reproductive chances. It's really huge debate, though, about why women still somehow manage to do this, even though it's not needed for reproduction.
