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Response to Puts and Dawood's ‘The Evolution of Female Orgasm: Adaptation or Byproduct?’ — Been There

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

Elisabeth A. Lloyd*
Affiliation:
Tanis Chair of History & Philosophy of Science and Professor of Biology, Indiana University, Indiana, United States of America. [email protected]
*
*Address for correspondence: Elisabeth Lloyd, History and Philosophy of Science Department, 130 Goodbody Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.

Abstract

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David Puts and Khytam Dawood's recent critique of my book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, attempts to make plausible an adaptive account of female orgasm based on a hypothesized mechanism of uterine upsuck and sperm competition. Yet the authors fail to respond to the criticisms of such accounts that I detailed previously in my book. They raise a further concern about my definition of adaptation — a red herring — and manufacture a conceptual error regarding heritability that they then attribute to me. Most seriously, they fail to address the glaring failure of sperm competition accounts to accord with evidence from sexology. Specifically, the distribution curve of orgasm-with-intercourse — according to Dawood et al.'s own data, as well as others' — is relatively flat across the various classes. This curve needs to be tested against a well-formed multistrategy adaptive hypothesis; it cannot be explained by the adaptive account defended by Puts and Dawood in their critique.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006