Quote:
Originally Posted by duga
They technically are. I mean, it makes sense that one gender has to really want sex while the other, as a means of natural selection, is very picky about which member of the opposite sex they will do it with. If everyone wanted sex, then we would overpopulate and certain negative gene pools would never be weeded out. If no one wanted sex, we would die out. In terms of social taboos, this area is up for debate. As far as the facts go, however, this is just biological fact. You can see this in nature anytime sexual reproduction is involved.
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The bolded sentence is pretty spot on
The rest is rubbish, though. Our biology does not worry about the collective human genome and so on. That's group selection which is really an outdated idea in modern biology.
The reason why one sex wants to have lots of sex while the other gets to be picky has to do with gametes, sperm and eggs. Sperm are tiny things, cheap to produce and men make millions .. millions! Eggs are much larger and they're generally available one or a few at a time. That means that already in the uterus, there's a situation where countless sperm compete against eachother while the eggs get to be selective about who they'll "accept" (quite a few species have adaptations that let sperm battle it out between themselves).
Go up a level to the male and female individuals, you'll see "successful" sex with a resulting pregnancy is quite cheap for the male. There's the price of the sperm which is negligible and then effort spent impregnating the female. Any energy spent on reproduction after that is more or less optional. For the female however, they'll be stuck with a fetus which takes a lot of energy and also makes the mother less able / more vulnerable. Once it's born, she will have to feed it and spend energy doing other things to keep it alive. If it dies, she'll have wasted a lot of resources.
In essence, there are two selfish strategies. For a male, sex is cheap and so it can make sense to have as much sex as possible without being very picky. For women, however, sex is potentially extremely costly and so they should be picky about who they do it with. The result is a situation where men compete for sex with women who get to be selective.
That's the jist of it. Of course it doesn't tell the whole story as women as selectors get a lot of power over our evolution and would of course try and select for men who are loyal and help raise the child/children. That sexual selection will of course lead to men who do not behave as selfishly as one might expect from what I wrote above, but it still shapes us to some degree. The selfish male strategy is still present at some level.