Also, speaking of stats, I'm sure anyway pregnancy arising from rape is reasonably rare, despite what the soap operas may have you believe. Even if this weren't the case, it would not consitute Darwinian evolution. The rapist is doing the same as the non-rapist, except in an immoral way. Morality is not genetic, it is defined and shaped by culture, environment, and upbringing (to which Jude was alluding before, I think).
You girls are too locked into a century 21 way of thinking.
I'm talking about evolution here which means looking back thousands of years. Forget condoms and safe sex. Those concepts did not exist back then.
As for the comment that survival of the fittest has "nothing to do with sex", well you obviously meant that as a joke Anne. You were being ironic, right? Tell me you didn't mean that for real.
Okay Paul - from the point of view of genes, masturbation is a bit of a dead-end, the chances of impregnation are very slender for males and non-existent for females. But mostly, genes don't say 'do this and this and this', they hardwire into us the tendency to find certain things pleasurable and say 'in general, if you do something that feels nice, try to do that again. If you do something that hurts, avoid that'
So, all animals are hard-wired to find at least some pleasure in sexual sensation, and to have warm feelings about their young. When animals mate, they do not mostly think about having a child, they are mostly following an urge to gain sexual satisfaction.
My guess is that we all have a potential broad range of experiences which might be pleasurable, and we, for reasons of self, tend to gravitate to particular ones. Infants have no aversion to eating rotting meat, but they have an aversion to eating something that they tried before and didn't like.
Read last night a very interesting experiment on addiction - there's loads of experiments showing that rats, monkeys, whatever that are trained to press a lever which then administers cocaine will keep pressing that lever till they starve to death, losing all interest in anything else. This demonstrates the addictiveness of drugs. But this guy, Alexander, he thought 'maybe what this demonstrates is that an animal in horrendous laboratory conditions will opt for pleasurable sensation', so he made a rat-kingdom that was pleasurable, put mates and nice places and good food and fresh water. The rats there had no interest in taking the drugs that were on offer. And the previously addicted rats from the lab that were moved to the rat-kingdom had no interest whatever in continuing to take the drugs that were on offer that they were supposedly addicted to...
Point being, environment is always a big factor.
(Purplehaze - my point really is that while simple creatures can be controlled by their genes and their behaviour predicted, that complex creatures such as apes and man cannot be. Genes are not that constrictive. Dawkins himself was aware of how his books might be interpreted to mean 'none of it is my fault' and argued strongly against this. We as humans have certain natural default tendencies, but our consciousness allows us to decide our behaviour and thwart our genes. Contraception is an illustration of just that, as is abstinence)
No, it's not a joke. It's Darwin's way of thinking, nowt to do with c21. Darwin's theory didn't revolve around which members of the species shagged the most in their lifetime. It revolved around which members survived longer, and ergo (heh heh) were able to continue shagging. The mutations that didn't survive long gradually died out, leaving the mutations with an extra survival feature became standard. That's evolution, mate. Ironically, it's YOUR way of thinking that relates more to century 21: a modern human sexual misconception about an old theory on creatures holding their own in the jungle. If your thinking were true, ugly people would have died out by now. You only have to look at Justyn Thyme's abc rogue gallery to see that's far from true.
Sorry Anne, don't want to be rude, but your highly simplistic explanation shows you do not understand the modern theory of evolution, as expounded by people like Richard Dawkins.
Suggest you read Dawkins and then come back and we can have a semsible discussion about this.
Mark, that book is shown at great length by Ricky Gervais in his stand up DVD, "My night with my mate Ralph at the finest theatre in the world" or "Animals".
He makes the point that none of the images are pictures, they are drawn and so do not constitute proof although that's just a comic point and I'm sure all the writing in this thick book is worth a read.
Andrew, my friend had a video of the Sphex wasps experiment on video when I was at film school and tried to enter it as a piece of coursework. His point was that even though he didn't actually film it, he had taken it out of its original context and shown it as something utterly watchable, which it really is. After about three minutes of watching the poor little sod go back into the hole YET AGAIN we can't help but personify the wasp and scream at it to just drag it in!
Listen, dub, you patronising puddle of piss - excuse me, I'm trying hard not to react to your ratty defensiveness, but it's becoming a chore - I may well be simplifying Darwin, but I used him to good effect to argue against your "rapists-do-it-more-so-there-should-be-more-rapists" theory (if that's not oversimplifying, I don't know what is.)
If you've got some other evolutionist to back up YOUR theory, then let's hear about him. Let's hear how his theories back up your argument. Don't the do the I-read-more-than-you-so-it's-not-worth-talking-to-you thing (I read a lot, but not everything, like a lot of people) ; that suggests to me you just want to namedrop, sound clever, but don't actually have anything from Dawkins to back up your silly thesis.
Just to recap:
a) Rapists don't necessarily have more sex than non-rapists. In fact, a lot of the time, quite the opposite.
b) Rape doesn't exist in the jungle, it's a modern moral convention. It didn't exist in caveman times. So this "rape gene" will have only developed (coincidentally) around the time we as a society decided it existed. This is very shaky scientific ground.
c) Darwin doesn't back your theory at all. If Dawkins does (a Darwin fan I understand) then let's hear about it...
*an aside*
I saw Gervais at Goldsmiths Student Union a few years back testing all that material out on a crowd of drunken students.
He was quite good. Did the stuff about the Daddy Long Legs and the most powerful poison in the world make it past the first draft stage?
Pages