The Sex Lives of Us

Radio 4 have recently been running a series of programmes entitled The Sex Lives of Us, which aims to "explore sexuality in modern Britain". A bit of early morning titilation never hurt anyone, but I'm puzzled as to how some of the episodes have been billed.

Today, for example, we have Mariella Frostrup chairing a discussion on "whether our current propensity to start having sex earlier, more often and more randomly in the past means that we treat it as just another pastime rather than a duty to maintain the species". I mean: what?

Firstly, I've always been suspicious of claims that we now have sex earlier, more often and more randomly than in the past. I might be pursuaded to give you more randomly (more randomly than in the 1960s, though?), but how on earth does anybody know how often people in the past had sex? And the idea that people in modern Britain start earlier is preposterous: during the industrial revolution girls were commonly married by the age of 14. In the Victorian era and the 1950s people perhaps talked about sex less often, but that's hardly the same thing.

Secondly, when have human beings ever had sex out of "duty to maintain the species"? When has it ever not been an enjoyable pastime in its own right, that people want to do because it's pleasurable?

It seems utterly bizarre to suggest that at any time in the past people felt any "duty to maintain the species" - they might have felt a duty to maintain their family, but it seems more likely that they procreated for the same reasons we do: because of what children signify and the fulfilment they bring to a marriage. The underlying reason is, of course, because producing children is the way our genes copy themselves from one generation to the next. But even that isn't "maintaining the species": it's maintaining the DNA. And nobody has ever used that as the main reason for making love.

Sometimes I really do wonder about some people. Why assume that human beings fifty, a hundred or a thousand years ago were fundamentally any different in their attitudes and emotions than we are now?

Lyrebirds and Suchlike

In the woods of Southern Australia there lives an animal called the Lyrebird, a large songbird with an extraordinary ability to mimic sounds. It generally does this in order to attract mates, which it does by putting on a show on a little staging platform in the forest, dancing around and imitating the calls of all the other birds around it. (Why the female should find this ability attractive is a mystery; it is probably to do with the principle of positive feedback loops in sexual selection, whereby a slight, random female preference for an aspect of male morphology grows exponentially as the genes for the preference and the morphology become linked; the behaviour becomes steadily more attractive because it is attrative.)

In recent times, though, the bird has taken to imitating not only other bird calls, but also sounds produced by humans - such as camera clicks, chainsaws, car alarms, car engines and rifle shots. It does this with uncanny accuracy, intertwining such sounds seamlessly into its song.

The bird's ability is, I think, by turns charming and horrifying, and in its own way a strange commentary on the modern world, in which we could say that the "sounds of the forest" as we traditionally understand them - bird song, the wind rustling through leaves, the movement of small animals in leaf litter - are only as much a part of life in the average forest as are the noises of chainsaws, rifleshots and car alarms; human development and overt influence now permeates the world to a degree which must have been inconcievable even a century ago. I've never subscribed to the view that indigenous peoples left their environments basically untouched (even the most 'primitive' societies manipulated forest fire and seed dispersal to their own advantage) but even so, it cannot be argued that our time has brought anything less than an astonishing level of human presence and human technology throughout the world.

It makes me wonder about global warming. I've often thought that the global warming bandwagon serves to distract people from other, perhaps more pressing, environmental concerns, and that it's important to note that, while climate change may threaten certain ecologies in the long term, in the short term far more pressure is being placed on the natural world by basic, old fashioned human expansionism - and we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook in that regard by focusing all of our energies on the bluff and bluster of the lobbying surrounding global warming.