by NEIL MCARTHUR
French actor Alain Delon and Italian actress Claudia Cardinale during a scene from The Centurions 1965. PHOTO/George Rodger/Magnum
When it comes to sex will humans ever be liberated from the basic biological needs that drove our evolutionary past?
Literature tells us that our desires know no reason. We read Racine’s Phaedra or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and we see people captured by passion, acting in defiance of all sense or explanation. But science is never satisfied with ineluctable mystery, even in the realm of desire. During the past four decades, researchers into human behaviour have begun to investigate sexual desire. More than anything, they want to know: why is it that we want who we want?
Evolutionary psychology offers one compelling answer to this question. It tells us that, for all its complexity, human desire is the result of something quite simple: our struggle to stay alive. Lust, infatuation, true love – these are all just mechanisms we have acquired in order to reproduce and to keep our children alive. Meaning that, when we look for sex, we are actually, unbeknown even to ourselves, acting in ways that are highly strategic and rational. We are using adaptive techniques that humans developed over our species’ long history, in order to maximise their genes’ chances for survival.
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