14 September 2011
FROM whence came the female orgasm? After 40 years of debate, evolutionary biologists have used 10,000 twins and siblings in an attempt to discover whether it arose to give women a reproductive boost, or simply as a by-product of evolution of the male orgasm.
Some reckon the female orgasm is adaptive and possibly influences mate choice, strengthens pair bonds or indirectly helps to suck sperm into the uterus. Others argue that women have orgasms for the same reason that men have nipples – being highly adaptive in one sex, the traits tag along for the ride in the other.
Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Pekka Santtila at Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, argue that if the female orgasm is a simple by-product of the male orgasm, then similar genes would underlie orgasmic function in both men and women. As a consequence, opposite-sex ...