Adaptation or happy coincidence?
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...qualities that a woman would want to pass on to her children. Thornhill suggests that this shows that the female orgasm is a way for women to help the sperm from “higher quality” mates reach the point of fertilization. “We’re talking about something that’s not a passive reproductive tract,” he says.

Symmetry is also a characteristic of attractiveness, points out Don Symons, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The more symmetrical the body and face, the more attractive it is. Symons finds the fact that women have more orgasms with more symmetric men unsurprising. “If a guy is better looking, the more sexually excited the woman is and the more likely she is to orgasm. Why wouldn’t there be a link?”

Perhaps the female orgasm is just a byproduct of the fact that men and women are developmentally similar, suggests Don Symons. “Males have nipples,” Symons says. “Does that mean that natural selection specifically favored male nipples?” According to Symons, the default position for men and women is to have the same body plan. Every change from that plan comes at a cost that must be balanced by a reciprocal benefit. There’s no benefit to balance the developmental cost of eliminating nipples in men, so men have nipples even though there’s no adaptive value to them. Similarly, Symons thinks that because natural selection created a link between the genitals and the brain that causes orgasm, giving men their “great experience” as incentive to inseminate women, women simply share the same connection without it serving a specific function. His argument is bolstered by the fact that the penis and the clitoris stem from the same organ within the embryo – it is only after the organ receives a dose of certain hormones that it will begin to develop into either a penis or a clitoris.

A major failing of the adaptation hypotheses is that they are based on the assumption that the female orgasm has an adaptive value to begin with, according to Elisabeth Lloyd, Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, because they’re biased. “They go in with a loaded question ‘What is the adaptation’ instead of the neutral question ‘Is it an adaptation at all?’” says Lloyd. Similar to the premise of innocent until proven guilty, a trait or feature cannot be assumed to be adaptive until it has been shown that it was shaped by natural selection to fulfill a specific function – that the fit between the design and the solution of a specific problem is so...