Sex is one of the most important parts of human psychology. It must be, otherwise we wouldn't spend.... Actually, I looked around and I couldn't find any concrete figures on how much money is spent on sex research. I found answers on the corporate budget of Microsoft, Sun Systems, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Electronic Arts, and nearly every imaginable avenue of government spending (except the obvious exceptions - they still won't give me that Presidential security clearance, gosh darn it), but nothing about the money spent on sex research, education, and treatment. Oh, I can find a lot of articles bitching about how much money is spent on sex research, or about how we are all being corrupted in one way or another by one type of sexual education or how prostitution is a booming industry, whether it's legal or not, but there are no numbers. Robert Heinlein said "[W]hat are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" What he meant was that if you can't quantify a source by exact figures, you can't trust the data.
This makes me wonder about a great many things, not the least of which is the reliability of nonprofessionals and unqualified, armchair experts expounding on subjects they have a moral stake in without sparing any work on their brains outside of how to make their lies sound believable. It's been like this for decades, really, even in a world that has long since seen Alfred Kinsey and the results of his research. For those of you who don't know, Alfred Kinsey was the father of modern sexology, and founded the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in 1947. In the 50's, people wanted him lynched for even talking about sex, let alone "wasting" money on thinking about it. In the end, however, everything we know to be fact (that means quantifiable results and evidence) about the psychology of sex, and most of what we know about the biology of sex is due to the foundations laid by his work. Liam Neeson played him in a biopic a few years back. Most people hated it. I loved it. This is beside the point, though.
Moving on, the money spent on trying to figure out sex is astronomical - that much I am reasonably sure of. (See that? Right there? No numbers. Not a quantifiable fact. Don't trust it.) Alright, fine, maybe the money is reasonable or even grossly under what would be reasonable, but the reams of data collected by Kinsey and his colleagues both living and dead are astounding in their quantity, and again, you can't really say anything about sex that wasn't learned due to his discoveries. I wish I could say that the things I'm about to say in this post are mostly due to his research, as well. Most of it, however, also owes a lot to Charles Darwin, or as I like to call him, Uncle Chuck. Dunno why, but I do. Deal with it. But before I move on (and to justify the massive tangent about Kinsey I just went on) if you want to know everything you ever questioned about sex and more, look up his work. He is a much more comprehensive and reliable source than I am. Now, on with the question.
Not too long ago, during a friendly argument over intelligent design vs. evolution, the contention that species are driven by an instinctual desire to reproduce was challenged by a very simple question: if evolution maintains that the first organism that every living thing on the planet evolved from was the microbe - a single celled organism that exists to this very day and is too simple to experience emotion at all, let alone desire - then how can the contention be correct? Like most simple questions, it had a simple answer, and it comes from observations made by Uncle Chuck and those researching his legacy, more specifically those with very powerful microscopes. See, microbes - capable of experiencing desire or not - do reproduce, albeit asexually.
STOP IT. Get that look off of your face. Yes, this is going to be a bit of a science lesson, but you've come this far, so don't puss out on me now.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Asexually. Yes, they split themselves in two and go about their business as if this is a normal thing (which it is, by the way). And with this particular version of the process, that's pretty much the end of the story. They eat by absorbing material around them and converting it into a refined version of themselves, and they produce waste made up of all the things they can't use or the byproducts of their own bodily processes, just like we do, if on a microscopic scale. Sometimes, however, the microbe would split itself in to four pieces, producing not two cells, but four gametes. Call these "cell juniors", if you like, but this is the same story as above: eat, grow, waste, survive, do all the things multicellular things do, only smaller. But there's a couple of problems for these half-cells: they're only half a being, and they know it.
See, when the tiny little cell in this scenario split itself, it produced a quartet of creatures with only half of the chemicals that make up their DNA, because if it had only split in two, the DNA for each "child" would be complete and whole. Now, the process of living in their (now) separate environments have made them into different beings, even caused them to grow a bit, but they are forever incomplete - and they know it. Almost like something out of a very sentimental high fantasy novel, those chemicals call out to each other, seeking a reunion. The blueprint for what they once were is fractured, and not only does this cause a "chemical desire," but it creates a magnetic pull in the four creatures to reunite with something similar to what they lost. It's kind of awesome to watch, from what I understand, because a gamete separated from all viable mates will, for the most part wiggle for a while searching for a mate, but not much, and not for long. However, if there is a passable terrain between that potential mate and the gamete in question, oh it is TOTALLY ON. Seriously, the thing goes nuts, doing everything in its power to get there and do its thing, and it knows to do this because it has picked up on the chemicals it needs to complete its genetic code once again.
Anyhow, this is going somewhere, I promise. Every once in a while, these gametes would run into foreign gametes, and in a few instances, they would combine. These were the first instances of sexual reproduction: forming a living organism out of two separate entities. The cells produced from these unions would have a much more diverse set of DNA, which made them more adaptable than either of the original organisms they had once been a part of. This means that those children had a higher rate of survival than their parents. Because of this, those cells that actively repelled their parents and went outside their own gene pool thrived while those that kept recombining with themselves dwindled and, in some cases, died out.
The offspring of those cells are a part of almost every living being on the planet right now. The upshot of all this is that we were the ones who thrived. The organisms that had the instinctual drive to not reproduce sexually are still around, but we're not those organisms. DNA is a funny thing; we know on a cellular level that fucking gives us advantages. Now, with the mindset of a human individual, we will never see those benefits. The benefits belong to those cells who will live on in our children. But the cells, and therefor the instincts drive us, nonetheless.
However, if your looking for a simpler answer... it's because sex feels fucking awesome, and knowing that, who can think about anything else?
If you have a question for the demon, send it to askthedemon@gmail.com, and remember:
never stop asking questions.
