Jerry Coyne carries out an amusing exercise in reasoning like an evolutionary psychologist: why does human semen taste bad? It turns out that it is really easy to invent all kinds of entirely reasonable rationalizations for it: in particular, it’s to promote ejaculation in the orifice that is more likely to result in pregnancy, since women can’t get pregnant by way of their stomach. It’s all deductively logical, but built on premises floating in thin air, with no empirical foundation at all…the usual flaw on which evolutionary psychology fails.
It does open up all kinds of angels-dancing-upon-pins sorts of questions. By the same logic, shouldn’t most women find anal sex extremely distasteful and unpleasurable (there’s another subject for Coyne to use in an informal poll — or maybe not, unless he really wants a reputation as a perv). Would the unusual anatomical arrangement in Deep Throat be evidence against evolution? And say…shouldn’t there be selection against male interest in fruitless pornography? There’s potential for a whole industry to flower around the pursuit of these questions. With illustrations.