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Is sexual intercourse socially learned or innate?

At birth, take a male and a female human from each of their parents.

 

Raise them together, but independent of any possibility of social learning - other than what they get from interacting with each other.

 

I.E they aren't taught a language, there are no other humans around, and thus no pre-existing social conventions to mimic.

 

And here's the question: Do they know what sex is and how to do it?

 

It's almost inevitable that they will independently discover:

 

  1. touching their reproductive organs feels good,  
  2. they are "attracted" to the opposite sex 

 

But there's a rather large leap from that, to:

 

  1. the male innately knowing that he ought to penetrate the female until climax, and 
  2. the female understanding that when that happens, she will get pregnant and produce offspring. 

Are there any studies that have tested this on mice or some other species?

 

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Categories: Human Body, Animals.

Tags: sex, reproduction, sociallearning, naturevsnurture.

 

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hardworkingfamily says:

The "Blue Lagoon" scenario...   Perhaps we can look to other species to find an answer to this?

Doesn't this situation happen in real life zoos, where very rare mammels are raised in isolation to their species?  Do such males mate after being presented with a female of the same species?  Or do they need some type of sex education first?  I seem to recall that pandas, for example, are not very instinctive.  But perhaps this is unusual (a reason that they are rare?).   Or they may know what to do, but not wish to for some reason.

In contrast to the panda, I am doubtful that a male dog, or mouse, in a similar situation would struggle to reproduce.   Has anyone seen this in practice?

Desmond Morris noted that the human is a very sexual type of ape.  I suspect that the unsocialised male would be more like the dog than the panda.  He would work out what to do in order to reproduce, even if he had no idea what the effect would be nine months later.

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Tags: sex, reproduction, sociallearning, naturevsnurture.

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posted on 2010-06-10 21:45:45 | Report abuse


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