16. Human Sexual Behavior II

Stanford University.

Let us get started here.

So picking up from the other day, where have we gotten?

Not very far.

Behavior-- full range variability

of sexual behaviors, fixed action patterns.

Is this kind of dark here?

No.

Seeing in some ways what's interesting

is the conservative nature of sexual behavior across species,

other ways the sheer variety, trying

to make sense of what aspects of human behavior are unique,

all of that.

Then beginning to march backwards-- what goes on

in the nervous system one second before sexual behavior occurs?

And marching through the relevant limbic structures,

some of which have strong sex differences,

some of which don't.

Seeing some ways in which neurotransmitters

in the whole world of dopamine complicates things enormously,

marching through there.

Where we had then gotten to was asking, OK, so

what sort of bits of information in the environment, what

sort of ethological releasing stimuli

can trigger the nervous system to do its thing?

And you've got the drill by now.

So what we had done was look at a couple

of different sensory systems, and we had just

started to wallow in the world of pheromones,

of pheromonal communication.

What we ended with was number one, the hormone dependency

of generating sexually meaningful pheromones,

that business being that males have to have

sufficient testosterone.

Females have to have ovaries on board

to be producing pheromones that carry sexual meaning.

What is the reason for that?

The fact that a whole lot of the actual chemicals that

constitute sexually meaningful pheromones are made out