The drive to reproduce – to move our DNA into tomorrow – may be behind our ability to do math, make music, and even play sports. Evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher explains why our complicated brains evolved in response to a very primal urge to mate.
Dr. Stieg: Today I’m with Dr. Helen Fisher. She is one of the world’s leading experts on love, an author, and biological anthropologist. She is a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University and a member for the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Helen, thank you for joining me. We’re going to talk about a topic I think that everybody’s intensely interested in and it’s how lust built the human brain. When I interview people that are interested in diet and nutrition, they say that the brain developed as a result of our need for survival and better acquisition of foods. You’re changing that topic. You’re saying that my brain developed because I lust.
Dr. Fisher: Well, you know, I’m an evolutionary anthropologist, so I studied the evolution of the brain and all the social and sexual emotions and a wonderful book came out sometime ago called The Mating Mind. And the question was, why are we so good at math? Why are we so good at engineering? Why do we do charitable giving? Why are we so musical? Why do well, we do all the arts. So why are we so good at sports? I mean, you don’t have to know calculus to find another banana in the woods. So why is it? So anthropologists have long wondered why it is that we’ve evolved this very fancy brain and it’s probably just for courtship. As a matter of fact, started with Darwin.
Dr. Stieg: So you’re saying then that my mathematical skills and my intuition are all secondary to my need for courtship?
Dr. Fisher: Probably, yes. Well, they evolved because of course, you know, Darwin was really annoyed when he saw a peacock’s tail. He said, every time he wrote to his son, he said, “Every time—
Dr. Stieg: Was it envy or was it an annoyance?
Dr. Fisher: It was annoyance. Because you know, I mean, what is the peacock’s tail? I mean, it’s a handicap. You’re carting something around, you don’t need a big fat tail of feathers to live another day. And he began to finally realize this is for courtship. This thing evolved not to win another piece of corn to eat, but to win a female and have babies and send their DNA on into tomorrow. So the basic hypothesis is, and it’s called sexual selection, it’s a form of natural selection. I mean natural selection, really. We often think of it as, okay, good eyesight, so we don’t fall out of the trees. The thumb, so we can make tools and weapons. But the bottom line is we have to do more than live another day. We’ve got to move our DNA into tomorrow. So we’ve evolved all kinds of courtship devices to attract the opposite sex or to fight with members of our own sex.
Dr. Fisher: So, for example, an elk has these big antlers. Well, they’re there to fight other males so that they can get access to females. But sometime in our past via this concept called sexual selection, we evolve all kinds of mechanisms to win the mating game. So a million years ago, a guy who was trying to shoot monkeys in the tree and knew how many were left after he got two of them was more impressive to the girls. The guy who was able to sing better, the woman who could dance better, the person who was more charming or more charismatic or just simply more clever, won more in the mating game, had more babies and passed their DNA on.
Dr. Stieg: It seems to me, that you’re holding the male accountable, and I would like to contend with you that—
Dr. Fisher: Well, first of all, I’m not—
Dr. Stieg: Women are hunting also.
Dr. Fisher: Big time.
Dr. Stieg: Both sexes want the race or the species to survive.
Dr. Fisher: Well, they want themselves to survive and a species survives because each does, and there’s absolutely no question about this, Phil,8 that I’m actually probably the only scientist in America who really defends men and I do it for very, very good reasons. The reason it’s both sexes is because we are a pair bonding species. So not only do males have to fight other males to attract females, but females have to attract males. And because we are a monogamous or a pair bonding species, females have evolved basically the same brain. I mean there’s gender differences in the brain, unquestionably, but the courtship game, it takes two, no question.
Dr. Stieg: …to tango. As a result of that, are we really selecting within our species just the best people that are good at reproducing? Or is it again, are there other things that affect our survival? If you’re attractive and you’re attracted to me, we’re going to mate, but what does that have to do with eating and what does that have to do with survival and what does it have to do with dominance and all the other characteristics?
Dr. Fisher: It’s all a big mix of things, of course. Basically what Darwin said is that if you have four children and I have no children, you live on and I die out. So the game of love matters. I mean you can own the world, you can have all the money, you can have all the prestige, you can be the best high jumper or the best singer, et cetera. But if you don’t have babies, you don’t pass your DNA on into tomorrow there is something called inclusive fitness. So let’s say you are my brother and we both have two other sisters or whatever, and let’s say I don’t reproduce, but I help you reproduce by helping your children through college and helping your children learn math in school, et cetera, et cetera. So because we’re part of the same gene pool.
Dr. Stieg: Or you can help me find another beautiful woman that I can mate with, right?
Dr. Fisher: There you go. Absolutely.
Dr. Stieg: My daughter does that for my son all the time.
Dr. Fisher: Oh, well. So there we go. A good inclusive fitness for the family.
Dr. Stieg: You emphasize the fact that we attract the opposite sex and I want to focus on the word attract. What does that mean? Is it because you’re beautiful is it because, if you’re a male, you’re a good hunter? Is that attractive? And if you’re a female, you’re a good provider, you cook well. What, quote, is attract?
Dr. Fisher: I and my colleagues have put over a hundred people into a brain scanner and studied the brain circuitry of attraction. We call it romantic love, but we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background. Same general level of intelligence, same general level of good looks, same religious and social values, same economic goals and reproductive goals. Your childhood always plays a role. We build a, what I call a love map, an unconscious list of what you’re looking for in a partner in childhood. But we’re also naturally drawn to people because of our chemistry. You know, people will say, we have chemistry or we don’t have chemistry, and I’ve studied the brain circuitry, the basically the brain chemistry, human personality, and I actually created a questionnaire that’s been given to 14 million people in 40 countries and watched why we’re naturally attracted to one person rather than another. But, when you’re talking about a one night stand and just lust, you know, we can—
Dr. Stieg: Is this the first time around? Because I think that as I was listening to you, I was thinking there are many examples of elderly men or elderly females that don’t seem to be attracted to somebody of the same social setting. And, I mean, we can make some jokes about that, but I won’t.
Dr. Fisher: Well, so of all ages, we were attracted to all kinds of people that astonish our friends. Two people who love to play the piano, they may be different cultures, different sizes, shapes and ages, but they share an interest.
Dr. Stieg: I guess what I’m saying is when we’re younger there’s this need to reproduce. When we’re older we’re probably attracted to people for other reasons.
Dr. Fisher: What’s interesting is I study older people cause I’m older, I do an annual study with match.com called Singles in America. This is a representative sample of Americans based on the U.S. Census. We do not pull the match members. And there’s a question that really showed me something about older people. I asked the question, would you make a longterm commitment to somebody who had everything you were looking for but you were not in love with them and people over 60 with the least likely to compromise, the most determined to have a partner who they were madly in love with. And also I asked the question, you know, would you make a long-term commitment to somebody who had everything you were looking for, but you did not find them sexually attractive? And once again it was older people who said no.
Dr. Stieg: So is love sexual attraction?
Dr. Fisher: I think that we’ve evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive, second is feelings of intense romantic love. And the third is feelings of deep attachment. And I think the sex drive gets you out there looking for a whole range of partners. You don’t have sex with somebody you’re not in love with. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time. And that third brain system of attachment enables us to stick with this person at least long enough to raise a single child through infancy together.
Dr. Stieg: When you’re talking about people that are over 60 that wouldn’t get involved with somebody that they’re not in love with, is it all three of those or is it, you know, I’m looking for companionship and this person is really comfortable to be around. You know
Dr. Fisher: When we ask, they’re not looking for just companionship. Now, for example, I’m over 60 and there was a guy a and—
Dr. Stieg: You don’t look a day over 39!
Dr. Fisher: Well, you’re a sweetheart, neither do you. Thank you very much. Anyway, he was a guy from Arizona. He had everything I was interested in, he was good looking. Now he was smart, he was funny. He loved the theater the way I do. He was a good writer, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t find him sexually attractive and I wasn’t in love with him. Am I going to leave New York at all? My friends and family and connections and apartment and interests in order to go someplace just because somebody is a companion? People over 60 are happier. There’s data now in 15 cultures, you probably know all this as a neuroscientist yourself, but happiness increases with age and the most likely to compromise where young men of reproductive age, they were the most likely to find a companion to help them have and raise babies if they were not in love with the person and did not find that person sexually attractive. So it’s the young that have to compromise because they’re the ones that have to send their DNA into tomorrow.
Dr. Stieg: Well, let’s talk a little bit about aging and our sex drive or need or lust. Let’s focus on the male first. What happens to the male body as we age and how does that change our lust?
Dr. Fisher: Yeah. It doesn’t change the eagerness, but it can change the performance. It does change the eagerness to some extent. The peak of male sexuality is between 18 and 25 and the peak of female sex drive is between age 25 and 29.
Dr. Stieg: This is where I think God is unjust. *laughs*.
Dr. Fisher: Yeah. Actually I think it’s sort of cool because there’s always somebody chasing after somebody, you know, if they were always there at the same time. And then after five years I said, ah, no, no bother. But I, in fact, I even thought of that — first the man is lusting and then the woman is, and as they age, a man’s sex drive goes slowly down as activity of the testosterone system in the brain goes down.
Dr. Fisher: It can often increase in older women because with menopause levels of estrogen go down about 20 times. But levels of testosterone only go down about three times and so you see the ratio change of estrogen to testosterone and whereas the young man was hunting the women, it can be older women who are actually more sexually driven than men, so we always get that imbalance. Keeping somebody racing after somebody. You know when in terms of the best sex, when we asked that question in the singles in America study, the best sex is the peak of women’s, but they would say is their best sex is age 66 and the peak of men’s best sex they report is age 64. And by that they’re most likely to, well first of all, they know who they are and they’ve got the courage now to say what they want—
Dr. Stieg: So it’s the emotional component of the sexual act?
Dr. Fisher: I think it’s also the circulation in the genital area becomes more and more intense, particularly with having babies and women and with orgasm it puts a lot more circulation in that area—
Dr. Stieg: I would actually think of atherosclerosis and hardening of your vessels that it would actually diminish.
Dr. Fisher: It could be in some people—
Dr. Stieg: And since erectile dysfunction is actually a blood flow problem, it’s counterintuitive.
Dr. Fisher: You might be right. I mean this is not something I study, but older women do have more activity in the testosterone system and that’s linked with the sex drive in both men and women. But what’s nice for men is they’ve now got Viagra and women have estrogen replacement and you know, we have all kinds of mechanisms to keep the sex drive and all of the organs in shape.
Dr. Stieg: I think that’s optimistic for people then, that you know, they think that when they’re past, for guys, 25 — his days are past him, but so for men, their happiest or most meaningful sexual encounters are—
Dr. Fisher: Sixty-four. And I think one of the reasons is, men’s and women’s sex drive is somewhat different. Young men are very focused on orgasm, whereas women are more contextual, holistic. They like the flowers and the candles and the nice environment and everything. They’re more sensual and—
Dr. Stieg: The conversation after the act.
Dr. Fisher: Yes. When we asked what you don’t want in bed, the top one is somebody who talks too much. *laughs* I never met anybody who talked too much. This came as a surprise to me. I think that as men get older, they become more contextual. As testosterone goes down and they begin to make estrogen, not just the ratio of estrogen to testosterone, but out of the adrenal glands, men begin to make more estrogen and you can see it in men, they get little more floppy breasts, more weight around the hips, the way women do. It’s my guess is that they begin to see sex in a broader world of the conversation and the, the context of it.
Dr. Stieg: Maybe it’s just so they understand the Harry Callahan line, you know, “A man’s got to know his limits.”
Dr. Fisher: There you go. Then the young men don’t. Right? And they know how to please.
Dr. Stieg: For multiple reasons.
Dr. Fisher: Yeah. They know how to please more. And you know, when I ask also in the Singles in America questionnaire, men want to please. Men want to please women. And it’s not because they’re just macho. There’s some data that as a woman has an orgasm, she’s pulling that semen up into the uterus. So it’s adaptive for a man to please a woman because he may just send his DNA on into tomorrow.
Dr. Stieg: Helen, thank you for this provocative conversation. I look forward to getting back together so we can delve more deeply into the positive impact that love and sex has on our brain and our bodies. Thank you.