Re: Sex and stress

From: Peter F. (effectivespamblock_at_ozemail.com.au)
Date: 06/26/04 

Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 22:20:04 +0000 (UTC)

"Tim Tyler" <tim@tt1lock.org> wrote in message
news:cbivm0$1dbg$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
> Researcher Richard Michod and colleagues at the University of Arizona in
> Tucson have found that high temperatures make the green algae Volvox
> more likely to reproduce sexually.
>
> A news article about the story:
>
> ``Is Sex a Cure for Stress?
> Heat turns normally asexual algae into sexual deviants''
>
> - http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-06-09-3
>
> Michod interprets the study as evidence for his "sex->gene repair"
> theory.
>

N.B. The question above may exemplify a slightly sloppy use of the word
"stress"!
It is best to as far as possible consistently separate the meaning of stress
from stressor (what causes stress). That is, a differentiation of meaning à
la Hans Selye.

It would be easy for me to extrapolate - but I won't.
(Depending on the molecules being heated and their proximity to a
heat-source and the magnitude of the energy output of that source, "heat"
may be an environmental evolutionary adversity or it may be an environmental
evolutionary opportunity.)

Instead I take this as an chance to point out that especially (but not only)
in humans, stress (especially environmental causes of SHITS come stress that
is generated specifically by CURSES - i.e. specifically by SHITS
"conditioned-in" type memories) often find an AEVASIVE (inEPTly put,
"neurotic") platform/outlet;

In the case of that "platform" being the sex instinct, this outlet is one
that represents a 'transformation' [the oldest traditional roughly
synonymous term is "sublimation"] of such accumulated potentially
distressful memory states (CURSES), from something adverse to something as
biologically central an "evolutionary opportunity", as the sexualization of
"stress" (that is, here primarily, potentially maladaptively distressful
neural action potentials) caused by SHITS, and, subsequently, entirely
possibly by CURSES alone.

P