From: "jfoster" <borealis-AT-mail.wellsgray.net>
Subject: Re: Erotism
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 12:46:15 -0800


Ants. 

Ant and bees [hymoptera] are social insects forming colonies of related
individuals. Social insects are in all cases related to each other and each
level of social functioning is determined by the amount of similar genes
which the individuals carry in their cells. An ant colony will divide into
two colonies when one of the fertile females mates with a genetically
different male from another colony. The progeny from this outside mating
will migrate or attack the other less related individuals within the colony
including the workers and the soldiers. The homology of the world of social
insects is similar to human colonies of genetically related families and
tribes. 

The forest dwelling communties of the neolithic cultures of the Holocene
period of the last 8000 years demonstrates that genetic similarity is a
force of conservation and preservation since offspring that are related to
a common parent will become and behave altruistically within the family and
tribe, but males will compete with  unrelated males more often over
territories and fertile females. Inbreeding is the only hazard that impacts
irreversibly the adaptive fitness of the neolithic hunting and gathering
society, so there are various rites, rituals and practices within the tribe
that allow for the opportunity of fertile individuals to mate with persons
outside the tribe that have both biochemical and errogenous
implications/drivers. One of them is the taboo of not mating or marrying
with members of the same tribe. 

In South Africa the custom of the tribe is to meet once a year with other
unrelated tribes or bands [usually and globally a tribe contains about 50
persons with a common parent or grandparent]. The main purpose of the
meeting or celebration is to allow unmarried members of a tribe to court
and marry a member of another tribe. Beauty, hunting skill, and resoruces
are the currencies of attractiveness but so are some less obvious cues
which act as attributes of attractiveness. Since there are thousands of
years of oral culture and customs that have evolved to accomodate
intermarriage of tribes, the biology of the human being has adapted to
favour this practice. 

There are several studies using students which indicated that the
attraction of the female to the male is determined in large part by the
odor of the male. The studies determined that the more genetically
unrelated the male student to a female student was the greater the
attraction of the female student to the odor of the male. The studies have
been replicated. The methodology consisted of male students wearing tee
shirts for one weekend and not taking a shower or using any scented
deodorants or soaps. There were requested not take a shower. The shirts
were taken and placed in bags for the females to get a whiff of. The
females ranked the shirts and odor as to preference. And the outcome was
highly significant in correlating the odor to the preference for the most
unrelated males, i.e., Cuacasian females were more likely to indicate a
preference to African or South American amerindian males, than Caucasian
males. The men were told not to eat spicy foods like curry or chutney.  

Bataille as a researcher in the ethology of humans was probably not aware
of this observation, and was only able to express the attraction of the
female for the male on the basis of obvious attractants. Ants are like
humans in that they have evolved similar mechanisms to prevent inbreeding.
But the mechanism operates differently. The fertile female ant [there is
only one] in the colony produces only infertile offspring as a result of
cues that the worker ants respond to. The worker ants therefore allocate
food and hormones produced from the queen ant efficiently to the offspring
thus preventing the development of fertile offspring [they are all
infertile]. However when conditions are right [climate, population, etc.]
some workers get the notion to allocate resources to developing larvae so
that there are fertile females and [in bees the fertile male is a drone]
drones. Drones are essentially useless to the colony. The fertile queen
will kill any fertile females in most cases. 

Anyway my point is that eroticism in humans is often subliminal/liminal and
as such is a vastly unchartered sea of possibilities for artistic
speculation. If humans could maintain the rituals, practices and customs of
the neolithic and hunting gathering societies, then maybe the consequences
of inappropriate mating practices or courtship traditions could be
abolished. 

john

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> From: Ken Itzkowitz <itzkowik-AT-marietta.edu>
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