Is Sex Necessary?

Rev. Edmund Robinson

Unitarian Universalist Church in Wakefield

September 26, 1999

The title of this week's sermon has already occasioned a fair amount of comment in the church and, I'm told, in the town. One of our older members told me "I don't know if sex is necessary, but if I remember correctly it was pretty nice." As some of you may know, the title is the same as that of a book written in earlier in this century by James Thurber and E.B. White. I plead guilty to plagiarizing the title and that's the only connection between what I say here and that book, which I haven't read.

Now, there are many ways of considering such a topic, but what we're going to be doing here is looking at sex through the lens of evolutionary biology, and I need to say little about that lens. In the first place, it is a very wide-angle lens, so those who came to this sermon expecting me to paint racy pictures will be disappointed, for you won't be able to see much detail. In the second place, it focuses almost exclusively on an aspect of sex that is completely irrelevant to the sex lives of some of us and irrelevant to 99% of the sex lives of the rest of us, that is the production of offspring. Third, in so doing it may seem theologically or politically reactionary. After all, it has been basic Christian orthodoxy for most of this millenium that sex outside of procreation was sin. And fourth, it will require a little science, which I may very well get wrong. But I hope that if you hang in with me, you may find the conclusion as fascinating as I did.

Now I don't want to completely disappoint those who came this morning looking for a little raciness you know who you are. There is a folksong from the early 80's by Peter Alsop that I was tempted to sing in the service, but to do so would have pushed my own sense of boundaries. However, I think I can safely quote one verse and chorus here:

"As soon as you're born, grown-ups check where you pee
And then they decide just how you're gonna be
Girls pink and quiet, boys noisy and blue,
Seems like a dumb way to choose what you'll do.
"It's only a wee-wee so what's the big deal?
It's only a wee-wee so what's all the fuss?
It's only a wee-wee and everyone's got one,
There's better things to discuss!"

Ah, if it were only a matter of plumbing! But sex, in any of the senses we use that word, is close to the core of who we are. Our denomination recognizes this in the new sex-education curriculum it has developed, Our Whole Lives. We have so many deep-seated hangups about sex that it's really hard to speak of it. We ministers are certainly not above or beyond hangups. The evolutionary approach I'm going to take this morning is only one way to look at this endlessly fascinating subject, and by taking it I don't mean to duck the power, the passion, the poetry or the problems that sex poses in all of our lives.

Let's start with the word sex. My favorite reference, the Oxford English Dictionary, gives four distinct meanings. The first, and earliest, is the division of the human or an animal species into males and females. The second, related sense is that of the qualities of being male or female. The third is the general sense of sex describing the reproductive process and the organs associated with that process. With this sense we can speak of sex drives, sexual desires, sex organs. Only in 1929, six centuries after the first meaning do we get the first use of a fourth meaning, sex as the act of having intercourse. And of course, though it isn't yet in my dictionary, only last year were we treated to a public speculation in the White House scandals of what kinds of sexual encounter are included under the term "having sex." Incidentally it is because of this fourth meaning that sex has become a somewhat dirty word, giving rise to the now pervasive euphemism "gender" as a word for the division of the species. One of my pet peeves, but I won't linger on it here.

Now you are probably asking, what does all this have to do with the title of the sermon? Just this: I could ask the question of whether sex is necessary on the level of the fourth definition, and that would be a discourse on the desirability of being sexually active as opposed to being inactive or celibate. That is not what I want to talk about here, in part because you all work out the answers to that question differently in your own lives and there isn't very much a minister can helpfully say about it in a sermon. This sermon is not, then, going to be about "doing it." I think I hear a collective sigh of relief, though maybe its one of disappointment.

Nor is this sermon mainly about the third sense of the word, relating to sexual desire and its fulfilment. This sense of the word was the subject of this year's conference on Star Island of IRAS, I-R-A-S, the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science. It was a very informative week presenting a lot of stuff I didn't know both from scientific and religious perspectives. I'll just share one provocative thought here. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose specialty is both sexual differences and sexual drives, offered the opinion that the brain has three different faculties related to love and sex, and they may be carried on by three different systems within the brain. The first she called arousal, but we might call it lust. It is the raw desire to have sex, and particularly in males, it can be very impersonal and visually stimulated. The second faculty is attraction, where the mind focuses on one specific person and won't let go. This may or may not be accompanied with feelings of arousal. The third faculty is attachment, where you come to depend on being with another person and make all the adjustments in your other life activities which may be necessary to maintain that relationship. The problem, and we can all see it both in this outline and in many examples from our own lives, is that these three faculties aren't always focussed on the same person. You may be attached to one person, married, in fact, find yourself daydreaming about someone else, and find yourself turned on by still a third person, perhaps a stranger you encounter on the bus.

This clarified for me a thought -- probably left over from my parents own birds and bees talk with me -- I'd had for a long time about sex in this third sense: that sex is like fire: it can be very useful and beautiful and productive and it can also be incredibly destructive. In particular, it seems especially cruel in the design of life that we have a family and child-rearing system based around monogamy, we have emotional needs for security and fidelity, but we have sex drives which makes us tend toward the promiscuous. Wouldn't you think a loving Creator would not have installed at the center of the psyche a little motor that leads us to as much harm as it does pleasure? I think Helen Fisher's description of the mechanism is very helpful, but why couldn't we have had just the one for attachment or have it so that the attachment always controlled the other two. This three-tiered sex drive gets us into trouble. And it's been doing it for a long time. 2800 years before Clinton got into trouble because of his wayward sex drives, King David went so ga-ga over the sight of Bathsheba bathing naked on a rooftop that he had her husband killed in battle in order to get her, thus bringing down the wrath of God upon him.

Now you will say, but it's useless to ask these questions. The human psyche is what it is, whether designed by a loving God or a demon. I agree that there is a certain givenness about human nature. But I have the kind of mind that likes to inquire "what if," in order to see whether I can discover a "why" for what we are given. So the "what if" that I have posed for some time is, "what if the human race had asexual reproduction?" In other words, just do away with the distinction between male and female and have everybody be one sex. The scientists can probably work this out. When we wanted to have babies, maybe we could just divide, like the amoeba. Unisex fashions, unisex hair salons, eliminate the horrors of dating, the pain of childbirth, unequal pay.

Well, after carrying this question around in my head for years, I finally stumbled upon someone who had taken it seriously enough to answer it. Ursula Goodenough is an eminent cell biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and is one of the principal movers in IRAS. Last spring, she came out with a beautiful book called The Sacred Depths of Nature. In twelve elegant chapters, she describes the way the world works from an evolutionary and biological point of view. The first part of each chapter is science, explained in terms an attentive layman can grasp. The concluding part is a religious reflection on the science she has just explained.

Goodenough says she is not a theist, but she is able to convey quite powerfully the sense of awe she experiences as a scientist looking at nature. She describes her approach as "religious naturalism," and I think it has great promise to go at least partway toward bridging the gulf between the worldviews of science and religion, the widest gulf facing us today, in my opinion. I see echoes here of Emerson, the closest thing Unitarians have to a saint, and I have begun to call nature worshippers of this school Neo-Transcendentalists. I would include in this label the essayist Annie Dillard and poet Mary Oliver.

One thing needs to be noted here about the perspective of evolutionary biology: it has no end-point. The beak of the bird fits the bell of the flower not because someone designed it that way but because all the birds that didn't have beaks shaped like that didn't reproduce successfully. It is what they call a stochastic process, one lacking in a grand design. So when Goodenough speaks about the purpose of something in evolution, she is talking about its fitness to make the whole process work over many generations.

Anyhow, back to sex. We know that sexual reproduction is not the only form that life takes; amoebas and bacteria, for example, simply divide in order to reproduce. Why couldn't we emulate them? Think of the money we could save on perfumes alone, not to mention muscle cars. But Goodenough says this is not good enough. If you reproduce by simply dividing the cell, what biologists call mitosis, you get virtually no genetic variation in the second generation. It's about like cloning. The two daughter ameobas are genetic carbon copies of the original.

With sexual reproduction, as you remember from your biology course, you get the chance to get the active genes from either parent, and this vastly increases the genetic variation in the species. And its only with genetic variation that Darwinian evolution can work. Thus the reward for enduring all this burden of sexuality is that over millions of years we can evolve useful things like opposed thumbs and great immune systems and a cerebral cortex wrapped around the more primitive parts of our brains that allows us to speak and produce great works of music and literature and philosophy. So we might be happier if we didn't have sex. But we would still basically be amoebas. I don't think any of us would want that.

Actually as Goodenough explains it, it's a bit more complicated than that. In between amoebas and us there are groups of organisms such as algae and fungus that have sex and reproduce by something called meiosis, but they don't have the differentiation of cells that higher organisms do. In the higher organisms, cells in the developing embryo quickly differentiate, with some forming the germ-line cells that are capable of meiosis. The rest of the cells form the soma, which is all that part of our body not concerned with reproduction. The kicker is that many of the somatic cells are programmed to die at some time, but not the germ line cells. This is part of a larger tradeoff between complexity and mortality. Let Ursula Goodenough explain it to you in her words:

"The more general fate of the soma is that the whole soma dies. If this death is premature, before the germ line has had time to be successfully transmitted to the next generation, we say that that organism was either unfit (an insect incapable of flight) or unlucky (an insect eaten by a bird). But if it happens after the germ line has successfully participated in the production of sons and daughters, then we say that the organism has served its biological purpose. Natural death may occur after only a few days of life, as with some kinds of adult insects, or it may be postponed for hundreds of years and hundreds of attempted procreation cycles, as is the case for some kinds of trees.

"Eventually, though, the sequoias die just like the dragonflies. If we don't die by accident or infection or because of the failure of a particular organ, we die because we just get old....

"So is there such a thing as an immortal organism? The answer is yes, but immortal organisms are by definition very limited in their complexity. For example, there is no death programmed into the life cycle of a bacterium or an amoeba. For sure, the cells can be killed by boiling or starvation, but they don't have to die...

"But once you have a life cycle with a germ line and a soma, then immortality is handed over to the germ line. This liberates the soma from any obligation to generate gametes, and allows it to focus instead on strategies for getting the gametes transmitted."

In other words, the cells in the body other than the reproductive ones generate forms which insure that the reproductive ones pass on to a new generation. These forms include wings, tentacles, claws etc: Even though each cell in the soma each contain two full copies of the entire genome,

"Transmission of these somatic genomes to the next generation is not included in the arrangement. The arrangement is that the parts will do their utmost to ensure the transmission, and often the nurture, of the germ line, and then die."

And then she gets to the thought that I think makes this whole idea so remarkable:

"One of these parts' is my brain. My brain developed with nary a backward look at gene transmission or immortality. The whole point was to make synapses, strengthen them, modulate them, reconfigure them, with countless neurons dying in the process and countless more as dying during my lifetime, some as I sit here typing. It is because these cells were not committed to the future that they could cooperate in this most extraordinary, and most here-and-now, center of my perception and feelings.

"So our brains and hence our minds are destined to die with the rest of the soma. And it is here that we arrive at one of the central ironies of human existence. Which is that our sentient brains are uniquely capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own death, yet it was the invention of death, the invention of the germ/soma dichotomy, that made possible the existence of our brains."

In other words, death and the differentiation brought about by sexual reproduction is what makes all of human complexity, including consciousness, possible.

It is interesting to contrast this scientific account of how we came to be the way we are with the creation myth of the Garden of Eden. As I read the story, originally Adam is created alone -- i.e. there is only one sex, and only one individual. We don't know whether death was programmed into this individual, but we do know that one of the trees planted in the garden is the Tree of Life, which confers immortality on anyone who eats of it. Now God does not forbid Adam to eat of this tree, only of the other tree, the one conferring knowledge of good and evil. So it may have been in the first scheme of things, God's Plan A, that human race remain sexless and immortal -- indeed, it might not have been planned to create a race at all, but only the one individual. Notice that the switch to plan B, involving the creation of Eve, is not motivated by God's desire that the human reproduce, but that he not be lonely.

After the affair with the serpent, God lays down some punishment on all three participants, and the punishment includes mortality, for Adams is condemned to toil for his bread, "until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." God then becomes concerned that Adam, with his new knowledge of good and evil will now eat of the tree of life and become immortal, so to prevent this, the pair are banished from the garden and a flaming sword is set to guard the tree.

Thus in this archetypal myth, sex in a general way induces mortality, because before there were sexes, Plan A had no provision for death. Of course, immortals appear throughout religious literature and mythology. And after contemplating Goodenough's treatment, we can see that nature does actually contain organisms that are immortal, they just aren't very interesting to anyone other than biologists. Perhaps Adam under plan A was an amoeba, but if so, I don't think I want to invite him to my next dinner party. For the serious point of all this is that we can't conceive of being human without both sex and death. Both are totally entertwined in who we are. Yes, sex is necessary in order to be human. Without it, human life is literally inconceivable.

In the sermon two weeks ago, I talked about the deep wells of the spirit in the religious traditions of this church. Last week, we drew on three historical religious traditions to consider the question of atonement. This week, we have shifted the focus to a scientific perspective, but I think the insight this has provided into the way we are human has been as profound as much that can be pulled from the wells of religious tradition.

So here we are. You were maybe expecting something really racy, and all I have served up for you is the meaning of life. How did I do that? Let Ursula Goodenough explain in closing:

"Religious naturalism offers two responses to human death. The first is the response to the death of someone loved, or a death that is premature or senseless...Our sorrow at the death of others is a universal human emotion that transcends cultural and religious particularities...

"And then there is the response to the fact of death itself, and in particular to the fact of my own inevitable death. When I wonder what it will feel like to be dead, I tell myself that it will be like before I was born, an understanding that has helped me cope with my fear of being dead. But what about the fact that I will die? Does death have any meaning?

"Well, yes it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the [higher] creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love…

"My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death."