Quote Originally Posted by IndieAnthias View Post
Well, protected sex does not carry all of the risks of sex, condoms for example are intended to prevent disease transmission as well as pregnancy. And no, when I talk about the evolutionary benefit, I'm not talking about the good feeling, I'm strictly talking about the spreading of genes. That's how evolutionary success is always measured. What I'm saying exactly is this: Sex with another species carries all the risk of disease infection with none of the benefits of genetic procreation. Therefore natural selection can only give us an urge to avoid it. The fact that it happens at all is a maladaptive byproduct of the urgency of the sex drive, and the reason why social moral reinforcement evolved.

But contraception is evolutionarily novel, which means that it wasn't around for most of the time we were evolving. Strictly speaking, protected sex is a maladaptive byproduct of the urgency of the sex drive, just like bestiality. But on this level of analysis, you don't need to assume that this implies a 'should', as in "we should only have unprotected sex", unless your name is Natural Selection.

Here's a bit of a mind-bender: If Neandertals were not extinct, being a different species, would having sex with one be bestiality? (because it did happen... humans and neandertals did interbreed.)
You are the best poster of this thread.

Neaderthals had a larger brain volume than us. Hm. I think, since society would hold both species with equal regard (we'd probably broaden our idea of 'species'), it wouldn't be taboo.