Humanimal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature—A New Evolutionary History by Adam Rutherford

Author:Adam Rutherford [Rutherford, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615195312
Google: ldqCDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1615195319
Goodreads: 40591933
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2018-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Briefly, let’s get into one last sexual act that has a precisely zero percent chance of resulting in conception: necrophilia. There is not much data available on its prevalence in thought or deed in humans (many more people fantasize about sexual relations with dead people than actually do it), but it is illegal in most countries. The status of necrophilia under the law is nevertheless globally uneven: it was only specifically outlawed in the UK in 2003, and in the US there is no federal legal edict on necrophilia; each state has its own particular view. Sex with the dead is considered to be a paraphilia, an unnatural deviance indicative of an abnormal psychopathology.* That’s a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, and yet this practice is seen in dozens of animals.

Zoo behavior is often weird, the artifice of a captive life driving deviations from what animals in their natural habitat might normally do if left unbothered by humans. Nevertheless, many animals in captivity have engaged in activities that perhaps visitors were not counting on seeing when they went to the zoo, such as male pilot whales who have been seen attempting penetrative sex with dead females since the 1960s.

A 2009 report in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine described a new classification system for necrophilia, with ten classes, including role players, who get sexual pleasure from pretending their live partner is dead; romantic necrophiliacs, who in bereavement remain attached to their dead lover’s body; opportunistic necrophiliacs: those who normally have no interest in necrophilia, but take the opportunity when it arises; and homicidal necrophiliacs: people who commit murder in order to have sex with the victim. It’s not only something that occurs in the unnatural context of captivity though. Necrophilia is common in the wild. Sex with dead individuals has been known about in Adélie penguins since the earliest days of Antarctic exploration, as documented by the scientist aboard Captain Scott’s last and fatal venture south. The penguin’s behavior was deemed “astonishing depravity,” and far too unsavory for delicate Edwardian sensibilities; it was redacted from the larger report released to the public, written in Greek, and made available only to a select group of stout-minded British gentlemen scientists.*

In 2013 in Brazil, two male tegu lizards of the species Salvator merianae were observed copulating with a dead female for two days, during which time she had bloated and begun to putrefy.† Such is the biological imperative, probably driven by the enduring presence of pheromone signals that females emit to indicate sexual availability, that male frogs and snakes have been recorded attempting copulation with females who have been decapitated and run over by a lorry, respectively. In a brutal write-up published in 2010, male sea otters were observed repeatedly and successfully attempting forced copulations on females, sometimes drowning them, and at other times causing injuries (such as perforated abdomens and vaginas) so severe that the females subsequently died. The males were then seen copulating with the carcasses for several days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.