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	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."

Amen.