significance and that it is merely a phylogenetic holdover from normal development of the male. This idea springs from the fundamental observation that while male orgasm is essential for conception to take place, female orgasm is not, and indeed does not always (or even often) occur during copulation. This view is represented by writers such as Donald Symons (1979): "the potential for female orgasm can be understood as a by-product of selection for male orgasm" in much the same way as the existence of nipples on males can be accounted for by the selection for lactation in females. Symons cites the fundamental neuro-muscular similarity of male and female orgasms as support for this position, citing Masters and Johnson's demonstration that the contractions reliably occur at exactly the same time interval (0.8 seconds) in both sexes. One of Symons central arguments is that the female orgasm is highly individually variable and unpredictable. Symons proposes this to mean that the mechanism is revealed not to be an adaptation purely by virtue of its seeming inefficiency and unreliability. This point is also made by Hrdy (1981) who comments: "a physiological mechanism....that is important to fitness (or reproductive success) and properly adapted to its task should work better than that." Symons calls on a variety of other evidence to back up his position; primarily ethnographic studies (including, unfortunately, the now badly discredited work of Margaret Mead on the people of Samoa) but the absence of any real empirical data is highly conspicuous, mainly because very little real experimentation had been done at this time. The other position taken by researchers in this field is that female orgasm is indeed adaptive and serves a clearly defined, and beneficial, purpose. One of the first writers to put this idea onto any firm footing was Desmond Morris in 'The Naked Ape' (1967). Morris espoused two possible functions for the female orgasm; firstly that mutual enjoyment of the act of copulation facilitates the formation of a strong pair bond between males and females and secondly, that the female orgasm promotes contentment and drowsiness leading to sleep. This second point (rather ungraciously termed the 'poleaxe hypothesis' by Baker and Bellis ) is judged to be of importance because of the bipedal gait of humans. If a human female stands up after copulation gravity may have some effect on the number of sperm retained, therefore the adoption of a supine posture after copulation may be adaptive for conception. However, these arguments are again devalued by a lack of hard evidence to support them. In the last few years several extremely significant studies have been performed which have gone some way towards solving this problem. The study performed by Baker and Bellis directly tested two hypotheses; the 'poleaxe' hypothesis of Morris (1967) and an alternative theory first espoused by Fox et al (1970) termed the 'upsuck' hypothesis. This argument contends that

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Approximate Word count = 2003
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)