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rhollerith_dot_com comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong
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I understood all of that, you were quite clear about this in your post. You think that the danger of sex is biological and that this has been vanquished by vaccines, condoms, etc. In reality, most of the power of sex to harm is social, emotional, and psychological. You are feigning expertise, without even considering the emotional, psychological, and social ramifications. It is pretty common to see this kind of shallow, hyper-atomistic (not considering ramifications upon society), reasoning on Less Wrong.
There is substantial evidence that sexually promiscuous people (distinct from people who have frequent sex) are less happy. It is also a fact that married people have more sex (and more varied sex) than demographically comparable singles. Since married people are also significantly happier and report better health, it seems likely that it is not sex *itself that causes people to be happy, but rather that people who are in stable, happy relationships are also having more sex. Yet your post instead argues that people should just have more sex (including casual sex with strangers, multiple partners, etc.), ignoring the vital element of being in a stable, long-term relationship--in spite of the fact that promiscuity actually is associated with lower happiness. This is inexcusable. Do not give advice about topics when you have such a shallow understanding.
I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that these social and emotional factors are adaptations that evolved due to the biological dangers. Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
I know that most educated people believe that, but I've never seen a good argument for it.
At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these "insufficiently recognized" pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you'll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections -- including near a dozen at least in the herpes family -- that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)
In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.
It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.
Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?
I'm not a medical professional either, but...
Except in the specific cases of microbes that target the immune response, wouldn't you expect to see things like an elevated white blood cell count in patients suffering from a pathogen, even if the specific pathogen was not well recognized or understood? In other words, you would see the symptom in a blood test even if you didn't know exactly how to look for the pathogen.
If the pathogen reproduces slowly (the pathogen that causes TB might be one such) or has some way of hiding from the immune system or is one of those viruses (e.g., the herpes family) that get into cells and tend to remain dormant for long intervals, then they can be very hard to detect and will certainly not show up in a WBC. I saw news reports earlier this year about evidence that some cases of obesity are caused by gut microbes not previously regarded by, e.g., doctors and society as being pathogenic.
The biggest biological danger of casual sex was (to women) unwanted pregnancy. It's now almost gone thanks to modern contraception.
STDs certainly exist, but they too have become rarer. Syphilis used to cause a lot of mortality and disability, and was mostly (not entirely) defeated by antibiotics. And with modern health care and social safety nets, if you do get sick, your outlook is much better than even a century ago.