I was pondering the other day, about how Ebola and Rabies both induce dementia in their victims, generally causing them to run around in a panic waving their arms, spraying blood and bodily fluids everywhere--it's a very effective form of transmission. There are diseases that stop crabs from eating so they can spend more time transmitting the virus.
Combine that with this story and it got me thinking. Why couldn't an STD make us want to have sex more? And is there any evidence that it has?
Consider how we desire sex, compared to how we desire food. Most people, a few wackos excepted, don't find food impossible to resist. Sure they may drool over it, but they have the very clear option to avoid eating it, and we're simply designed not to ever choose that option when we're hungry. Compare it to how we desire exercise. We feel happy running around like beheaded chickens, but it doesn't feel like there's anything forcing us to do it. Even if we're stir crazy and just have to get up and jump around, it's an enabling act, and we can't not decide to do it.
Now consider sex. I don't get much into sex myself, apparantly, but as near as I can tell one of its allures is the unrefusable nature of it. We can enter an altered mental state of arousal in which we literally feel compelled to engage in the act. And what an act it is too! Lots of fluids exchanged, lots of energy expended, and to no benefit to ourselves personally.
Think back to a time when internal fertilization was just starting to evolve. If you look at amphibians and such, they go about sex very practically. It's something they pursue, and not something that needs to entice them. To be frank it's easy to have sex when you have sex by squirting out eggs or sperm into the water. I imagine that early reptiles and other internal fertilizers took a rather practical approach to it as well, and you know what that means? That means they were really terrible at having sex.
Enter the sexually transmitted disease. Supposing there were a virus that infected the DNA of your gametes, and also caused you to desire sex more, against your own survival instincts. The virus only benefits from transmission after all, not the continued survival of its host. So pretty soon these viruses that produced sex maniacs were weeded of the symptoms that killed people, and suddenly you have some reptiles who take it slow and simple, and other reptiles infected, who are better at fertilizing. They have sex more, and they have sex at the cost of their own survival. And that cost turns out to be a gain overall, since they pass on more children.
Imagine how many of those viruses could be hiding out in our genome, on one chromosome or another? Could that be why we have floods of strange chemicals in our blood that induce us to have sex? We eat because of a perceived deficiency in our chemical levels. We dance because of the need to clean out wear and tear from our muscles. But we have sex in such an intense and uncompromising way because there are mysterious hormones flooding through our blood that force us to do it, to desire it, to want it. It's a benefit overall for the genes if we spread our genes, even if us doing so produces accidental children, or other suffering.
How many people have been drawn to the allure of the werewolf? Could there be ancient diseases that were once like rabies, that now increase our sexual desire and prompt us to make snap decisions? I think it seems like a pretty interesting hypothesis that viruses to preserve their own genetic code entered in a mutualist relationship with animals, causing the animals to have sex against their will, and even to desire this loss of will, thereby ensuring the propogation of both the virus, and the future generations of said animal. Look at a bull elephant in must, and tell me that's not a mind warping disease trying to spread itself by driving the host insane?
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