STD Proliferation Hypothesis (report of causality from a changing society)

*I keep going back and forth between calling this a hypothesis and a theory. In lamens terms, it's a theory, but until I cite references to all my claims, I'm going to call this a hypothesis*

In case I start rambling and get off track, I’ll start with this outline:

1. demographics (ecological niche of STDs.)

2. contraceptives (changing intrinsic sexual incentives for women)

3. the change from an agrarian society, to an industrial society, to the information age, to the post-information age (in other words the change from a stable environment to an unstable one) resulting in the breaking down of marriage and monogamy.


Basically, I’m going to explain the ecological niche of STDs and how the human population is making a shift into this ecological niche (as unintended results of items 2 and 3 above) bringing about the rise in STDs.

I’ll start with the ecological niche of STDs.

It always bothered me that sex education in school (or rather, STD education as it should be called) didn’t really make good connections as to how a person really got STDs based on their behavior. Especially when you get information that says you only need to have sex once to get an STD. And although there are many scientific studies underway to determine if education is curbing the proliferation of STDs, the difficulties of objectively determining a population’s sexual behavior are apparent. In any case, STD’s seem to be on the rise.

So first of all, I’d like to focus on the STDs themselves and consider what ecological niche the pressures of natural selection would put them in to better make the connection of what behavior actually constitutes as being risky.

If you were an STD, and your survival and posterity depended on sexual contact and (especially in the case of viruses) being passed from host to host, in which population would you be more successful? In a population of people who never have sex or have one or very few life partners? Or are you going to do better in a population of people who are constantly changing partners?

That sets the spectrum. If we construct a hypothetical graph to demonstrate what the STD population might look like against an x-axis ranging from abstinent/monogamous to promiscuous, it might look something like this:

A population that is constantly changing sexual partners would make a very hospitable niche for STDs. I mean, abstinent people or monogamous couples cannot ensure the posterity of STDs. So they aren’t going to be successful among those groups.

This gives humans an incentive to be on the monogamous side of the spectrum. At least you would think so. But it isn’t STD’s that influences where people fall within the spectrum. It’s pregnancy.

Here’s a point that one of my biology professors made regarding sexual incentives in men and women. He posed the question, “How many babies can a woman have in one year?” Of course the answer (generally) is one. Then he asked, “How many babies can a man have in one year?” The answer is “as many as the number of women he impregnates.” You could argue the answer is zero since he doesn’t carry the baby, but the woman who has the one baby…that baby has a father, right?

And anyway that’s the point. The fact that men don’t have the responsibility of carrying the baby affects their sexual incentive relative to women’s. Pregnancy has no inherent incentive for a man to stay with one person. For women, however, pregnancy does create an inherent incentive to stay with one person.

This is where advances in contraceptives come into play. With effective contraceptives, this all but takes away the risk of pregnancy, which in turn changes the sexual incentive for women, making it more similar to men’s. In other words it gives women less incentive to stay with one person.

This brings about the unintentional consequence where a mutual lack of incentive to stay in one sexual relationship shifts the human population away from monogamy and into the ecological niche of STDs.



The degree to which the human population overlaps with the STD population is not drawn to scale. I’m more using this graph to illustrate a trend. If you look at this graph, you can probably get an idea of how effective (or ineffective) condoms will be at preventing the problem at hand if indeed the human population is shifting to the right. (This is taking into account condom failure rates. A 20% failure rate on the left side of the chart is not as potentially profound as a 20% failure rate on the right side.)

What should also be noted is that condoms and abstinence are only short term solutions to the problem of STDs. In fact, selling the idea that condoms and abstinence are the only solutions to preventing STDs creates some long-term problems.

The main one being that the posterity of the human race requires unprotected sex. If the human population shifts significantly into the ecological niche of STDs, and more people spend their younger years on the right side of the spectrum, and then later decide they want to settle down and have children, they’ll have to take those condoms off. But the thing is they’ll have already put themselves at risk from residing in the niche of STDs.

This probably doesn’t need to be stated but as for abstinence, it’s a fine short-term solution, but it’s unreasonable to expect someone will remain abstinent their entire life unless they plan to join a monastery or convent.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, contraceptives are not the only thing causing a shift away from monogamy. The movement away from an agrarian society to an industrial society, to the information age, to the post-information age (This term is from “The Deviant’s Advantage” by Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews). Basically, this movement equates to a shift away from a stable environment towards an unstable environment.

I won’t go into great detail on this shift, but consider that in an agrarian society, you live on a farm. You’re there for life. Your environment doesn’t change, which gives you a sense of stability. You know who you are and your place in the world, because you really don’t have many options for other things you can do or places you can go. This kind of setup creates a stable foundation for marriage and family institutions.

The industrial revolution changed things, but there was still stability at least from the ability to have a job for life, which again, creates that stable foundation for a family.

Then there’s today, which Wacker and Mathews describe as the post-information age, where nothing is that stable as things change increasingly rapidly. As I’m sure you know, people don’t have job security anymore and they must not only change jobs often, but also change geographic location. Far removed from how things were set up in agrarian society.

The change of geographic location changes your perception of who you are and how others perceive you. Also changing your job can affect these respective perceptions as well, resulting in an inability to know who you are and your place in the world, because you have plenty of options now.

And if you have an inability to know who you are in the world as a result of the instability, it’s possible (or likely) your significant other has the same inability. With that in mind, it’s a wonder couples can stay together at all these days.

Of course, what I’m suggesting is that they can't (or at least are not, according to the divorce rate), which I’m suggesting is also what is shifting (or what will shift) the human population away from monogamy towards the niche of STDs.

Point being, proliferation of STDs is a bigger problem than condoms and abstinence can solve. Indeed, behavior seems to be more important.

Not sure if this is a profound idea. But I thought I’d post it. I know this is a pretty simplified picture of what is happening and that there are a lot of other factors that I haven’t gone into. But hopefully, this post has some useful insight. I may modify this post and add references later.