Evolutionary stories

Question

I wrote a comment to the question Are women's orgasms more powerful than men's? addressing:

I can't think of any evolutionary reason why it might be so, and I've also considered a possibility that it might just be woman's reactions to orgasms that make it appear as though theirs are more powerful.

My comment basically contains an evolutionary just so story. I don't back up the story with a source but there no reason to do so. If I want to argue that a story is true, it makes sense to provide evidence for it being true.

If the person who posed the question lacked the imagination to think up a story, I think it's perfectly reasonable to post the question as a comment.

If the community truly doesn't want to have any stories then the questions like this should get edited to remove sentences like "I can't think of any evolutionary reason".

Additioanlly I would point out that my comment also included speculation on possible way of testing the question in a similar way that other comments in the question did.

There no reason to delete the whole text before given me the change to delete the part addressing the evolutionary story (basically reposting the specualtion).

Answer 1

The deleted comments was:

As far as I remember the evolutionary-biology story is: For a man it's more important to be able to react when either a wild animal or to a hostile man who arrives. Therefore some of his mental capacities have to be free. The woman doesn't have to pay attention to anything besides the experience of the orgasm. - That story would lead to testable predictions. You could randomly play sounds in the background and see whether man or woman are better at remembering them afterwards. - Another thing you can measure would be calories burnt, heart rate or skin conductivity changes.

It was flagged as being an unreferenced answer in a comment. I agreed with that assessment and deleted the comment.

We don't want to let our reference requirements being eroded by users posting answers in comments instead, though there's a pretty large grey area of comments that are on the line between adding some helpful information and being an unreferenced answer themselves. This is often a difficult decision, in this case it helped that at least one other user agreed with me and flagged it.

I do think that we shouldn't be a site that just repeats or invents such evolutionary stories without looking at how much evidence for them there actually is. Many of those stories seem to be based on slim or even no evidence at all, but still they are repeatead as if they were facts.