Disgust: While avoiding contaminated food is a key adaptive problem, we also had to avoid having sex with individuals that could harm our survival, our children’s survival, or generally reproductive success

Sexual Disgust: An Evolutionary Perspective. Courtney L. Crosby and David M. Buss.  Emotion Researcher, 2020. emotionresearcher.com/sexual-disgust-an-evolutionary-perspective/

Introduction: One of the first emotions explored by Charles Darwin, disgust, presumably evolved to solve adaptive problems related to our health. Examples of these problems include avoiding ingesting toxic or pathogenic substances, such as rotting meat or moldy mushrooms. However, a key scientific question is whether disgust evolved to solve adaptive challenges in addition to food consumption. Darwin described disgust as a revulsion to offensive objects, primarily those of taste, but extended to anything that causes extreme dislike or distaste—through vision, smell, or touch (Darwin, 1872). While avoiding contaminated food is a key adaptive problem that our human ancestors faced, they also had to avoid having sex with individuals that could harm their survival, their children’s survival, or more generally their reproductive success. Sexual disgust may have evolved as a somewhat specialized emotion—based on the underlying architecture of disgust—to solve these problems (Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009).