Throughout history, societies have held a myriad of beliefs regarding sex. Whenever these attitudes are changed drastically in favor of greater openness and understanding, we are said to have experienced a sexual revolution. Well, hold on tight to your cultural norms because we are on the verge of a sexual revolution that is going to make the 1960s look like a Puritan picnic.

Evolutionary psychology gives us a hint about the origins of human sexual behavior. Sexual practices were first shaped by such practicalities as the female having a greater parental investment than the male, female reproductive capacity being more affected by age than male and the issue of paternal uncertainty. A female can always be certain that her offspring is hers, but a male does not have the luxury of such assurance.

These three factors form the foundation of our modern attitudes toward sex. It is because of these factors that women are more choosy in whom they sleep with than men, men prefer younger women and why men and women experience jealousy in different ways.

Beginning with what has been called the “Big Bang of the Mind” around 40,000 years ago, when art and symbolic thought were believed to have arisen in anatomically modern humans, sex was integrated into the latest pastime of our species, religion. Effigies suggest that fertility was very important to these early people as goddesses were depicted with huge breasts and gods were portrayed with large phalluses. Sex and religion have been intertwined ever since.

Western society was awash in centuries of ignorance about our sexual selves as late as 50 years ago. Science had advanced more in the previous century than it had in the 20 centuries prior to that, but we still clung to such ridiculous notions such as masturbation causes disease and oral sex will lead to infertility. In addition, birth control was illegal and information regarding it was considered pornography. We can thank the likes of Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey for dispelling such ignorance.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s came with the advent of the pill and penicillin. The possibility of having sex with as many partners as one wanted to, without the fear of pregnancy or disease, existed for the first time in history. Naturally this, coupled with expanded openness and understanding about our sexual selves, led to an explosion of experimentation, the likes of which had not been openly seen in western society for nearly 1,600 years.

Since this time, new diseases have arisen that penicillin cannot cure. Genital herpes and HIV have shocked society into a new kind of morality, one based not so much on religion as on the threat of a lifetime of pain or an early grave.

This is about to change. We stand on the cusp of a biotechnology revolution that will extend life spans by centuries and attack disease at the molecular level. With the prospect of being married to someone for hundreds of years, marriage will be drastically altered if not eliminated entirely. The threat of disease will be gone, and reproduction will be 100 percent in the control of a woman, making abortions unnecessary.

In this sense, the coming sexual revolution will not be a revolution so much as it will be an all-encompassing juggernaut that envelopes our entire species and reshapes society as we have known it since the dawn of civilization. Millennia of societal programming regarding sex will be forced to give way to technology. For the first time in history, sex will no longer be tempered by the risk of pregnancy and disease.

This change is only one of many that we will face in the coming decades. Like our ancestors, we will be forced to adapt and evolve or die amid changing conditions. We need to learn to think as freely as they did. Otherwise, we will be relegated to the scrapheap of eternity, as bones to be collected by alien biologists in the distant future.

Adaptation and evolution are in our very near future. We may even evolve beyond sex. The important thing is that we keep our ears to the rail and our eyes out for the paradigm shift to come.