Evolutionary repugnance...

'Sensitivity to disgust changes with age. “Very young children don’t have a strong sense of disgust,” says Curtis. “It really only kicks in when they’re about two, which is when they become independent of their parents. It ramps up over the years until you are about 30 or 40, and then it starts to drop.” They also found that women tend to be more easily disgusted than men.

“We’re all evolved and we’ve all gained advantages, in terms of reproduction, by avoiding things that might have made us sick,” says Curtis. “In our evolutionary past, it tended to be mothers who looked after the children, so it really paid for them to be extra squeamish because they had to not get sick themselves. They also had to keep young, dependent children safe. Having an extra disgust towards food, for example, or if there was a sick person around who was going to make your child sick, you would perceive that a little more carefully.”

...The word “disgust” to describe the feeling we would recognise today arrived, in English at least, in the mid-18th century, says Richard Firth-Godbehere, a historian of emotions. “It was taken up quite quickly because there seemed to be a gap in our language to describe this sensation. The earliest proper research was by Charles Darwin, who had wonderful photos and descriptions about disgust. He had pictures of people pulling this gape face. He noted that people, wherever he went in the world, would pull the same face if something disgusting happened.” Darwin, of course, thought it had evolutionary origins.

“Freud had some strange ideas about disgust,” Firth-Godbehere adds. “He talked about the idea that the reason humans walked upright is because we wanted to keep our heads away from our genitals, and animals are closer to the ground because they’re more revolting than we are.”'

[theguardian.com]