They also speak of ‘mating seasons’ on the discovery channel. My question is, does this apply to humans as well? Do we get increased sex drive in different seasons?
Also, if humans don’t, do other animals mate all year round as well?
Two mating seasons in my household; “day”, and “night”. Other than that, things are pretty much stable year-round.
Hmmm.
Biologically it’d make sense to be horny in the late summer and early fall. The harvest has come in. There’s plenty of food for the winter, plus hunting season is near. You can kind of lay around the house a bit, as opposed to spring when you’d need to be out in the fields planting stuff. Get knocked up in, say, August, and you could pop the kid out by May, just in time to plant new crops.
Plus when a baby is born in spring or summer, there’s less worry about keeping them warm. Back in the cave days it was probably very hard to deal with a winter birth because it was so friggin’ cold, and plus Mom probably wasn’t eating much and maybe milk production would have been hindered? At least if the kid were still inside Mom, he’d get all the nutrients he needs because the body will take whatever it needs to from Mom to help the baby grow.
Then I could make the opposite argument: summer is miserably hot and the last thing people would want to do is get it on. Late fall (say mid Octoberish) and winter are good months for sex because we’re more likely to cuddle when we’re a bit chilly, and things tend to happen in front of a roaring fireplace to begin with. Plus there’s less to do during the cold months so we’re stuck in the house a lot more and, well, you gotta fill the time somehow.
You oughta take a poll and see if Dopers seem to be in the mood during certain times of the year.
I remember my biology teacher saying spring was the natual human mating season.
Her theory: sunlight, which you get more of in the spring after a long winter, stimulates vitamin D production in the body. This increase in vitamin D production kinda revs up the system. “Spring fever” is an actual condition, a prelude to the mating season if you will.
IIRC, more babies are born in September than any other month. If that’s true, it sort of puts a lie to the idea that humans experience increased fertility and/or sex drive in Spring.
Northern hemisphere snob 
I always associated high Sept-Nov birthrates with cold dark days Dec-Feb here in north.
Human females tend to have increased sex drive when they’re fertile. Mating season is a few days long, happens about once a month, and varies by woman. This is rather different from many other mammals, who tend to go into estrus at roughly the same time every year.
My wife and I have a torrid sex life to begin with, but everything seems to ramp up quite a bit come Spring time I think it is a combination of the warmth (fewer clothes and lighter-weight clothing when we bother to get dressed) and the amount of daylight.
Ah, Spring, when a young man’s thoughts turn to boffing like bunnies on a 3 day crystal meth jag.
I remember from my primatology class that apes (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) mate year round. I think there are other primate species that do as well.
Another interesting thing I also remember is that chimps are the only other species (or one of few?) apart from homo sapiens who are known to have sex as an emotional response. In other words, on occassion something other than the instinct to reproduce drives them to want or have sex, such as excitement over seeing an abundance of food, or nervousness after having been through an aggressive situation.
And here I thought it was just some boffo New Years’ Eve parties. 
I, personally do not know of any biological facts regarding this topic. However, I will tell you when spring comes around and it starts to get warm and sweaty, My libado goes way up. I do not want to do it during the winter at all, but in the spring and summer, boy howdy I am ready to go.
I always considered September babies to be the result of drunken X-mas and Newyear’s parents too. Of course it’s not a very smart thing to say to either the parents or the kids implicated…
I doubt any seasonal mating habits we may have develloped have any bearing on survival nowadays… at least in industrialized countries. Fall hunting seasons are very, very, very, new - used to be you killed something to eat when you saw it… still is lotsa places; same with “planting season” - waaaaay too recent a turn to have any measureable effect on human evolution.
So they might exist, but you’d be hard pressed to come up with a modern “reason” for any patterns that show up.
What’s odd about us amongst mammals is that neither males nor females naturally know when the latter are fertile. By contrast, the norm amongst other mammals is that the female will displays some sign - smell, visual, whatever - that she is. Since we don’t know this, we can’t only have sex only when it’s most likely to produce a baby. We just mate all the time instead.
All the issues involved and the theories as to why this is are discussed in detail in an understandable manner in chapter 4 of Jared Diamond’s Why is Sex Fun? (1997). A good read.
I would have thought it were more logical for babies to be born in March-May. If they are born in september, they have to go through a potentially harsh winter while less than 6 months old.
Yah, but the harvest is in so there’s plenty of food. And Mom and Dad don’t have to be off hunting and farming all the time; they can hole up in a cave for the winter and devote themselves to looking after junior.
In many parts of the world there isn’t a lot of meat to be had in the winter. But newborns don’t eat meat, so that’s not a problem.