If you are going to nitpick about this: as long as you procreate, you could die the next day due to lack of food and shelter and humanity would continue to evolve in this manner as it has been for thousands of years.
Does this mean that shelter and clothes are unnecessary? No. Just because a handful of people are able to cope with extreme conditions without X doesn't mean X isn't a fundamental need.
You're turning this into a semantic argument. The original discussion began with the question "Which one could you live without?". Whether or not sex fulfills some other evolutionary function is not the point.
Yes--sex is less fundamental a need than food and shelter. You can go without sex for years at a time, but it's hard to go more than a couple weeks without food or shelter.
Maybe it is __less__ fundamental, but the point of this discussion (which you are confused about) is that it is __still__ fundamental.
Maybe you won't die, but humanity wouldn't exist without it. And don't pretend that most people don't have a primal urge to have offspring, or at the very least, a sexual relationship.
No, the point of this discussion is the claim that "sexual love is a human need as fundamental as food and shelter". That's an exact quote. "As fundamental as" is a comparative phrase which means sex is on the same level of fundamentality as food and shelter in the hierarchy of human needs. Since food and shelter are necessities for survival on a daily basis and sex is not a necessity for survival at all, it follows that food and shelter are more fundamental needs, hence the statement under contention is false.
I was arguing using your incorrect assumption that the topic of the discussion was "which one could you live without", and tried to explain that the necessity to live was not the sole criteria for measuring the degree of fundamentality.
I myself believe it is just as fundamental as food and shelter, as some people are willing to give up both food and shelter to attain it.
