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What makes them different from primates?
This doesn't bother Chimpanzees.
It was an advantage for every male to be as promiscuous as possible. This doesn't mean every male had the opportunity or was allowed to be as promiscuous as possible.
Extra-genetic information/memetics are important - but the hardware remains biological and determined by evolution. The tools we use to evaluate the adoption of memes and create them are at their very basis genetically determined and as such subject to evolution.
While explaining specific social practices by appealing to evo-psych is often retarded, when you're dealing with questions that have to do with fundamental human motivations (i.e. fear of heights, aversion to pain, perhaps things like appreciation for humor, art) evo psych seems like an incredibly useful paradigm.
Not all selection is natural. There's also sexual selection. (Which the Cosmidian approach acknowledges.)
Not all heritable traits are selected. Some are coincidental (ie, Gould's spandrels). (Which the Cosmidian approach tends to dismiss.)
Not all biological traits are heritable. (Which the Cosmidian approach tends to dismiss.)
Not all ubiquitous behaviiors have direct biological causes. (Which the Cosmidian approach tends to dismiss.)
None of the great apes engage in lifelong pair bonding. And in all of the great apes, females have been observed engaging in extra-pair mate selection and mate poaching.
I think you missed the bit where I covered this with the whole "children don't survive"
Infanticide was very common in our history.
I'm not saying males aren't promiscuos. I'm saying there would have been equal pressures against being promiscuous and that these pressures would have gotten stronger and stronger as human society became more and more sophisticated.
So just claiming promiscuity is ignoring any pressures going the other way that arise as a result of our social groupings.
Whoever said it doesn't bother chimpanzees I would like to remind you this is an argument about human beings. Chimpanzees don't have the social pressures we have against promiscuity. So you know, no duh it doesn't bother them. That's my point. It bothers us.
But to the question - long term pair bonding happens in species where both sexes have to contribute so much effort into their offspring, that any splitting of that effort/time by trying to cheat is wasted effort. What you find in such species (I believe just a handful of birds and a few other oddities), is that there is virtually no sexual dimorphism when it comes to physical size. When the males are bigger than the females, that is one of the main indicators of species promiscuity. The larger male size ends up selected for when it can turn into a real mating advantage.
Secondarily, you also find that in monogamous species or species that arent monogamous but there isnt really any cheating, males have tiny dicks.
No argument from me on any of those points.
Interesting.
I brought them up as an example of an animal that has tightly knit social groups, including male-only groups, that also features rampant male promiscuity without said males killing each other regularly over it. Now, chimpanzees and humans clearly have differing standard responses to promiscuous behavior, so understanding the different evolutionary paths the two species took to get to where they are today can help us understand why that is.
So are humans likely to be one of these rare exceptions of monogamous species?
I don't think so, for one thing we have the largest dicks of any of the apes I believe.
Not going to impact your survival much, but might have huge boons due to the potential offspring (even if there is only a 1% chance of the bugger surviving). What I meant was, it's not going to be a huge loss.
Edit: And I wasn't specifically thinking of humans, but I think it applies. Imagine vikings raping and pillaging.
Because they have evolved to favor cooperation with one mate. Why don't other animals pair-bond for life? Because they didn't evolve that way, whether it's because their ancestors didn't acquire the appropriate mutation, or their environment encourages promiscuity, or their physiology (including repropductive system) makes pair-bonding a sub-optimal trait.
Cooperation and altruism are totally cool under selfish gene theory, it's perfectly possible that a behavior which evolves between genetically-related individuals could also evolve between mates.
I see two major problems with evopsych:
1) No evolutionary psychologist believes that every behavior is totally related to environment and genetics, and no psychologist believes that every behavior is related solely to culture. It's just a disagreement on magnitude. Dawkins, favorable to evopsych but a strong proponent of memetics, might think that a 40/60 genetic/cultural split explains things. More outspoken evopsychologists might think it's more like an 80/20 split. Cultural anthropologists might lean more toward a 30/70 split. It's outright unreasonable to dismiss the claim that environment and genetics has an effect on human behavior, just as it's unreasonable to claim that culture is purely a genetic trait (hint: it's not. lateral transmission and all that).
2) Testing it is a bitch. For one you've got to make claims about a specific population. Humans have "evolved" as separate populations for tens of thousands of years, as evinced by there being distinct cultures all across the globe. The first question always is: what pressures caused this or that cultural trait to evolve? Then, can you extrapolate that beyond the population being studied? Usually not. Some gross generalizations (men being more predisposed to promiscuity than women) are more widely applicable, but there's always an exception because cultures are weird things. Memetics allows for wildly different cultures to emerge in a timespan that has little effect on the human genetic code, leading to a huge variety in behaviors that can sometimes be widespread and other times be relegated to a small remote Amazonian tribe. That doesn't make every result immediately invalid, but it does water down the strength of statements like the one I just said about men are more predisposed to promiscuity than women. It doesn't mean it's true in every culture or even a strong effect in the ones where it is true, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Drawing a useful conclusion from evolutionary psych is like modern day gold mining. Miners process thousands of tons of rock to produce a few ounces of actual gold. Evopsychologists have to run massively more complex experiments than other branches of psych just to get a useful conclusion; you can get a statistically significant result in neuropsych with like 30 subjects, but try extrapolating evolved human behaviors out of even a hundred times that many and your conclusion is going to quickly fall apart.
And all that necessary effort means, of course, that some less-scrupulous evopsychologists will handwave it away and publish results that have no business being published...
when the indigo children come
Not particularly. There's so many factors you are talking about that differ between them that any comparison made today is going to be impossible to isolate. And you can't compare them at different stages of their evolution because you can't go back in time.
So what have you got? Nothing concrete. Some vague comparisons between species that means nothing until you isolate all of the potentially confounding factors using other methods of inquiry. The theory seems sound, but soundness is only the first step in a theory. If you can't test it, you can't go past that step.
This is why I do not see the use in starting from evolution and working from there. You end up cockblocked by all these confounding factors and need to wait until they are cleared.
And then you could still be way off because of unseen factors.
Testing is certainly a hassle when you've got such a large confluence of factors, though occasionally we get something like a twin study/adoption study thats fractionally more tidy when it comes to breaking down the magnitude of the split.
this is why we need a fascist technocracy government.8-)
Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer
(Emphasis mine.)
And the five principles of EP:
Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.
Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.
Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
We cannot assume, though, that all behaviors or responses are modular. We have to establish that by variable isolation, which is extremely hard to do.
Maybe that math makes sense for some species, but not for humans. The reasons are so obvious I feel stupid even thinking about saying them.
It's a theory that wouldn't work if being duplicitous was impossible, yeah.
The math makes plenty of sense for humans. If I have sex with three different women and have children by all three, I have a lot less invested in each of those children than each of the individual mothers. From my genetic perspective, the loss of an individual isn't a huge loss to the chances of my genetic material passing on to another successful generation relative to the loss of the mother.
If the infant dies out of necessity for the survival of the group (too weak or whatever), still, not a big deal from my genetic perspective, it's not so hard to make more.
Could be true, but see if you can find a single working geneticist who has ever used this idea in a useful fashion.
Like everything Gould wrote, this is either wrong, trivial or irrelevant.
That's an argument that works great if I plan on having sex only once with a given woman. It falls apart if I like to have sex a lot. Given the subject matter, I don't think it debunks anything relevant.
If I have three girlfriends I can have three times the babies. If I regularly cheat, I improve my odds of having more babies.
You're definitely not going to father more than like, 4 babies in one year no matter what you do.
Hell no. I want to adopt.
No, I'm just unlikely to have more than that. But you know what? I'm definitely maxing out at one if I'm monogamous, and I'm definitely increasing my chances of having more than one by not being monogamous, be it by cheating or having a harem or whatever.
I should add, I'd also like to clone myself.
Maybe in the hypothetical case where you have harem of women that will all have sex with you all the time, and a staff of servants to take care of them and the babies. But in the more realistic case where it takes time and energy to find a mate, and to take care of the babies, it's not so clear.
edit: quoting from that article: also, i can't help but laugh that this is being studied by someone named Smuts.
So what you're saying is
You want to be your brother, your father and your son... simultaneously?
I'm on board with that. Give them numbered dunce hats.
Um, no, it's pretty clear that if I'm monogamous I top out at one kid/year, and if I'm not monogamous, I increase my odds of having more than that.
I feel like I'm arguing against the notions like cheating doesn't result in babies and that paternity fraud doesn't exist. Or that men with multiple wives don't have the capacity to have a lot more kids. I don't need to concoct wild hypothetical, this all actually occurs and has been occurring.
No, I just want there to be more of me than there are of you.
for what it's worth, the people with the most kids in our society are usually catholic, married and monogamous.
Like: 'shhh' means 'be quiet'. To all humans.
Or: infant sounds for mother are phonetically extremely similar to the sound babies make while nosing around looking for a teat.
Or: if you take humans from anywhere and give them a bunch of pictures of ecosystems to choose from (mountains, forests, savannas, deserts,) and ask them 'where would you like to live?', there will be a strong predisposition towards savannas.
That's some cool stuff.
Loren: I don't know why people are having trouble with what you're saying, either. It seems beyond obvious that if a man is having sex 100 times a year with one woman, he has much less opportunity for offspring than the same man having sex 100 times a year with two women, or three women, or four women.
I know. It's obvious. It's basic math.