Dear Guys Who Would Like to Make Stuff up About Sexual Relations a priori on the Basis of, Like, Spiders or Something

I love you and I vote that we ban all evolutionary psychology on-the-veldt bullshit forever.

Now that CT has gone downhill and isn’t a serious academic blog anymore what with the lady-posting about all the lady-topics that only affect ladies, such as human reproduction,

I’m torn between quietly savoring this…

and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

…and trying a thoughtful remark along the lines of that.

What puzzles me is what the evolutionary explanation for sexist internet trolls could be. After all, there must be one, since evopsych explains everything. Trying to imagine such personality traits out on the savannah, with other people having clubs, stick and stones and stuff, leads quickly to the conclusion that those with the genes for trollery would quickly have died out. But maybe one of those complicated stories is needed. After all, whereas other hunter gatherers were prone to perish if they consumed food contaminated with bullshit, those with the troll-gene could swallow lots of the stuff and still survive to reproduce. So there you have it.

Further concerning, or maybe against, the Env Evol Adap: what about the most amusing guy in the band? One hot candidate for the evolution of human intelligence is that it evolved through sexual selection, on the analogy of the peacock’s feathers, but in our case, the biggest brain, which is after all pretty costly, what with the comparative size of head vs. birth canal. [Inferential jump here.] And it was not the best at solving math problems or inventing wheels, but rather the funniest, the wittiest, the most fun to hang around with, whose lineage prospered. On that basis all the action would be round the campfire, telling jokes, not out in the bush (except when giggling and tickling a deux).

Not to mention that, at least in Australian Aboriginal societies, the women fed themselves and their children while out gathering, and only brought the surplus home to share with the hunters. So you have a bunch of well fed women and kids, sharing what the hungry men brought home. Congrolof the means of production and distribution, I believe is the relevant term. Men who made clever remarks (or could sing?) might get a few more eggs or tubers brought home for them.

Via Making Light, Evo Psycho Bingo!

ajay writes: This varies depending on what latitude you’re at.

Perhaps so, but all the actual evolution of humans happened in Africa, so evo psycho explanations have to refer to African conditions, not those in Greenland.

I am above average in wealth and wit (compared to the population at large, not to Timberites) and I get less tail than average. This is known in economics as “market failure” and calls for government intervention. Subsidised hair dye and facelifts would probably do the … I was nearly going to say “trick”. Libertarianism has its limits.

The only near-modern genuinely hunter-gatherer culture I’m very familiar with is the Inuit, who – as it happens – offer an excellent “anti-veldt”: The men hunted and practically no gathering occurred whatsoever since there was almost no edible vegetation to gather. Women and men both collected eggs sometimes, when in season and feasible. But otherwise, sexual division of labor was strict – women only hunted if widowed and unable to find a new home or spouse. Getting an adequate diet could be a close thing in the best of years, and in bad years, there could be so little food that the older members of the community might volunteer for euthenasia to make it easier on the others.

But you still don’t see any kind of “sexual economy” of the sort the evo-psych people describe. The Inuit were (and are) notoriously bad at monogamy. The early missionary accounts are hilarious to read because of the horror the Oblate fathers and stiff-collared Victorian-era Anglicans expressed when they saw what was going on. Pre- and extra-marital sex was the norm, and adoption was something unmarried mothers could almost take for granted. So, the milk was free and plentiful, and offspring were almost certain to be taken care of by someone.

The very idea of women going out of their way to pretty themselves for men and offer sexual favors in return for material benefits was just bizarre beyond words. Men got married because no one ever taught them how to sew a pair of pants, and the elders wouldn’t let you live off your mom’s willingness to do it for you if you were over 20. Women got married because the elders would get on their case if they hadn’t by the time they were 16. The most common marriage ritual was a kind of staged kidnapping, where the man would pretend to break into his bride’s family’s home and rob them of the much needed daughter and her skilled labor. Divorce was common, as was polygamy, occasionally polyandry, and bickering couples who screwed anyone they could find as soon as someone’s back was turned was just normal family life.

Getting a little nookie from your sister-in-law for no better reason than that your brother is out hunting, she’s willing and you just kinda want to… that was par for the course. But nobody traded sex for food. They might have sex with someone to annoy their spouses, friends, or family members for some slight, or just because they’re bored. But not for food! Why should anyone need to trade for sex?

This is just the opposite of what the stylized veldt model predicts.

Original rant was fantastic and the slate post was ridiculous, however things are generally complex and not too adaptable to funny, witty posts.

For example, I was a bit troubled by the 80/20 assertion, and voila:
“Frank Marlowe’s (2001) survey of the literature suggests that in the tropics women provide around 75% of calories in the family diet and men about 25%, wheres in the Arctic men’s contribution rises to 100%.”

From here: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/BooksOnline/He3-95.pdf

This is obviously a sidenote, as the original criticism of whatever his name was who wrote the slate article stands on its own.

“In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.”

Could someone explain how this works in the context of a society where there are no contraceptives but everyone is having lots of sex?

But…but…what about the spiders? Won’t someone think of the poor spiders?

mw has got us there. I do believe that the conditions in modern China exactly reproduce those on the veldt.

Is your point that humans, unlike all other species on the planet, were not subject to natural selection? Or, perhaps, that our ancestors were immune from the selfishness and status games present in modern society?

Animals choose mates for a variety of reasons. Males and females across the animal kingdom have evolved distinct reproductive strategies. And people are animals. This doesn’t lead to an endorsement of current social structures in any way. But there is a fantasy, beloved of ideologists the world around, that everything is a social construct. And this is not just wrong – it’s dangerously wrong.

In terms of gender attitudes towards sex – well, women get pregnant, risk death in childbirth (especially prior to modern medicine), and nurse. In the absence of effective birth control this is going to give them different attitudes towards sex than men. That doesn’t make these attitudes “right” or “natural”, and what works in a very different modern society can be radically different. (You can make a good case that our instincts for survival, for example, led us to value fat and salt a lot; in a society where food is readily available this can cause health problems.) But to pretend that we’re not the products of evolution is to valorize blank slate dreams. And I’m getting more than a strong whiff of that here.

Or, perhaps, that our ancestors were immune from the selfishness and status games present in modern society?

More than you think. Or perhaps it is better to say they played them in a radically different way. I am no anthropologist, but as I understand it is no longer controversial to assert that hunter gatherer bands from all over the world are actively antihierarchical.

@39: OK Belle, that’s fair. You get armchair psychologizing because it comes across as a subject where everyone feels as if they’re an expert. You get cranks reinforcing their world views for the same reason you get them in economics. The physical sciences have their drawbacks, but I am grateful for the fact that people are vaguely aware that there is a certain level of knowledge required to be able to develop theories.

I wanted to make moderately clever-sounding point point in #42 that “primitive communism” looks a lot more like “really-existing socialism” than one might like, but I think any comment with the word “socialism” in it is getting censored out. If this fails to go through, I’ll take it as evidence that my hypothesis about the Crooked Timber filters is correct.

Here’s a thing not to like about ev-psych that I haven’t seen mentioned yet, beyond the bad science and sexist confirmation-of-existing-belief: it cuts the imagination short by making everything that we discover about early humans be all about us.

For instance, I recently heard (no idea whether this is still / was ever considered accurate) a theory that for a substantial period of time, the entire human population on the planet was quite small and lived in a few caves along a particular coast. That’s deeply weird, isn’t it? I can’t say in this thread that “it seems natural” for people to try to imagine what life would have been like in such a society, but it seems like something that some people do in our culture a lot — look at pictures of ruins, that kind of thing. At any rate, apparently there’s already some ev-psych book out insisting that some aspect of our current lives is all about that time when the whole species lived in a few caves. It’s like people who insist that only their fanfic really matches canon.

Well, I mean, it obviously seems strange to you, though it may not to other humans.

I don’t think this is a fair characterisation of what is actually an intelligent and useful contribution, especially as it applies to Graeber and economies without money.

Marc, this is entirely in your head: “But to pretend that we’re not the products of evolution is to valorize blank slate dreams. And I’m getting more than a strong whiff of that here.”

My guess, Walt, is that it’s out of Steven Pinker’s head. Pinker wrote a very long book called “The Blank Slate” to rebut an argument that nobody is making.

“In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.” Could someone explain how this works in the context of a society where there are no contraceptives but everyone is having lots of sex?

Er, massive deliberate or natural perinatal and infant mortality, at a guess?

You know who’s not pulling their weight? Old people. Yet archaeology seems to suggest that some quite elderly and/or helpless people survived among early humans, in some (later) cases with indication that other humans were pre-chewing food for them, as one does for a toddler unable to eat adult food. It wasn’t all ice floes and forced starvation for the lazy, strangely. Well, I mean, it obviously seems strange to you, though it may not to other humans.

It doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I can think of one really, really obvious way that old people easily pull their weight in hunter-gatherer societies – and even, for that matter, in modern urban societies: providing child care. Not everyone has a maid.

Uh…as I understand things, women wish to find mates who will improve their reproductive fitness.

The editions of What Women Want always immediately get deeeeeeply weird, they can’t hardly manage a full sentence the reader can manage to not be creeped out by. You have to wonder what kind of person believes, or even claims to believe, that women wish to find mates who will improve their reproductive fitness.

I.e., they would like children

What kind of person believes that women predominantly engage in sexual intercourse because they would like children? (Why do men engage in sexual intercourse? “Because they desire the woman,” they say. Why do women engage in sexual intercourse? Please hold on while we try this extension.)

sired by a superior male

What kind of person feels comfortable using “sired” as a verb in this way when speaking about humans rather than horses? A ‘sire’ is a male who is forced onto a female because the forcer wants offspring with a particular anticipated phenotype.

—using “superior” in a reproductive sense—

I always stumble a little when we finally return to the part where we assume women are just semen receptacles in waiting, fulfilling a thankless and choiceless optimization function, vigilantly on the lookout for the best seed to plant in their soil-self. Since she’s attempting to obtain optimal seed (really the only factor in a baby-making equation is how viable the seedmaker male is), a woman needs to be verrrrry selective.

(Whereas guys are motivated to be unselective, I guess? Because the guys are the only ones who have value to contribute to the baby-making process, and somehow pretty much everyone is aware of this at all times?)

because such children are apt to inherit their father’s valuable genetic characteristics.

How selfless and heroic of them. These mothers, they’re like… angels! Virtuous angels

Having awesome kids is far more tenuously connected to one’s own long-term health and happiness than, like, avoiding the dangers of childbirth, butofcourse women, unlike men, are more interested in the health of their young than in their own health.

…

Okay, so here’s what I perceive happening in nature, on the veldt, humans or no humans. Males fight males for the opportunity to have sex with various females, often regardless of whether they’ve verified the interest of the female. A male peacock, when strutting, looks around for other male peacocks, and engages with them before interacting with females. Boy wolf 1 doesn’t back off challenging boy wolf 2 because female wolf A said nuh-uh. Boy wolf 1 is not thinking about whether or not female wolf A would actually prefer boy wolf 2 because female. They are not fighting to prove to female wolf A which of them is stronger. They are fighting over who gets to @#$& her, where it’s more reasonable to let @#$& denote rape than it is.

Physiology: Males can readily rape females in ways that females cannot readily rape males. An interesting question, from an evo psych perspective, would be: what mechanism allows the alpha-male, who acquired the opportunity to be rapist by fighting off the other potential rapists, to believe that what he just did somehow made him more attractive to the female?

This soil of mine is precious [to my future society, and rather than having my own preferences, I am a mere agent acting on behalf of that society, ’cause it’s the women who are mommies and stuff, right?]. So yeah, fight for me, baby: it’s time to prove you’re the seediest man around.

I’m the smiliest, talking to strangers-est person ever.

Many men are frightened by offered of sex by total strangers, just as many women are.

Also, Gregor Samsa became a beetle, not a cockroach.

No Socialism without c*alis.

Reaching the ripe age of 40 would have qualified you as old in prehistoric times. So I’m not sure that the survival of old people counts as an evolutionary problem per se. One area where ev psych really does have some explanatory power, at least from my readings, is that there is no particularly strong selection pressure once people are no longer fertile and their children are self-sufficient. This has a lot to do with the variety of health problems that crop up for older people. It simply doesn’t matter for natural selection if there is a trait that will kill you twenty years after you have your last child.

@53: There are people who do advocate blank-slate arguments, and there is a strong historical tendency to do so on the left (e.g. both radical Marxists and feminists.) It’s reasonable to read sweeping denunciations of evolutionary psychology to mean “all nurture, no nature” – because some of them really do mean that. Belle clearly doesn’t, and I wasn’t reading between her lines correctly.

@60: Natural selection has a lot to do with sex being fun. If we were talking about any other species would there be any problem in saying “natural selection favors males/females selecting mates who will have more offspring?”

Salient @57: You have to wonder what kind of person believes, or even claims to believe, that women wish to find mates who will improve their reproductive fitness

Evolutionary explanations don’t work that way. Whatever men or women may wish, or whatever any man, woman, or other organism’s conscious intention may be, different actions have different implications for reproductive success (ie, for how often a gene reappears in the gene pool), and those actions will happen increasingly often relative to alternatives, other things being equal. Organisms are purposive; selection is not.

Seems to me that in any discussion of peacocks, we should probably stick in some Veblen, and maybe a wee dollop of Marx as well. You know, stuff about how the more elaborate your display of useless accoutrements, the higher your status. About how the haute bourgeoisie mimicked the baronial stone piles and the mannerisms of the aristocracy (e.g., the Frick mansion), and the Communists took some pains to follow in their turn (e.g. the Moscow underground, the space program, etc.)

What such tongue-in-cheek observations have to do with the veldt, or male hotness, I have no idea, but as long as we’re having a little laugh, they surely deserve at least a passing mention.

I am considering buying a bow…

Niall, those are two different concepts (‘maximum age’ and ‘being old’).

Infants would sometimes be left on the ice in hopes that someone with better luck would find them before something carnivorous and hungry did. There are a number of stories of the infant so-and-so being found on the ice by a hunter who raised him or her, so even though the odds of survival were poor, they were non-zero.

You get a lot of this kind of story from mediaeval Europe too, for the same reason (see Hrdy; also on mortality rates in orphanages and baby farms).

#19:

“16: 15: “Perhaps so, but all the actual evolution of humans happened in Africa” – debatable.
Not debatable. That modern humans arose in East Africa is a fact as undisputed among actual paleontologists as the theory of evolution itself.”

But it didn’t stop then. Also not debatable. Humans at northern latitudes developed lighter skins to improve uptake of vitamin C. Humans at high latitudes in Bolivia and Tibet developed hemoglobin differences that make their ability to carry pregnancies to term much higher than lowlanders. They’ve isolated the genes and the effects; they’re independently evolved and the Tibetan one is more efficient.

Stuff evolves in a surprisingly few number of generations.

When I was 10, I thought 40 was old, so maybe the average San does too.

I’m quite sure that they understand old age, though, and know that 40 is not old in that sense.

Scott Martens @ 72

When I was a kid visiting my paternal grandparents, I found a glass-fronted bookcase hidden away in a dark hallway which contained nothing but the books once given to my father and his brothers — adventure stuff for young boys mostly — published from 1919-1930 or so. There was a good bit of Horatio Alger, Tom Swift, and a multi-volume series about the exploits of Boy Scouts in the Great War. The book that intrigued me the most, though, was called Lone Bull’s Mistake.

It was a story supposedly told to the author by an ancient Lakota chieftain — there was even a picture of the old guy in full regalia on the fly-leaf — about his father’s crime and redemption.

The father, Lone Bull, was a big wheel in the tribal group, a mighty hunter, etc., but also proud and mercurial. One year, the buffalo didn’t show up when and where they were expected, and the people were starving. When the herd was finally spotted, the tribal council decided to wait to hunt them until they got closer, so that the weakened members of the tribe wouldn’t have to travel so far to butcher the meat and bring it back to camp.

Lone Bull thought that this was silly, and overly cautious, and that no council had the right to tell him when and where to hunt. He went out, killed a number of animals, and returned to dispense the meat, thinking he’d be praised for his generosity. The problem was that the herd ran even farther from the camp, and everyone else lost the opportunity to hunt them.

Lone Bull was set upon that night by the other men, stripped of his weapons and goods, and he and his family were banished. His son, the narrator, then tells of the perils of being a lone nuclear family on the plains, with war parties from enemy tribes in the area. He also tells of his father’s humiliation when he has to beg to be taken in by his wife’s tribe — they were Crow, as I remember — and the poverty which afflicted the rest of the family as a result.

All comes right in the end, of course, as the son learns of an enemy’s plan to attack their original tribe, and Lone Bull returns in time to save everyone, and be restored to his former status.

How much of this had any basis in fact, and how much was the white author’s fantasy, I had no way of knowing, but it was a wonderfully told yarn. At the time it seemed perfectly plausible, especially the social relations, and over the years, it’s certainly stuck with me, much more so than the Boy Scouts in the Great War.

Great topic and comments.
That the female has a clitoris (belle@60) seems an important biological fact too often overlooked in evpsych, at least its popular manifestations. The clitoris has gotta be there for an evolutionary reason, right? Like maybe it encourages females to mate with males (among other naughty things it might encourage females to do), which causes babies to happen, which means the species survives. (Or is it simply, like the appendix, a vestigial organ, one that causes unfortunate complications for societies of male “rapists”?)
I’m a bit confused by the way different periods of human history are being elided in the comments here. Earliest homo sapiens on the Veldt and Inuits? Of course, with such slim evidence for early periods, we’re forced to use evidence from later periods (just very carefully, provisionally) to imagine, say, that earliest Veldt. Prehistoric archaeology may be more helpful here than, say, the Inuits. Belle’s OP seems to include insights gained from the extensive archaeological research on the millenia in between the Veldt and pastoralism and then agriculture/urbanization — useful for trying to imagine that Ur-Veldt.
Among the insights from that post-Ur-Veldt but before agriculture or even before pastoralism (but that might help us imagine that Ur-Veldt): there were so few people (including different hominids, like Neanderthals) on this planet for so long. So very very few. Every group must have developed ways to remain very very tight if its offspring were to survive (and thus “succeed” in evolutionary terms). These groups moved around A LOT, leaving the Veldt (I’m not sure all the fundamental modules were yet in their modern configurations at that point — I think the jury’s out on that), fanning out, and following the food and other advantages of different seasons and climates. Btw, I haven’t seen fishing/seafood mentioned here, but there’s plenty of evidence for pre-pastoral human groups learning e.g. exactly when the mussels or clams would be covering which beaches, and then traveling to those beaches at the right time. Just grab up all the food. Sit around and eat it together. Also, fishing itself (less glamorously macho than big-game hunting, I know.) We have no idea how these people arranged their sexual lives. Presumably, in ways that fostered successful reproduction and upbringing of the young, including through sexual activity that didn’t totally disrupt the dynamics of the whole group.
And in the spirit I think belle is trying to foster, I’ll add: one way of ensuring people do what they gotta do for their offspring to survive is to make survival look attractive. Like, gee, creating an environment full of experiences of pleasure and satisfaction. Including sexual pleasure and fun, but also including taking delight (people with one another, more often than not) in children, in stories, in bird songs, in pretty views, in swimming in a lake. Why don’t notions like pleasure and delight play a larger role in evolutionary psychology? (Do they play any role?) Isn’t curiosity (which I take to be hardwired to pleasure and delight, but that’s me) a fairly distinctive human trait and one vital to our success at adaptation to changing environments?
Some other things not being discussed: shelter, protective coverings (like clothing) and containers. Important if only to imagine how people’s time was spent (i.e., not just in “pure” leisure and not just sharpening hunting tools). E.g., collecting osier (or things like it), tufts from plants or (eventually) animals, and then preparing the raw materials to make thatch, baskets, clothing. Animal parts useful for a lot of this, too, but maybe because males did most of the hunting, the importance of weaving (because it has long been associated almost exclusively with women) usually gets overlooked. (See, for instance, Elizabeth Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.)
(Maybe more relevant to belle’s previous post, but also here):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/books/louise-j-kaplan-psychoanalyst-and-author-dies-at-82.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Louise%20J.%20Kaplan&st=cse

It would be interesting to see some study about why men are so much more likely to become fascinated with evo psycho stories than normal people are.

Evolutionary psychology probably explains this, because on the veldt you had to come up with some lame excuse about why you bashed that other person’s head in with some beast’s thigh bone.

The clitoris has gotta be there for an evolutionary reason, right?

Not right.

Things that look like important features of an organism, from our point of view, are not necessarily traits in an evolutionary sense and may or may not have been selected for. If you read even a little bit of evolutionary biology, what’s interesting is how divergent the traits that are actually the objects of selective pressure can be from the “traits” that a naive observer would identify looking at the organism.

One of my favorite examples is bipedalism in lizards. There’s gotta be some evolutionary reason why a lizard would run on two legs, right? Nope. It seems that the bipedal gait is often just an unwanted side-effect of the actual selected-for trait, a center of gravity toward the back of the body (which helps in making sharp turns):

The caudally situated body-COM [center of mass], however, might result in a lift of the front part of the body when accelerating … [leading to] observable distances passively covered bipedally as a consequence of the acceleration. In this way, no functional explanation of the phenomenon of lizard bipedalism is required and bipedalism can probably be considered non-adaptive in many cases.

Similarly, the lack of eyes in blind cavefish. You can tell a just-so story, like they atrophied in the absence of selective pressure, or it saves resources in development not to make them, but that’s wrong. Blind cavefish developed functional eyes, which are then covered up by other tissue. Why? Because the actual selected for trait is an overdevelopment of the midline of the head, which gives the fish a bigger jaw with more teeth and tastebuds. That this also results in the loss of eyes is just an incidental effect of how the regulatory genes interact:

what is going on in the blind cavefish is not selection for an economical reduction of the eyes, nor the accidental loss of an organ that has no effect: It is positive selection for a feature that is only indirectly related to the eyes.

In general, the idea that “when I look at this organism, I see X, so X must have been selected for by evolution” is not a scientific argument. And it should go without saying, if the actual phenotypic traits are so non-obvious in stuff like lizards and cavefish, where we can dissect them, make mechanical models, identify the genes active in different structures at different points in development, etc., then we definitely shouldn’t presume anything about them when it comes to human sexuality.

Also, I second whoever recommended Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest earlier. Ajay and others who doubt that food-sharing and other egalitarian norms could be common among hunter-gatherers, should check it out.

William@80: Lone Bull’s Mistake is now online in the public domain at http://www.archive.org/stream/lonebullsmistak00presgoog – I never read it, but it goes on the hopper of books I’ll read when I get a round tuit.

The book looks like fiction from a quick glance, and there’s a similar story among the Plains Cree (who I know better than the Lakota. Not that Algonquian linguistics does anything for me as a computer programmer in Germany.) The author appears to have spent much of his life circulating among the northern plains tribes, so he could well have produced a publishable novelized version of a traditional story with a nice happy ending for his white readers.

My guess is that the core of it is a standard morality tale to prevent the young hunters from running out to hunt the buffalo and messing it up for the rest of the tribe. The skittishness of buffalo herds, and the techniques for using large amounts of dividing labor to maximize returns by cornering the herd before slaughter – those things sure are true.

As always to the AA or the NA, I’m late to the party. And I may be banished from society for evermore. But, then again, I attend though late because I’ve got a breed to feed. Or so, I convince myself.

To resurrect the first sentence of this whole wonderful exercise in evopsych, I hope someone amongst (it is a pretty ironic correction by my web browser. ‘amongst’ was listed along with ‘monogamist’ by its spell-check. Polyamory was NOT the reason for our divorce. Alcoholistic tendencies was. But, as I said, that’s a whole new thing altogether.) the powers that be, recognise and confirm that 80% (maybe 75. Perhaps 51. The bulk, that’s what I mean) are expendable. Really. Even, in today’s PC world, a bulk of us are really not necessary for the species to continue (in the strictest sense of ‘species’ and ‘continue’)

That said, much as the original article over at Slate be over the top; to Belle; methinks the lady doth protest too much. A large – much too large for me to gather inputs for a blog comment – portion of humanity, including and up to her having the wherewithal to make this (and the previous one. Which I read in its entirety, sheepishly shying away from paid work, though paid) blog posting, is summarily attributable to the largesse of a few alpha males, in the past very few centuries or so, where the women were, as mentioned, receptacles of semen, of course, with exceptions that proved the rule.

The winds caressing the leaves are a wonderful metaphor for the current generation to come out of that mindset, no doubt. But, equally without doubt is the fact that having a womb rather than a penis is a ‘fact of life’ issue rather than the ‘purpose of living’. In cue with a few subjects prior to this at CT, the empowerment of the vagina is far more appreciated in this ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY9od2yuNVk ) rather than our own quaint chauvinism. Be it porcine or otherwise.

This all goes back to the veldt, when guys would claim it all goes back to the trees.

I said what authority they had stemmed from having demonstrable knowledge about things useful to the band.

And Scott, who seems to know something about the topic, said that’s not really true. Seems pretty clear.

It would be nice if we could avoid replacing the functionalist just-so stories of evo-psycho with functionalist just-so stories of our own.

Meredith @ 83: the title of this review of Elisabeth Lloyd’s book ‘The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution’ may go some way towards explaining the neglect of this topic…

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDcQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uhh.hawaii.edu%2F~ronald%2Fpubs%2F2008-LloydReview-Bio%26Phil.pdf&ei=K88VT5GOMMXMhAed6-2IDA&usg=AFQjCNHhrZGutxxlSYrSLIyFDsAJxNvzPA&sig2=FxF7mf4bzt1xheXDUolNFA

(It’s worth reading beyond the title, though, as its an informative review of an excellent book)

While we’re being sensitive: the ! in !Kung isn’t just there for a laugh; it indicates an alveolar click (in this instance a nasal alveolar click).

“Human capacity certainly allows for the fact that men prefer prosperous mates. This actual, existing preference is well-documented.”

Of course. But that is not the question. The question is whether or not you find cases where men, on average, care MORE about the prosperity of prospective mates than women do.

@mds/101: Alas, biology does militate against this, unless I have been mistaken all these years. But thank you!

Of course. But that is not the question. The question is whether or not you find cases where men, on average, care MORE about the prosperity of prospective mates than women do.

The China Daily link you provided doesn’t discuss men’s views on women who own homes, nor does it make the claim that there aren’t places where men place greater priority than women on a mate’s property. The China Daily link doesn’t indicate that the pollsters attempted to control for wealth and social status, etc. Your argument is designed merely to assume away cultural influences: anything that isn’t done by a majority, as revealed by opinion polling, isn’t relevant to a discussion of natural selection.

Lord knows it’s nice to finally see an evo psych type asserting that rape, for instance, isn’t a function of natural selection, even if you arrive at that conclusion in a rather odd way. (There are no societies in which a majority of children are conceived by rape, right?)

Anyway, even the evidence you provide doesn’t support your argument:

However, only 57 percent of women accept the claim that working well is inferior to marrying well, down from 71 percent in 2010.

So in less than two years, social mores on these things can change significantly. Sounds to me like a variable with some pretty strong cultural determinants.

politicalfootball @ 106:

The China Daily link you provided doesn’t discuss men’s views on women who own homes, nor does it make the claim that there aren’t places where men place greater priority than women on a mate’s property. The China Daily link doesn’t indicate that the pollsters attempted to control for wealth and social status, etc.

Hmm, I’d like to confirm these assertions, but try as I might, I can’t find China Daily amongst the online peer-reviewed journals accessible from my university’s network. A glaring oversight, apparently. When I have enough time, I’ll run over to the biology department and see if they have a hardcopy mixed in with back issues of The American Journal of Human Genetics. If not, I’ll try the statistics department next.

Jim Henley @ 104:

Alas, biology does militate against this, unless I have been mistaken all these years.

Next you’ll be claiming research applications of advanced biotechnology to human reproduction is a social construct. As if H. ergaster didn’t demonstrate fitness by means of a “well-equipped wet lab,” ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo.

Oh, and as an addendum – it should be noted that I feel sure that Karl Rove can be beloved. It’s just that wealth alone isn’t helpful when he’s evil and looks like he’s a fungal growth in a suit. He might find women more easily in part because we all know his name and some people will find evil fungus-heads hot. It takes all kinds.

Plus, there are sex workers who will prioritize wealth, and so a rich dude like the Rove might have more sexual access, as he has more access to everything workers provide. However, evidence that Rich Dudes have access says something causal about what they have access too? Meh. To flip the argument, it’s a bit like saying children in the third world have evolved to work long hours in sweat shop conditions because survival allows them to acquire enough time to have their own babies.

I believe the real argument is this: “human resiliency is an evolutionary strategy.”

To which I can agree.

Doctor Slack, I’m not quite sure what the reason for your complaint is. I’m not even being very critical about traditional Inuit social structure – the system did work, as far as it goes. But it corresponded very little to the rather utopian portrayals it often gets these days. Elders told a lot of stories, but the practical day to day survival knowledge was learned less at their knee than by watching the more immediately productive members of the community do things, and then doing them yourself. Boys learned hunting from hunters. Girls learned sewing (they did a lot of sewing) from women who sew. This is the kind of work that the elders largely no longer did.

The elders’ stories are far more often morality plays of various kinds than practical knowledge. Tales about the importance of listening to the elders, of failing to comply with the complex ritual and social rules of life and then being punished for it, and of the terrible things that can befall people and the importance of being ready for it. Some stories serve a quasi-religious function: creation tales, stories about the importance of morality, sharing, not being egotistical – the kinds of things people expect from Sunday School. But also, stories that serve, in part, to reinforce and perpetuate the position of the elders and legitimize their role. But not the necessary knowledge for coping in the Arctic.

There weren’t any elders who spoke English when I was a kid and I wasn’t in the Inuktitut stream at school, so I don’t know exactly what they taught from first-hand experience, only from interviews and books. But I learned to make an igloo from an active hunter, who also demonstrated how to skin a seal and cut the meat. (And how to serve it – raw, sliced thin, dipped in something I want very much to remember as soy sauce but probably wasn’t. Not how to catch a seal, mind you, but I considered the skinning and eating icky business anyway, and I was only a little white kid.) My carving teacher was an active carver who actually earned money doing it. I learned those things next to Inuit children – I don’t think they learned them from the elders any more than I did. By the 70s, it was already all very different from traditional life on the land, but I don’t think that part had changed.

This picture of the elders as the font of knowledge is a relatively modern development – the kind of knowledge they were praised for in the past was their knowledge of how to maintain order in the community. That I’m cynical about current portrayals of the role of elders is simply a refusal to idealize past social structures, the same refusal I apply when rejecting the belief that everything was peachy in America in some distant past when women stayed home, gays stayed in closets, immigrants were few and non-white folk knew their place.

Well, dog my cats! Here I got all lured in by the promise of spiders, and what do I find? No spiders! And a whole lot of free-wheeling, speculative evolutionary Kiplingesque hoo-ha, where modern approximations are assumed to be actual equivalents. Not even a single spider. Just a whole lot of arm-waving and pronouncements about how things should be improved from how men have buggered them up. Now isn’t that just like a woman? Whoops, I hear my wife calling; got to go.

(However, in the meantime, to clarify one reason I was a little short with you: “But it corresponded very little to the rather utopian portrayals it often gets these days.” Again, this will not do. What “rather utopian portrayals”? From whom? I would want examples. At least one example.)

I put this together to post in the last evo psych thread, but I think is still relevant: All this talk of ad hominids and evo psych put me in mind of a fascinating essay that I read the other day proposing the idea of a “long slow sexual revolution” as a rival narrative of the evolution of human sexuality to the tired, sexist, anti-feminist “man-the-promiscuous-horny-hunter/woman-the-choosy-chaste-gatherer” confection that is so popular in the media:

Becoming human over the last five million years has included sexual changes almost as monumental as transformations to other aspects of our bodies, cognitive abilities, tool use, and social life. This sexual change has made use of some of the same resources and adaptive tendencies, and been instrumental in facilitating these other changes. Overall, the pattern of human sexual evolution has moved toward [Here I skip a bunch of bullet points] […] a flexible, even contradictory sexuality, which, although it confounds the simple description of human sexual ‘nature’, is actually an adaptive strategy given an animal that is going to have to adapt quickly and respond sensitively to shifting contexts […].

(There follows a well-referenced and wide-ranging discussion that takes in, among other things, his opinion of the worst excesses of evolutionary psychology and people in that field need to take more responsibility for their media uptake.)

The author, anthropologist Greg Downey, makes no claim to being an important researcher in this area, but he references (and links to) a range of anthropologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, population geneticists. As a bonus, various heavy hitters in the area drop in to his comments thread. All of which made this a great starting point for me to start to understand this stuff better. He has a couple more parts planned, which I’m looking forward to.

Meredith, I did have the moment of pondering The Penis Imperative as a lost Robert Ludlum novel. Apart from that, thanks for clarifying, and much agreement now that I know what you’re doing.

Yeah, the previous thread was definitely superior in this regard (and perhaps others).

OK. Be the change you want see in the comment thread:

“Spiders generally use elaborate courtship rituals to prevent the large females from eating the small males before fertilization, except where the male is so much smaller that he is not worth eating. In web-weaving species precise patterns of vibrations in the web are a major part of the rituals, while patterns of touches on the female’s body are important in many spiders that hunt actively, and may “hypnotize” the female. Gestures and dances by the male are important for jumping spiders, which have excellent eyesight. If courtship is successful, the male injects his sperm from the pedipalps into the female’s genital opening, known as the epigyne, on the underside of her abdomen. Female’s reproductive tracts vary from simple tubes to systems that include seminal receptacles in which females store sperm and release it when they are ready.

Males of the genus Tidarren amputate one of their palps before maturation and enter adult life with one palp only. The palps are 20% of male’s body mass in this species, and detaching one of the two improves mobility. In the Yemeni species Tidarren argo, the remaining palp is then torn off by the female. The separated palp remains attached to the female’s epigynum for about four hours and apparently continues to function independently. In the meantime the female feeds on the palpless male. In over 60% of cases the female of the Australian redback spider kills and eats the male after it inserts its second palp into the female’s genital opening; in fact the males co-operate by trying to impale themselves on the females’ fangs. Observation shows that most male redbacks never get an opportunity to mate, and the “lucky” ones increase the likely number of offspring by ensuring that the females are well-fed. However males of most species survive a few matings, limited mainly by their short life spans. Some even live for a while in their mates’ webs”

Source – Wikipedia

But I’m glad you talked about lizards — I found it all very interesting. Spiders are interesting, too. I wonder if lizards and spiders are as curious about us humans (or about one another) as we humans (well, many of us) are about them (and about one another).

I wonder if GIANT spiders would beat GIANT lizards, or giant lizards would beat giant spiders?

I wonder if, in fact, giant spiders evolved to beat giant lizards, and this is what killed the dinosaurs, but then the giant spider males had nothing left to demonstrate their hunting prowess on, so the giant spider females wouldn’t fuck them any more, and the giant spiders died out too.

Actually, I don’t wonder that. I am completely sure that’s what happened.

Most people should shut the fuck up about wolves most of the time.

Presumably, Liam Neeson is exempt.

[Slams door, runs to attic to cry on the shoulder of ghost Geena Davis in a denim peasant dress.]

Hey, don’t blame us. You’re the one who said “Evopsych” three times.

Thank you praisegod barebone@99 for the essay on Lloyd’s book! It’s late and I’ve only read through it quickly once, but I will reread — and Lloyd’s book looks well worth reading.

Two overlooked points:

(1) People are throwing the “evo psych” label around rather loosely. There’s a field called Sociobiology which attempts to understand animal behavior — all kinds of animals, all kinds of behavior — as something affected by evolution. There’s a branch of sociobiology called evolutionary psychology, which attempts to explain human behavior while making certain other assumptions — a “modular structure” of mind, a bygone “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness”, etc. It’s possible to take sociobiology quite seriously while being dismissive of EP; I’d guess that most practicing anthropologists are in that category.

(2) Belle seems to be viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as dwellers in a veritable Garden of Eden. There’s food for all, there’s girls who want to have fun, etc. Bluntly, it ain’t so. Yes, most of the times, things look pretty good –for say ten months of the year. But almost always, there’s a stretch of a month or so when the easy hunting is over and the band breaks up and people are pretty much on their own –they traipse about in groups of two or three and settle for eating squirrels and bird eggs rather than giraffe steaks. At best, it’s dull and tedious.

And now and then, maybe two years out of twenty, climate really sucks. It rains and rains. Or it doesn’t rain, and the water holes dry up, and the animals that one hunts are few and scrawny. And life is isn’t fun, and people actually starve (or they did before modern states started to intervene in Bushmen lives).

This is why the Bushmen keep their numbers down, below the “carrying capacity” the visiting anthropologists have calculated that their population might rise to — to keep the band alive when the hunting is very bad. And this is why they keep some of their elders alive, despite the apparent cost, because the elders remember where the badgers or the springbok holed up during the last last great droughts, the elders remember the bushes with the sourtasting roots that could be pounded into a paste that ccould be eaten, and hopefully the elders remember the patterns of the night sky that presaged great changes in the weather and the sacred prayers that reminded the gods of their duty to believers. Not all of this is Fun.

And beyond this, we are talking about hunter-gathers as a stage of human evolution lasting over hundreds of thousands of years — over millions of years, given a liberal definition of “human.” And most of the time, even in Africa, we’re talking about interglacial periods — eras of 60 to 90 thousand years which ran 10 to 15 degrees cooler on average than the nice warm Holocene postglacial we now live in. Animals were bigger and tougher then, less friendly toward annoying two legged predators. Technology was simpler — humans didn’t have bows and arrows then, didn’t have nets for fishing, didn’t have metal tipped spears, didn’t always have nice shaped rocks to mount on spears, didn’t even have nice bowls to grind grass seeds to an edible powder, didn’t even have fire as a regular thing till maybe 300 thousand years ago. THAT’S your “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” — that gawd awful long long period before agriculture began in which humans learned how to build small societies which stayed alive where single individuals died, learned to build simple tools, learned to making clothing and ever more complex tools, learned to decorate their flesh to increase their sexual appeal, learned to talk to one another, to make plans, to address the gods, to dream.

It wasn’t Eden.

Not going to get into the whole ev psych thing (I do have a lot of time for it, though, when the subjects are ants). I just wanted to say this: sex is not cheap for males, when the males are spiders.

When you are asked “this guy makes a million, this guy is unemployed and homeless, which would you rather marry”, what response would you expect? To cite results like that as evidence for some genetic predisposition that women have for rich guys is so outlandish one wants to cry.

You seem to have completely misunderstood the relevance of the text you quote. It is part of the authors’ argument against Buller’s homogamy hypothesis for women’s mating preferences. The evidence that women have a “genetic predisposition” to prefer higher status mates comes from studies finding the preference across numerous cultures, from studies finding the preference in females of other species that share our parental investment model, and from other lines of evidence.

Oddly, I was just reading Peter Freuchen on the Inuit. (Danish Arctic explorer, early 20th century — though he lived long enough to be involved with the Danish Resistance in WWII — married an Inuit, lived with them for years and went about as native as a white explorer could back then.)

Freuchen points out that women had a pretty high status in Inuit culture because there was a shortage of them. And there was a shortage of them because female infanticide was really, really common. One recent paper suggests that between one quarter and one fifth of girl babies were simply killed at birth.

The reasons for this… well. That’s a can of worms. The Inuit straight-out said it was an economic thing: girl babies wouldn’t grow up to bring home food. Current researchers are divided between those who take them at their word and those who say something else was going on. It is, as you can imagine, a fairly sharp-edged debate. (N.B., the Inuit don’t do this any more — female infanticide, senilicide and invalidicide have all pretty much disappeared since the mid-20th century. So it’s a debate based on second- and third-hand accounts from a century ago, with an occasional sprinkling of hard data.)

Whatever the reason, the whole “women had awesome high status in Inuit culture”, while certainly true, is just a piece of something that’s darker and more complicated.

Doug M.

Instead of tilting at windmills, Belle, you might want to educate yourself about actual research into mating preferences by actual evolutionary psychologists.

Similarly, Don Quixote’s time would have been better spent in going after those large structures that harnessed wind power to grind grain.

DelRey, nothing in the article you cited provides any evidence for any kind of “genetic predisposition”. Every single piece of evidence presented, even if we take it at face value, is fully consistent with an explanation based on cultural norms.

No it isn’t. The fact that the preference has been found in numerous diverse human cultures, as well as in other species in which female reproductive success is enhanced by high status mates, is strong evidence against the hypothesis that it is the product of “cultural norms.”

Just a note on Belle Waring’s comment:
“I will now astound you by mentioning that people who are so old and infirm they cannot chew their own food are not wonderful babysitters in the way a healthy 65-year old can be.”
earlier on this long thread.

It should not astound anyone here that otherwise vigorous, I dunno, thirty-forty-fifty year olds could be good babysitters, toolmakers or hunters and still have bad teeth. Or no teeth. Just visit England to see this up close.

Before modern dentistry, I suspect being unable to chew was not the result of being “so old and infirm” as it was due to having terrible teeth. So, before the advent of Gerber’s and applesauce (not readily available in Greenland or Swaziland) chewing for the toothless, old or young, doesn’t seem like such a sacrifice, especially if the old liability was not such a liability after all. Small groupings of humans could also ill afford losing experienced members as well as children.

We must try to remove the lens of our current experience in making these judgments.

Evolutionary explanations don’t work that way. Whatever men or women may wish, or whatever any man, woman, or other organism’s conscious intention may be, different actions have different implications for reproductive success (ie, for how often a gene reappears in the gene pool), and those actions will happen increasingly often relative to alternatives, other things being equal. Organisms are purposive; selection is not.

Oh. Oh dear. This is going to require a considerably lengthier reply than I can hope to accomplish at 3:00 AM, sleep meds effective or ineffective. It’ll have to wait. Others who are familiar with the errors geo’s making here really should feel free to explain in my absence; geo’s not a troll, and will be receptive, I think, to correction. Which I will try to return and provide tomorrow if need be.

151: “The fact that the preference has been found in numerous diverse human cultures, as well as in other species in which female reproductive success is enhanced by high status mates, is strong evidence against the hypothesis that it is the product of “cultural norms.””

It seems that the factual claim is highly disputed but I’ll focus on the logical issue. If in a given human society marrying a high-status male is economically advantageous for women, and that probably is the case in any patriarchal society, then such a preference is fully explainable by cultural factors (or even by simple common sense). A girl growing up in a society where the economic status of a woman depends on her husband is probably going to prefer a rich husband. What is in need of explanation is why anybody would look for an evolutionary explanation for something so obvious. To make an evolutionary explanation at least plausible, you’d have to show that women consistently prefer high-status males even when they personally would be better, or as well, off with a low-status male. That I think will be hard to demonstrate.

It seems that the factual claim is highly disputed but I’ll focus on the logical issue.

What factual claim? Show us where it is disputed. I assume you’re referring a serious scientific disputation.

If in a given human society marrying a high-status male is economically advantageous for women, and that probably is the case in any patriarchal society, then such a preference is fully explainable by cultural factors (or even by simple common sense). A girl growing up in a society where the economic status of a woman depends on her husband is probably going to prefer a rich husband. What is in need of explanation is why anybody would look for an evolutionary explanation for something so obvious. To make an evolutionary explanation at least plausible, you’d have to show that women consistently prefer high-status males even when they personally would be better, or as well, off with a low-status male. That I think will be hard to demonstrate.

That doesn’t follow at all. If it were a matter of mere “economic advantage” rather than reproductive advantage we would expect the preference to be exhibited independently of sex. We don’t find that. Women exhibit a much stronger preference for high status mates than men do, across numerous diverse cultures and across individuals of wildly varying status within cultures. And we wouldn’t expect to find the same pattern in nonhuman species, where “economic advantage” is meaningless. But we do find the pattern in other species in which females acquire a reproductive advantage from high status mates.

“If it were a matter of mere “economic advantage” rather than reproductive advantage we would expect the preference to be exhibited independently of sex. We don’t find that.”

It seems you are mixing at least two separate arguments: the theory that females are hardwired to looking for a sex partner with evolutionary “fitness” so his genes will be passed on to her offspring, increasing their chance of survival. And the theory that females are hardwired to looking to bond with a high-status male (“provider”) because the economic advantage conferred increases her own as well as her children’s chance of survival. These two concepts get mixed up all the time in pop EP literature. I contend that the provider theory is not testable against the much simpler explanation that I offered. And the other theory is very difficult to test because if bonding with a rich guy is advantageous, then in all likelihood sleeping with a rich guy is also advantageous.

And I repeat that nothing in the paper you referenced proves what you say it should prove. Nothing. And yes the claims are disputed. The paper you referenced is a response to somebody who disputed these very claims and he’s not the only one (but I don’t feel I have the burden here to provide references). You may disagree with Buller but you’ll have to concede that he disputes EP claims about mating behavior.

“If people tend to prefer high-status mates because of general economic benefits rather than reproductive advantage we would expect the preference to be independent of sex. And we would expect it to decline as women acquire greater power and wealth.”

Unless being male happens to confer “higher status” is almost all current societies. And how long would you expect it to take for some underlying genetic preference to be expressed over some long-standing social pattern (or conversely, how long might it take for the social pattern to fade)? I’m aware of some research that shows social patterns can have appreciable effects up to 500 years after the end of the institutions which gave rise to them. And are the preferences those of the women, or the internalised preferences of their families?

Also – how may current societies have not been significantly influenced over the last 200 years by external societies – mostly male-dominated?

A frequent cause of dispute in Australian aboriginal society was “adultery” – younger women running off with young [low status] men. Even if women had a genetic preference for high-status males, are there no countervailing forces? EG the attractions of health and youth?

Does the evidence to date allow us to disentangle this enough to make even half-way decent hypotheses? Not on what I have seen.

Peter T

A few key weaknesses in the whole evo-psych fabric: A biologist of my acquaintance told me something that the whole “what’s the function of x” discourse overlooks – traits do not get selected FOR, they get selected AGAINST. Nature’s method of changing the gene pool is for some to have less success. If it is not being selected against, it may well hang around for ever.

Huh? Let’s say a mutation arises for improved eyesight. Organisms with the mutation have greater success at finding food and avoiding predators. As a result, they tend to leave more offspring than organisms that lack the mutation. The mutation is selected FOR, not against. And what does this have to do with evolutionary psychology specifically, rather than natural selection in general, anyway? Why would your claim here be a “weakness” of EP even if it were true?

A second remark she made was that, in almost all mammal populations studied in this regard, about 5% were homosexual (yes, there are gay elephants, hedgehogs and dolphins). This illustrates a point made by EO Wilson at http://www.cogsci.msu.edu/DSS/2006-2007/Wilson/Rethinking_July_20.pdf. Evolution operates at lots of levels. Homosexuality looks dysfunctional at the individual level, but is clearly not at the group level.

Again, huh? How is it “clear” that homosexuality is not “dysfunctional” at the group level? What is the evidence for that claim? And again, whether the claim is true or not, how is it a “weakness of the whole evo-psych fabric?”

The same question applies to your third baffling statement, about genes and RNA.

Low fertility among hunter-gatherers vs. early farmers:

Can’t cite a reference, I’m old and read a lot but don’t keep track of it. I know it’s findable for the internet-abled youngsters. This came from a book by someone who spent a lot of time with aborigines in Australia, IIRC. Book from the 70’s or so.

Women ovulate when they have accumulated a specific amount of body fat. They need X calories worth of body fat to ovulate. A low carb diet along with nursing means they go 2 or 3 years between periods once they have a baby. A small group means there may not be an eligible male right then, either.

High carb. farming diets allow the young mothers to accumulate X calories quickly, since grains pack on fat much more quickly than eating fat or meat does.

Also, some have done studies on how animal herders used their flock management skills to run agricultural societies, that the difference between keeping a bunch of goats alive and running a village full of farmers is not that great.

Love the addition of you to the group. For some reason, don’t even mind all the ‘fuck’ from you, even though I’ll old and usually do.

The key words are “greater” and “more”. Greater and more than other competing members of their species. So no, they are not advantaged – the others are disadvantaged.

Again, huh? The mutation provides a reproductive advantage to organisms that have it, relative to organisms that don’t have it. That’s why it’s selected FOR. It would only be selected AGAINST if it provided a reproductive disadvantage.
And again, what does this have to do with evolutionary psychology specifically anyway? How would your claim here be a “weakness” of EP even if it were true?

How is it clear that homosexuality is not dysfunctional at the group level? Because it seems to be widespread and an evolutionary stable proportion of the gene pool. If it were comparatively dysfunctional it would be selected against.

Why do you think homosexuality “seems to be widespread and an evolutionary stable proportion of the gene pool?” As far as I’m aware, there is no data on the rate of homosexuality in humans or any other species over long periods of time. We don’t even have good data on the CURRENT rate of homosexuality in humans. So there is no basis for your claim that homosexuality is “an evolutionary stable proportion of the gene pool.” You’re jumping to conclusions that are not supported by evidence.

But your argument here would be incorrect even if your empirical claim were true. For a number of reasons, a trait may persist in a population for a long period of time despite being harmful (“dysfunctional”). Many genes cause, or contribute to, more than one trait. A mutation that produces both a harmful trait and a beneficial trait will be selected for if the benefit outweighs the harm. A classic example of this mechanism is the sickle cell mutation, which confers both the harm of increased risk of sickle cell anemia and the benefit of increased resistance to malaria. A similar mechanism may be responsible for the persistence of homosexuality and other harmful traits, such as reduced fertility, and genetic diseases.

And yet again, what does this have to do with EP anyway? How is any of this a “weakness in the whole evo-psych fabric?”

I’ll add one more and then let it go. First – agricultural societies are at most 10,000 years old. For the 200,000 years before that (modern humans), or the 4.5 million years before that (hominid evolution) we lived differently. Evidence from how we live now is not evidence for how we lived then – or evidence for a genetic disposition. This applies to things like “status”.

Being hierarchical alone is not enough. And being closer to the top of the hierarchy does not in itself guarantee greater access to resources or some other driver of greater genetic success. It depends on a lot of other things. To give one example, hunter-gatherer societies are often (not always) quite violent – and the higher status males are the main targets (a pattern that sometimes carries over into modern societies – British aristocratic casualties in World War 1 were 25% higher proportionally than non-aristocratic ones, AND they participated more; there’s a reason Smith is a more common name than Plantagenet). The female who wanted a dependable, living partner would presumably do better to avoid that particular form of status. Evolution is about differential reproductive success – I’ll put more credence in this story when someone demonstrates that, other things being equal, higher male standing translates into a larger share of the gene pool over a long-ish period (say, a millenium).

First – agricultural societies are at most 10,000 years old. For the 200,000 years before that (modern humans), or the 4.5 million years before that (hominid evolution) we lived differently. Evidence from how we live now is not evidence for how we lived then – or evidence for a genetic disposition.

Yes it is. The more commonly a behavior appears across a large and diverse range of human societies, the more strongly it is likely to be rooted in our biology. It is very unlikely that the cross-cultural pattern of mating preferences found by Buss and other researchers arose by chance. Attributing it to “culture” is no help, since it just raises the question of why so many cultures exhibit the same pattern. The fact that the pattern is also found in nonhuman species that share our reproductive model is further evidence of its evolutionary basis.