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why won't she sit on my face? (pg. 8)
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| Looney4Clooney |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Because the day to day life of an obese American is directly comparable to the life of a prehistoric human in an untamed natural environment.
Where do these numbers come from? |
your hardware is pretty much the same. Culture unlike evolution happens rather fast. So there is a juxtaposition. There is no need for males to be aggressive but we are and testosterone was probably more useful when we were fighting bears or if you ask mat , dinosaurs. There is also the overlap of culture and evolution in that culture had a evolutionary purpose.
(edit, i just realised the first bit was to someone else )
Numbers , well that particular one regarding our ancestry comes from DNA research. As far as where i got the, research from Mark Leary which have been put into book form. The number is obviously an approximation but it does come from solid research and meta analysis of that research.
And then the other things i mentioned mostly from Dawkin's work.
I am just a hobbyist so although i do read quite a bit about it, i do know that this is one side that is championed by many but both including the side that made these theories can't account for everything. |
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| Beatflux |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Should be Beatflux's custom title, really. |
Why say something nasty? |
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| Looney4Clooney |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
It would behoove evolution to weed them out and favor those that don't have complications. |
well considering what child mortality is now and what it used to be, i think evolution did just that. But then again, who knows. That could just be medicine. We apparently have the same we did since the dawn of the human. Perhaps some more than others. The fact that humans are here is proof that we are a successful species. PRetty good odds you go extinct given enough time. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jon_Snow
Call it what you will, big , or what not. Blame it on society if that what makes you feel better. My point is stop trying to emasculate us men who act like men. We were born to hunt. To deny our birth right, our instincts is lie plain and simple. |
Raise your standards then, hunter ;)
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
And then the other things i mentioned mostly from Dawkin's work. |
Source? And source of his source?
What Sys said is spot on, actually. The whole "men seek to inseminate as many women as possible" is a self-defeating strategy because:
- You can't take care of a child unless you're around;
- You can't take care of too many children because of "1";
- Women are unlikely to go for proponents of mass insemination because odds are their children won't be looked after their mate (refer to "1").
Evolutionary biology is still recovering from some bad ideas it used to espouse back in the day (such as the false "altruism vs egotism" dilemma), so unless Dawkins said it very recently - and has a recent study to back this up - you should probably take it with a grain of salt. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| Perhaps this is some statistical concept I just can't wrap my brain around, but mathematically how can men be more promiscuous than women? I've read that the average man in the UK has 13 sexual partners in a lifetime, whereas the average for women is only 7. But how? Surely the number should be equal for both genders? I always took the disparity to be men exaggerating their exploits and women downplaying theirs. |
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| Lira |
Actually, you should be sceptical either way.
And are we really going to blame all of AnotherWay's problems all on Mother Nature? :p |
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| Looney4Clooney |
i addressed the issues you mentioned in a previous post.
The main point is that men invest as little as they can get away with while not sacrificing the say a possible mate rejecting him because her adaptive behaviour is to be selective and chose a mate that will help.
1. you have to understand the energy a female puts in and what a male puts in are not the same. Therefore a male can have more than one mate.
2. it doesn't matter because worst case scenario, it dies. Best case , some other male things that offspring is theirs and does the work for them.
3. Women are more selective but not fortune tellers. So yes, their tendency to be selective does balance the equation but not enough to make it 50%. So males , as our DNA supports are more promiscuous.
It is a complex issue.
Regarding a source,
well i'm pretty sure the selfish Gene goes over all this.
Book by Mark Leary.
Brian Charlesworth
Mat Stevens
there isn't one source because the research happens at different levels. You have those that work with dna. Those that are staticians .... But Dawkins , is probably a good place to start. By no means the most important but he is understandable and you can start your journey there and then see the research he uses, the people that contest him .... |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
No we're not. Human babies take an extremely long time to become self-reliant - it's years before they can even walk or feed themselves with any reliability. Without constant attention, they would die very quickly. This means that human parents are required to stay as part of a family unit for very long periods, to ensure the fruits of their genetic seed don't starve to death after a few weeks. Furthermore, human pregnancy is very long and incapacitating. The male cannot leave the female during the latter stages of pregnancy, because she becomes increasingly physically handicapped by the pregnancy, progressively more vulnerable to outside dangers and far less able to do essential things like hunt for food. Consequently, it is an evolutionary necessity that human sexual partners are programmed to want to stay together, so the father will help the mother during pregnancy and with raising the child. That is essentially why human society is rooted around a basic ideal of the monogamous relationship. |
Unfortunately, the actual biological and anthropological evidence does not support this rambling conjecture. Although you correctly point out that both very young human offspring and pregnant females would struggle to survive in the wild without support, you err by leaping to the conclusion that the father of those offspring that would ordinarily provide that support. Furthermore, even to the extent that the father does participate in supporting pregnant females and offspring, there is no basis from which to infer that this supported would necessitate a “monogamous relationship” or “family unit.”
In birds, for instance, it is very common to observe “social monogamy”—that is, an identifiable male/female pair that share territory and cooperate in meeting their basic needs, including raising offspring. Yet actual sexual monogamy is rare amongst those species, so male birds often help raise offspring they did not father.
In mammals, even social monogamy is rare. There are a variety of reproductive and living arrangements, but the most common is for females live in groups where they can depend on each other for help during pregnancy and in raising young without support from males. Humans’ closest relatives do not adhere to that model—chimps and bonobos live in social groups that include both males and females. There too, however, monogamy is absent and tasks such as supporting pregnant females and offspring are shared by the group generally.
Nor does the evidence suggest that homo sapiens might have evolved toward social or sexual monogamy since diverging from their shared ancestors. In his Atlas of World Cultures, for example, George Peter Murdock surveyed 563 human societies and concluded that only 17% exhibit any form of monogamy. It is difficult to reconcile these data with the idea of an evolutionary basis for modern Western idea of the “family unit” or for human monogamy more generally. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Perhaps this is some statistical concept I just can't wrap my brain around, but mathematically how can men be more promiscuous than women? I've read that the average man in the UK has 13 sexual partners in a lifetime, whereas the average for women is only 7. But how? Surely the number should be equal for both genders? I always took the disparity to be men exaggerating their exploits and women downplaying theirs. |
http://www.careerpioneernetwork.org..._hypothesis.pdf
this meta analysis . although geared towards showing differences in general between male and female was pretty important. And the list of research at the bottom , well , the problem i think is that there are so many that unless this is your career, you have to rely on experts and their opinion. There is no way to review all the data so i'm just going with what the prevalent view is among the scientific community.
ah and speaking of people to do the work for you , great timing arbiter. I'm going to go spread my seed, |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
Nor does the evidence suggest that homo sapiens might have evolved toward social or sexual monogamy since diverging from their shared ancestors. In his Atlas of World Cultures, for example, George Peter Murdock surveyed 563 human societies and concluded that only 17% exhibit any form of monogamy. It is difficult to reconcile these data with the idea of an evolutionary basis for modern Western idea of the family unit or for human monogamy more generally. |
All right, just so my post doesn't get too long, I'm going to focus exclusively on this.
Assuming the population sampling isn't skewed for methodological reasons (that can always happen for the smallest of reasons), we can't draw any conclusion from this until we know what all the options are and whether these options are more prevalent in a situation or another.
For example, it is well true that in traditional Nepalese culture polyandry is the rule - but that's because men usually have to spend too much time away from home, and women only marry brothers, who take turns looking after the children. All else being equal, a person is more likely to take care of a nephew than a random kid whose father happens to be a total stranger. If a guy isn't a cuckold and the father is someone from his group, then a case can be made for polygamy - and then you'd get rules of exogamy/endogamy depending on how it's done.
An assumption Jack and I made was: If you're going to defend polygamy in a society like ours, you should change all variables except for those that are necessary to have a society like ours. To my knowledge (and I know a bit about Jê peoples around here), we're not nearly as group-oriented as some of these societies are - so monogamy is the best solution unless you change some of the variables.
Also, lest we forget, there's no reason to believe any of these societies have chosen the best available option: for all we know, all they chose is a system that currently works, either because it's more stable in their environment, or for some other similar reason. It may not even be something hard-wired, and even if it is, there's no reason to believe this is a one-size-fits-all solution. Some people (and some of our ancestors alike) may have been genetically predisposed to monogamy, unlike the other group.
So, in short,- There's no reason we should believe that the system most people/ancestors chose is either desirable or the best available option;
- There's no reason we should believe a cultural trait is genetically predisposed unless everyone who exhibits that genetic make-up adopt that behaviour (and in this particular case, there's no reason to believe we all share the same genes regarding this particular behaviour, otherwise we'd have to explain what's wrong with nearly 1 out of every 5 people surveyed by Murdock).
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
It may not even be something hard-wired, and even if it is, there's no reason to believe this is a one-size-fits-all solution. Some people (and some of our ancestors alike) may have been genetically predisposed to monogamy, unlike the other group. |
I think we agree that cultural or environmental factors—as you describe in referring to traditional Nepalese culture—probably account for most, if not all, of the observed variation in mating habits between human societies. Few species exhibit substantial interspecies variation in that regard, and there's no reason to think that different populations of human beings would have evolved along such disparate lines within their relatively brief existence.
Thus, you seem to misunderstand my point on a more basic level. I am not suggesting that any of this evidence conclusively establishes that humans are genetically predisposed toward polygamy. Rather, my argument is that the evidence certainly does not suggest, much less establish, that humans are genetically predisposed toward monogamy. Now, if one is inclined to weigh the various evidence of mating behavior in humans and other animals in order to evaluate which genetic disposition (if any) appears more likely in humans, then—well, I do not think it is a particularly close case. However, that would admittedly be no more than an educated guess.
As an aside, I am not sure what you mean when you refer to a "best solution" or "best available option." First of all, I am not sure for what or for whom you mean to suggest that "monogamy is the best solution." I also cannot discern whether you are referring to social monogamy, sexual monogamy, genetic monogamy, or some combination thereof. In any event, I think that is an entirely separate question from whether or not there is a genetic predisposition for any of those behaviors in humans. |
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