This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If this counts as "plausible" according to evo-psych, then evo-psych is even more of a joke than I already thought (I did not hold the field in high esteem as-is). No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.
A wise man once warned of crafting just-so stories, never do we ask "What does the world look like if this is true?" We can also ask "So, does the world look like that?" Our ancestral environment was not one in which Single Female Lawyers could get knocked up, yet remain sexy and self reliant; it was one in which chid rearing was insanely hard, and required the support of the tribe, who had no incentive to aid someone who couldn't be bothered to stay loyal to tribal hierarchy. It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed. Opportunities for surreptious coupling would be few and far between; a man and woman - who the tribe did not already recognize as coupled - would have arroused suspicions.
All this talk of evo-psych as applied to modern (emphasis on "modern" as opposed to "traditional") mating practises sounds like nothing so much as the never-ending attempts to square the absurdly high rates of obligate homosexuality in humans with basic evolutionary theory; perfunctory just-so stories that fall apart under the slightest investigation (something something "reasoning from first principles doesn't work for human interaction"). We know what kind of animal selects for female preference, and it doesn't look anything like human social organization. Even more, if we evolved for female preference, then why the hell is it failing so badly on the one metric that counts, human reproduction?
It should be blindingly obvious that humans short-circuited mating by means of social mediation, much like our simian relatives. This is far from uncommon in the animal kingdom; on the one hand, I can click on a Youtube video and watch the larva of a parasitoid wasp that has evolved an insanely specific method of feeding that allows it, without anything that could justify being called intelligence, to carefully eat only the parts of its host to provide nourishment without killing the host as long as possible. Then I can click on my "recommended" list and see a cheetah mother trapping a helpless foal, and spend hours watching her dumb-as-shit cubs play with said foal, lacking even the basic instinct to hunt. They literally didn't evolve the basic senses necessary to get food, they have to learn it from observation and trial-and-error, is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation (see also farming, which isn't an evolved instinct in any human observed)?
Woah. Here I was irresponsibly speculating how mate selection might have worked in the ancestral environment when I should have just asked you because you know exactly how it was.
Contrary to common belief, the ancestral environment was not the biblical Middle East. We can infer from the relative testes size of humans relative to other primates that women were unlikely to mate with different men during their fertile period compared to Chimps but probably still somewhat likely compared to Gorillas. Of course, there are all kinds of confounders -- the most important one probably is that with humans, female fertility is not obvious.
The existence of biological fatherhood explicitly seems to be a rather recent discovery made by early agrarian societies, probably in the context of domesticating animals, and gave rise to patriarchy. Different pre-modern societies have very different attitudes to fatherhood. I will grant you that a gene which made you bash the head in of anyone who fucked your wife (if you can get away with it) would probably have been select for, though.
From a genetic fitness point of view, cheating is a numbers game. As you point out, getting caught cheating in a society where it is against the social norms will probably severely limit the male's genetic fitness. On the other hand, fathering a child which will be fed by some other guy gets you a lot of fitness for basically free. If the likelihood of getting caught is high, the punishment is severe and your legitimate opportunities for procreation are plentiful, then cheating is maladaptive. If the opposite is the case, then it is adaptive.
For women consenting to cheating, the potential gains are much lower (unless her husband is infertile). In a society with little property and no Swiss bank accounts, any bribes were probably not worth the risk (if the society was strongly anti-cheating). The main reason would be that the guy she cheated with had a higher genetic fitness than her husband, which would benefit her child. OTOH, if ancestral societies had opinions about female infidelity, they probably had no sophisticated theory of culpability and consent. Telling your husband "Tribesman Urgh tried to touch me, tell him to stop" would be one thing, but if you were raped in the context of intertribal warfare, you likely had little to gain by telling your tribe about it.
I do not think that they were segregated as nuns are from monks. Sure, they had mostly different roles, and at times these roles might have separated most of the men a day's march from the women. I will also grant you that their life was a lot more communal, so texting "honey I have to work late" while you had an affair in some motel was not a thing.
But the ancestral environment was also not as dangerous as a horror movie, where slipping away from the main group for a minute (especially to have sex) is a death sentence.
I think a lot of basic sexual behavior is innate. If you raise teens without any sex education and give them the opportunity, they will sooner or later figure out sex on their own. I also think that basic sexual attraction is innate. Probably something on the level of "I am into boobs-havers".
A lot of specifics are then learned, as your brain matches the kinds of humans it sees to its rough templates. If high heels and red lipstick are a reliable predictor of the wearer being a sexually available woman, and your brain is wired to be into women, then you might end up associating that with this.
I also think that some things are mostly innate turnoffs, though. Facial asymmetry. Birth defects. Clear signs of sickness, or starvation.
I am sure that there is some primitive tribe where being small and weak is considered attractive in men, because there is some tribe for everything, but in the ancestral environment, muscle mass and size was likely capped by lifetime nutrition. So you are not selecting for giantism genes, you are simply selecting for "was able to secure a good calorie intake for himself", which is a very desirable trait, so I would suspect that there is a genetic predisposition towards preferring larger men.
More options
Context Copy link
People been farming long enough that we’ve evolved some instincts. Little kids will plant random stuff in the dirt as a form of play. And theres just a satisfaction from eating your own homemade fruit that doesn’t come from store bought stuff, even the fancy organic kind. Likewise people seem to generally like animal husbandry.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link