Pyrrho

There are a couple of things to say. First, people have said far sillier things at II while being serious. So it can be difficult to tell whether someone is serious or not about something, particularly when there is no tone of voice, body language, etc., to help with the interpretation. Second, it is often amusing to take someone seriously when they were joking. You see what an interesting response I received?

jayh

Where's this primary stuff, and what does it say about the adaptive nature of premature ejaculation?

I have NO idea. That's exactly my point, some wild eyed story is being repeated.

Speaking of strawmen, to what unfalsifiable speculation about organs are you referring? If there are any, they are also unscientific, and they certainly don't validate similar poor methodologies such as unfalsifiable conjectures about human behaviors.

First, I was not claiming that things were unfalsifiable, only that if some of the standards people here are holding for EP, the evolutionary path many phisical organs would be called unfalsifiable as well. We can speculate as to why we walk upright, why we have opposable thumbs, why hair remains only on our heads. We look back at our prehistory and look for environmental conditions that would have favored those enhancements. The same thing applies to behaviors (or actually meta behaviors I would guess). We see a behavior that is extremely cross cultural, seems to provide some degree of survival advantage. There is not much difference in the two positions.l



Which animals? Gorillas, chimps, or rabbits? Do we automatically assume that the ones that are most closely linked genetically will be most like us behaviorally despite the great differences in our environments?

Different things would be take different evidences. The differences in sexual behavior relating to relative resource allocation explain large amounts of instinctive mating behavior, from insects through humans. There is no reason to seriously question that.

On more detailed levels, relative monogamy/promiscuity have known tradeoffs, and more can be learned by watching our close relatives. Remember that we are not looking at survival advantages in the civilized world, but survival advantages much farther back for clues as to the roots of our behavior.

Cultures are a profound evolutionary adaption (chimps also display documented cultures) as a mechanism for adapting our selves to survival in the immediate habitat. Many aspects of culture (aspects which are near universal, though seemingly arbitrary such as gender roles) seem to be mapping of our own instincts into a formalized structure. For the last 30 years people have tried to produce gender neutral toys and gender neutral cultures for children, but the kids somehow didn't go along, now it is widely acknowledged that differences in boys and girls are not entirely cultural (though culture has a habit of trying to take tendencies and cast them into absolutes, not really a good idea).


In NO WAY am I advocating return to rigid gender roles. We've already learned that's a bad idea, but we also have to avoid the opposite extreme of pretending that gender biased preferences don't exist.

j

ohwilleke

Let's think about the facts a little more.

We know that agriculture is only about 10,000 years old as a permanent occupation. Domesticated humans are perhaps 500 generations old. Moreover, it is fair to say that genetic selection pressure has decreased in the past 10,000 years, rather than increased. We also know that prior to 10,000 years ago, there were no permanent cities.

We know that more or less modern humans have been around a 100,000 years at least, perhaps longer, and that at least precursors of modern humans have been around for a few million years.

We know that the human family tree springs from Africa, although one can quibble about how far back. We are Old World primates.

We know that life expectency in pre-modern societies, such as the least developed parts of Africa now, and early Colonial Africa is about age 40, although some people would live twice as long.

If population levels were stable, which is not necessarily safe to assume, the median age of the population in pre-modern societies would be about 20, with a systemic bias towards lots of small children many of whom won't survive to adulthood, and few people over 40.

We know that 21st century humans in the developed world are capable of having children starting at 12-13, and that in less ideal environments from a food and disease standpoint, such as pre-modern societies, that fertility started later, perhaps in the mid to late teens.

We know that a woman's ability ends in her late 30s to sometime in her 40s, somewhat gradually.

We know that pregnancy is a serious cause of mortality in women. We know that many men died of war, hunting, disease and so on, at ages where they were sexually capable.

We know that most pre-modern societies have high fertility rates. The average woman has five or more children ion a lifetime. Basically, pre-modern societies show fertility paterns consistent with being pregnant, nursing, or having sex and on the way to being pregnant for women for their entire fertile lives. Aside from children and old women (older than the average life expectency, i.e. 40s and up), all women were part of the reproductive cycle all of the time.

We have no reason to believe that women delayed sexual activity for extended periods beyond puberty in the pre-Neolithic era, i.e. more than 10,000 years ago (the first evidence of artificial contraceptives of which I am aware are IUDs used by the ancient Egyptians).

We know that breast feeding for prolonged periods of time (several years) is common in pre-modern societies, and reduces fertility, especially at first. We know that it takes on average about six months to get pregnant in the absence of any contraception or nursing.

It is fair to guess that most pre-modern women spent a large majority of their adult lives pregnant or nursing, and hence dependent on above normal food resources. It is safe to guess that lean times lead to many miscarriages and infant deaths, and that good times lead to many more children who were born and survived infancy. Probably, the children that survived were not evenly spaced, but came in mini-baby booms that corresponded to prolonged good times. In periods like the extended drought we now have in Colorado, parents would bury many or most infants.

We know that the world's population increased from about 200 million in the time period from 1 AD to about 500 million in 1650 AD. This is an average annual growth rate of about a a twentieth of a percent per year (of course, with ups and downs). We also know that world population was less prior to agriculture ca. 8000 BCE. It is fair to guess that 20,000 years ago, before agriculture came on the scene, that world human population was in the millions or tens of millions spread from Africa to Europe to Siberia to Australia (earliest Austrialian evidence is from 100,000 years ago, and earliest Siberian hominids date to perhaps 300,000 years ago).

We know that the population of North America prior to 1492 was on the order of 3 million or less. We know that the first humans to arrive in North or South Americans came perhaps 12,500 years ago, perhaps 18,000 years ago, but certainly not 100,000 year ago. Assuming an initial population between 200 and 20,000, this implies annual population growth rates of 1%-2% per year, far in excess of world population growth. This implies that territorial abundance was an important limiting factor in pre-modern population growth.

Put another way, pre-modern humans grew in population until they could just barely sustain themselves by hunting and gathering. Moreover, the norm was to experience the deaths of most of your children before they grew old enough to reproduce.

We know that women in the advanced stages of pregancy aren't the strongest travelers, and that women take considerable time to recover from a birth.

We know that horses were not present in any symbiotic relationship with humans in 1492 in the Americas. The ancient people who settled the Americas did not bring a horse culture with them. It is fair to guess, given the ability of horse culture to propogate quickly because horses are faster than people and provide many advantages, that horses were more or less absent from pre-modern human culture.

We know that groups of people can walk a mile or two per hour for several hours a day. A group of people can walk a hundred or two hundred or more miles in a month.

It is fair to guess that hunter-gatherer societies were more mobile than subsequent feudel agricultural societies where few people ventured more than five miles from their birthplace in a lifetime.

We know that war was present in pre-modern societies.

We know that these societies probably did not have any form of writing, but probably did have oral language.

We know that these people pre-dated any major monotheistic movement.

We have good reason to believe that even if early humans were 100% monogamous until the death of a partner, that mortality would lead to multiple partners for many people.

We know that in societies where polygamy is practiced today or in recent history, that only something like 10%-15% of men are in formal multi-spouse marriages and that far fewer are in marriages with three or more wives. There is no human society known where a majority of men, or a majority of women have been in multi-wife marriages.

We know that widespread cousin marriage, such as that found in Saudi Arabia, has effects which, if negative, is at least not sufficient to render a society incapable of functioning.

We know that brother-sister marriage is a very uncommon human cultural practice.

We can infer that "wandering tribes" of early humans in the same area probably had significant blood ties and in connection with the blood ties, language ties, to each other. This suggests that fellow groups might not have been as "foreign" to each other as a purely "random" model might suggest.

We can guess that children with significant disabilities were far less likely to survive to adulthood than children without them.

We can guess that early humans did not have a problem with lack of exercise, too many sweets and fats, too much salt, or similar modern health problems. Beer bellies, and obesity generally, were probably rare. The focus would have been on not starving to death, rather than weight loss. The old would have gotten that way by being particularly healthy for their age.

We can also guess that many early humans who have experienced boom and bust cycles. Rather than staying at a constant weight, probably most of them got heavier when times were good, and experienced lean times as well.

We know that pre-modern humans were shorter and smaller than modern humans. This change is evident even in the past few generations in Japan, and between the 21st century U.S. and the U.S. of the early 1800s.

Seeker196

Some issues:

If you mean 'North America' we don't all 'know' that. In Ethnohistory at least there are widely varying estimates for pre-Columbian pop densities, influenced by things like storage techniques, trade network access, what kind of agricultural if any.

Also, the polygamy issue I think is less clear cut. Living here in Korea, any tour of the Joseon dynasty museum, or a visit to a preserved folk village will show that many east asian cultures were as polygamous as they could afford to be. That's not to say every peasant had three wives, but it was accepted that they would have mistresses and concubines.

Even in Korea today, marital infidelity is the NORM. The idea of only having sex with your wife has not truly penetrated the Korean consciousness, because they were not exposed to Christianity until the 19th century and thus preserved the older ways.

Dr Rick

To what instinctive mating behaviors in humans are you referring? The term "instinctive" isn't used so much to apply to humans these days, because it seems to foster a dichotomy between nature and nurture, but I'm curious to learn what you mean by this, and if you want to use that term you certainly can, but it would be helpful to define it first.

Rick

wildsimian

Just a stab in the dark here. I admit I still have a lot to learn. So please feel free to correct me where I'm wrong or point me in the right direction.

If we whittle it down, the one reproductive quality that is the same in all apes is that we are K-strategists.

Granted, there are other non primate mammals that are K-strategists as well. But at least it's a common link (to start out with). The one thing that seems to separate us from the other ape k-strategists is the length of time it takes for our offspring to reach maturity (being able to fend for itself). So it would seem plausible that female selection by males was based on mothering instincts and their ability to care for their offspring ... and in turn, males would be offered sex on a continual basis.

But when/how did it finally occur to early humans to have sex regardless as to whether the female was reproductively receptive? Was it initiated by the females? But even so ... in all other apes, the males aren't interested sexually until the female is in estrus. Did evolution favor females with constant pheromone output? Did this occur because of some capitalized mutation? Or was it favored over time?