Scrambles

Obviously testosterone level is not equivalent to fitness.



Scrambles

God Fearing Atheist

What would be the fun in that?

-GFA

Dr Rick

That's not good advice, imo; you're likely to be amazed at one can acquire on a mere credit score, and I have it on good authority that it has nothing to do with reproductive fitness and absolutely nothing to do with one's ability to add and subtract.

If it's all about what I possess sans what I owe, I'm "da bomb", babe.

Soyin Milka

Pyrrho!
You're making me doubt of myself now.
I was sure it would be obvious I was mocking sociobiology and the crazy conclusions evolutionary biology can allow us to reach about modern human behavior if we're not careful.
I must work on my humor I guess.


Soy

jayh

What has developed here is a lot of straw man name calling.

Unfortunately much of what gets popular media is simply speculation (I have speculated on some of my arguments here, and have said so), others have (mis)quoted some very wild speculations. I don't think anyone here has read any primary documents for this stuff about early ejaculation and so forth.

Yes falsifiability is important for any particular aspect to be taken seriously. However, this applies EQUALLY to physical adaptations as well. There is no laboratory to replay how or why organs are the way they are, we can only look at the organ and then environment in which we suspect it evolved, and attempt to draw conclusions. When the same process is done with human behavior, some people cry unfalsifiable.

Actual EP (as opposed to the newspaper accounts) does exacly the same thing with behavior as with any other adaptation. One of the ways to validate that a behavior has evolutionary roots is to look for similar behaviors in animals, look for cross cultural norms that would not be expected to be universal purely by chance. Pinker refers to Donald Brown's list as a good starting point. There are a couple hundred well researched items including religion, classification of colors, fauna, kin, sex, tools, weather, food sharing and cultural structure around food sharing (why would negotiations be conducted over meals worldwide if there were not an underlying behavior?), interpretations of facial expressions, music related to dance, seen as art, vocal forms, repetition, variation, myths, etc.

It is important to remember:

1). The behavior's function at the time it was selected for may be entirely different from its use now.

2) as with every physical adaptation, there is a degree of speculation involved. A behavior pattern is simply an organ.


3) Do not confuse the possible evolutionary roots of a behavior, and how that behavior manifests itself now, in a very different world. For example the mental skills that enable written language did not evolve for that purpose, they were co-opted relatively recently.

j

Dr Rick

Please enlighten us, then, and just don't leave us hanging. Where's this primary stuff, and what does it say about the adaptive nature of premature ejaculation?

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.

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? What's falsifiable, verifiable, and predictive about this?

Common traits amongst cultures do not necessarily demonstrate a genetic evolutionary connection, either; cultures and mores could evolve themselves seperate from genes. We need science, not conjecture.

Something can be "well-researched" and still be wrong, however. If there's a verifiable, predictive, and potentially falsifiable hypothesis supported by observational and/or experimental data, it will stand on it's own merits. We don't need a wastebasket of concepts that's either taken as all or left as none.

1) good point

2) then let's call it speculation, not theory, and certainly not science

3) okay.

ps418

That's true. By definition, before you can demonstrate that a behavior is an adaptation, you have to demonstrate that individuals with some genotypes are more likely to manifest the behavior than individuals with other genotypes. Without a genetic basis, there can be no response to selection.

I disagree with you a bit here. Conjectures, like refutations, are an integral part of science. Conjectures are just hypotheses. Like the hypothesis of common descent, which is was just rank speculation when it was first proposed. I do not think that EP hypotheses are inherently unfalsifiable, in the same way that Omphalos is unfalsifiable, just very difficult to falsify because of very incomplete data. In an imaginary world were you knew of every human's fitness, behavioral characteristics, and could perform the strain and selection tests that would tell you to what extent various behaviors are influenced by genotype, then it would be easy to test alot of EP hypotheses, because you could show that a behavior is an adaptation or that its not. So, most EP conjectures will remain conjectures rather than theories.

Patrick

Calzaer

Waitwaitwaitwai.. BACK UP!

How do we know Homo Ergaster was monogamous?

*double-take*

I'm sorry, I'm stupid, I'm an education major. Can someone please explain this??

Craig

It's a joke (and a nice subtle one at that). In other words, the male's remains did not have any money buried with them, ie he was married (monogomous) and his wife took it all.

Pyrrho

I did not say to consider it sans what one owes. Someone holding something in his or her hand is no guarantee of ownership.