Dr Rick

No hard feelings, then. I look forward to your future posts.

Rick

Vorkosigan

Not a lot! but it's a numbers game, and our bed-hopping ancestor would leave more children than a celibate man would. In between are all the shades of grey. A man with a wife would leave x number of children. A man with a wife plus a mistress would leave xx children. A man with a wife plus two mistresses would leave xxx children. A man with a harem would leave xxxxx children. NONE OF THIS WOULD WORK IN REVERSE and that's the critical point: a woman employing the identical 'strategy' would NOT have more children.

The problem with this point of view is that it treats women as passive recipients of male sperm, and that is most emphatically not the case.

I am not "asking the wrong question"! I am challenging the assertion that the use or non-use of BIRTH CONTROL had any influence on evolutionary psychology!!!!! Who cares if guys who have one-night stands insist their lovers use birth control!!! We didn't have birth control when these behavioral tendencies evolved, and more importantly, THERE WAS NO CONSCIOUS DESIRE FOR ANY PARTICULAR OUTCOME!!!! dammit, this is reminding me of Helen on the baptist board the other day.

You have misinterpreted my post, and are in any case wrong on all counts. If male humans were reproduction maximizers, no male would ever ask a woman to use birth control for a one-night stand. In point of fact, the case is the opposite, males devoutly hope NOT to impregnate the females they are with when they have casual sex. Humans are not reproduction maximizers but sex maximizers. Despite having multiple sex partners, I have had only two children that I know of, and few men I know have more than ten. Virtually all have less than 4, and many have none at all. Any healthy woman who started at 15 could easily churn out 15 children over the course of a 25 year fertile life, yet almost none do. Consider that fertility drugs are available everywhere in industrialized countries but few couples use them. If humans were reproduction maximizers, everyone would use them.

The conclusion is simple: human sexual strategies relate to reproduction indirectly. They more directly relate to maximization of sex.

Additionally, abortion, contraception and infanticide have been around for evolutionarily significant lengths of time. No man who raped a woman, or had casual sex, could be certain that the child would be raised to adulthood unless he took steps to assume control of the female. That is why rape is not a significant reproductive strategy in a species like ours.

Ultimately, human sexual behavior is mostly about maximizing sex acts. Wait! That's my wife giving me the eye...gotta run...

Michael

Jubal

I think it's an effect of testosterone, really, but that's just me.

RufusAtticus

Cricket is right, the typical male strategy is to invest a little in many offspring, whereas the typical female strategy is to invest a lot in few offspring. This is of course a gross simplification and many species don't really match it. For instance, humans have slightly different requirements. Because human babies need a lot of investment, fathers benifit by hanging arround and providing support. Now, this leads to an interesting dynamic.

Although fathers instinctively want to have a lot of children, they still have to care for them to be successful. That is why in many cultures, wealthy (however it is defined) men tend to have more wives than other men. However, if wealthy men have many sons, the sons will be relitively poor since they have to share the father's wealth. An alternate strategy is for a man to have fewer children and thus wealthier sons. These sons can then have many wives and thus produce many grandchildren.

In this thread there seems to be a confusion between a cultural behavior and a genetic one. The human male desire for sex is a genetic behavior tied to "our knuckledragging past." The use of birth control is a cultural behavior that allows men and women to reproduce in a controled manner. The cultural desires and constraints on the number of children are different than the genetic ones. Birth control is just another invention that allows cultural evolution to reign supperior over genetic evolution.

-RvFvS

Dr Rick

Rufus, are you certain this generalization is correct? I know of some fathers who may want lots of children, but also know many that only want a few and some that didn't even want to be fathers in the first place.

<strong> In many cultures they don't, however; is there really a pattern here that supports some type of generalization regarding human behavior?

<strong> There will probably continue to be confusion without some clear definitions. It would be lots more clear if you would define the terms you are using, particularly cultural behavior and how it can be distinguished from genetic behavior. Obviously, the former is learned and the latter is inherited, but how are we to know to which category a particular behavior belongs?

I think that "desire" is similar to "thirst" or "pain" in that it is more of a stimulus than a behavior, so what definition allows us to classify "human male desire for sex" as a "genetic behavior?"

<strong> How do we know this? Is this assertion verifiable and potentially falsifiable as any scientific hypothesis or theory should be? How do we verify it, and what evidence could we look for that would falsify it?

Rick

[ April 11, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Cricket is right, the typical male strategy is to invest a little in many offspring, whereas the typical female strategy is to invest a lot in few offspring.

Rufus, this is not a gross oversimplification, it is dead wrong. Look at the number of children men actually have. It's not very many.

Michael

cricket

Hi Michael,

RufusAtticus is more knowledgeable than I, but I'll chime in since I've got tax chores to avoid.

It's true, as you say, that most men don't have many children and don't want many children, if indeed they want any at all.

But they are descended from males who behaved as though they did want children. It's not that the ancestors actually wanted children, it's that they behaved as though they did. It's not the ‘intention' that mattered in our evolution, it's the behavior and the result. Males who mated frequently with many females left more offspring than those who mated infrequently with few females. The more promiscuous male left a genetic legacy, and if behavioral tendencies like this are inherited, then his genetic legacy has shaped modern man.

Males who behaved this way fathered several sons, who also tended to behave this way. Those sons who tended to behave this way also fathered several sons, and so on, through all the generations. We are the result.

A gross simplification, as Rufus said, but that's the theory in a nutshell. Until today I hadn't realized any of us at II disagreed on this theory, so I apologize for stating it as a given in my OP. I didn't realize there were secular arguments to the contrary. I've read Buss, Wright, Ridley, Dawkins, and other authors of popular science, and since the authors I've read support this theory, I assumed all the II members did also. I see now I was wrong about that, and I look forward to reading posts from Rick and others (you?) that present the other side.

[ April 11, 2002: Message edited by: cricket ]</p>

RufusAtticus

Rick,

Yes, this seems to be the correct generalization for males across all forms of life. Females produce nutrient-rich gametes in small quantities. Males produce innumerable motile gametes that function basically as DNA transports. Female fertility is gamete limited. Male fertility is not gamete limited but is limited by the number of sexual encounters. That is why males, including humans, have higher sex drives than females. However, each species has its own twist on the generalization. That's why it's a generalization. In humans, males just can’t fire and forget. Their offspring will have a better chance of survival if fathers help raise them. Thus the number of children a male can successfully raise is resource limited.

This generalization results from studies of societies that allow polygyny. I read a paper about a year ago on this topic, but I can’t find the reference right now. There appears to be a lot of anthropological work with this. You might try doing a literature search and see what you can did up.

Like you said, the simplest difference is in inherited versus learned. There is a lot of contention in the scientific community on the extent of cultural and genetic behaviors. The human male sex drive is safely considered to be a genetic behavior because it correlates with our biology and similar behaviors in other the organisms, which don’t experience cultural evolution. It also agrees with generalized evolutionary models.

Genetic constraints reflect the limitations of human fertility due to biology; such as, the number of children a woman can bear in her lifetime and perhaps the number of chances a male has to sire offspring. Cultural constraints reflect the investment a child needs to successfully grow up and cultural opinions on the number of children in a family. Birth control is one manner for humans to give into their biological desires (i.e. sex drive) while accomplishing cultural goals.

It is very obvious that most of us could have more children than we actually do or want. This is how we know that culture and biology differ with respect to fertility. I am only mildly familiar with the scientific study of human sexuality and reproduction. Anthropologists and social scientists investigate to what extent this exists and what is the variation among cultures. Thus I don’t feel I’m capable right now to answer your questions concerning the testing of this hypothesis.

Michael,

Notice that I did not specifically refer to humans in the above statement. It refers to the typical male strategy across all species. Why do you think males produce lots of highly motile DNA packages and females produce nutrient rich cells in smaller quantities? Furthermore, I also mentioned why humans diverge from this simplification.

I will try to answer any questions.

-RvFvS

cricket

Rick,

Yes, and I wish I could quote from the last three or four books I've read, *all* of which have mentioned this sort of thing. I can't remember specifics, but two of the good books were Robert Wright's The Moral Animal and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen. (Never lend others your books, else that's when you'll need to quote from them.) I just did a quick online search though, using 'polygyny' and 'wealth', and there's some stuff coming up. I won't wade too deep but <a href="http://www.globalideasbank.org/crespec/CS-33.HTML" target="_blank">here</a> is a finding I must mention. I've not heard of the anthropologist quoted here, but the site claims "unequal societies concentrate sexual partners at the top" and reports "The Indian emperor Udayama had a harem of 16,000".

!

I hadn't heard of that one before!

If I get my books back this week I'll quote to you what i've read in them; the specifics of the claims and the sources.

Dr Rick

Good morning, Cricket, Rufus, and Michael (and anyone else who wishes to contribute to this thread):

There is no evidence that fathers or males of any species inherit a desire for children. Males and females inherit a sex drive, and most species satisfy the demands of this drive through innate mating behaviors, but that is not the same as a desire for children. In response to their sex drives, both frogs and fruit flies will engage in instinctive mating behaviors, but there is no evidence that they do so out of a desire for offspring and there is no reason to believe that they are aware that their behaviors will result in the production of progeny.

Human males (and females) also inherit a sex drive, but neither that nor counting the numbers of gametes produced is evidence that they "instinctively want to have a lot of children."

The results of studies on polygamous societies and cultures may not be any more applicable to non-polygamous ones than a study on the marital habits of catholic clergy would be. There are cultural differences in all these groups that may make the findings from a study on one not generalizable to all.

Rick