Totalitarianist

Here.

Wyz_sub10

As a matter of evolution, it wil probably receive a more appropriate response there.

tronvillain

Yes, I have heard that before and it seems to be a reasonable explanation. What exactly is your point?

Dr.GH

Among humans, sexual behavior is highly regulated by social custom. These customs vary a great deal among contemorary societies, and are known to vary a great deal across time within any given society. Sexual behavior generally is variable within any given society, with some behaviors supressed, as others are encouraged.

Social conventions among humans are not necessarily oriented toward maximum fecundity, or genetic richness. This is not an evolutionary issue. There exists under the current range of constraints on sexual practice a quite adequate genetic variability, and a more than adequate fecundity. Humans have a very protracted fertile span, and delayed reproduction of even a decade or more has little negitive consequences.

The technological, social, and historical bases for a particular set of sexual norms are too complex for me to bother with on a short, and transient web page.

The notion that the sex with children is "evolutionary" is typical creationist posturing, and very irritating.

I'll conclude this post with this observation. The socialness of humans is a greater evolutionary advantage than the so-called "nubility" of young females, and this includes the prohibition of sexual use of children of either sex.

pz

Oh, baloney. That's nothing but facile reductionism for simple minds.

Dr. GH has addressed this quite well.

echidna

The sex drive is an innate feature of humanity, although I’m not certain that the author has a good grasp on it (so to speak). We have many such drives, such as sometimes the drive to lash out and kill someone who irritates us. This illustrates several points, that firstly having the drive does not justify that it is right to follow that drive, and secondly that there are many modifying factors to consider other than simply the drive itself.

Do you have a point T ?

Doubting Didymus

Is this representative of the standards of evolutionary psychology, or is this just a particularly bad example? Never having read much in the way of it, I am quite astounded by the standard of this paper. I found myself continually asking, 'yes, but how do you know that?'. There's no evidence suggested. The whole thing is one big armchair story.

Dr.GH

There is more bad evolutionary psychology, than good evolutionary psychology. Currently bad evolutionary psychology is the refuge of racists, and (apparently) pederasts.

echidna

You left out misogynists and homophobes.

Tat

The article is a fairly one sided, almost polemical view of the "recent work" on evolutionary views of human behavior.

It is important to note that Ev. Psych. is only one of several ideas of evolutionary theories of human behavior (in the Darwinian sense). Advocates of Ev Psych tend to empahsize the environment in which we evolved. It is not widely accepted among professional anthropologists. It is, however, alive and well in psychology (as the name implies).

Anthropologists usually claim to have a counterexample for just about any idea ev psych advocates put forward.

The two other (Darwinian) evolutionary models of human behavior are Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) and co-evolutionary theory/memetics.

HBE takes the perspective of adaptation to a particular environment. It is much more widely accepted among anthropolgists, though by no means universal. Most HBE work has biology (as opposed to culture) underpinning behavior, though Eric Smith and others have tried to point out adaptation might just as easily be at the cultural level.

"The" HBE perspective on the issues of the OP are likely to be something of the following:

Of course, as with most current reseach, asking three HBE anthropologists about something will likely result in four or more mutually exclusive answers. This is just one view.

The terms I've used here are also not always as clearly delineated as I've made them out to be. Sometimes someone in the HBE camp will refer to their own work as ev psych, and many reseachers find some valuable work in all camps. Just to add ot the confusion, there are other schools of thought which call themselves evolutionary. They are quite different from those above.

Moving away from the evolutionary theorists, there are many anthropologists who would disagree with the article from a wide variety of perspectives.

For the moral side, I'll stick to Hume. Even if something is natural (in whatever sense one takes natural), it doesn't make it right or wrong. Those are moral decisions.

Apologies for lenght.