Lizard

I am certainly no expert on rape, or "coercive sex," as it might be more properly called. I think sexuality is a very complex topic, one that takes on different connotations in different situations.

For example, I don't imagine there is such a thing as coercive sex among Bonobo chimps. Everybody does it with everybody. It's a social bonding mechanism.

However, in other animal groups, coercive sex can be a means of asserting dominance, and may confer an evolutionary advantage: only the strongest get to pass on their genes.

One thing that has not been mentioned is homosexual rape in wartime. In the Old Testament accounts of battles, the most humiliating thing an army could do was use the opposing army's troops as women, i.e., rape them. If a man is treated like a woman, I suppose the reasoning goes, he loses all confidence and concedes victory to the rapists. It wasn't enough to burn their villages and conquer them militarily; it was also necessary to demoralize the enemy completely by taking away his image as a man.

I am not sure if this type of rape is still common. Perhaps in the Serbian conflict?

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: Lizard ]</p>

lpetrich

Alternatively, dominance hierarchies are a way of reducing conflict, since fights can be very dangerous for their participants. Thus, not fighting means that all involved survive intact, thus getting greater reproductive success.

scigirl

Lone Ranger,

I just wanted to thank you for your last post here - very thoughtful and well written. I suspect many fields involving any type of human "psyche" have some quacks, some legitimate scientists, and everything in between.

scigirl

Dr Rick

If there is "legitimate" work in EP, than it is scientific and subject to objective verification and potential falsification; all else should be discarded.

Most of the speculation that EPs spew today would not survive such testing.

<strong> Perhaps you could convince us better by presenting an example of such scientific objectivity performed by an EP.

<strong> That does not legitimize the entire field of EP and therefore every word that is spouted from an evolutionary psychologist. Our evolutionary history may have influenced our behavior, but that does not mean that each fanciful speculation about how it affected us should not be rigourously questioned and evaluated.

Afterall, even Christians have done "some good work."

Rick

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

The Lone Ranger

I think that Ipetrich makes a good point; it's important to remember that there are transmission means other than heredity whereby behaviors can spread through societies.

Even if a behavior is universal, that doesn't imply that it's genetically influenced. It was pointed out by E. O. Wilson (I think) that in every human society ever studied, people who used spears as weapons threw them pointed-end first. Does this mean that there's a genetic predisposition to throw spears this way? Of course not. It simply means that humans aren't stupid.

I agree wholeheartedly. Many people in the field have promoted wild and unsupported claims. I suspect that this is, in part, a reaction to the excesses of those who vehemently oppose any attempt to apply evolutionary theory to human behavior.



I do think that Chomsky overstates his case somewhat, especially when he starts talking about "universal grammar." It seems to me much more convincing to simply point out that the human brain seems to be adapted to very quickly and efficiently learn languages (at least when we're young). Stephen Pinker, for example, has pointed out in one of his books that there are a few genetic mutations which seem to influence their bearers' abilities to learn languages. (I'd have to go look it up again.)



I'm not sure I understand. No one, to the best of my knowlede, ever claimed that speculation (fanciful or otherwise) about how our evolutionary history may have influenced our behavior shouldn't be rigourously questioned and evaluated.

It's worth pointing out, as I frequently do to students, that there is no such thing as genetically-determined behavior. Similarly, there is no such thing as environmentally-determined behavior. The whole "nature-vs-nurture" thing is a red herring, to some extent. An organism's phenotype (which includes its behavior) is always due to a complex interaction between genetics and environment.

Of course, some traits (for example, the color of your eyes) are far more strongly influenced by your genes than by your environment, while other traits (the language you speak, for example) are far more strongly influenced by your environment.



Well, how about one positive and one negative? First, a negative example.

Zahavi's "handicap principle" has sometimes been used to explain certain aspects of human behavior. According to Zahavi, for example, the beard in human males is a selective feature, because it gives an enemy a convenient "handle," thus a bearded man will be more vulnerable to an enemy. According to Zahavi, particularly in warlike societies, men should prefer to grow long beards, and women should prefer bearded men as mates, because any man who could survive with such an obvious disadvantage must have superior genes. While I don't deny that the "handicap principle" might apply to certain aspects of human behavior, this seems too much.

More to the point, Evolutionary Psychologists have modelled the presumed adaptive advantages of some of Zahavi's claims regarding human behavior, in order to test those claims, and shown that they simply do not work. Whatever the use of Zahavi's principle in explaining certain adaptations, EPs have shown that it has very little applicability to explaining human behavior.

A more positive example regards incest avoidance in humans. It's quite well-established in various animal species that animals tend to avoid mating with close relatives. It has been shown that many animals can apparently recognize closely-related individuals by smell (for example), and that they avoid mating with those individuals. EPs proposed that such mechanisms might exist in humans, as well. Sure enough, it turns out that when non-pregnant women are exposed to the body odors of unrelated males, they consistently rate them as more attractive than the body odors of closely-related males. (The situation, by the way, is precisely the opposite for pregnant women.)

Obviously, it is unethical to perform certain types of manipulative experiments on humans. But, there have been a few informative "natural experiments." For example, some people have insisted that incest avoidance is due to cultural teachings, and has nothing to do with genetics. (In part because some cultures have -- to a very limited extent -- actually encouraged incest.) As it turns out, though, even in Israeli kibbutzim where children growing up together in the same kibbutz are actively encouraged to marry, they almost never do so. The evidence strongly suggests that humans do have an inherited predisposition to avoid mating with those whom they have grown up with (who are very likely to be close genetic relatives in most human societies). If humans didn't have such a predisposition, the studies with the Israeli kibbutzim would very easily have shown it.

Cheers,

Michael

RufusAtticus

I'm pretty sure that Noam Chomsky has spent time with other languages. Universal Grammer has changed a lot over the years. I believe that it is now considerered to be the cognative bias in humans that restricts us to certain ways of foruming language. For example, the object-action-attribute distinction would be such a bias.

~~RvFvS~~

Dr Rick

Your argument is compelling, Michael; perhaps I've been too hasty in rejecting EP.

If you do know, could you tell me where this study was published?

Not necessarily; as you point out, some cultures and royal families actively practice incest.

The aversion to marrying one that someone grew-up with could be environmental; maybe it's hard to be attracted as an adult to one that you fought with as a child. That may or may not be the case, but the observations from the kibbizum do not distinguish potential environmental from genetic influences

This is the problem that permeates much of EP; an observation is made and then determined to have evolutionary significance even though other possibile explanations exist.

You're correct that practical and ethical considerations inhibit expermentation in the field, but that does not mean that we should just accept speculation because we cannot gather the data.


Rick

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

Dr Rick

...and I'm going to re-post something from an April E/C thread that illustrates the "just so" methodology in practice

<strong>Women are predisposed to gossip:

"...A new study shows women are more afraid of malicious gossip than men are; while many men will back down when faced with the threat of physical violence, women are more worried about being stabbed in the back by cruel rumors.

"I call it informational warfare," says lead author Nicole Hess, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "Men are more inclined to compete for resources through physical violence, while women compete by waging gossip."

Hess believes humans are primed by evolutionary history to fight for what they want. But how they do battle depends on their gender.

Our male ancestors fought physical battles against other tribes to gain access to rich hunting grounds or fertile females, Hess says.

But because women lacked the physical strength of men, they had to find other ways to win, she says. Battling for the survival of their children, females formed their own coalitions to secure scarce resources like food and inheritances for their offspring. These coalitions were based not on the threat of physical prowess but on the spread of rumors, she says.

"Women are more likely to get the resources they need if they have good reputations," Hess explains. "And women will use gossip to destroy their competitors to get those scarce resources."

While Hess' idea springs from the survival-of-the-fittest theory of evolution, it has modern parallels. For example, if two women are competing for the same man, they may spread malicious rumors about each other.

"One woman may say things about the other like, 'She sleeps around,' as a way of discrediting the competition," Hess says.

To test her theory that men and women perceive gossip differently, Hess asked male and female college students to imagine they had discovered someone cheating in a competition. The students were then told the cheater had friends who would either beat them up or bad-mouth them. Men backed down when faced with the threat of physical violence, but were indifferent to verbal backlash. Women didn't care about bodily harm; they were more worried someone might dish the dirt on them..."</strong>

Doctoral candidate Hess, studying at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology in Santa Barbara, doesn't even consider that cultural differences in how boys and girls are raised might play a role. Her test couldn't possibly distinguish cultural from genetic influences, but that doesn't stop her from speculating on the latter and ignoring the former.

It doesn't matter that male role models generally don't gossip, and female role models, until very recently, generally don't fight. We didn't ever see Clint Eastwood defeat his Hollywood foes by saying bad things about them, no team ever claimed the Super Bowl by spreading rumors, and Doris Day never won Rock Hudson by shooting another woman.

It doesn't matter that in the same press article there's a link to a study that suggests that boys may engage in gossip as much as girls.

It doesn't matter that recently we have seen a surge in human female perpetrated violence coincident with changes in the roles and oppurtunities that women have in the modern world.

No, these are issues that an evolutionary psychologist/anthropologist would rather just ignore as she opines on how our ancestors, whose environment and culture we do not know, continue to guide our behaviors from their ancient pasts.

Rick

Rick

Vorkosigan

Doctoral candidate Hess, studying at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology in Santa Barbara, doesn't even consider that cultural differences in how boys and girls are raised might play a role. Her test couldn't possibly distinguish cultural from genetic influences, but that doesn't stop her from speculating on the latter and ignoring the former.

Ah, you have a copy of her dissertation. What can you tell us about how the test was done?

Here is a shorter paper by her.

<a href="http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~hess/gossip.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~hess/gossip.pdf</a>

You could read the paper and find that she surveys a great deal of cross-cultural literature. Why don't you take a look and see what you think?

Vorkosigan

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Our evolutionary history may have influenced our behavior, but that does not mean that each fanciful speculation about how it affected us should not be rigourously questioned and evaluated.

Rigorously questioned and evaluated, not dissed and dismissed.

Vorkosigan