tronvillain

luvluv:
Nonsense. Human sexuality could easily be similar to that of other mammals, with sex limited to fertile periods - all you would have to do is only make females sexually receptive only during ovulation and have males attracted to the signs of ovolution. Yet for some reason, humans are set up to have sex all of the time. Why? I have provided an explanation, but what is yours?

Exactly what about it flies in the face of "everything we know about male sexuality"? I think it is pretty clear that men like sex, and that is what the entire idea is based on. Men really like sex, so a constant supply will be likely to make them stick around which is in the interest of their own genes (making the child more likely to survive) and the genes of the mother (making both her and the child more likely to survive). While it is true that pregnancy eventually becomes obvious, as you yourself point out that is months in, which is much longer than a male would have to spend to ensure pregnancy otherwise, giving a male a much larger stake in the success of the child. While there is also a male tendency to "look around" you have to keep in mind that there is roughly one male for every female and that groupings were probably relatively small (around a hundred individuals say) and isolated, so other opportunities for sex were probably not plentiful. Are you going to give up your steady supply of sex for the tiny chance that there might be another supplier?

Do nearly all societies have rules against masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex? Have nearly all past societies also had rules against those behaviors? I would like to see what evidence you have of this. In any case, it is not readily apparent what their causes might be, since it is not at all clear that engaging in such behaviors has any impact on birthrate.

It is a possibility that such rules exploit innate tendencies, but since many people abandon such rules or never have them in the first place it does not seem all that likely. Even if such innate tendencies, it would say nothing about whether we should have such rules. After all, if such innate tendencies evolved to emphasize reproduction, why should we not ignore them or actively resist them, since we do not currently emphasize wanton reproduction ourselves.


Before you reply, let me point out something:

WE DID NOT EVOLVE IN THE ENVIRONMENT WE EXIST IN TODAY.

Salmon of Doubt

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Salmon of Doubt I'll tell you what explains guilt feelings and social prohibitions around non-reproductive sexual activities. Religion. Religion wants to keep us living in fear and not having any fun on Earth so we more readily believe the claims of paradise in heaven.

Unfortunately, your argument for the evolutionary origin of guilt makes no sense when you compare it to Biological facts.

Clearly human cultures now express much guilt about sexual feelings of all kinds. This is not an inborn feeling, as young children will quite happily ask questions about sex and genitalia. Then they are taught by their parents that this is a taboo.

I don't know much about other religions around the world, as I went to a Christian school and they somehow neglected to teach me about other cultures. For this reason I cannot provide as many examples as I would like to. Maybe someone else can help me out here? I do admit that I am just making an assumption that religion is mostly to blame for feelings of guilt, because that is my experience.

I don't see any evolutionary reason for sexual guilt feelings to exist, as these feelings of guilt expressed by people in today's societies often extend to sex for reproduction, and evolution would quickly eliminate people who felt so guilty about all sexual acts. I don't believe that sexual guilt is something innate and inherited, because I have quickly lost most of the guilt and bad feelings I used to have about sex once I became an atheist and rejected Christian culture. Therefore I make a conclusion that the guilt about sex stemmed from religion, and the cultural taboos enforced by the even more religous past.

I think the idea that sexual guilt evolved is rubbish, and am simply postulating a hypothesis that the other uniting factor between cultures who experience sexual guilt is religion.

I clearly don't have all the answers about culture and religion, because I have never had the opportunity to study any religion except Christianity. I do, however, think I know quite a bit about Biology and evolution, as I am currently studying it at University.

If you could, please explain to me again your basic reason for believing that guilt over sexual feelings confers an evolutionary advantage, because I can't remember seeing any convincing argument in favour of that yet.


You're missing the point. In evolutionary terms, males WANT to pass on their genes! If any male did not want to pass on his genes to the next generation, he would have died out. Of course, males have evolved to try and get lots of women pregnant and then get away before they get tied down in child rearing, and I have already explained the mechanism women have evolved to try and make sure this doesn't happen.

What you are talking about, I believe, is sex for pleasure, not reproduction.

Sex has evolved to be pleasurable because it made more 'cave-people' want to reproduce. This pleasure also has side effect, especially in this modern era, because people want to have pleasure whilst at the same time limiting childbirth. Hence people have oral sex, etc, to get the pleasure without children. There is no need for evolution to select against people who have oral sex, as long as they have regular reproductive sex as well. Why should guilt over sex evolve in this situation?

Why do humans need 'guilt' to guide their choice of mate? Humans select other humans who are attractive, intelligent, and impressive in other aspects. This is an instinctive choice that ensures the healthiest offspring. Where does the need for guilt come in to it?


Males are more promiscuous than females because males always consider the chance that they can sleep with a woman and then escape after she's got pregnant but before she forces him to help with child rearing. Your entire argument seems based on the fact that men like to sleep around. If men liked to sleep around without getting anyone pregnant, the species would have died out long ago! You are looking at this from a modern male perspective, and not an evolutionary one.

You didn't listen to what I said before, did you? Males would LOVE to know when a female was pregnant, then they could sleep with her when she was ready and then run away. Females have evolved the hidden ovulation to entrap males into sleeping with them for longer so they can force them into child rearing.


Hmm. When human sexual behaviour was evolving, I don't see many paternity suits being very important....

Obvious in modern men, yes. But the modern world has arisen in the blink of an evolutionary eye, and you cannot apply modern standards of thought, because evolution does not work that quickly!

I admit my argument that you are referring to was not properly justified, and I should have worded it better.

The human capacity for guilt (and love and humour) is probably innate. Just not for sexual practices. It is useful for a social animal that it feels guilty after killing another member of its tribe. It is NOT evolutionarily useful if it feels guilty after engaging in behaviour used for reproduction!

And no, apes are not our ancestors, but the ancestors of apes were the same as the ancestors of humans. It's just that apes have not evolved the same brainpower we have, therefore they represent the only living things alive today and available for study that are most similar to our ancestors.


Correct.

Well, since watching sunrises would have no effect on evolution, I can't see how that is at all relevant.


Oh, I think it is. If you beat a child every time it plays a sport, and no-one in the whole culture plays a sport, and considers that sport something that only wicked people do, that child will quickly learn never to mention sport in polite company, and will probably believe that sport is morally wrong. Otherwise, why would there be such a taboo over it?

Then why was it so easy for me to overcome the guilt I felt about all sexual acts? I thought it was all wicked, but it has been easy for me to accept that sex is a normal healthy thing to do, and that homosexual sex is also a normal (for me) healthy thing to do? By your reasoning, I should not be able to do that.

Your points are somewhat muddled and confusing, but If I'm reading you right, I agree that some acts like murder are probably meant to have guilt attached to them. I doubt anyone could make themselves feel good about murder unless they had serious emotional or mental problems as a child. But other things I think guilt is flexible about. We have the capacity to feel guilty about murder, therefore we can also apply that guilt to other things, like sex, or sunrises, or sport.

If guilt about sex was as inflexible as guilt about murder, why do so many people still have sex? Why do so many people overcome the taught guilt about homosexual sex or oral sex and do it anyway? The child I mentioned above may eventually come to believe that sport isn't really wrong, and play sport in secret. If he gets braver he may find some other people to play sport with and it may come out into the open. Can you see any analogies forming here?

Homosexual people would effectively be immune from evolutionary pressures if living in a group. If homosexuality is caused (as the available evidence indicates) from altered hormone levels in the brain from birth, homosexuality is not inherited genetically. Therefore, levels of homosexuality would remain relatively stable as the odd mother developed a temporary hormone imbalance whilst pregnant. These homosexual children would grow up and be a useful part of the community, hunting and gathering with everyone else, but would simply fail to produce children. Those individual's genes would not be passed on, but a few homosexual people would still be born each year.

Where in this scenario does guilt come in to it? The homosexual feels no guilt because they're doing what comes naturally. Anyone else they want to have sex with but who doesn't want to have sex with them might tell them to go away. Why is guilt necessary? Guilt would not emerge in the homosexuals through evolution as they do not pass on offspring.

You're concluding that sex guilt, especially same sex guilt is commonplace because it has an evolutionary basis. As you can see from reading my posts, I can't see any basis. Therefore if this is not true, the commonness of sex guilt must be due to something else, and I postulate that this something else is religion.



quote:

Granted. However, this is just my alternative hypothesis, put forward to explain a situation since your theory failed. Unless you have more biological evidence or logic for why evolution would encourage us not to have sex?




quote:
How do you explain the sexual attractants of a peacocks tail? That actually hinders the bird, because the tail is heavy, and the male bird cannot fly. This is detrimental to the male, but attractive to the female, because the male proves himself to be strong by the fact that he can live successfully even with this disadvantage.

The brain is a very expensive organ. It requires a lot of energy to make it work, and we can clearly survive very well without it, as evidenced by the rest of the animal kingdom who do not have large brains. The fact that it also can help with survival is a by product, just like the fact that attractive long fur can also help warm an animal.

In case you think I'm making this all up, I'm not. I read it in a science book last year, I believe it was "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature", by
Geoffrey Miller. It provides a very convincing argument on how sexual selection shaped the brain, and not survival. Stupid people can tag along with the clever ones and use the advantages that having one intelligent person in the tribe can give. the stupid people can do very well like this. However, if the females CHOOSE the intelligent males to mate with, we get a sudden and more dramatic increase in brain size, as the stupid males are weeded out.

Only secondarily. Can you provide your own references to books which could convince ME what you already know is CLEARLY true?

So why didn't they evolve intelligence also?

No, you weren't listening again. My argument is that females select a random detrimental trait to find attractive, and this trait is then exaggerated. Hence we should NOT expect to find more than one species with intelligence, just as we should not expect to find more than one species that have a peacock's tail.


[QUOTE][B]
OK, life on this planet has been estimated to have been around for a billion years. Give or take a few hundred million

For everyone's information, the current estimates of ages according to of one of my lecturers:

Earth = 4.5 billion years old
Life = 3.5 billion years old
Multicellular life = 500 million years old
Humans = 100,000 years old


Your insistence on DESIGN here really does cast into doubt this whole debate. My arguments are based on evolution. If you're just going to try and undermine my whole side of the argument by removing the source of my evidence for no good reason, what's the point in having this debate?

philechat

Muslim culture is also Bible-based (despite a "new" book called the Quran), and I specifically called this same system of thought "Judeo-Christian" to avoid confusion. Please, if you can, read the messages more carefully so I don't need to repeat myself.

"Not going to break my back in researching something kind of obvious"? :banghead: And by the way, EVEN if homosexuality is reviled in most cultures at most time, so do most cultures at most time practice polygymy. And now you are arguing fidelity here...

dangin

This is a debate about human nature, ethics, and evolution, am I supposed to interpret your posts symbollically? If you can't write literally about these subjects, what are you doing here? Besides making thoughtless arguments.

Hey look, you learned that the brain is a chemical process. Gee was that hard wired in there, and I just had to teach it to you to activate the hard wiring?

Absolutely humans are more successful, if you mean large buildings, airplanes, sitcoms, fast food, cable TV (including porn), and millions of different shaped and colored dildos.

But we are talking about evolutionary success. I got you to understand a little more about the brain, let's see if I can do the same for evolution. There is no "success" in evolution, there is failure, and there is treading water. We, like every other organism currently alive, are treading water.

When mankind discovered penicillin it wiped out all the little germies. They couldn't compete for the most part. But then (here's a shocker) they started competing. They evolved resistance. Which is why we now have amoxicillin. zythromax, cipro, Gentamicin, Baycip, Cetraxal, Ciflox, Cifran, Ciplox, Ciprolet, Cyprobay, Quintor, Ciloxan, Penetrex, Gatifloxacin, Levofloxacin, Lomefloxacin, Noroxin, Amicrobin, Anquin, Baccidal, Barazan, Biofloxin, Floxenor, Fulgram, Janacin, Lexinor, Norilet, Norofin, Norxacin, Orixacin, Oroflox, Urinox, Zoroxin, wait, don't stop reading now, there are more.

And we still can't beat all the germs. A host population, has a parasite population. The host evolves a defense against the parasite, the parasite is less successful until the new strain of that parasite spreads throughout the population and equillibrium is reinstated. The host and parasite have evolved to be "stronger" than their predecessors, but the competitive gap between them remains the same. This fluctuating gap is the only measure of "evolutionary success" and it is anything but constant. This gap indicates how far your specie's head is above the water they are treading. And this is only a tiny portion of evolution's checks and balances.

All our technology, and knowledge amounts to little on the evolutionary scale. You learned about the brain, can you understand this about evolution?

Another example is Alice and the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. Alice is running from the queen, the queen is chasing. Alice runs faster, the queen runs faster, so alice runs faster still, but the queen keeps pace. They are moving faster and faster, but the gap between them remains the same.



Well golly johnny ignorance. The exact age of life on earth, and the exact species Homo Sapiens evolved from are both questionable. Knowing science means knowing what you individually don't know, and knowing what collectively we don't know. Collectively, we don't know these things. And that knowledge is not the point anyway. The point about the length of life on earth is that we have been evolving since then, and that history means something to who we are today. The most recent evolutionary step means even more because that is who we would be most similar too, although much of our history is still with us, buried deep, within our animal psyches. But since your tactic is deflection of the point, you still need to do better.


So there is an "extraordinarily scant" amount we can learn from apes about ourselves. Then we must be capable of learning next to nothing from other social animals that diverged from our line even further in the past. Your human centric egoism is grossly appalling and inaccurate. But I'm not even going to argue this with you. I don't want to strain your chemical brain too much, I'm really hoping you'll get somewhat up to speed on evolution before we joust again.

So are you actually saying that only serious and committed couples have children? (In my best Ren from Ren and Stimpy voice.) What are you thinking man? This doesn't play out statistically in our current society let alone historically, and cross culturally. But let's say that it does, and let's say that it has for 2,000 years since the mighty jebus was here. That is 2,000 years, verses hundreds of millions of years of animal sexual behavior. All things being equal, which of these two stretches of time has had a larger impact on our development as a species?

luvluv, I'm begging you, please stop, these threads are being archived, you are going to become a primary source for someone's term paper in the future about the delusional, unscientific rantings of the religiously motivated debater. I'm going to put it in my will that all my future descendents come back and read your threads as an example of the kind of thinking to avoid at all cost. I guess you are doing a service then, so carry on.

dangin

I guess I talked him into quitting. luvluv, say it ain't so, c'mon man, I kid, I kid. You make a very good argument for me to poop on.

dangin

from salmon above

Earth = 4.5 billion years old
Life = 3.5 billion years old
Multicellular life = 500 million years old
Humans = 100,000 years old

Thanks for the data. However, I remember the story of less than a year ago claiming the universe was 18 billion years old. But now (today on NPR) NASA said difinitively that the universe is 13.7 billion give or take 10 percent.

All this means, is I think we are still working it all out.

I'd be interested to see data on the human figure too. The last one of those I heard had Sapiens at 35,000. But that may be old data too.

That's it, if science can't do better than this, I'm becoming a drooling fundie. At least then I'd KNOW what I know.

luvluv

tronvillian:

My explanation is that it wouldn't work as well for humans as it does for other animals. As I said, MOST of us are probably here by accident, and that is BECAUSE men and women have the luxury of engaging in sex without considering the consequences (which is why it's so pleasurable in the first place, so we'd have a sufficient motivation to do it even when it's not the smartest thing to do). My explanation of why we are receptive to sex all the time is because that, in the end, LEADS TO MORE OFFSPRING than obvious ovulation. Men do like sex, but if a man knew that everytime he had sex there would be a good chance that he would get his partner pregnant, I'd imagine sexual intercourse would go WAY down and masterbation would go way up (or we would have invented some incredibly powerful contraceptives).

How often are men concerned with "ensuring pregnancy"? Only after they are already committed in some sense. So the sexual motivation would be superflous. And given the gestation period of women this notion is even more ludicrous. How many men stay with pregnant women for the sex?!?

This was never my argument. I was only trying to establish that the rules were natural, and not inventions of religion.

I was peppering my argument with humorous anachronisms. Of course our ancestors didn't have paternity suits or child support payments. But all male humanoids, whose offspring were born relatively helpless and who survived from learned rather than instinctive behavior, would be required to sacrifice enormous amounts of resources in the rearing of children.

Salmon of Doubt:

That's an argument from personal experience, and an incredibly shaky one at that. Many people who aren't religious still feel guilt for certain expressions of their sexuality.

My basic reason would be that guilt feelings (and concomittent feelings of rapture with the proper expression of sexuality) would direct sexual activity towards procreative activities with committed, fit partners.

I would totally disagree. Men want to have sex. Most of them, even in a world in which there was no resource commitment required of them, would generally not care if the woman they had sex with was pregnant or not. I would think that, if my basic intent with the woman was sexual (as is often the case with human males) pregnancy would get in the way.

Males want to have sex, and in evolutionary science it might be a helpful simplification to say "men want to pass on their genes" but that would be a misleading simplification in this case.

It might not in it's current context of oral/anal sex as foreplay or as an OCCASIONAL alternative, but my point was that it is likely that ancient man, when he first became intelligent and first realized how pregnancy occured, may have used anal sex and or oral sex as a total alternative. As humans are designed so that sex can occur from behind, I see it as being even more likely that anal sex would have been seen as a very convenient alternative. Any community for which this habit became pervasive enough would have been at an obvious reproductive disadvantage.

For proof of this, again, witness our own modern society. We engage primarily in non-reproductive uses of sex (in the west) and the Western European countries are DEPOPULATING themselves vs the rest of the world, where contraceptives are rarer and there are even more restrictions on certain sexual activities.

Yes humans are selective in who they chose for a mate, but are humans (particularly males) that selective with who they just want to have sex with or under what conditions they will have sex?

I think you are reading your scientific and biological abstractions into the psychological motivation of ancient man. You, sir, are incapable of knowing whether or not pregnancy was ever the intent of any ancient man. However, we know from our access to modern men that this is generally not true. So how do you know it is true of ancient man? It seems to me that the abstraction of saying that men seek to reproduce would be helpful to studying evolution, it would not be helpful in actually assigning motive to any particular man or group of men. Men, even ancient men, probably want to have sex.

Why, for instance, would a man want to have children he would never know? And if he wanted to get her pregnant and leave, wouldn't it be the case that he would likely never know his son or benefit from his son's existence? Why then would he want children? It is far more parsimonious to assume that he just wanted the sex.

a) How would repeated sexual contact "force" a man to care for a child? (Can you justify that without using the g-word?)

b) You really, really need to justify the notion that men want to get their women pregnant. It is far more parsimonious to assume they just want the sex, and I really can't think of a single argument nor shred of evidence which supports that notion. So you need to do something other than just state it.

Any remotely humaniod baby, which was born helpless and functioned through learning rather than instinct, would require an enormous investment of resources. Thus, any remotely humanoid male would avoid overtly ovulating women in favor of non-ovulating women if they could.

No, you could be able to do that even under my estimation, though not totally. People have lost their guilt over any number of things we consider to be deeply wrong, and that they have (at one time or another) considered to be deeply wrong. That doesn't mean that the notion that the guilt was natural cannot be correct. Despite what you think, there are totally sane people who have lost their sense of guilt over murder. I know it makes people feel better to believe that all murderers are insane, but I would doubt that this is true. If you do something often enough, and ignore your conscience enough, eventually you will be untroubled by it. This works with nearly EVERY moral activity, even ones we consider most worthy of guilt (kiddie-porn, murder, rape). For whatever egregious crime we can imagine, there is a totally sane, perhaps otherwise morally upstanding person who has lost all sense of guilt towards it. As you say, I believe that our guilt sense is flexible and therefore the ability to stop feeling guilt is as possible as the ability to develop guilt feelings for an activity you previously saw nothing wrong with. However, this would not act against the idea that any guilt feelings were or were not natural.

Remember, my only point is that the sexual guilt feelings are natural, not that they are right or that they are binding.

You are the one turning this into an argument about homosexuality, my friend. I never mentioned it (in fact, homosexuality is that "controversial topic" I mentioned that I wanted to avoid in this conversation).

I think guilt feelings would be very helpful in prodding you to attempt to sexually reproduce with a women even if you weren't attracted to her. As is evidenced quite often in modern society (which homosexual men and women marrying and/or procreating out of a sense of guilt or shame over their orientation) this strategy can work pretty well. Lots of homosexuals try the heterosexual lifestyle (often resulting in procreation) out of sheer guilt (of the which shame is an attendant or corallary). Nature really doesn't care if you are motivated into reproducing as a result of shame or attraction, and shame/guilt would be a VERY efficient means of getting a homosexual to reproduce.

Not my argument. My argument was that nature would attempt to guide us to engage in reproductive sex.

Like most birds, I think it is because the male's colorfulness acts as a "bullet-shield" or as a distraction for predators vs the dull-colored females. A colorful male, being that it will draw away predators from the female and their young, will always provide a survival advantage to the female. I don't think evolutionary theory supposes that females seek males for the male's evolutionary advantages, but for the evolutionary advantagaes a male CAN BESTOW UPON A FEMALE.

Where are you studying evolution? It's not your major is it? Seriously, I don't think the above is even nearly correct. We didn't evolve large brains because they are sexually attractive to females. To name just one problem with that notion, if it were true males would be decidedly more intelligent than females.

Okay, well just because you didn't make it up doesn't mean it's not crazy.

That intelligence is clearly a survival tool? That's pretty obvious isn't it? Lots of people who can't use their brains to get laid still tend to avoid falling objects and not walk off cliffs and read instructions and so on and so on...

If I understand evolution correctly, anyway, the primary factor in what male's genes are passed on is that the prospective males SURVIVE to mating age. Everything else is secondary. The primary factor promoting evolution (change) is that non-succesful males die off BEFORE females choose a mate, not that they die having never been chosen by the females. And how much of a factor was female choice in early humanoid sexuality anyway?

That's just the way the cookie crumbled. Why didn't we evolve wings or gills? Seriously, where are you studying evolution?

I was listening pretty well. You said that it was ridiculous to assume that sexual guilt was a product of evolution or that it was succesful, since if it was a product of evoution and succesful it would have evolved in other animals. You have echoed the same fallacious sentiment in your above comment asking why other animals have not evolved rationality if it was a survival advantage.

I don't believe in atheistic evolution, I'm just trying to prove to people who do that they are wrong (in thinking that sexual guilt comes from religion) even on their own terms.


philechate:

Muslim culture is clealry not implied in the phrase Judeo-Christian. Maybe you should be more careful about what you say.

Polygymy would fit under my argument very neatly, provided the father sought sexual reproduction with his wives and he was committed to care for all of them and was capable of doing so.

dangin:

We're getting unneccessarily distracted here. Let's break this down to sheer population. Are animals that are more numerous and which inhabit more areas more succesful? I'd say so. Therefore, humans are more succesful than apes.

I have no problem with this. However, if you're going to call someone out for not knowing science on this board you better know it yourself. There aren't many dummies around here. A nickle's worth of free advice.

Whatever steps produced the sexual habits of apes likely has very little to do with us, given that they are not our ancestors (or our closest relatives).

Yes, we are capable of learning next to nothing about our sexual ethics from the sexual ethics of animals much less evolved from ourselves. Since apes are not our ancestors or our closest relatives, the notion that we can determine whether or not our sexual feelings of guilt are natural or learned would seem to be a doomed endeavor. You have admitted that our other feelings of guilt, our capacity to feel guilt, is innate. Is there any evidence that apes feel guilt about things like murder or rape? So, on many different levels, your appeals to apes to decide this argument makes no sense.

Hey, I believe humans and apes should have seperate washrooms and drinking fountains. If that makes me human centric... guilty.

No, I pretty obviously was not saying that. I was saying that nature always SELECTED or pushed in that direction.

To be very polite, you are not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer that I have ever encountered on these boards. These wisecracks are really ironic, if totally humorless. If you have a point to make, imitate the intelligent, informed posters and make them.

Your apparent affection for the greatest insult comic dog of our generation, while admirable, is no substitute for being informed.

dangin

luvluv, you think overpopulation is success. And you tell me I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

From your limited awareness, I'll take that as a compliment. But now you can't even respond to arguments and are reduced to pithy remarks. Splendid debating there. I hope you understand more about evolution now, even though a "dummy" is teaching you. I'll always count it as one of my successes that I got you to understand that everything the brain does is chemical. What you do with your new found knowledge is up to you, and will probably be wasted.

tronvillain

luvluv:
I will point this out again: WE DID NOT EVOLVE IN THE ENVIRONMENT WE EXIST IN TODAY. How often in history have men considered getting their mates pregnant a bad thing? That we may consider it so today is completely irrelevant. It is not at all clear that obvious signs of fertility would decrease rather than increase birthrates, especially (as is usually the case) if females were only sexually receptive during those periods and those signs were considered extremely attractive. If basic reproduction were the only purpose of sex, that seems a more likely state of affairs for a mammal than hidden fertility and near constant sexual receptivity.

*sigh* We are talking about the genetic interest of males here, not their personal interests. In other words, if ovulation is hidden a male who has a one night stand and runs will be more likely to reproduce than a male who sticks around for a few months and has a lot of sex. This is especially true in light of the fact that human female immune sytems seem to require some time to get used to a given male's semen (this does come close to eliminating the chance of pregnancy from a one night stand, but does decrease it), which is potentially another female mechanism devoted to minimizing male "free riders." To even the odds a one-night stander would have to have sex with countless women, which is unlikely given the size of human groups for most of evolutionary history. It is simply going to be in the genetic interest of a human male to stick around for a while. A good mechanism to promote this would be a high sex drive without too much requirement for novelty.

Once a male has stuck around for a while he is going to have a significant investment in the infant, and given the difficulty involving in caring for human infants and children it will probably be in his interest to stick around for at least a couple of years to ensure that it survives. Exactly how much it will be in his interest depends on exactly how much his involvement increases the chance the child will survive and what his chances of finding someone else to mate with during that time if he left would be and so on. What would be a good mechanism to promote this? Again, a high sex drive without too much requirement for novelty, and probably emotions such as "love."

You have thus far failed to establish that they are. In any case the rules are almost certainly not natural, though they may exploit natural tendencies (the existence of which has also not yet been established). I was simply pointing out that the existence of natural tendencies would not justifty the existence of the rules.

If we are going to continue with the evolutionary arguments, we might want to consider moving this thread to Evolution & Creation.

dangin

If we move it, luvluv will just get spanked all the harder by the real experts. I don't know about you tv, but I am a layman. Get this going in E&C and it will be a bloodbath.


OK, I've talked myself into it.