beausoleil

Boy, egos really are out of control round here. Well, while I'm at it I'll set you straight on something else. The essence of irony is subtlety - your somewhat plodding and sledgehammer wit is quite adolescent (and perhaps repetitive!).

The book in question asserts, for instance, that females are more likely to coneive as a result of rape. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks in converting that into an argument for its success as a reproductive strategy.

'Much' may have been going a bit far, I agree, but I find the hoop jumping necessary to construct an evolutionary advantage associated with homosexual behaviour (in particular) unconvincing. Some behaviour may just have no advantage - will evolution wither on the branch if that's accepted?

Dr Rick

The late S. Gould refered to evolutionary psychology (EP) methodology as the "just so" way of explaining human behavior for the reasons beausoleil observed here.

It's too bad that the proponents of this stuff hijacked the word "evolutionary;" once EP has been fully discredited, opponents of evolution may be tempted to cite it as an example of how the theory of evolution isn't really science.

Rick

joshack

It's too bad that the proponents of this stuff hijacked the word "evolutionary;" once EP has been fully discredited, opponents of evolution may be tempted to cite it as an example of how the theory of evolution isn't really science.

LOL, you're joking right? But throwing that Gould expression in was just too over-the-top.

Vorkosigan

Boy, egos really are out of control round here. Well, while I'm at it I'll set you straight on something else. The essence of irony is subtlety - your somewhat plodding and sledgehammer wit is quite adolescent (and perhaps repetitive!).

I was trying to work at a level you could understand.

The book in question asserts, for instance, that females are more likely to coneive as a result of rape. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks in converting that into an argument for its success as a reproductive strategy.

On what evidence? How would such a response on the woman's part have evolved? The woman is a not a passive recipient of make sexuality, but an active chooser.

'Much' may have been going a bit far, I agree, but I find the hoop jumping necessary to construct an evolutionary advantage associated with homosexual behaviour (in particular) unconvincing. Some behaviour may just have no advantage - will evolution wither on the branch if that's accepted?

Of course not. Haven't read Sperm Wars, won't comment.

scigirl

I think you hit on a very important point here. How are we defining "rape" in the biological sense? Do we know for a fact that the females have no choice whatsoever in these acts, or is the act simply violent in nature? While it's important to not immediately jump to an evolutionary explanation for human behaviors, it's also important to not "anthropomorphize" (spelling?) animal behaviors. Just because it looks like rape to us doesn't mean that the female isn't somehow still playing a role in selecting a mate (better pheremones, etc).

scigirl

scigirl

beausoleil,

A belated "welcome" to infidels from another research scientist. What is your field of study? Mine is. . . well immunology I guess.

scigirl

lpetrich

Be careful. Because some strategy is a means to some end does not necessarily mean that those practicing it are consciously aware of that. Thus, when one eats, one is not consciously aware that one is resupplying one's body with useful substances. Likewise with sex and reproduction.

Also, sex can be purely social, such as strengthening social bonds or expressing dominance, though such sex only happens in very brainy species.

The Lone Ranger

It has been my observation that whenever anyone dares suggest that our evolutionary history might have influenced our behavior, many people become quite upset. Evolutionary psychologists can (and sometimes do) overstate their cases, and by no means are all of the hypotheses that they present very well supported by evidence. Even so, this doesn't mean that good work isn't being done in the field. One should note that most EPs are careful to claim that the evidence in some particular case suggests that there might be a selective advantage for such a predisposition. No one is suggesting that humans are automatons, mindlessly following programs laid down by their genes.

Even so, no one in the behavioral sciences doubts that evolution has helped to shape the behavior of other species. As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, to think that Homo sapiens alone has somehow escaped this (as some opponents of Evolutionary Psychology actually claim) is naive indeed. And as E. O. Wilson has pointed out, the claim that there is no such thing as an innate human nature is itself a claim regarding human nature -- a most astonishing claim indeed, in fact.



No offense is meant, but this is a gross caricature of how Evolutionary Psychology is done, as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides point out in <a href="http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html" target="_blank">this</a> scathing article.

Evolutionary psychology is a very new field, to be sure, and it's still in its formative stages. Even so, EPs do present and test hypotheses, and they reject those which fail the tests. And EPs are well aware that many aspects of human behavior have no selective advantage (this, in fact, is the default position). To claim that the discipline is simply made up of a bunch of people who like to tell "just so" stories is simply false.

As much as I respected Gould in other areas, his tendency to mis-represent the work of those who dared to investigate the possibilities of evolutionary influences upon human behavior, and to call those who do nasty names is not very flattering. I think that he did the behavioral sciences a great disservice thereby.


Do you mean that there is no legitimate work done in the field, and that it should be discarded therefore? Even Gould, as much as he disliked the field, admitted that they had done some good work (his objections to EP, to be blunt, were more political than scientific). For instance, he freely admitted that the evidence for an innate "language instinct" was quite convincing -- this alone shows that our evolutionary history has almost certainly influenced our behavior to a certain extent.

Cheers,

Michael

Camaban

I'm probably wrong on a few things here, but.

As for rapists not ejaculating, I'm pretty sure that much of the time, it's because they simply don't have time to finish the job (during wars, they've pretty much got all the time they need on account of very few people are going to stop them. (Rape was only declared a war crime between 5 and 10 years ago))

Also, as for Rape being a way to get the next generation going. the ancient Jews condoned it, as long as the rapist married the rapee to give it some respectability, so that would be an example of Rape being used to get a mate (an instinct legalised?)

lpetrich

I think that one has to be careful here. Forms of society can also be subject to evolution by natural selection -- and such social evolution can mimic biological evolution.

For example, imagine a population of warniks and a population of peaceniks. The warniks are, not surprisingly, much better at fighting wars than the peaceniks, and when the two come into conflict, the warniks win. The result is nothing but warniks.

Thus, a taste for fighting wars can be 100% learned, while nevertheless being very common -- simply because that those with that taste tend to be the winners of the resulting wars.

This caveat will apply to any social species where much behavior is learned; it might be interesting to see how this applies to chimp societies, for example.

The "language instinct" is a good example of how nature and nurture can be closely intertwined. Though some language features are universal, others are highly variable. In speech sounds, different languages use different selections. English does not have a trilled "r", which is common in other languages; likewise, English voiceless and voiced "th" are rare in other languages.

Similar speech sounds are interpreted as variants of a high-level "sound" or phoneme, but one language may put into separate phonemes some sounds that another language does not.

Thus, Old English treated /f/ and /v/ as belonging to the same phoneme; the sound was /f/ initially and finally and /v/ in-between. This feature survives in -f/-ves plurals, though it has otherwise disappeared.

And it disappeared thanx to William the Conqueror and the resulting numerous Old French borrowings, some of which distinguished /f/ and /v/ (fealty vs. veal, fail vs. vale, etc.).

Also, Chinese distinguishes meanings with syllable tones, while English uses tones only for emphasis, such as the apparently-universal rising tone for questions.

There are also differences in grammar, such as adjective-noun ordering, subject-verb-object ordering, and so forth. Though English and many languages has subject-verb-object as their usual order, many other languages have subject-object-verb. A less-common order is verb-subject-object, and orders where the object is before the subject are rare.

Many languages have articles, many do not; thus, my father had trouble with the word "the", because his native Serbo-Croatian had no counterpart word.

Some languages have no word for "to have"; instead of "I have a computer", one must say something like "At me is a computer". Some languages, like Japanese, express "to be &lt;adjective&gt;" by treating the adjective as a verb, thus "I was cold last night" becomes "I colded last night". In the Romance languages, and in their ancestral Latin, an adjective can be used alone, becoming a noun with the meaning "&lt;adjective&gt; one". Thus, "the big one" becomes "the big".

English has the oddity that a negated sentence must contain at least one auxiliary verb, unless its verb is "to be"; if there is normally none, then "to do" is used. "I am not at home", "I do not go home", "I am not going home", "I did not go home", "I was not going home".

This makes me suspicious of Noam Chomsky's theorizing about language "deep structure"; has he spent much time working on languages other than English?

However, the late Joseph Greenberg has done much research into comparative linguistics, finding out that many features are correlated in various ways; what this indicates is unclear, however.