This is reaction to the recent blog post, Monogamy is a lie!
This is a much more important topic which that blog post doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of, because this goes deep into even how societies organize and the back story of the formation of popular culture. I doubt I will be able to touch on all the facets in one blog post. This is a very deep topic.
In my opinion and scientific understanding, that blog is too simplistic and only considers what a man may think he desires without factoring in what each specific man could realistically achieve and the various strategies that men and women employ in order to maximize their evolutionary strategy.
Competing Evolutionary Strategies
As in all life forms, humans are collectively maximizing their evolutionary strategy, to promote their genetics to as many offspring as possible. Individual instances may have various strategies, even including celibacy or even refusing to bear children. It is interesting to note that those degenerate strategies are perhaps the result of a successful strategy of another competing class of humans who inherently (whether they consciously recognize it) desire to promote the impotence of other humans in order to reduce competition. The interplay of strategies is probably far too complex to summarize in a short blog post, but I will try to at least help the reader gain some insight.
Nature is resilient because it can draw upon a huge diversity of chaotic random experiments (i.e. chaotic genetic mixes) so that at any given time, there will be a best fit to the circumstances. It is this huge pool of diversity that protects against extinction events.
Female Eggs Are Rarer
One of the first and most important facts we must consider when analyzing human sexuality and reproduction, is the female's eggs are more valuable and rare than the male's sperm. If the human race only had one male, it could impregnate every female. Whereas, if we only had one female, humanity will be on the verge of extinction. This is likely why females are not given enough testosterone to cause them to take huge risks as man so bravely do, so as they will be protected and the men will be sacrificed first. Women however will become extremely brave and great strength when their offspring are threatened and again because they only have a limited number of eggs and pregnancies within their roughly two decades fertile lifespan. I've read stories of females who lifted a car to rescue their child, but I didn't verify this.
Typical Female Evolutionary Strategy
The female's evolutionary strategy is typically to make sure she has sustenance to raise her offspring, while also attempting to be impregnated with what she perceives to be the superior genetics. A female's hindrain is typically instinctively tuned to want to be impregnated by the male who is perceived to the leader or superior to the other males.
And this is apparently why women are instinctively attracted to bad boys, because this seems to correlate with high level of violence that apparently correlated with the alpha-male victors in our primitive, post-paleozoic, hunter-gatherer time period when mortal danger was omnipresent.
Alpha-male Evolutionary Strategy
The alpha-male's strategy is typically to have the beta-males raise his offspring. The female needs sustenance especially while she is pregnant, and the alpha-male spends all his time remaining superior and impregnating as many females as possible.
Beta-male Evolutionary Strategy
The beta-males also wish to be alpha, but for whatever reason they are realistically incapable of it, so they must accept the role of trying to impregnate a female when she is fertile by keeping her away from an alpha-male.
He may for example use his ability to provide sustenance as an offering. If the female perceives that beta-male to be of sufficiently good genetics to justify giving some of her eggs and fertile cycles to, then she may perceive that his offering is of great value for her evolutionary strategy, but she will likely demand his monogamous commitment because she pays a high price (in terms of her rare eggs and pregnancy cycles) and expects the certainty of the sustenance in return. So she doesn't want her beta-male creating new responsibilities where he will dilute his ability to commit everything to her. The feelings of love seem to derive from these various strategies. Love is a release of oxytocin into our brain to make us desire to continue that relationship.
The beta-male also has an incentive to promote societal enforcement of monogamy because it is a group watch strategy to prevent alpha-males from stealing his female's reproductive cycles. Society can be on the watch of females and ostracizing them when they go outside the bounds of their committed relationship to accept the genetics of an alpha-male. Yet society also needs the alpha-males to succeed sometimes in spreading their genetics, because they are dominant and thus their genes have a certain level of priority, yet nature also needs to maintain the diversity of the gene pool in order to be resilient.
Cycle of Civilization Collapse and Rejuvenation
So there we have the reason that everyone pretends to want to enforce monogamy but simultaneously everyone has an incentive to try to cheat it.
And the alpha-males have both an incentive to promote monogamy so the beta-males raise the offspring of the alpha-males and restrain the beta-males from competing with the alpha-males to impregnate so many females, while also if possible a superior strategy of promoting memes which encourage the beta-males to become infertile (e.g. condoms) without destroying the fertility of the females and encouraging them to accept promiscuous females.
So thus I see the devolution of Western culture upon us because the males have been emasculated with a combination of societal enforcement of child support payments along with the absolute right of the female to divorce taking all the financial support while remaining promiscuous.
Again the blog post I am reacting to doesn't seem to comprehend that it is promoting a strategy that is not only entirely unrealistic for most men, but is also perhaps dysfunctional in terms of evolutionary strategy (although every aberration has purpose in nature's cycle of creative destruction). This is another sign of the decadence of Western civilization.
And so that is the primary reason why I live in southern hemisphere, where traditional evolutionary strategies, marriage, etc.. are still intact.
References
Most of what I know on this subject originates from the writings of Eric S. Raymond, the 150+ IQ progenitor of the term "open source" in his famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay. Also James A. Donald (one of the first guys who communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto) also presents a blog of politically incorrect mysgonist yet also logical analysis. I had written a related blog several years ago, Information Is Alive!
Edit: all images herein are licensed for reuse.
I want to pay tribute to one of those bad boy icons:
This is so awesome! Thank you. It's amazing how strongly science controls us and we often don't even realize it.
I love that you used classical art, to represent your information! Wonderful post.
Thank you for appreciating it. I felt compelled to react to that other blog, even I am very busy right programming.
Thats good though, You provided Steemit with some extra wonderful content :)
Programming sounds tough. Did you go to school for it?
I learned some at the university, but I learned much more by doing. In my opinion, programmer is a very lonely profession. To be a really great programmer, talk less and live in the tedium of 1000s of small details. Programming is a creative art, but it is very tedious and requires very long periods of delayed gratification. I am extrovert, but I also love to design, so I guess I sacrifice for the thrill of the result. Well at least I used to, so I need to go back into my cave now. Btw, programming the way I do it (disappearing) is incompatible with relationship. Some others perhaps are able to carry out programming in a more socially interactive methodology, but I find my productivity goes to 0 when I try to do that, because my extrovert side takes over. For example, Eric S. Raymond appears to have a high enough bandwidth to code at a high productivity while simultaneously very social.
Dude his code is every browser, mobile phone, and desktop computer on the planet. Some people are very efficient, which is another sign of genius.
I don't know what ESR does for a living, but in the open source world he's not very productive, to say the very least. Unlike most other big names (like, say, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, or more recently Satoshi Nakamoto) he's mostly known for his writing essays and not code.
Now really? So please point me to his major contributions to browsers, phones etc. Or, if you want to refute what I said, to an open source project where he is a major contributor.
I knew beforehand only about fetchmail and bogofilter (I'd used both), Wikipedia also says that he contributed code and content to BoW. Not very much, but feel free to substantiate your claim quoted above. I am always happy to admit error in face of evidence ;)
You are consuming my time, forcing me to refute your ignorance because you come here and attack my reputation. That is what I consider to be rude. You come off as an academic who is offended that anyone other than your fellow academics might have a theory and opinion on anything in your claimed area of expertise.
His GIF code for example is in use in all those cases. His GPS code is in use in nearly every mobile device, including the military. Now he is working on the very important problem of rescuing important large historic code bases from archaic version control systems. Man please...
Interesting points. Here's another resource that makes a few more points as well: The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Monogamy.pdf
http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Monogamy.pdf
It seems logical that if we have most males focused on working to support their wives and families, instead out and about foraging and collecting women, then society will be more productive and less contentious aggression. The testosterone level will be lower. I alluded to this facet in my reply to @igorterleg. For him to compare low productivity societies, and declare that thus it can't be an evolutionary strategy seemed quite myopic. James A. Donald argues that a society which restricts female hypergamy and encourages marriages for "lower status males", is more productive and civil. It can be possibly a collective (group) evolutionary strategy.
Overall it appears to be a better deal for beta-males, except when it becomes too asymmetrical as it is now where financial divorce shifts too much power to the females. Now the younger generation is rejecting marriage because of this, and substituting it with birth-control and promiscuity. So the cycle appears to be overdoing a good thing, destroying it, collapse, and rebirth.
I am not arguing that monogamy is the right strategy for a high status male. There are means by which to escape society's imposition of monogamy, if one is truly high status. But my intuition and experience is that rarely if ever does promiscuity correlate with maximum productivity. Which is probably one (subconscious?) factor in why you settled down and became a serially successful author.
Edit: it is easier for those who are propped by debt and socialism entitlements, to argue for arrangements which destroy productivity. Western society.
Great read thank you. JJ Robert's book "Sex 3.0" immediately while reading your post. I highly recommend it for anyone who isn't satisfied with with answer of "that is just how it has always been.
After graduating with a degree in psychology I did not come close to understanding psycho-sexual-social development like I do now. Best summation of why religion exists, women are suppressed, marriage exists and how to evolve beyond all the problems created out of male paternity anxiety.
I must say this article uses many stereotypes taken from animal world and from evolutionary POV. I must disagree, specifically the part about alpha/beta males seems to be quite artificial. I don't deny there might be such a cases, still it's a bit harsh generalization IMHO. The idea that beta males raises alfa males offsprings makes me laugh. Again, there might be such a cases but it doesn't make it rule or principle. People see logic in your thoughts but it's easy to come with many models and theories that has some internal logic. I'd rather see decision based on individual preferences and individual strategies and perspectives rather than some evolution bondage. Your model could fit to (certain) animals quite well but there is no reason to simplify human to those animals.
How many men you think are shacking up with some woman who has kids from another man, or paying alimony and child-support to a woman who is also raising the kids from another man? Certainly not just a few. Of course the incidence is less now with Western women starting birth control bills from age 16 and birth rates so drastically lower.
If you think alpha-males don't exist, then you live a sheltered life. Do you not see Donald Trump on TV? (even if you hate his politics, you can't deny that he has a steady supply of new younger women in his life, and those are just ones we know about)
We are animals.
I don't see how what I wrote is inconsistent with individual preferences. Since we have big brains, we can have an evolutionary impact with our creations and cultural impact for example. Hereditary impact is not the only facet. Remember I wrote in my blog post that I couldn't possibly cover every facet in a short blog post. It is a very deep, complex topic.
I think we see many alpha-males making their evolutionary impact with their accomplishments, more than their offspring, e.g. Bill Gates who may have had a big impact in Africa's evolutionary trajectory, although I haven't studied this in detail. Probably some key players in China are having a greater impact on Africa, but I am not sure.
Sorry, cannot see any strong indicator that beta males take care of alpha males children in general. Mostly rich alfa males pay for theirs children and I consider that as taking care for their children under given circumstances. In this case the other man just takes care of the abandoned woman. But this it would be rather just playing with words. Let's say there are all kinds of scenarios, some of them pretty mixed. We can see all kinds various patterns here.
Let's focus on your statement - We are animal. Having body doesn't make you animal. Having legs doesn't make you chair. People have much more potential than animals in this. But yes, when you put strong belief into evolutionary mechanism your life will probably follow that model. If you decide to follow another model, you can. In other words, if you are able to strongly indoctrinate people with the idea that carnal evolutionary strategy is our only destiny then they will follow that model. And, yeah, congrats, you were able to reduce people almost to animals. For example I live under different kind of belief and strategy and many people I know as well. But yeah, it was difficult to go this way because outside pressure was very strong specifically in certain age. But now I see it was just strong indoctrination of that kind, ignorance and laziness, nothing more. I'm not questioning statistics here (most of the word is really living according to what you've described) but it's just description of a state not a principle. It's up to each of us which model we want live and yes, it takes always an extra effort and energy to transit from one state to another.
It is all the children of those visible alpha-males you don't know about, and all the alpha-males which aren't visible. Do you think public personalities don't cultivate the image that they want you to believe. I think you are naive.
Also, you seem to have missed my point that the bad boys are often "fake" alpha-males. Women's hindbrains seem to be instinctively tuned to be impregnated by these indicators, which fool them into thinking these "bad boys" are alpha-males. And to some extent, that makes them alpha-males in the sense that expend their time and effort being superior to other men in terms of producing offspring yet also typically very unproductive for society in any other metric (c.f. my reply to @neilstrauss). You could read for example James A. Donald's blog post about a female attorney who has been fucking bad boys all her life and is now age 30-something and running out-of-options (because her hindbrain fooled her). Or other women who divorce their subservient husbands, destroying the children.
I have an ex with 3 more children from afaik 3 different men, for example. And I pay her monthly, because the government in the USA will revoke my passport if I don't. I'd probably pay her something any way, but I wouldn't have been paying the $1000s per month she was demanding (requesting) from me during past years (which I no longer pay). And I empathize with her inability to remain productive and choose more wisely. At least now I understand why she couldn't (and her 40s are approaching so it is winding down).
P.S. I've been at different times of my life a "bad boy" and a very productive entrepreneurial software developer. So I speak from my experiences.
To me, all life consequences are based on perspective from where you're doing your decisions. If you evaluate everything by worldly ways (carnal or hindbrain if you wish) consequences are usually bad in long-term (regardless if you are alpha or beta male or female). That is what distinguishes us from animal, we have freedom not to follow "the animal" inside. When I made decisions based on natural way of thiking I was always in trouble, sooner or later (and I did many of them). But when I was trying to made decisions from higher (faith) perspective (fighting natural world-view and my carnal side) although it was hard fight, I made much better long-term decisions for me and people around. When you are able to influence your wife with your example and integrity in this, her hindbrain can be silenced for her. Its up to everyone when he/she decides to follow better (or you can say Godly) ways. Like the female attorney you mentioned. Now she knows her hindbrain fooled her and she only devastated her life (and maybe some other) and she will not (hopefully) listen it anymore and will try to live by better principles. She found that by hard way. That's not necessary but unfortunately very often case. Everyone of us is stupid and proud in certain age, sad thing is when we don't recognize it and leave it. In a broader picture everything is just a way back to God. So perception of monogamy depends mainly on your perspective, for a human with an animal/carnal mind it's practically impossible, for human with a spiritual mind, nothing can be more natural. I experienced both of these states.
I can see some logic in this.
What we should be looking for is evidence (there's none), not logic. Because one of the main rules in logic is that when starting with garbage you can get at everything (mostly garbage, but sometimes truth).
Nope. See my other replies to you for the reason.
Monogomy is eugenics by the powers of church and state.
As if the church and state were not desired by humanity, else they wouldn't exist.
It has to be a strategy or benefit of some group powerful enough to sustain it.
It would be interesting to try to understand who benefited from it and why, which is sort of what my blog post was trying to scratch the surface of. The sociological and anthropological topics are far too complex to be argued succinctly. We could go on for years arguing. And that is why I am in the field of computer programming instead.
Wonderful post!Thank you.
It's funny how the guy who is known mostly for being a laughing stock of computer geeks, the author of sex for nerds HOWTO and above all for his worlds encompassing ego is now an expert in evolution.
Now, seriously: there's not a shred of evidence that human monogamy might be an evolutionary strategy, and whatever (admittedly meager) evidence we have points in the opposite direction. A recent book does quite a good job of debunking these misconceptions, and another gives also valuable insights, although it touches monogamy only incidentally.
But maybe we shouldn't expect too much. Psychologists are notorious for their treatment of evidence, and evolutionary psychologists (which in fact are neither) are the worst of this stock. So what to expect from guys like Raymond or Donald, who - perhaps brilliant in computer science - have yet to understand that not everything is an algorithm.
Ad hominem.
Well, while it is hard to keep oneself from a little joke, you would certainly do yourself a favor reading the entire comment. Or perhaps one of the books I refer to. Or two.
As for ad hominem... well, I would be most suspicious of a history book which is not written by a historian or a physics book not written by a physicist. They might have some insights, but most of the time it's just crap. It's only reasonable to be wary of computer scientists trying to explain evolution, and even more, culture.
Mary Midgley once surveyed and found out that Creationism is most popular among trained engineers, the least among historians and... theologians (biologists were somewhere in the middle AFAIR, thankfully closer to theologians than engineers). It's described in her book Evolution as a religion (the title is quite unfortunate, she is not a Creationist and does not deny the evolution). And she is not the only one to have noticed that engineers tend to have a somewhat simplified view of such complicated issues. After all, Salem Hypothesis did not emerge from nothing.
Ego much?
Appeal to authority is not convincing.
Say, 0.1 milliESR ;)
Authority? Really? Not being an expert in physics when I want to know something about, say, quantum mechanics, I should read a book by a trained physicist, or, say, a Medieval literature expert who never took a lecture in physics above high school level?
Granted, the physicist may be a kook and the literature expert a genius, but the probabilities of this are?
Obviously there are caveats: seeing in a work in a field I'm not familiar with badly botched statistics on which the work's argument depends I can be pretty sure I'm reading crap, no matter who wrote it. But unless you're competent in a field related to the work's argument you will do the best to rely on experts.
Lol, good one. I've butted heads with him, so I've experienced it first-hand, but you also came off initially to me as being too willing to accept some bullshit of academics as well. I'd prefer to keep my mind open and unfortunately I don't have enough time to read all those books so I can better respond on what I think is bullshit and also to learn what those authors have to say.
I agree except I find that academics often have an agenda, often based around who is funding their research and the culture that pervades these Ivy League cathedrals. See for example the AGW (man-made global warming) junk science.
The literature cited by @neilstrauss seems to support much of the thesis I grabbed from ESR and JAD as I expounded in my other comments on this page.
Also statistics are not proof of a causal relationship. Repeatable physics experiments are more in alignment with the scientific method, than what appears to me to more conjecture in the social sciences. But again I am not an expert, so perhaps I would change my mind if I had more time to read experts in those fields.
My mother who practically prays to doctors which I don't, shocked me recently when she said she doesn't listen to veterinarians about the best feeding practices for the dogs she rescues. She said she observed that her hands on experience was more relevant than their academic theories. It was validation for me that not accepting without careful study the experts in fields dominated by theory instead of practice, is a reasonable stance.
Well, a mind open might also be open to bullshit. Nobody can be expert in everything today, Renaissance is long gone. That's OK. What worries me, that too many people (and, sadly, it appears that you as well) are all too eager to think what is bullshit or not without actually reading all those books, as if admitting own ignorance was something of a shame. It is not. I'm pretty much completely ignorant of quantum mechanics and I do not feel ashamed, but neither do I feel a need to take a stance in Copenhagen vs. Everett (I know of such a dispute, yes, but I don't understand it at all). :-)
You missed the point, I never said they were. I said that if I read the work whose argument depends on statistics, and these statistics are clearly and badly fucked up, then I have a strong reason to think this work is worthless. Not so incidentally, this can be said of pretty much everything in evolutionary psychology.
But then again, it still does not do much more than argue that this is possible. Which it clearly is. But there's no real argument why it would be more probable than, say, a byproduct of other historical events.
We may, for one, argue, that Christianity was more friendly than Islam to philosophy and science from the beginning and therefore it's not very surprising that the Christian attitude to science was shaped by people like Augustine or Aquinas while the Islamic one by people like al-Ghazali and I could build an argument in defense of this, but I'm not really sure. What if in the world of Islam prevailed people like Alhacen or Averroes and in the Christian one people like Tertullian or Cosmas? Wouldn't we now discuss why polygyny was so successful an evolutionary strategy (or not)? :-)
Or, they argue that young males without a female partner tend to engage in crime. This is true, but there's a big warning bell: most of the evidence comes from normatively monogamic societies. So it's possible that non-monogamic societies find other ways to police young men than finding them wives, and they do not appear to discuss this (and some cue could be taken from some modern Islamic societies which, unless or maybe until the said society is destroyed by war, oops, liberated, tend to be less crime prone than Christian or post-Christian ones with a similar standard of living, think e.g. North Africa before 2011 vs. Latin America from Mexico to Brazil).
Frankly, I think there are way too many variables, most of them so far unknown, for us even think of being able to successfully determine whether monogamy was a successful evolutionary strategy (but if it was, then why in the most successful West it is being weaker and weaker?), or a byproduct of other, sometimes accidental changes.
In fact, even in biological evolution where there is a rich fossil record, and we are able more or less to trace the history of many developments, often we are unsure whether they were adaptations or byproducts. For example the os penis (the boner bone) which we humans do not have. Dawkins once famously speculated (I think in The selfish gene) which evolutionary forces could lead to humans losing the bone, but it's, well, speculation (and one that begs some obvious questions to boot). But we don't really know if it was adaptive or accidental. So why we would expect to know what was and was not evolutionary in mind and culture development where evidence is way less than that?
I don't want to discuss AGW as this is another field I am mostly ignorant of, but it seems to me more than accidental that the same people who had spent years on casting doubt on health effects of tobacco were later casting doubt on AGW. Clearly not only academics have an agenda. But then again, I don't know much about AGW so I don't feel competent to discuss it. So I only ask: how much are you competent in this field, how much works did you read, followed the footnotes, verified the statistics and so on?
Well there you go doing what you said I shouldn't do.
When we are in a mini-ice age from 2030 - 2050, then you maybe you'll realize how fucking junk that AGW science was. And that is a backtested prediction.
Yeah like the variety your academic cohorts are promulgating and then accusing everyone else of being ignorant because we refuse to waste our time reading their agenda indoctrination books.
Or you could consider the theory from my blog post which is that randomization is the strategy of nature. So it can all just be random diversity so as to be consistent with the Second law of thermo, that entropy is trending to maximum.
Joseph Dunphy's response here http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-explained/ kinda points out how the Salem Hypothesis does, kinda, emerge from nothing.
Quite the opposite. While the Salem Hypothesis is to be taken somewhat tongue in cheek, in the linked article it's explicitly written that, quote, _ Surveys of the phenomenon suggest that it is a very real phenomenon. _, end quote.
It could be correlated with precisely the theory I am presenting in this blog post, in that engineering is a profession focused on production and practice, not on theory. Monogamy (and other group compliance paradigms such as religion) appears to me (see also my comments on this page) to be a strategy to keep men productive. So those men which subscribe to being productive are more inclined to want to see the world as structured in a conducive way to production versus chaotic genetic diversity. OTOH, it can also be argued that the Humanities are elite political agenda indoctrination camps (with heapings of theoretical bullshit and massaging statistics to tell any story desired). Isn't life wonderfully complex. I love it.
It could. It might. It is possible. Well, it is. It is also possible that the engineering education and profession is promoting an oversimplified mechanistic worldview which in turn promotes a strong negative preference for more complex explanations and theories, especially where evidence is not 100% decisive (which means pretty much everywhere). It is possible, but possible does not mean probable and while I'm inclined to believe the above explanation (not that I tried to study the phenomenon in depth), I'm honest enough to admit that I am not aware of a shred of evidence to support this speculation.
In short, I don't know.
Did you really expect me to go do the scientific method in a blog post? You criticism is disingenuous. None of the 85% of cultures that preferred polygamy were competitive economically with the dominant Western monogamous cultures over the past couple of centuries.
Nature is adapting too fast to even apply the scientific method, i.e. there appear to not be repeatable instances, but rather a continual evolution. Although perhaps we might find a cycle if we could compile enough historical data.
So just accept that is for the most part won't be a concrete science.
Perhaps you prefer posit the theory (which you've alluded to) that engineers are just simpletons and want to enclose everything into a neat equation.
(I would guess it is both your theory and my theory combined. I know from my own personal experience and other engineers I've known that we do indeed prefer production over endless theoretical bullshit. I do like theory and philosophy, but I like it to end up somewhere within reasonable time frame; whereas, some academics make a career out of theoretical research that never produces any practical real world application/production.)
And perhaps I think your cohorts rather bloviate about various speculative causal interpretations from complex data sets (making arguments about evidence leaning towards), which from another perspective appear to be aliasing error and thus hogwash.
So we shouldn't blog because neither of us have any solid veracity. Blogging is often about expressing ideas and opinions.
Frankly, I almost didn't write this blog, because I did realize that the social sciences are far to complex and muddled to make absolute arguments. But I decided to proceed, because I sense there is a decadence associated with the new fondled idea of polygamy for Western culture. We are importing the barbarians again, repeating the fall of Rome.
None, that is, except Islam. Yes, Islam declined over the last few centuries, but how much of it might be attributed to its preference for polygamy, and how much to other factors like, say, Mongolian invasions which barely touched the Western world but destroyed most of the Islamic one twice. Or accidental discovery of Americas (which is doubly funny because it was enabled by Columbus' gross miscalculation: he thought that Japan was only about 5000km westward from Canary Islands).
I do. This still does not mean it should be allowed free speculation. History is in much worse situation as what it studies is by definition non-replicable, and even approximating contemporary statistics and cross cultural studies which are available to evopsych (or would be available if they knew how to do it) are out of the question. So it's in fact only explanations of any available evidence. Yet, historians show much more of scholarly discipline than evolutionary psychologists do.
Most of the evopsych research I read appears to do the thing backwards: assume the answer (it must be an evolutionary adaptation) and try hard to support it with whatever excuse at evidence they can come at and speculation. Outside of evopsych (and Continental philosophy, maybe something else) a respectable scholar should first look for evidence against his hypothesis, then for alternative hypotheses and only failing that tentatively treat his hypothesis as confirmed. And never be ashamed of admitting ignorance (yes, I know, easier said than done, publish or perish and all this stuff.)
There are perhaps more theories of what caused the fall of Rome than bad evopsych research papers out there ;) Let's not go there, at least now.
Sorry, I missed the "Joseph Dunphy's response" part. But it does little to refute this anyway, as the phenomenon has been noticed not just by Salem or Patterson but by others as well (e.g. Mary Midgley). He points (quite correctly) that most engineers are not extremists or creationists, but since most educated people in the world are not extremists or creationists this seems not very relevant.
From what I know about this to date, I take that among people with higher education engineers indeed are overrepresented in creationism. I will however happily stand corrected if pointed to new evidence.
We could posit that building large family networks and having many loyal sons, would be advantageous in those agrarian and somewhat feudal or tribal societies, but would not be beneficial in the modern economy. Perhaps this is why monogamy has been winning and production increasing as a result. Granted these are theories. We write blogs to share our thoughts and impact on others. I don't think your experts should have a monopoly on influence and sharing. Knowledge creation is an accretive, bottom-up process, not a top-down cathedral.
Indeed the Americas have been a huge economic driving force, and especially during the Industrial Age where the USA had a coast on both major oceans the Mississippi River to bisect the Eastern portion and transport cargo most efficiently. And it was arguably the Puritan, monogamous conservative culture (along with a temporary boost of slavery in the South) that drove the great production to harvest that resource.
Again it is all conjecture.
Ah your academic bullshit is why we computer programmers (not the scientist variety, but the actual doers) are changing the world, while you stroke your feminist agenda propaganda dick. As Einstein is quoted, "If the facts don't fit the [feminist, emasculating] theory, change [reinterpret] the facts."
Consider my reply to @jimmco. The logic presented isn't exclusive of other complex anthropological interplay. It seems someone got offended that their field of expertise wasn't being claimed by a "non-expert".
The time scales required to falsify evolution are too great to argue for any non-archaeological evidence. We must reason about our experiences and what seems to make sense.
Regarding the book you cited which apparently discusses cultures which reared children as chattel and even though I haven't read the book, this seems to be orthogonal to the logic I presented in this blog post. These cultures have developed around the economics of oversupply of labor in agrarian societies. Remember before the Black Death, Europe also had an oversupply of labor and people were treated as slaves.
I realize you were responding more on the claim of falsifiable evolutionary relevance, and you may be correct that there is none but you can't prove it. It may just be a short-term strategy which fizzles out without any evolutionary impact. Yet I will still argue it is an attempt at a strategy for maximizing hereditary impact. You will observe in those societies which treat children as chattel, the women are often also treated as possessions of their husband. Again this appears to be an evolutionary strategy of beta-males.
Yet we could also reason that is might just as well be a practical strategy of how cope with an agrarian lifestyle, where one needs a reliable female to maintain the household chores and watch over the children. So in that respect we could argue it might have nothing or much less to do with evolutionary impact, and more to do with practically how to produce the most. Yet even that is an evolutionary strategy to survive, thrive, and produce offspring.
Aliasing error is not pointing any where. There are plethora of strategies being applied in nature, and mapping these out with some repeatable scientific test is I think basically impossible. All we have is conjecture. The relevant strategies may be changing (due to the environmental conditions changing, e.g. the end of the agrarian and industrial ages) faster than any evidence could support them.
You are throwing aliasing error all over the map. And I don't see a benefit to wasting my time on it.
It is all aliasing error, because there do not exist total orders in our universe nor in nature. Everything is a partial order and perspective is always relative. This can be easily proved by noting that a total order would be equivalent to real-time omniscience, but this would require the speed-of-light to not be finite, which would collapse the past and future into each other.
So all you will ever have is relative agreement and disagreement.
That is why I won't waste my time reading your propaganda books.
I posted this in her comments a while back
@msgivings ,
My response to your post is long so I thought I would make a post and just link it. I have a lot of questions and think it would show great character on your part if you checked out my response and made one back so your followers and myself can fully understand your position on this subject better.
https://steemit.com/responce/@skeptic/a-responce-to-monogamy-is-a-lie
Thank you and look forward to hearing back from you.
I'm still waiting on a response from her. :/
Well I think someone did respond and point out that monogamy is sort of forced on us by society. And there are even economic ramifications to not adhering (especially for the man). But I also point out that for example the economics of divorce have become asymmetrical in favor of women employing beta-males as a financing strategy for them to be promiscuous. This is one way beta-males end up paying to raise the offspring of other men. Obviously the woman's hindbrain perceived those other genetics to be more desirable whether it was a true alpha-male or a bad boy imitation (which apparently fools the woman's instinctive hindbrain).
yeah I go thru k selection vs. r selection and all that. I hope she responds but I doubt it.
Most excellent. Thank you.
Probably everything we think and do derives from an evolutionary strategy - cool post :-) - have you read 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins - the whole book is about stuff like this- just awesome.
You have portrayed male polygamy as impregnating as many females as possible. I think, male polygamy is having multiple sexual relations. It is not impregnating multiple female.
Your concept of equalizing bad boys with alpha male is most likely wrong as well. If that were true, today's rapists would have been termed as alpha male.
The man in the following video is an alpha male according to your classification...
I did not. I pointed to theory which seems to argue that women's hindbrains sometimes do conflate the two.
Yes the man in the video may be an alpha-male, as he has become a leader of a large tribe.
Lol, what ever. Western decadence. Fornication without offspring. Addiction much.
I'd like to think we're more than our biology and/or evolutionary strategy. More than our limited relationship constructs we squeeze ourselves into, often without success. If this is what marriage is then I want none of it. Ever.