Evolutionary Psychology- What are people's views on it?
So, what are people's views on how to treat evolutionary psychology? Does anyone have information as to whether the "field" can substantially conclude accurate understanding of our human behavior / mental processes, or does it become "just so" stories? I can see so many pitfalls, especially if the hypothesis being sought is cultural, but misattributed to something [s]natural[/s] instinctual / innate. Cultural practices and beliefs can simply be universal because it is the most stable form that "works". So it is hard to prove it is "biologically selected" rather than culturally selected (and becomes stabilized over the most pragmatic outcome over a wide variety of cultures).
Instincts are hard to define as well. The "instinct for sex" for example, might be an example often studied. How much of that aspect is actually cultural? Perhaps relation-pursuing is more like a learned pastime that involves a biological process. Sticking a penis in a vagina (or any other orifice), because you find that person attractive doesn't seem purely instinctual. Nothing in humans is that automatic. There is an element of learning everywhere and throughout all human behaviors.
The problem as far as Philosophy of Science is concerned is that "hormones", "instincts", can be thrown around for anything that we "normally do" without a strong control study for cultural causes. And even then, it is hard to determine if a statistically significant study is actually something in our evolutionary biology akin to an instinct.
At the end of the day, evolutionary psychology's conclusions may be just a mirror of the researcher's hunches. They see what they want to see in it, and provide "just so" conclusions to justify their hunches.
Even worse, these conclusions gain popularity and are broadcasted widely, leading people to act upon them as if they were natural, perpetuating a feedback loop that intertwines behavior and psychology with the presumed expectations of human nature.
We can conclude anything from evo psych:
"The drive to overthrow bad leadership"
to
"Why people gossip"
"The drive for empathy"
etc. etc.
Instincts are hard to define as well. The "instinct for sex" for example, might be an example often studied. How much of that aspect is actually cultural? Perhaps relation-pursuing is more like a learned pastime that involves a biological process. Sticking a penis in a vagina (or any other orifice), because you find that person attractive doesn't seem purely instinctual. Nothing in humans is that automatic. There is an element of learning everywhere and throughout all human behaviors.
The problem as far as Philosophy of Science is concerned is that "hormones", "instincts", can be thrown around for anything that we "normally do" without a strong control study for cultural causes. And even then, it is hard to determine if a statistically significant study is actually something in our evolutionary biology akin to an instinct.
At the end of the day, evolutionary psychology's conclusions may be just a mirror of the researcher's hunches. They see what they want to see in it, and provide "just so" conclusions to justify their hunches.
Even worse, these conclusions gain popularity and are broadcasted widely, leading people to act upon them as if they were natural, perpetuating a feedback loop that intertwines behavior and psychology with the presumed expectations of human nature.
We can conclude anything from evo psych:
"The drive to overthrow bad leadership"
to
"Why people gossip"
"The drive for empathy"
etc. etc.
Comments (135)
I'm not sure that was a critique of evolutionary psychology rather than of a critique of the idea of human nature, and maybe even of psychology tout court.
And that would be a ...what...theory?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Interesting. This theory of yours about the human psyche...it's like there might be some field dedicated to exactly these sorts of theories... about the psyche....what elements are cultural, which evolved...
Quoting schopenhauer1
Do they? Is that how people think a lot of time? You're really churning them out. You could get funding for this, possibly a whole university department if you play your cards right. Just need to think of a name for it...
Quoting schopenhauer1
We're going to need a journal for these. Perhaps we should put some effort into testing them, or formalising the methodology a bit... But the name...the name
Naturalness Thinkology. I think it might catch on.
I take it seriously, on the basis of looking at a lot of the relevant science. I've also made many empirical observations of my own. I've been testing my intuitions on the subject for a long time. Furthermore, I make use of my understanding that we are social primates - including here on TPF. Sometimes subtly and other times not so subtly.
Psychology is too broad.. Freudian Psychology or Cognitive Psychology? A bit different. Evolutionary Psychology just seems to be something that is especially egregious of not being able to really delineate and, might never have a definitive criteria to do so. Whereas genetics and artifacts can tell us about evolutionary development to some degree of accuracy, using ourselves to tell us about ourselves, is fraught with assuming the consequent.
Yeah, "formal".
I wonder if anyone has ever written on this before..oh wait:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology
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Further reading
Books and book chapters
Alcock, John (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516335-3
Barkow, Jerome (Ed.). (2006) Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513002-7
Buller, David. (2005) Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.
Buss, David, ed. (2005) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. ISBN 0-471-26403-2.
Degler, C. N. (1991). In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism in American social thought. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-507707-0
Ehrlich, P. & Ehrlich, A. (2008). The dominant animal: Human evolution and the environment. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Fodor, J. (2000). The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology
Fodor, J. & Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (2011). What Darwin got wrong.
Gillette, Aaron. (2007) Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230108455
Gould, S.J. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Joseph, J. (2004). The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope. New York: Algora. (2003 United Kingdom Edition by PCCS Books)
Joseph, J. (2006). The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora.
Kitcher, Philip. (1985). Vaulting Ambitions: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. London:Cambridge.
Kohn, A. (1990) The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life
Leger, D. W., Kamil, A. C., & French, J. A. (2001). Introduction: Fear and loathing of evolutionary psychology in the social sciences. In J. A. French, A. C. Kamil, & D. W. Leger (Eds.), The Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 47: Evolutionary psychology and motivation, (pp. ix-xxiii). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Lewis, Jeff (2015) Media, Culture and Human Violence: From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity, Rowman and Littlefield, London/Lanham.
Lewontin, R.C., Rose, S. & Kamin, L. (1984) Biology, Ideology and Human Nature: Not In Our Genes
Malik, K. (2002). Man, beast, and zombie: What science can and cannot tell us about human nature
McKinnon, S. (2006) Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology
Rose, H. and Rose, S. (eds.)(2000) Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology New York: Harmony Books
Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.
Richards, Janet Radcliffe (2000). Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-21244-1
Sahlins, Marshall. (1976) The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology
Scher, Stephen J.; Rauscher, Frederick, eds. (2003). Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches. Kluwer.
Segerstrale, Ullica (2000). Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-286215-0
Wallace, B. (2010). Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work
Articles
Buller, D.; et al. (2000). "Evolutionary psychology, meet developmental neurobiology: Against promiscuous modularity". Brain and Mind. 1 (3): 30725. doi:10.1023/A:1011573226794. S2CID 5664009.
Buller, D. (2005). "Evolutionary psychology: the emperor's new paradigm". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 9 (6): 277283. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.003. hdl:10843/13182. PMID 15925806. S2CID 6901180.
Confer, J. C.; Easton, J. A.; Fleischman, D. S.; Goetz, C. D.; Lewis, D. M.; Perilloux, C.; Buss, D. M. (2010). "Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations" (PDF). American Psychologist. 65 (2): 110126. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.601.8691. doi:10.1037/a0018413. PMID 20141266.
Crane-Seeber, J.; Crane, B. (2010). "Contesting essentialist theories of patriarchal relations: Evolutionary psychology and the denial of history". Journal of Men's Studies. 18 (3): 21837. doi:10.3149/jms.1803.218. S2CID 145723615.
Davies, P. (2009). "Some evolutionary model or other: Aspirations and evidence in evolutionary psychology". Philosophical Psychology. 22 (1): 8397. doi:10.1080/09515080802703745. S2CID 144879264.
Derksen, M. (2010). "Realism, relativism, and evolutionary psychology". Theory & Psychology. 20 (4): 467487. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.321.8061. doi:10.1177/0959354309350245. S2CID 145505935.
Derksen, M. (2005). "Against integration: Why evolution cannot unify the social sciences". Theory and Psychology. 15 (2): 139162. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.1027.3828. doi:10.1177/0959354305051360. S2CID 144467388.
Ehrlich, P.; Feldman, Marcus (2003). "Genes and cultures: What creates our behavioral phenome?". Current Anthropology. 44 (1): 87107. doi:10.1086/344470. S2CID 149676604.
Fox, E.; Griggs, L.; Mouchlianitis, E. (2007). "The Detection of Fear-Relevant Stimuli: Are Guns Noticed as Quickly as Snakes?". Emotion. 7 (4): 691696. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.691. PMC 2757724. PMID 18039035.
Franks, B. (2005). "The role of 'the environment' in cognitive and evolutionary psychology" (PDF). Philosophical Psychology. 18 (1): 5982. doi:10.1080/09515080500085387. S2CID 144931740.
Gerrans, P. (2002). "The Theory of Mind Module in Evolutionary Psychology". Biology and Philosophy. 17 (3): 305321. doi:10.1023/A:1020183525825. S2CID 82007006.
Looren H, de Jong H, Van der Steen W (1998). "Biological thinking in evolutionary psychology: rockbottom or quicksand?". Philosophical Psychology. 11 (2): 183205. doi:10.1080/09515089808573255.
Lewontin, R.C. (1998) The evolution of cognition: questions we will never answer, in D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg (eds), An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 4: Methods, Models and Conceptual Issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 10732.
Lipp, O.; Waters, A.; Derakshan, N.; Logies, S. (2004). "Snakes and Cats in the Flower Bed: Fast Detection Is Not Specific to Pictures of Fear-Relevant Animals". Emotion. 4 (3): 233250. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.4.3.233. PMID 15456393.
Lloyd, E.A. (1999). "Evolutionary psychology: the burdens of proof" (PDF). Biology and Philosophy. 14 (2): 21133. doi:10.1023/A:1006638501739. S2CID 1929648.
Machery, E. (2007). "Massive modularity and brain evolution". Philosophy of Science. 74 (5): 825838. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.215.1961. doi:10.1086/525624. S2CID 117037111.
McKinnon, S. (2005). On Kinship and Marriage: A Critique of the Genetic and Gender Calculus of Evolutionary Psychology. In: Complexities: Beyond Nature & Nurture, McKinnon, S. & Silverman, S. (Eds); pp. 106131.
Panksepp, J.; Moskal, J.; Panksepp, J.B.; Kroes, R. (2002). "Comparative approaches in evolutionary psychology: Molecular neuroscience meets the mind". Neuroendocrinology Letters. 23 (4): 105115. PMID 12496741.
Panksepp, J. (2000). "The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology". Evolution and Cognition. 6 (2): 108131.
Smith, E.A.; Borgerhoff Mulder, M.; Hill, K. (2001). "Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: A guide to the perplexed". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 16 (3): 128135. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(00)02077-2. PMID 11179576.
Smith, E.A., Borgerhoff Mulder, M. & Hill, K. (2000). Evolutionary analyses of human behaviour: a commentary on Daly & Wilson. Animal Behaviour, 60, F21-F26.
Verweij, K.; et al. (2010). "A genome-wide association study of Cloninger's temperament scales: Implications for the evolutionary genetics of personality". Biological Psychology. 85 (2): 306317. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.07.018. PMC 2963646. PMID 20691247.
Samuels, R. (1998). "Evolutionary psychology and the Massive Modularity hypothesis" (PDF). British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 49 (4): 575602. doi:10.1093/bjps/49.4.575.
Wilson, D.S.; Dietrich, E.; et al. (2003). "On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology". Biology and Philosophy. 18 (5): 669682. doi:10.1023/A:1026380825208. S2CID 30891026.
Weber, Bruce H.; Scher, Steven J.; Rauscher, Frederick (2006). "Review: Re-Visioning Evolutionary Psychology". The American Journal of Psychology. 119 (1): 148156. doi:10.2307/20445326. JSTOR 20445326.
Wood, W.; Eagly, A. H. (2002). "A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences". Psychological Bulletin. 128 (5): 699727. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.128.5.699. PMID 12206191.
Other documents
Stephen Jay Gould."Darwinian Fundamentalism", New York Review of Books, Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
David Buller. "Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology" Scientific American. December 19, 2008.
David Buller. "Sex, Jealousy & Violence. A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary Psychology". Skeptic.
"Paul Ehrlich challenges Evolutionary Psychology"
John Klasios. "The evolutionary psychology of human mating: A response to Buller's critique".
Malik, Kenan. 1998. "Darwinian Fallacies". Prospects.
Schlinger Jr, Henry (1996). "Full text "How the human got his spots. A Critical Analysis of the Just So Stories of Evolutionary Psychology" (PDF). Skeptic. 4 (1): 1996. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-11-07. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology: Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned. Robert Kurzban's review of the book Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology.
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 567). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Full text
Tooby, J., Cosmides, L. & Barrett, H. C. (2005). Resolving the debate on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpenetration of motivational and conceptual functions. In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Content. NY: Oxford University Press.
Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology by Edward H. Hagen, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 567). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Why do some people hate evolutionary psychology? by Edward H. Hagen, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin. (See also: his Evolutionary Psychology FAQ which responds to criticisms of evolutionary psychology.)
Geher, G. (2006). Evolutionary psychology is not evil! ... and here's why ... Psihologijske Teme (Psychological Topics); Special Issue on Evolutionary Psychology, 15, 181202. [2]
Liddle, J. R.; Shackelford, T. K. (2009). "Why Evolutionary Psychology is "True." A review of Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True" (PDF). Evolutionary Psychology. 7 (2): 288294. doi:10.1177/147470490900700211. Archived from the original on June 20, 2010.
The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology: Persistent Falsehoods About Evolutionary Psychology by Gad Saad
Evolutionary Psychology Under Attack by Dan Sperber
Bryant, G. A. (2006). "On Hasty Generalization about Evolutionary Psychology". American Journal of Psychology. 19 (3): 481487. doi:10.2307/20445354. JSTOR 20445354.
Tybur, J.M.; Miller, G.F.; Gangestad, S.W. (2007). "Testing the controversy: An empirical examination of adaptationists' attitudes toward politics and science" (PDF). Human Nature. 18 (4): 313328. doi:10.1007/s12110-007-9024-y. PMID 26181309. S2CID 17260685.
Online videos
TED talk by Steven Pinker about his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Margaret Mead and Samoa. Review of the nature vs. nurture debate triggered by Mead's book "Coming of Age in Samoa."
Secrets of the Tribe Documents the conflicts between cultural and evolutionary anthropologists who have studied the Yanomamo tribes.
Eek, that doesn't seem like good science.
No, it's not science. It's just living in the world and paying attention.
Understandable, I think understanding human motivation and the human condition is valid. I do it all the time. Evo-psych basis for things is harder to prove. I can say, "We (mankind) is an insatiable creature that always is dissatisfied." That's one thing. Then I might say, "And that is due to the fact that in our past we needed this..." Probably true, but vague enough to be so general as to not be too problematic. The more specific though, the more evidence becomes necessary I would think.
@BC
@apokrisis
@Jamal
@Paine
@Janus
So what did you think of all those books and papers? --- Or, wait, was your OP a summary of your position after reading all that stuff?
Science doesn't prove things. In many cases science can provide pretty overwhelming evidence in support of a theory, but that isn't sufficient to consider a theory proven. Psych theories are certainly less accurate than theories about things which are much less complex than human beings, but that's not surprising.
I personally use psychology to tune up my intuitions about myself and other people, while taking it all with a grain of salt.
It Ain't Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb, The New Yorker
Anything but Human, Richard Polt, NY Times
Not sure if trolling? My point is that my point isnt some crazy outlier.
No of course not, but why should you care if it's an outlier? You're an anti-natalist, for chrissakes. Outlier is where you live.
Of course people have critiqued evolutionary psychology. Of course there are examples, especially I think from earlyish days when people were a little over-excited about the prospects for it, and some of that stuff is a bit cringe.
But so what? It's obviously not a stupid idea. We are what we are, and the principle science of what we are is biology, and biology is completely steeped in evolutionary theory at this point. Of course there will be insights about human beings that are shaped by our understanding of evolution. How could there not be?
(I was ever so slightly teasing you about the list because it's obviously a real mixed-bag, even to someone as ill-informed as I am. Some of what's on there is clearly going to be a defense of the ideas you were attacking. Some of it is notoriously, let's say, "motivated" attacks, not taken seriously by anyone, I think, rather like the drubbing sociobiology took mainly from stuffy humanities types. It's nothing like evidence that evopsych is a disreputable field or a field in crisis or something. Might be, but that list would have nothing to do with it.)
Yes I am, and you're right, I don't care about being an outlier. However, when someone implies that something I am presenting is an outlier when it isn't, I will make that fact known. That was a specific answer to an attempt at snark by another poster.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't know, that last sentence kind of contradicts what you're saying. Wikipedia isn't academic journals, but it often references them (as there are plenty in there). Anyways, I think it's fine as a discipline. However, I see it really straddling the line. It's not just a field of study. It's underlying premise is that various behaviors, some very specific ones, can be traced back to processes that are hard to prove.
It's easier to do animal evolutionary psychology. There are much easier ways to point to programming. Obviously as you move to complex social animals such as ourselves with language and strong sense of self-awareness, and conceptual cultural transmission, that becomes rapidly difficult to discern as to what is evolutionarily selected (if that is even the case), or what is cultural. There used to be an idea towards the beginning, as you were alluding to, like humans evolved a swiss-army knife module system. That seems to be out of favor.
I meant the list as a whole -- some of the stuff on the list might be cogent critiques that are crucial to the future development of the field or even its collapse. I wouldn't know. But some of what's on there is definitely not that, so the list as a whole is not, say, evidence that the field is disreputable or something. That's all I meant.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Proof isn't exactly on the table anyway. I think what you're saying is that evolutionary explanations of behavior are inherently more speculative than other sorts of explanations, and I'm not sure that's true, because we have some pretty solid ideas about how evolution works, so at least the foundation is solid, even though shifting all the time. Cultures and languages also evolve, and the mechanisms are quite similar, but I think there's not much prospect of science of culture that would look much like biology. Maybe someday, but for now that appears to me at least to be beyond us.
I think the big takeaway from the last hundred and fifty years of biology and psychology is that we are not nearly so different from other animals as we used to think. We're still trying to figure out just what is and what isn't different about us, and evolutionary psychology is the obvious terrain for whatever fights we have about it.
:ok:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Eh, evolution related to physical artifacts, and biological systems, even perhaps cognitive systems. But more complex behavior? Much more of a grey area.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, but that wouldn't be my argument (that culture plays a major part in behavioral phenomena).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Even just @Wayfarer's article makes the argument clear:
Quoting Anthony Gottlieb- It Ain't Necessarily So
Behavior is a product of brains. Bird brains manage the kind of singing each species (and each individual) performs. Bird brains also manage mating, nest building, egg laying, egg incubation, chick feeding, chick fledging, and so on. I don't know how birds do it all, exactly, but they do.
Animals that are closer to us than crows, like dogs, have bigger brains and have evolved to learn and do more things. You've heard of the border collie that has learned the names of about a thousand objects and can connect each object to its name. This collie also has grasped some rudiments of grammar. Dogs are uniquely able to look at us and identify what we are looking at. They can follow our gaze. Very few other animals can do that. They are good at manipulating us.
Most people don't have a problem attributing crow and dog psychology (their behavioral abilities) to evolution, What else would it be?
But then we come to our own case and suddenly the thought that our behavior might have evolved ranges from "Of course it evolved!" on over to "Evolutionary psychology is anathema!"
I'm of the former, rather than latter, view. But what does that mean?
We didn't evolve the ability to read and write. What we evolved was the ability to deploy language. Presumably we began talking early on. We talked for a long time among our small simple hunter-gatherer groups. Writing and reading came about (you know, 5K years ago) when the complexity of society developed enough that it became advantageous to capture abstract spoken concepts in abstract written symbols (like, in clay).
Learning to speak (Chinese, Arabic, Danish...) is very easy for children--all three at once, if the environment allows. That's an evolved ability. Learning to read and write the language we speak (or any other language) is difficult. Reading and writing are not evolved abilities.
We didn't evolve a preference for French Roast coffee (or some other inferior slop). What we evolved was the capacity to metabolize caffeine and feel slightly stimulated. The same goes for quite a few psychoactive chemicals.
One could go on for hours citing examples of what capacities we did not and did evolve.
The thing to avoid in thinking about evolved psychology is that we didn't evolve specific preferences -- houndstooth over plaid; vanilla over strawberry; antinatalism over pronatalism. What we evolved was the ability to prefer, and manage preferences. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Sure, but what do you take away from that?
Are we just going to do another round of the endless consciousness debate in this thread? "Science still hasn't explained it, so it's not biology." That's a crap argument. Science is hard, and it takes a long time, and people need to deal. Why is everyone so intent on second-guessing science? Why all the armchair quarterbacking? Just say thank you and let them do their work.
Everyone knows behavior is both nature and nurture; we're just working out the details. I think it's both natural and salutary for biology to push the envelope a bit because that's how you can find the limit, the point where you say, past here it must be something other than biology. If that means evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are still in the 'over promising' phase then the 'under delivering' will pull things back, probably too far, and the pendulum will keep swinging but with a shorter and shorter period. We hope. But if no one ever tests the biology-first approach, we're not going to learn much.
No.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But is it amenable to science is the question. That article actually covers the general problems I am presenting.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think @BC kind of gets at it:
Quoting BC
If the scope is not delineated properly, it becomes absurd. The article again brings up the point:
I think it goes back to what I said in the here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
But yes, I agree with your points about language. That is certainly something in our hardwiring. How and why it is selected for is a mystery, but there are many theories- everything from Chomsky's "all at once for internal dialogue" to better tool-use and social coordination, etc. It's hard to know the causes versus the effects. But if we can't even figure out language, the more modular behaviors would be near impossible, and even so, how would it be attributed to biology versus culture?
The biggest pitfalls is that humans simply live out the tropes that the evopych puts out. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Probably evolved capacities.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But that is exactly the endless debate about consciousness here.
Sure, possibly exaptations that were then coopted as adaptations. But this is so general that it really doesn't touch the realm of evopsych.
Quoting Criticism of Evolutionary Psychology Wiki
Noam Chomsky argued:
Quoting Chomsky
The exact nature of the evolved traits (what its origins are), and its attributions. See my post above:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/823047
As @Srap Tasmaner has already said, the vast majority of those sources are from within evolutionary psychology - the first citation is Henry Plotkin, for Christ's sake!
I don't even like evolutionary psychology that much, but I like less lazy hack jobs that purport to take down an entire field of investigation because you've had a bit of think about it and reached your own conclusions (in that exact field no less) without having done a shred of research beyond a misunderstanding of a Wikipedia article.
It seems your beef with evolutionary psychology amounts to little more than that it reaches conclusions that "don't seem right" to you. Well put your big boy boots on, read the material and engage with the criticism.
So you look deeper and learn about how our closest living relatives live in relatively small cooperative bands in territories bordering on the territories of other small bands of chimps, and while there is cooperation within a band there is 'murderous' hostility towards chimps from neighboring bands. Then you look at the way humans behave.
Us and Them
I am you trolling nitwit. Read my other posts. If you want to make an argument instead of troll me then do so. Otherwise, youre a hack of a hack. An internet troll who knows how to be condescending. Congrats, you passed Internet 101.
Evolutionary psychology conceptually is perfectly fine. The general idea that we have psychological features that were developed in response to environmental pressures, like any other features we have, makes perfect intuitive sense.
But beyond the general idea of it, it seems very speculative, and it seems inherently so - I don't see a path out of the speculation for most hypotheses in the evo-psych realm.
I think that pretty much sums up what I think of evo psych - the basic tenet of it is pretty much obviously true, but any specific hypothesis is probably untestable, unverifiable, unsatisfiable.
I apolgise, I must have missed it. Which of the sources have you tackled? I've scanned back through the posts but can't see a reference.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Hence the four quotes I selected from your OP. All are theories about human nature. Presumably you're not claiming you were born with that knowledge (that would automatically undermine your position about cultural acquisition), nor, I assume, are you claiming you acquired it by divine revelation?
So how did you come by it? Observation, and testing.
So you've answered your own question.
Yes, these are my thoughts on it too. Pretty much summarized it. :up:
The New Yorker article is a good jumping off point from which I quoted heavily. Thanks Wayfarer. The Wikipedia article itself had some good ones.
You can trash the sources, but then you are simply circling the topic and not engaging it. Posturing, trolling, whathaveyou. Your elitism isn't a defense. The field has always had these criticisms. No, this isn't on the level of genetics, molecular biology, atomic physics, etc. It's a particularly sticky topic because it assumes a framework that may not be the case (biologically adapted rather than sociocultural, or even where the delineation or combination would start or end etc.).
You can either engage with the topic or don't.
Sorry for calling you a nitwit. Rather, you are just condescending :razz:. You clearly know how to do this well, so that would not be a nitwit.
Quoting Isaac
Observation and testing doesn't prove it is right. This is notoriously fallacious thinking in the social science fields. The assumptions prior to testing, the test subjects, the conclusions can all be up for interpretation. Going through the motions of testing does not confer divine truth to the project. Departments can also simultaneously reinforce arbitrary assumptions and/or have diverging assumptions, making the initial assumptions questionable.
Besides which, as I bolded in the quote laid out nicely by the New Yorker:
That is to say, most of the empirical markers are not amenable to observation or experimentation.
Now, finally, you conflate two things from my OP. I am NOT saying "so LeTs CaNceL EvoPsycholgy".. Rather, I am just questioning its usefulness in determining human nature. You seem to think I am making that point. I am not.
Just from this article alone, we get these criticisms (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/#MasModHyp):
Arguments against evolutionary psychology
Over-attribution of adaptations based on apparent design:
Critics argue that evolutionary psychologists often rely on apparent design to explain adaptations, leading to the creation of "just-so stories."
Gould and Lewontin (1979) expressed concerns about explaining apparent design solely through adaptation, and Williams (1966) cautioned against excessive attribution of adaptation as an explanation for biological traits.
Ignoring alternative evolutionary processes:
Elizabeth Lloyd (1999) derives a criticism from Gould and Lewontin's views on sociobiology, highlighting how adaptationism in evolutionary psychology overlooks alternative evolutionary processes.
Buller (2005) argues that evolutionary psychologists excessively emphasize design and assume that evolution is finished for the traits they study, instead of recognizing ongoing evolutionary changes.
Misconception of adaptations and variation:
Evolutionary psychologists assume that adaptations are universal, unvarying traits, while genetic variants are considered evolutionary noise with little adaptive significance.
This constrained notion of adaptation fails to acknowledge that adaptations can still exhibit variation and be subject to ongoing selection.
Different types of adaptationism:
Philosophers of biology have proposed various types of adaptationism, including Godfrey-Smith's "explanatory adaptationism."
Explanatory adaptationism aims to address questions about apparent design in nature and distinguishes evolutionary psychology from creationism or intelligent design but doesn't provide clear constraints on evolutionary explanations.
Flawed method of testing:
Evolutionary psychologists often rely on cross-cultural psychological tests to support their view that universally distributed traits are adaptations.
Critics argue that this method is flawed since the presence of a trait across cultures doesn't necessarily prove it is an adaptation but neglects the wider scope of evolution as defended by philosophers of biology.
Insufficient consideration of alternate hypotheses:
Critics argue that evolutionary psychologists give insufficient weight to alternate hypotheses that can explain the data as well or better than their preferred hypotheses.
Buller (2005) highlights the importance of introducing alternate hypotheses, such as assortative mating by status, which may better account for certain mate selection data than high-status preference hypotheses.
Perhaps it is important to mention that what can be learned about human nature from evolutionary psychology is only a portion of a large complex picture.
I don't know of any evolutionary psychologists, who if asked, "Nature or nurture?", are going to respond with 100% nature. or even 50% nature. EP is most appropriately understood as simply a part of a very complex picture.
Does being in a blaming state of mind amount to Monkey Mindedness?
I'm afraid it starts off quite inchoate, and there is a lot of context behind some comments that I'm not going to try to fill in. Still, perhaps some will recognize some usefulness to it.
No it isn't. A newspaper article isn't a source in an attempt to undermine an entire academic field of enquiry - not even close.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Exactly. How is that any different from you trashing all the papers, books and articles produced in favour of evolutionary psychology? It's a complex topic, one which has been wrangled over by some very dedicated professionals. It's perfectly possible they're all deluded (it happens), but, as I'm sure you've heard, we generally hold that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Declaring an entire field's worth of researchers to be deluded needs more than a newspaper article.
Quoting schopenhauer1
My point was that your argument relied on them. You could not have written the post without those assumptions being the case, so if you say "we can't possibly know" then your argument falls down. You've made assumptions about what is 'human nature' and you've used those assumptions to present an argument throwing doubt on the ability of scientists to conduct research into human nature. So how did you do that research if they can't?
Evolutionary psychology is flawed. It's flawed by methodological issues which are mainly to do with experimental design and statistical analysis, some of which your later citations touch on.
What it's not flawed by (and no serious academic has accused it of) is a general inability to tell the difference between human nature and culture at all levels, which is what you'd need to further your "sex drive isn't biological in humans" project. No one is seriously suggesting such a thing, and you're clutching at straws trying to connect the two.
The effects of the endocrine system on behaviour are pretty easy to document, study, and draw relatively robust conclusions from and I don't know of a single academic in the field who questions that.
Yes it is plus infinity! As I said, it's a suitable "jumping off point", then provided more.
Im discussing it on a casual philosophy forum. Know your forum bruh.
Rather than reprimanding someone for questioning evolutionary psychology, it is more productive to engage in respectful and constructive discussion. Fir
Just a general comment here. I think you're missing the point of the field.
There are a lot of areas where people assume they know roughly what the explanation of some human behavior is, even if they don't know the details, and that explanation often begins with a broad gesture at history and culture.
But sometimes there is a kind of explanation available that is really quite different. Often what the sort of explanations I have in mind have in common is that they contest the generally "intellectualist" approach to human culture and behavior. There are classic examples in the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, who offered what we might call "material" explanations for things like religious dietary restrictions. Just as curious is the reverse: the emphasis on culture as shaping economics in the work of Marshall Sahlins. Harris in his day was about as controversial as Robert Trivers is in ours.
All of this to say that I think evolutionary psychology is valuable at the very least for moving the Overton window here, in much the way that anthropologists like Harris and Sahlins did -- what if we don't assume we already know how this works but try, you know, the opposite? In the case of human behavior, what if we don't assume it's all cultural, but consider that maybe a great many facets of our lives make perfect sense if you remember to think of as animals first and foremost and expect that to be more than sort of the bare substrate upon which we grow our rich and marvelous cultural lives.
What's the alternative? We're born animals but leave all that behind almost immediately? After the last 150 years of biology and psychology that sounds like a non-starter.
We can do that. I am not saying we shouldn't, but it is a competing idea amongst many, so this is more a critique as to how efficacious it is in this endeavor. So I think it is helpful to delineate two kinds of "evolutionary psychology". There is Evolutionary Psychology and evolutionary psychology. The capitalized "EP" is to highlight that it is a more thoroughly modular approach. All sorts of behaviors are thus studied to see if they somehow have a correlate to some evolutionary trait. Lowercase "ep", recognizes that of course the brain is an organ shaped by evolutionary forces, but that it is more general. And these general processing components then have a much less defined way of shaping behaviors and thought-patterns. Rather, the farther up the limbic system to the neocortex, it is more about plasticity, learning, individual variation and preferences, and cultural markers, etc.
Perhaps the mirror neuron system was coopted to imitate tool use, and this then got exapted for use in language acquisition, and then the need for long distance communication selected for the FoxP2 gene to be used in vocal communication.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440963/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00698/full
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15301747/
Interesting quote I just came across today:
The spot for the recognition of letters and such is right next the area dedicated to recognizing faces. I love the suggestion that on the one hand we have a largely innate capacity for recognizing faces, but that the writing systems we developed were designed to take advantage of just that sort of capability, so with a little specialization we get this. It's not that our writing systems are innate, but it's also no coincidence that we have the writing systems we do.
I don't know much about the whole war over modularity, but I don't understand how lesion studies make any sense if the brain just gives us one big general intelligence. Some degree of modularity seems really obviously right.
On the other hand, the great bulk of our behavior is going to draw on many, many modules in the brain. Exceptions might be things like flinching, ducking, those basic reflexes. But not, you know, art, or modeling someone else's beliefs, or making dinner.
Maybe that puts me -- as if I had any expertise here, and I don't! -- in your lowercase "ep" camp.
It's funny how often this is levied. You opened a thread dismissing an entire field of enquiry on the basis of some stuff you reckon about it. In what way do you think that is 'respectful' to the decades of work those researchers have put in to their study. Do you have any idea how much work it takes to produce a paper for publication? And it takes that much work because we spend a considerable amount of time checking sources, checking methodological commitments and ensuring the results are meaningful. Of course we fail at that a lot of the time, but doing so shows a damn sight more 'respect' for our reader's intelligence than the sorts of posts we so frequently see here thinking they've dismantled the whole thing from their armchair... because philosophy.
Yawn. I dont care about righteous indignation. The question is the question. Deal or go away.
Sure but isn't that basic cognitive psychology? Evolutionary psychology tries to go beyond that to how. With EP, it is basically trying to figure out what the earliest human environment looked like, and what could have taken place to shape our cognition and psychology based on these assumptions. It is reconstructing some kind of environmental conditions that our ancestors faced and conjecturing about that reconstruction, how it is that humans adapted to it or selected for it (assuming it was adaptation and not some other mechanism).
Just so we are on the same page. IEP breaks this down well:
So we are on the same page, I am using this as my definition of Evolutionary Psychology (in the narrow sense):
I'll go and read the IEP article, thanks. It looks better than the New Yorker piece.
My first reaction to what you've quoted is that this a damned clever idea, based on the simple insight that we evolved when and where we did, and so it's the conditions then that have the most explanatory value. That strikes me as obviously true.
For instance, there's a related theory kicking around, because climate change is on everyone's mind: Africa had long periods of being stably dry and long periods of being stably wet, but there's a brief period -- maybe 40,000 years or so? -- when the climate of Africa was swinging wildly back and forth, massive lakes here today gone tomorrow, that sort of thing; and it's right around then that home sapiens emerges, so the theory is that we represent in part a hominid that is somehow more climate-adaptable than others. ---- You could have just looked around at where humans ended up living and seen that, but that's not an explanation for why we are capable of living everywhere. -- But this theory does not seem to be committed to a "climate module" or something, but maybe someone has tried that.
Rather than me just going through the same stuff you're reading and also responding to it, are there specifics in what you quoted that bother you?
I can look at what you bolded.
(2) sounds kind of speculative, right? But it does make sense: we face severe evidential constraints theorizing the mental faculties of early humans, but we can still figure out what their physical environment was like, so that's a way in. It's a clever idea.
(4) is just true, isn't it? Or at least it's known that the human brain does have a considerable number of somewhat specialized modules, and that a lot of the more complex behavior we engage in (including cognition) is enabled by those modules being linked together in various particular ways. (It's all very reminiscent of Smalltalk because Alan Kay wanted computing to take biology as its model.)
And (5) is just saying that we're stuck with our biology, isn't it? You and I choose to write different things, but the biology that enables us to read and write is almost identical.
Here -- I'll just make what I assume is your point. Sometimes it appears we can actually overcome some habit of thought or behavior that goes so deep it might as well be innate. The example I have in mind is color constancy. There is reason to think visual artists can in some sense overcome the slightly misleading way we think about what we see. The example you have in mind is that we're programmed to reproduce but we can overcome that by moral reasoning.
I would be interested to know what exactly painters are doing when they "see what colors are really there". Is that an after-market un-correction of the mis-correction our visual processing engaged in? The eyes do take in the "real" colors but presumably all the "original" data is destroyed without making backups. Maybe it's a matter of attention? Maybe you can train yourself to exclude contextual information about the ambient environment? --- For one thing, I assume not even painters do this all the time, but still see my blue Corolla as a kinda uniformly blue car. (There's some fading, some dirt, and some rust -- even I can see that.)
For your point, obviously people can choose not to reproduce, so I'm puzzled about why you feel like you need to prove that, or why you think evopsych might be trying to prove that they can't.
How is it that animals behave in characteristic ways? We think they evolved to behave in certain ways that worked for them in the environments in which they exist(ed). Behavior, we think, is governed by brains--brains that have evolved, and through some mechanism (which I don't understand) produce consistent, somewhat predictable behavior.
Consistent, predictable behavior is what enables us to manage animals, and animals to interact with us. (I'm thinking of university campus squirrels, for instance, that are expert at spotting potential free food, and will "reach out" to said sources, maybe even climbing up a pant leg, if the subject stands still.)
Every animal learns new information, but they come from the mint with a package of behaviors which enable them to succeed (if they aren't eaten, run over, get shot, get sick, starve, etc.).
When it comes to the paragon of animals--our esteemed selves--a lot of people are squeamish about US evolving.
We aren't separate from the rest of nature, we are nature, and the workings of life have produced in us the kind of animal that we are. Just like it did everything else.
That's my basis for thinking that our behavior evolved, and how we developed technical abilities. There was a long stretch of time--hundreds of thousands of years--between the first stone tool (a rock to crush nuts) and the first brick. Between the first camp fire and the first fired brick, between the first club to kill something, and the first metal spear tip. Millions of years between the incessant chattering of our direct predecessor in an African tree and the equally incessant chattering of French intellectuals.
That reminds me of Alexander Melamid's and Vitaly Komar's book, Painting by Numbers, edited by JoAnn Wypijewski, It is not 'hard' science, maybe not hard 'social science' either, but it is interesting and relevant here. The authors wanted to know what different broad cultural groups preferred in paintings and colors. (The authors produced their own paintings for the surveys.) They found broad preferences in groups. Blue was the most popular color, orange the least. Representative art (like landscapes) was much more strongly preferred over abstract paintings. Most groups preferred occupied landscapes (presence animals or people). Blue sky, green hills and grass, water.
It seems reasonable to me that people would like landscapes more than, say, abstract expressionism, for the same reason that people tend to find parks with trees, grass, flowers, etc. more pleasant than the the most splendidly designed concrete plazas.
Boston City Hall Plaza is an architectural failure, in my opinion. I like many brutalist (bare concrete) designs but this one failed to incorporate humane relief. The building dates to 1963. Some recent efforts have been made to change the building, ranging from demolition to redesign. Like many "urban renewal" projects, City Hall replaced what was described as a seedy but vibrant area. Can't have seedy! (Minneapolis did the same thing with Block E, a very seedy and very lively block in the middle of the downtown area. Once leveled, that part of the city died, and nothing they have tried has brought it back to life.
Boston City Hall
Boston Public Gardens
So the questionable part is not if human brains were directed by evolutionary forces. Rather, it is whether certain contents of our thoughts and supposed "motivations" for behaviors are somehow mostly shaped by evolutionary (biological) pressures. That is the EP (not lowercase "ep"). That is to say, everything from how we interact with friends, supposed mating strategies, how we are influenced or influence others, are all somehow based on some brain module/mechanism that is inbuilt from the pressures our ancestors faced. It is that stronger stance that I am questioning.
If you want a "foil" for some kind of alternative theory, it is clearly something akin to simply cultural development and how social dynamics (perhaps "social psychology" or even "sociology") plays out. I am thinking something akin to Yuval Noah Harari's theory of how "stories" often are how humans become motivated and give reasons for their actions. We create a narrative and buy into it, more-or-less. But this is all from a brain that has the ability to form language, has strong self-awareness, and clearly needs cultural and social inputs to get by. All of this itself, one can say was predisposed from brain substrates and mechanisms that were in place from evolutionary forces, but that is not necessarily the Evolutionary Psychology explanations I am discussing. No one is denying that psychology is shaped by a mind/brain that had certain selected factors. It is when complex behaviors are reduced to selected behaviors where the "just-so" stories come into play.
This does have broader significance. Because of our (human) self-awareness, we can create feedback loops that self-reinforce something we think we know. So if X trait is supposed to be some sort of selection factor, people act that way because that is what was supposedly selected for. Thus the behavior is not necessarily instinctual or natural, but reinforcing around the narrative they heard.
Do you honestly think the proclivity to reproduce might not have been selected for? That it might be merely cultural?
Reproduction is another complex scenario of biology interplaying with sociology and culture. There isn't a clean cut answer. How do you know the origins when there are so many variants of many reinforcing mechanisms feeding into each other?
Here is an example:
Someone grows up with culture reinforcing X, Y, Z traits as attractive markers. These are the things that should get your attention, in other words. This then becomes so reinforced that by the time of puberty, indeed the connections are already made that this is the kind of things that are generally attractive. Of course, right off the bat there is so much variability in people's personal preferences (beauty is in the eye of the beholder trope), but EVEN discounting that strong evidence, let's say there is a more-or-less common set of traits that attraction coalesces around. Again, how do we know that the attraction, or even ATTRACTION simplar (just being attracted to "something" not even a specific trait) is not simply playing off cultural markers that have been there in the culture since the person was born and raised? There is the trope in culture, "When I reach X age, I am supposed to be attracted to someone and pursue them or be pursued (or mutually pursue or whatever)".
Even a biological response (like be sexually aroused), may be culturally driven. Sexual arousal can come from a number of factors including simply hormone responses to stories. People get aroused by stories.. But stories are imaginative mental projections that one is doing. That is to say, all of this can be in some sense self-learned. People pick up cultural cues and then reimagine them in their heads such that attraction, sexual response, is all tied together in a narrative of how it is "supposed to play out". It is culture reinforcing itself, then the individuals taking it as just "natural".
Reminds me of E.O Wilson's theory of Biophilia.
I further confess that I do not have much knowledge about all the evolutionary pressures our ancestors faced. Lions, tigers, and bears--an obvious pressure; finding enough food--another obvious pressure. Mating and successful child rearing, finding shelter from the stormy blast and a safe place to fall into unconsciousness for 8 hours, +/- every day. Some of that may explain why we don't just lay down on on a busy sidewalk and go to sleep and similar things we don't do.
The bands of hunter gatherers who are our kind since a few hundred thousand years ago also had social pressures. Of course the social pressures they had to deal with were simpler than ours -- they didn't have to coordinate their shoes, socks, trousers, jacket, shirt, and tie else be made fun of. (These days people wear all sorts of shit in public, so maybe evolution is entering a new phase.) I am pretty sure that questions like "who's in charge" was an issue. In other social animals, who is top chicken, top cow, top dog, top chimp is contested. That a social characteristic we seem to have inherited in spades. "Who does what" was, I suspect, also a recurring issue. I'm thinking less of gender roles here and more social status roles. Who gets the biggest hunk of meat, for instance. Who decides whether this or that rock outcropping makes a good place to stay for the night?
I don't think the paragraph above is a story. Though, why wouldn't Harari's story telling theory be an example of evolutionarily produced behavior? (I agree, though, that story telling is regularly used by humans to do everything from getting up in the morning (against the body's unwillingness) to why we should send a sample of our species to Mars.
Yet homeless learn to do it, and the ones that like the lifestyle prefer um, "urban camping" (and not saying all or most homeless people do of course).
Quoting BC
But how can that really be parsed out beyond regular sociology? Look at the !Kung. They developed a system whereby they downplay the person who made the kill during the hunt so that they don't get any ideas of superiority. It is more of a signal that "we are all the same whether you directly contributed or not to the obtaining of meat". So perhaps feelings of justice and fairness are more innate. I'll give you that. But culture plays so much that even inborn ideas of justice (babies being pissed when you don't give them their deserved reward or something) can be quickly curbed such that maybe its more of a trait that is not even that significant. Again, all speculation, but it's all speculation, and that's my point. Because culture overlays so much on top of "innateness" it is almost impossible to extricate it. But beyond that point, perhaps there is nothing to extricate, as the content of our actions are self-projected stories all the way down ("turtles all the way down"). It's a self-aware, linguistic mechanism constantly reinforcing learned traits. So only much more general things like "language" and "social learning" can be gauged for selection and not "hierarchies of alphas" or "mating strategies", and complex behaviors such as these.
Quoting BC
I guess let me clarify, the "ability to make up complex conceptual frameworks" might be evolutionarily evolved, but the specific "stories" within those frameworks, perhaps, were not, is what I am suggesting.
I haven't read E. O. Wilson (yes, I should have but...) so I didn't get any ideas from him directly.
A lot of this discussion is revolving around whether our behavior is "essential" (bred in the bone) or constructed (taught). We are not one or the other, of course -- both come into play.
Some people think that homosexuality is constructed. I say NO, but the way homosexuality is executed is largely culturally constructed. An otherwise culturally isolated homosexual community probably won't develop a black leather and chains fetish sub-group--unless there were some male motorcycle clubs around wearing hot looking black leather and chains. Probably won't cook up rainbow flags, either, or call one another 'miss thing'.
Heterosexuality is not constructed either, but it is certainly culturally constructed. There is nothing essential and biological about the oft-cited Leave It To Beaver lifestyle of suburban living, (I never watched the show; we didn't have television at the time.). Suburban living was LITERALLY constructed.
:rofl:
Quoting BC
Definitely. But I asked an even more radical question in a post above. I'll just quote the whole post here though because you may have some comments:
So the bolded part is the "radical" part. So I guess your experiences (or memories of said experiences) might provide a counterexample. That is to say, when you were younger, you thought nothing of any of it but by puberty, you were attracted to men, and this wasn't the popular cultural trope, so it must be a natural instinct. But this is where we must be careful not to misconstrue my argument. I am not saying that preferences aren't somehow "innate" or at the least, "individual to the person", but rather attributing those preferences or even BEING ATTRACTED ITSELF as somehow selected for rather than a cultural thing. That is to say, the culture reinforces being attracted AT ALL to SOMETHING.
I'll get even MORE controversial. It is possible to get aroused and climax without any external stimuli. But by the time of puberty (not all but many) people pick up the habit of projecting (like a story!) onto a fantasy of SOMEONE or a proto-type of SOMEONE such that sexual arousal GETS ATTACHED to the constructed story of a particular type being the OBJECT for arousal. In other words (and this is now paralleling not deriving from Freud), a general sexuality becomes DIRECTED (by social and cultural cues) towards an SUBJECT (a person presumably) such that people then tie the two together AS IF they are ("innate"/"natural instinct") when in fact it was riffing off cultural cues all along.
Good point. EP may produce all sorts of behaviors, but what we are going to be able to parse out is mostly pretty general.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Never mind babies. In experiments with chimps (not to make unflattering comparisons) when a subject was either not rewarded or was rewarded with an inferior snack (a cucumber slice instead of an apple slice they stopped cooperating with the experimenter. Dogs were a little more forgiving. They cheated dog would stop cooperating if one dog was rewarded and they were not. If they each got a reward (even if one got meat and the other a cracker) they were satisfied.
The animal evidence suggests that some sort of "fairness standard" operates in some social mammals, at least.
It isn't just "turtles all the way down". It's a meatloaf of biology, evolution, and culture all the way down. This meatloaf is the mostly unobservable brain -- by unobservable, I mean I don't know what most of my brain is doing, never mind my knowing what your brain is doing. We just know that small conscious bit. I can scan your brain with a fMRI which tells me just about nothing about culture and evolution.
I think I can agree with all or most of this and still retain it is mostly stories all the way down (in the case of humans). Babies also have an innate reflex to suckle and the "palmer reflex". However, these go away. And presumably emotions such as "fear" and something like fascination is innate. But yeah how that plays out when culture is such a huge factor, really is very hard to tell and can become something like a genetic fallacy for many ideas.
Suppose we start with some ancient single-cell organisms, alike in every way except their proclivity to reproduce. Natural selection is just the process by which the descendants of those with the higher proclivity to reproduce will swamp the descendants of the others in short order.
Presumably then the instinct (let's just call it that) to reproduce is about as old as anything could be and shared across almost all living things. But even if this is a problem natural selection had to solve multiple times, for whatever reason -- population separation, for instance -- it would, every time, exactly the same way. If anything is in natural selection's wheel-house, this is.
You would want to argue that somewhere along the way, in the evolution of hominids. culture became self-reinforcing enough that natural selection no longer needed the instinct to reproduce and could kind of slough it off, just not bother selecting for it because culture had that covered, and that in essence this could have happened without people ever noticing. One day our ancestors had an instinct to reproduce, the next they didn't but culture had already taken the baton. And this would only have happened with us because we're the only species with rich enough cultural lives to have pulled this off.
Okay that's a just-so story. Might even be true. Is there any evidence of the sloughing off mechanism? Is that even a thing that can happen? Maybe some of our ancestors ended up with junk instead of the reproducing-gene and it didn't make any difference because culture. Maybe we're a mixed lot now, some with it, some without, and it's hard to tell one from another because culture. I have no idea.
Also possible that there is no instinct to reproduce per se, but in our case an instinct for sex, because that leads to reproduction, which is what natural selection is actually aiming at. Kinda tricks us into it. Possible. Maybe even likely, since "I will now reproduce" is not really a sensible intention, one you can reliably put into action. But "I will now have sex" sure is. Should really be having sex whenever you're not doing something else you absolutely have to.
But the whole point here is that natural selection is simply unable to leave this to chance, without changing its name to "natural something or other". Reproduction is the only thing natural selection really cares about, and everything else is a means to that end.
Look at it this way. Copulation doesn't always lead to reproduction, which is why it makes sense to say we can't have a reproducing instinct but only a sex instinct. But natural selection is also responsible for the fact that sex is not, among us, guaranteed to result in reproduction. Why did it allow that? With a lot of other species, we see clear seasonality of reproducing, clear indicators of readiness (like, right now readiness) to reproduce, and so on. If we don't see that with Homo sapiens, that's what needs to be understood first. All natural selection can do is change the prevalence of alleles among offspring, it's all based on reproduction, and evidently at some point this version of hominid sexuality and thus reproduction won out. How did that happen and why?
And if I remember right even Darwin thought sexual selection was probably a thing among our hominid ancestors, so there's more mud in the water.
I have no idea if there's evidence for any of this.
Still seems risky to me. Surely the chances of genetic drift are by definition higher where sexual behavior isn't selected for. Culture's good, but it's not as good as your genome. It seems like natural selection will just keep stepping back in to reward those with the instinct to knock boots, so long as there are any left.
Yep, pretty much agree there. Variation leading to selection through population niche in the environment.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well now you are putting the cart before the horse and assuming the very thing I am arguing (for humans that is). That is to say, you can have reproduction be more to do with culture than with instincts. And if you want to say well THIS is natural selection then, fine, I'll agree to that but then you are really widening the scope of the use of that term. That means anything cultural is now "natural selection" which is a category error.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You are strawmanning a bit here. I am not saying it was "one day" necessarily. Certainly by the time full-blown language and conceptual frameworks could be implemented. I could not provide you the details from one to the other or even how long that took. Then I would be giving a "just so" story of course.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yep.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well that's just it though. "I will now have sex" is indeed a cultural thing more than anything. Pleasure feels good, but everything from initiating with a person, to when and where to do it, is cultural. Even more rudimentary, it is simply satisfying a preference for something that "feels good". However, the fact that it has to be "that person" giving you the pleasure and in "such and such" proscribed way is very much something conceptual driven. It isn't innate. There are many cultural cues that this is what is to be done. In other words, there is "something" one must direct one's preference for pleasure "to" or "for".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is using "natural selection" in two different ways. The "natural selection" for which we mean genetics leading to variations that lead to survival is one thing. But "natural selection" as simply a "strategy" (like certain stories that work) that work towards survival is different, and I think we should use a term like "cultural strategy" or something like that.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, I even question this. Pleasure feels good is about all we can say here. "Pleasure feels good so now I am going to X" can be culturally derived.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think you may not be counting for simple contingency. The cultural preference to direct ones pleasure "towards someone else" and the tropes that surround that just so happened to work in place of natural selection (as used in the biological sense).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, culture could have contingently been "good enough" to take the place of some naturally selected instinct.
To be a bit graphic for an analogy:
1) To have a bowel movement is natural.
2) To have a bowel movement feel vaguely "relieving" or "good" is natural
3) To have a bowel movement in a toilet bowl is cultural.
The homeless are outliers. Many of them are drunks and drug addicts, or MI, and as such, are destitute. Some of the homeless are destitute and don't have CD or MI issues. People sleep on the sidewalk (or in doorways, on steam grates where such things exist, or in shelters of some sort) where there is simply no alternative. The CD homeless can't use in in shelters, and the MI may not be stable enough to be housed in shelters.
99.99% of the population consistently avoid sleeping in the streets.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Reminds me of this Jefferson Airplane chorus, particularly the imperative last line:
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love!
Music has been flogging the importance of love for decades. All you need is love sung in 10,000 different songs. Quite often "love" is another term for sex.
On the one hand, hormones are the primary motive for us to go find somebody to fuck. Cultural expectations are secondary, but more elaborate. Fucking is fundamental. On the other hand, culture decorates the urge and gives it a more elaborate shape. There are culturally defined standards for prospective sex/love objects. Just any old slob won't do; a very exciting partner might be too unpredictable. We are expected to find a beautiful or handsome mate, curvaceous or muscular, blond or brunet, nicely dressed, etc. People are judged on the quality of their partners--someone you could confidently take home to meet your folks.
Granted. And perhaps "comfort is a preference" is something innate. A dog rather sleep in dry place than the rain. I have no problem with that idea.
Quoting BC
Great case in point! I'm not saying this song has thus promoted people "must find someone to love" but the idea that it is somehow "in the culture" does act like that.
Quoting BC
But again, this is assuming the consequent. You are just re-stating the assumption I am questioning. Perhaps we want pleasure, and culture has taught us "you better find somebody to love" then.
Quoting BC
The pleasure of climaxing is fundamental. The preference for it to be done this or that way and directed to someone else in the first place, seems pretty culturally driven. It is there in the culture before you can even reflect on it much to say otherwise. It seems instinctual from a non-reflective vantage point, perhaps.
Quoting BC
Yes, very much cultural there. So I think we are almost on the same page, but it is where the delineation should be made that we are disagreeing.
You seem to be saying that various appearances of the person and qualities are probably culturally derived, but the very drive "to fuck (someone)" is not.
I am saying on the other hand, that it is simply "pleasure" that is innate, and directing it "to someone" is STILL cultural. I gave the analogy to my previous post:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'll just focus on this, because I don't have a handle on how you understand evolution by natural selection.
The word missing here in your critique is "reproduction". Survival, for natural selection, is enough survival to reproduce at least as much as everyone else. Adaptation is enough adaptation to survive enough to reproduce at least as much as everyone else.
Reproduction is the thing. No reproduction, no natural selection.
Hence my claim that if reproduction becomes too chancy in a population, those for whom it is still as close to a sure thing as natural selection can make it will be rewarded in subsequent generations. This is not a hard one for natural selection, and as many times as it has to fix a population's relative disinclination to reproduce, it will. That's all it does.
And as I said, we have to look at what's apparently left to chance in human sexuality in this light. There may be very, very good reasons humans reproduce the way they do, unpredictably (per occasion) and at any time, not seasonally. If not, if it's something that just happened -- came along for the ride when some other features or behaviors won out -- natural selection will work with what it's got to ensure reproduction.
It's clear you didn't really read my previous post in much detail as I believe my responses from my last post still stands so I will refer you to that. If you want to quote from that we can go from there.
At the end of the day it is a question of "Is it selected for" or "Is it cultural stories/tropes that work". One has to do with genetics and their phenotypes and behaviors and the other with cultural stories / tropes / traits that are not correlated to a hard-coded selection but a trait that is learned and shared with the community and integrated by an individual. There was once a term called "memes" that paralleled natural selection but I don't even want to venture into that. All that is necessary is that it is the general ability to integrate concepts, and not some defined behavior that is selected for, for the difference to be a (major) distinction.
There's that nice expression that evolution is driven by the four F's - feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction. None of that encompasses one of the very most basic attributes of h. sapiens: to ask why. Why are we doing all this? Why should we continue to reproduce? Plainly there's a small but significant coterie within the human population who consciously decides not to. Why on earth not? Makes no sense! :chin:
Mary Midgley (not one of Richard Dawkins' favourite philosophers) has a good book on this, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears. It's part of the larger overall trend of treating science as religion, as being the source of normative judgement as to how we should live.
We are singing from the same hymnal at least; not sure if we are on the same page. I agree that pleasure-seeking is biologically driven, but we are also driven to achieve it with somebody else. Who that somebody else ought or ought not to be is a cultural matter. We are not naturally onanistic. We're a social animal.
We have a batch of drives from the most basic -- hunger, thirst, sex -- on to more complex ones: comfort, security, mental stimulation, touch, expression, love, freedom of movement (nothing political meant here)... various people have drawn up lists, like Maslow. hunger and eating are biologically driven; what we eat, where, when, how, and with whom is culturally defined. Sex and pleasure with somebody else or alone is a basic biological drive. My guess is that the basic "how" is pretty much baked in. The rest of the animal kingdom manages to mate without a guide and I think we can too, even if the Kama Sutra isn't hard wired. We require touch as infants and are driven to seek out touch, but where, when, with whom, and where not, when not, and with whom not are culturally defined.
And so on and so forth,
but I did my best.
Have a nice day.
But aren't you sort of reiterating what I am saying by emphasizing the "social animal"? If I get bored and play a video game or pick up a book almost every time I am bored, is that evolution selecting it? I am sure you would say that is a misattribution and silly. You may try to go a step further and say "flow states from things that keep our attention" is something selected for, but even that is pretty tenuous.
And THIS is where I think the muddled thinking actually comes in (understandably). BECAUSE reproduction is so vital to evolutionary biology, it SEEMS like there must be an evolutionarily biological reason for why we direct our pleasure towards someone else. 100% we can live and not fuck until we die. We can live and not play video games and not die. We can get pleasure from both and abstain from both. The parallel with evolutionary reasons makes sense on a surface level, but the genetic fallacy becomes a strong possibility in this case. It's like saying "bats evolved from birds because they both fly". Obviously there are different evolutionary paths/reasons for their differences.
Quoting BC
I think you are almost right except if you took out (with somebody else). Pleasure being "good" seems fairly innate. However, "seeking out a mate" is a trope. Other animals which you are trying to compare to have mating seasons. Many animals LITERALLY hump if they smell something a certain way.
We have little really tendentious tales of "pheromones'" and such that are like cute little pat stories you see on something like a science channel or popular magazines or something on Valentine's Day. Rather, while there might be receptors for pheromones', this isn't the "reason we seek a mate" in the first place. So I do beg to differ.
Evolutionary biology accounts mainly for the ground floor. Evolutionary psychology maybe 2 & 3, but its relevance wanes as you go further up.
I beg to differ as reproduction is not a "physiological need". Pleasure is good, and we generally seek it out in culturally appropriate ways but where it is directed is cultural. And we can certainly agree it isn't needed for individual survival.
And I gave detailed answers to all your paragraphs and then provided a summarized one so yeah you can't say I just handwaved you off or anything, although you seem to be doing that to me. Make your case or don't.
I think the pleasure associated with sex is rooted in evolutionary physiology. it is natural that the reproductive urge harness all the pleasure centres in seeking to express itself. Humans, uniquely, are then able to detach the associated pleasure from its biological origin and pursue it for its own sake (although there are accounts of eroticism in other species, famously bonobos.)
This I agree with.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is too vague, so harder to comment on.
Quoting Wayfarer
Fair enough, that's not in dispute. Rather, the origin of this pursuance of pleasure (that we "find a mate") is not innate but cultural. We see at a certain age at a certain time we "find mates" for which to find pleasure with. So I'll quote this again:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes I mentioned him a few posts back to BC.
But do you understand what the measure of "good enough" is?
For culture to take the place either of genes that more or less directly drive reproductive behavior, or of genes that at least drive sexual behavior because that's how we reproduce, it would have to be at least as reliable at producing rates of reproduction at least as high as the genetic solution; if not, natural selection will fix that, so long as the old genes are still somewhere in the population.
For the old genes to just drop out, this culturally sustained level of reproduction will have to go on long enough not only to have the old genes miscopied into oblivion, but to catch up to and surpass any beneficial traits or behaviors that might happen to be riding in individuals with the old procreative genes, else natural selection will keep rewarding them.
In essence, the genes for procreative behavior are competing against nothing at all, so it's very hard to see how natural selection could ever definitively weed them out. Procreative genes could even just continue to proliferate as a redundant free rider; even if the cultural mandate to reproduce were more intense than the genetic, those individuals would reproduce their unnecessary genes at that higher rate. For natural selection to take any interest, the individuals carrying the procreative genes would have to be less fit, less adapted, less suitable as sex partners, and less fertile. Why would they be, especially with the 'procreators' continuing to 'interbreed' with the 'culturalists'?
That's all assuming a culture that is at least as sex-positive as the procreative genes. If it's not, it's a non starter.
Now, how on earth would such a culture arise? You want to chalk all this up to human self-awareness and positive feedback: that thing we all do, because we are biologically disposed to, we all agree so hard and so long that we should do that, and preferably do it even more than we are naturally disposed to, that eventually the biological disposition just withers away. It's easy to see what would sustain the genetic solution here; it's just how natural selection works. But what would sustain such an intense and long-lasting cultural mandate? Especially given that biology is happy to take care of this without taking up cultural resources: there's no gap being filled by culture, no problem being solved, the mandated behavior was already taking place. Culture, then, does this for no reason at all, just because, it seems to you, it can.
In summary, no conceivable selection pressure against procreative genes, no conceivable cultural selection pressure for culturally mandated high rates of reproduction.
Now, if your answer is that there is no reason to think there ever were any procreative genes to start with, keep in mind that we had to come from somewhere. We have ancestors without language, without culture, and their procreative genes would certainly have been selected for, all else being equal. You have to explain how we got rid of them, and I don't see how you can.
That reproduction takes place without natural selection. So in a way it isn't even "good enough". Rather, it is another way for something to happen whereby reproduction has taken place that is not natural selection. Saying "good enough" just meant, that the species didn't need it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ok I guess...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ok...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is called "moving the goal posts". You are asking for a mechanism for how it came about when I am arguing simply what is the case, not how it came about. For example, an arborist might tell you a whole lot about how the tree functions without knowing every part of its genetic and evolutionary path to get where it is. To discount what the arborist is saying because he can't recount the whole species' evolution would be a category error.
However, even if I indulge your switch in argument from what is happening to how it got this way, you seem to make natural selection some kind of goal-oriented process. It's not. It's not lot looking for ways to maintain itself.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
No, that's the thing, I don't have to explain how we got rid of them. Again, the arborist analogy. I can give you a possible narrative for the sake of argument..
I mean, bonobos already have an odd mating strategy. They essentially have sex at the drop a hat. Presumably, it's a way of maintaining alliances and lowering tensions. The common chimp has an estrus cycle where there's a time of the season where the female is more likely to be receptive to a mate and the male picks up on these cues and/or hormones, or whatnot. Presumably a hierarchy has something to do with what chimp can have sex with whom. There's outliers and ones that try to get in under the radar, contenders, etc. Common chimps indeed pay close attention to hierarchy and alliances (at least how we interpret it).
However, whatever it is that humans had going on between australopithecines and hominins, eventually a conceptual framework became possible whereby narratives and reasons were the main factors for how to live life. That is to say, language, and a sense of self and other, created concepts that could be rearranged. The world became virtual in that there was a remove whereby it was the case that someone knows they are having an experience rather than purely experiential, or associative. Having these virtual frameworks (concepts and their arrangements) allowed for a different kind of way-of-life to take place. That is novelty, and cultural storage and dissemination of knowledge. Now how it relates to reproduction.. look at ceremonies. Many tribes have a ceremony for "becoming a man/women". Marriage itself seems pretty universal in that it allows the conceptual demarcation of who can have sex with whom. But you might say, "Aha! See marriage is thus evolutionarily evolved from genes". No, rather it might come out of something like jealousy which may or may not itself be hardwired. Let's say that jealousy is hardwired. Jealousy is a general emotion. A child can be jealous of a sibling because the other sibling received more attention, or was given food or they got to play with a toy and they did not. So rules might be made...sharing etc. Or the toy goes to whoever found it first, or whathaveyou. But you see these are all cultural strategies, perhaps selected for but not in a genetic, biological way, simply because our brains are very plastic and certain cultural practices allow for survival better than others.
So tying it back to sex, pleasure feels good. Presumably, people "knew" that one way that sex felt good was by putting it in certain orifices. Putting a penis in a certain orifice creates a baby. Presumably our ancestors put that together. This idea is passed on in culture through various ways. Children generally learn about this, rather than from scratch. That is to say, they might not know how the physical act works until they try it, but they are aware this is what happens. That is because it is in the culture. It is encouraged. It becomes narratives like "romance", and "tradition", and "duty", and it gets wrapped up in concepts of being a man or a women, of being a full member of the tribe/community, of continuing the seed, etc. These are all coneptual. But it is encouraged because presumably the tribal members wanted more people in the tribe and this was a strategy that works. And as long as the trend continues of a majority wanting to pursue this kind of pleasure, and connect it with reproduction, then you have what we have. You create cultural markers around where to direct the pleasure to create more people, so you encourage other markers like, "this is what you should be aiming for", and it becomes so ingrained it becomes as if it was innate. The problem is, we are too self-aware. You can have perfectly celibate people, you can people that just practice onanism, or people that have sexless marriages, asexuals, people who just don't have sex for whatever reason, people who don't try, people who don't care, etc. But there are also people who don't work, or do a lot of things that might be necessary to maintain a community. Humans are plastic like that. You just need enough people to buy into the narrative to maintain the facade. Don't get me wrong, it does help that what is being encouraged feels good!
Seems, Sir? Nay, it's a necessity. Were this abstracted atomized pleasure all that was necessary, evolution would have never got off the ground and we'd all be single-celled prokaryotes instead of multi-celled eukaryotes.
Boredom appears in animals with enough brain matter to get bored. Chickens don't get bored; bright parrots do. Animals that are caged (or live in our houses) who become bored can be very problematic. BTW, dogs don't hump our legs because they want to mate with us; they are engaged in a dominance display.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Baloney.
I don't know exactly why, but some people seem to like EP and some people don't. Both can find justifications for their preference.
But what about boredom? Boredom can lead to any number of outcomes. Tribal people can sing and dance and play when they are bored, talk to friends, or make up stories, or do acts of courage and sport, or hone a skill, tattoos, art, etc. Modern people have gadgets and books, and also stories and talking to friends, sports, honing, a skill, etc. People also might have sex... because they are bored and it is a pleasurable way to pass the time. But the pleasure and the "doing it because of boredom" are two separate things. One is a natural biological response, the other is an epiphenomenon from the state of boredom.
Presumably, you can be an onanist or be celibate if you wanted... and perhaps as you get older you may already be :p. But either way, humans literally, don't have to do anything they don't want. They can refuse to work, commit suicide, take a shit on the street. Granted much of these are outliers. We tend to like what's comfortable and not what is too against the cultural norm. Dating, relationships, and even sex can become culturally insignificant. Look at the Shakers. Certainly the culture around relationships looks different in India or the Middle East than it does in the Western countries. You wouldn't misattribute that to evolution. You would say that is cultural. Perhaps all of this artifice around sex is cultural too. That is to say, it is a culturally maintained thing. No one is denying that sex feels good, but how it manifests is just cultural tropes perpetuating it. Think about it...
"I find this person attractive" and "I want to stick my genitalia in them because I am attracted to them" seems innate, but there is a lot of conceptualizing that make one have to do with the other. Everything from "finding attractive" to "what one does with your genitalia because you find something attractive" is cultural. If this concept never existed, it might look a lot different. Perhaps people would just be generally onanistic without a real need for a target for their pleasure. It just gets wired that way in the cultural trope. It's the chicken or egg. You can strongly disagree with some anecdote but then that cultural trope is there long before your experience.
Perhaps Adam and Lilith didn't get along because Adam simply didn't really know what to do. God had to encourage Adam and Eve... Perhaps it was that damn snake keeping the source of suffering going :D.
It's not.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm talking about how it came about because we're talking about what results and what does not result from natural selection. Your position is that our procreative behavior did not come about because of natural selection, remember? So it's what you're talking about too.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I've gone out of my way not to use the usual personifying and teleological language just to avoid this kind of crap. I allowed myself a colorful turn of phrase describing something that does not happen and you make an issue of it, the same way you accused me of strawmanning because I said "one day we do x, the next we don't," as if I were suggesting your claim was that it happened one night a million years ago.
It's childish.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's your thread, do as you like. Would you rather be blogging?
But there's every reason to assume procreative behavior is wired into all living things, and that's going to include our ancestors. And I can't see any mechanism by which that changes just because we start telling stories and making pots.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, you've mentioned this pleonasm before. Was there an option we narrowly avoided where pleasure would turn out to feel bad?
And then it just happens that sex is pleasurable and therefore feels good, like a lot of things do. Purest happenstance.
And then because the tribe wants more members -- for its cultural purposes, no biology involved -- it in essence manipulates (encourages, cajoles, tricks) people into having sex by teaching them that it's the kind of pleasure that feels good and thus getting them to reproduce.
Thank god culture showed up when it did, or our ancestors might never have had sex, and then where would we be?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I can't see any scenario in which I say that.
Which is blindingly obvious, right?
I suppose it's no use noting how much cultural capital has been spent trying to get people not to have sex, or to only have pre-approved socially useful sex. (For all we know, it's just trying to undo hundreds of thousands of years of culture making people have sex. Sure it is.)
No what I have to prove is our mechanism isnt via natural selection but cultural propagation, not the exact story for this change. Its enough to know its not natural selection that propagates our reproduction mechanism.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We are quite different animals, though animals nonetheless. An aardvark isnt a chimp and a chimp isnt a dolphin isnt a bat.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Thats my point. Its as close to self-evident that this is true. But of course heroin also feels good. It would certainly be a different society if this is encouraged. Addiction is chemical but it is cultural that there is this drug you take which makes you feel good.. and even then only certain people would be willing to indulge it etc
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Its just not needed to show that it is what we do.its an interesting question that would take many studies im sure. But my point is to not but to show that I just have to show culture as a viable and more plausible theory, not explain every genetic detail to how culture took over.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yet you are the one seeming to start it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, the tropes are there before anyones individual experience. It does cajole and encourages, creates the strategies that become the cliches that become the obvious stories and on.
The problem is theres very little experimental evidence you can gather unless you forced people into isolated societies that did not have any cultural ideas about sexuality or relationships.
And what is it in your story-telling so far that you think has given any measure of relative plausibility?
We all seem to agree that our drive to have sex was innate prior to the development of language, you now ask us to consider two options for what happened next;
1. It remained that way
2. Culture took over the job replacing it almost like for like with an identical acculturated desire whilst at the same time the original innate desire disappeared.
Demonstrating that (2) is possible is not the same as demonstrating that (2) is even likely, let alone something we ought accept over and above (1).
What I think we're all waiting for is your reasons for believing (2) is more likely than (1), not just your reasons for thinking (2) is possible.
Perfect.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What do you think you're saying here?
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is no conceivable selection pressure that would reward the absence of procreative genes. There is no conceivable cultural selection pressure for making sure that what biology already guarantees continues to happen.
There may be reason to lie about it. If you can convince people that the sun rises each day because you tell it to, that makes you pretty damn important -- just don't get high on your own supply. You don't make the sun rise and people don't have to be tricked into having sex.
Quoting Isaac
Which is natural selection's whole thing, hence my insistence we must be able to at least imagine a mechanism for getting from point A to point B.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So I will say it is actually extremely hard to test for because of what I said here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
In other words, the culture perpetuates the narrative of attraction and what to do with that attraction.
Let's imagine there was a world whereby sex was unknown. All people knew was self-pleasuring which they discovered pretty early on. It's like an undirected pleasuring in this case. It's pleasure because of mechanical processes at that point. You may even have some people who never discovered this, but if they did, someone else would probably tell them. The telling part is the cultural part. It is shared diffusion of information that otherwise would be unknown.
Ok, but let's say this is natural enough that anyone would eventually discover this pleasure on their own.
The next move is to then make the leap that this pleasuring sensation can be performed by another person. I contend that this move is not automatic, but initiated by cultural cues. It is not just the idea that someone can physically perform the sexual act, because it is never presented in such stark terms. Rather it is the whole artifice of "attraction to someone, romancing/courting/initiating with someone, and having sex with someone". That is a long complex conceptual web of ideas that don't just come innately.
First you have the idea of attraction itself. Yong people often imitate what people slightly older are doing, or what is broadcast in society, what are the rituals, and stories, and narratives people perpetuate. This gets internalized. When people get to a certain age, these are the habits we should expect. Discussions around puberty have become an industry unto itself. But here is where there is a great exemplar of how EP is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Raging, uncontrollable hormone-monsters becomes the narrative. That is a relatively modern trope though. True enough hormone levels definitely contribute to people's moods and physiological responses, but it doesn't actually form conceptual understandings. The narrative around "teen love" or dating culture, or courting, or getting laid, or what not, is all trope-y cultural markers. It's setting a framework. Teenagers aren't isolated people, they internalize the previous generations' broadcast about this and it becomes their norms. People can embrace, shy away from it, ignore it, whatever, but the cultural marker is there and the next generation internalizes the tropes and plays them out.
Even the idea that "He/she is hot" can be a trope. As a young person, there might be predispositions to seeing symmetry, and lack of blemishes versus blemishes, differences, things of this nature. But the idea of symmetrical/clean and this then becoming "attractive" could itself just be subtle markers.
But even if we allow for the idea of "attractiveness" (in a target of sexual desire way not in simply noticing very basic symmetry, etc.), It's the idea that attractive means you then get aroused from this attractiveness and then you court that person in some way, and then you have sex with them is extremely culturally driven. These are all socially complex moves that are not innate. They are picked up and played out over and over again.
So in other words, human sexual behavior is so conceptually driven, it is actually odd that, if you just thought about it for a moment, you wouldn't see the cultural foundations for the artifice.
Genes don't really "select" for stories. Rather, they may select for storymaking. That is to say, it is evident our brains were wired for language and cultural transmission, but the kind of cultural content that comes from this can be varying.
So yeah, while preferring pleasure seems pretty natural, the whole artifice of how it plays out is cultural, and if you have something pleasurable, and you have something for which the target of that pleasure also creates a new generation, and in close communal societies, this is seen as favorable, you get what you get. Then it expands from there in all sorts of culturally varying ways.
And yeah that's right sex needs to be promoted to some extent whilst at the same time curbed to a large extent. There can be all sorts of cultural narratives broadcast in order to maintain society a certain way.
I'm gonna stop you right there ...
Cross cultural studies have been done
[PDF]Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures
One of my biggest pet peeves on this forum is giving a thoughtful response and then the other person not really responding to it in a thoughtful way. Sigh.
thoughtful
adjective
uk
/????t.f?l/ us
/????t.f?l/
Add to word list
B2
carefully considering things:
He has a thoughtful approach to his work.
long
adjective
uk
/l??/ us
/l???/
long adjective (TIME)
Add to word list
A1
continuing for a large amount of time:
a long film/meeting
I've been waiting a long time.
It's a long time since I worked there.
Apparently the sessions are an hour long.
To alleviate any confusion.
Yeah that applies to you too. Cowardly when you don't let the other person just speak for themselves. I remember that you do that a lot. Oddly write in tandem with another poster. Weird.
Hey great example of the EP that I am talking about. 4.2 Implications at the end says it all. It's very much a just so story based on the data. They had a hypothesis and lo and behold, they got "evidence" that there are preferences that skew a certain way, and then say that this implies biological selection due to mating strategies, rather than it simply being a cultural thing or alternatives.
I just don't see how you can pull off attacking evolutionary psychology for its just-so stories and then, with a straight face, begin an argument
Quoting schopenhauer1
Evolution of mammals is gonna have some sex in there, just the way it is.
And once you've got sex, natural selection will make sure you keep it, that's my argument.
Your whole post could not have been more beside the point or less responsive to the issues that have been raised.
Come, come -- back to the real world. The 'trope' in culture is to put the brakes on the youngun's sexual drives, and discourage premature mating. Premature = before they are materially ready to independently provide for their own, their mate's, and their children's basic needs.
Im being serious. Where did they get the idea of mating? Its not an innate concept. Perhaps every generation reinvents the wheel and just figures it out. But no, its from cultural transmission. Its something weve been doing for a few hundred thousand years. So the story is indeed pretty ingrained.
I prefaced it that that is what I was doing in lieu of no ability to experiment in real time. Keep up.
It was giving a counter example- one based on culture. Very much the point (contra EP biological selection).
That's not a counter-example, it's an alternative description.
And you continue to ignore the argument I've presented, in detail, that the description you give, whatever its merits may be, cannot at any point be apt. You just keep saying that it could be culture, or you think it is culture, but I've presented a case that it cannot be.
A coherent alternative description is not an argument. I could offer a dozen more without half trying. (If you doubt that, google creationism.)
We disagree on this. You think it's cultural; I think it's innate behavior -- a product NOT of our development as Homo sapiens, but the product of vertebrate evolution. To borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, it's "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", applied to animals.
"Doing what comes naturally" doesn't mean doing it well, gracefully, or appropriately. There is a learning curve on the way to doing it well. What constitutes "doing it well" is a cultural matter. A stiff dick doesn't concern itself with "goodness" "grace", "propriety" or much else. Again, it's society's role to keep stiff dicks under control.
What is this mechanism that allows a story to be ingrained for 400,000 years? Racial memory (Jung's idea)? Some sort of encoding that is transmitted genetically? Some epiphenomenal process that the body passes from generation to generation?
I recounted it here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/824085
You didn't present that case. You tried to say that because genetics explains other animals, it must explain why humans mate the way we do.
You claimed:
You simply fall into making a false analogy. Other animals don't have the kind of language and cultural transmission that we do. Do you deny that point? I am guessing you don't deny it, even if you try to make it a "degree vs kind" goal-post move. But there is a difference that is a distinction. All you need is that this distinction causes many shifts in what becomes the impetus behind human actions.
Behaviors can be parallel but convergent. That is to say. Humans can do things other animals do but not for the same reasons they do. My general point is that conceptual thinking shapes our motivations.
I could have gotten food because I was truly hungry, I was bored, I just liked the taste of the food and wanted another hit, I am addicted in some way, etc.
Sex is the similar but also different. I think people confuse pleasure with where to direct that pleasure. Having an oxcitocin hit or something doesn't mean that that behavior is selected for. The effect of the behavior is rewarded, sure. But it can be rewarded without it having anything to do with another person. Rather, the part about, "This is how romance, and marriage, and such work" is culturally diffused.
What I specifically argued was that the transition from genetically driven reproductive behavior to culturally driven reproductive behavior is unlikely, unmotivated, and inexplicable.
It's the transition.
Unless you intend to deny that the reproductive behavior of our distant ancestors was genetically driven.
But if it was, I don't see how the transition to culturally driven reproduction behavior is even possible. That's not to say that culture isn't layered on top of biology, of course it is, in all sorts of ways that both encourage and discourage mating.
But if there's no actual selection pressure against the procreative genes, they're not going anywhere. And if biology is already guaranteeing reproductive behavior, there is no purpose served by a cultural construction driving it.
What we do see is cultural constructions trying to control it, direct it, prevent it, encourage it, assign it various social roles, assign it meaning, on and on and on. But the behavior itself goes on whether culture tries to put it to use or not.
It's the transition I argued makes no sense.
Lets be concrete here. What is this behavior. You cannot isolate sex from its cultural surroundings. I know you are sort of saying that but you are saying some part of this process must be genes. Which part? Because the case you make for genes can be explained by culture. All we can say with certainty is pleasure seems good which is as you pointed out about as self evident as it gets. We can debate the individual cross cultural studies but I can always cast doubt on the assumptions and conclusions. You can argue science and I can argue not quite there like a molecular biology or hell even biological anthropology which at least works in artifacts.
But before we get to that level of detail, why do you assume genes must code for reproduction in humans other than the circular reasoning that it has no reason not to. Well in this case, it does have a reason not to. If a new generation exists, reproduction has taken place. Nothing about that requires a genetically determined reason.
Presumably you can be celibate right now, full stop and you would continue to live. Not so with food, or refraining from going to the bathroom. Presumably you can take a city bus if that is an option and not drive a car. Its simply preferences we make habits of internalizing. The predisposition is simply the pleasure of comfort. Pleasure and comfort may be something higher organisms pursue, but each species has different ways of how it manifests. Humans are remarkably plastic. In order for pleasure to be more than just that, it is taught as to how it is directed in various confined stages.
If you seek to deny that sex in humans has a biological, instinctive basis shared with animals then you are promoting an absurdity. Sexual desire is unquestionably hormone driven as is evidenced by observing teenagers. It is also basically oriented towards others which is evidenced by the fact that even masturbation is usually accompanied by fantasy or porn. Your viewpoint is one-dimensional, sex is a mutli-layered phenomenon in humans.
Please read the discussions this far before ranting at me.
Your viewpoint is one-dimensional if you deny that there is a basic instinctive, biological other-oriented aspect of human sexuality. Do you deny that?
I don't deny there are cultural overlays; it's not a matter of "either/or".
Certainly there is diffusion of information in society. The need to eat isn't "knowledge" but WHAT can safely be eaten certainly is. Trial and error, repeated naively over and over, leads to dozens of dead diners.
We can agree on that much. Sex? Maybe not.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, this is all socially constructed. Showing up at the cave of one's love object with a haunch of deer, as an inducement to adjourn to a pleasant thicket in the woods, is the distant antecedent of showing up in at his steady's house in his father's new Chevy with a box of candy and plans to see Beach Blanket Bingo--and who knows what afterwards.
More social construction.
But what is likely to happen in the back seat of the Chevy doesn't need to be taught.
We disagree on this. That's fine. Disagreeing with EP doesn't make you a second class citizen, and you won't be arrested for thought crimes. Jesus loves the social constructionist about as much as he loves the evolutionary psychologist--which is not that much. Both of them will deny his grandmother's immaculate conception of his mother and Mary's perpetual virginity. Actually, Jesus doesn't care that much either way, but Saints Elizabeth and Mary are very dogmatic about it.
And, you might ask, WHY WHY WHY did immaculate conceptions and virgin births happen anyway? Well, it happened because these two people (Liz and Mary) were from that society where people just pleasure themselves, and hadn't heard the Gospel of S*E*X. They had apparently not been enlightened by any of the smart serpents one always finds slithering around, about the good work of a stiff dick. When the angel Gabriel explained to Liz and Mary how sex worked, they were horrified. So it was that Gabriel had to settle for the hocus hocus miracle method of reproduction rather than the usual down and dirty method that God invented for us and that Gabriel was looking forward to. The two hysterics stopped yammering and were duly impregnated in the most unlikely of ways.
Sometime later Jesus was born and we have no record of his pleasuring himself or anyone else. I suppose he, as a diety, could just imagine having sex with the entire human race at one time. Actual sex for the gods is sort of beside the point.
But I digress.
My first part of the response stands, that it is almost impossible to tell without an experiment such as one where an isolated group of humans grows up without any prior knowledge of sexuality. So, you'd have to see how that turns out.
However, it would not seem implausible, indeed, possibly very likely, that other-oriented sexuality is largely (maybe almost fully) from encouragement from learned experience. Pleasure is not in question. That is clearly something that is physiological. How it is directed is cultural. There may be a case of "independent learning" over and over. But generally, our brains are wired to pick up information quickly from our environment and then integrate it as if it was habit.
It would have to be a serious emergency to go to the bathroom anywhere other than a toilet in "civilized" society (not camping or living remote location). That is to say, you were trained that bodily fluids and waste goes into a certain kind of receptacle. It seems pretty natural at this point. It's so natural that it is basically a habit or "habit of thought" that is a habit in behavior.
And a lot of what we tend to do when analogizing with other animals seems just misguided. Other animals have more if/then routes to reproduction. There has to be a time of year, things like this. You might even try to analogize to what birds do when they see a mating dance or the other bird display colors and objects or whatnot. Although there seems like an element of "discernment' going on. The discernment is more like a computer program where the right inputs were put in place and again, more if/then.
The habit is cultivated to become as if it is if/then, but that's not what's going on. When your shoe lace is untied, eventually you tie it. But that's not because you have a mechanism to tie your shoe inbuilt into you. You have a learning experience early on built into you and it is now habitual.
There is no inbuilt mechanism in humans whereby an erection means that that erection goes into a specific location. It's funny to think about, but it's true. There is no time of the season, no if/then module, no nothing like that. Just very early understanding of the cultural artifice that also gets hard-wired early on.
And every proof you give will probably be ones whereby cultural preferences and exposure was still there (yes very early on!) for that behavior to manifest that way. We are not "reinventing the wheel" over and over by ideas of attraction, romance, courting, love, etc. It is also conceptual because we cannot but help but parse the world conceptually. And that is indeed socio-cultural.
Plausibility is the whole issue since we cannot know for certain, obviously. But everything we know about animal sexuality and the endocrinal and social nature of human sexuality makes it overwhelmingly plausible, in my view, that human sexuality has always been basically instinctive, with obvious socio-cultural overlays.
Of course, plausibility is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, so I don't expect you to agree with me. I will say, though, that we all have tendencies to indulge in confirmation bias in areas that have emotional significance to us, so it pays to examine and critique yourself and try to see whether you have other motives for wanting to believe whatever it is you believe.
I cannot find any motive in myself that would cause me to want to believe in the instinctive nature of sexuality; it wouldn't matter to me if it turned out that human sexuality is entirely socially constructed, I just don't believe it is.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is a silly argument. People with erections want them to go to specific locations; the erection itself is not a disembodied object that could have some kind of imperative motive force like the needle of a compass. Sexuality is not just the erection or vagina or anus or whatever but involves the whole body, the whole person.
Physical attraction is inexplicable: why do I desire one person who may be far less attractive by conventional standards than another person I have no physical attraction to? There is evidence that it can have something to do with pheromones, with how people smell: how could that be socio-culturally conditioned?
Well, seems perfectly clear to me that human reproduction has evolved over time, and that in doing so has been influenced by social, familial, and cultural mores. It's still innate and biological. It's not like there's a problem of mutual exclusivity here... is there?
What am I missing?
Quoting creativesoul
No one disputes that the physical pleasure aspect is biological. I guess let's step back. What are we going to define as biological versus cultural? Any physical act has a physiological aspect to it. But that's not what we mean here. We are looking at the artifice whereby one directs their sexual energy towards another person.
Well, anything can become fetishized. A naked body alone, doesn't make something attractive to someone. Obviously, in tribal societies, this proves itself so. It's just seen as perfectly normal daily life to be naked in those societies, and that is not sexual. So what I'm saying is it's an idea before anything else. There are individual preferences, but that doesn't speak to it being "inbuilt" any more than someone's proclivity for vanilla versus chocolate is. And even if it is, that would be pretty hard to prove what genetic artifice is making it so. Meaning, It would be hard to prove in some sort of "prediction" for what someone will like better. In fact, children who might like vanilla whilst young might go for the edgier chocolate when older. Etc. Palates change with experience and context.
So attraction, and being turned on by something does indeed happen, but it's hard to extricate it from cultural markers. Is it that sexiness is a definite thing, or is sexiness generated and then made as if it is an innate thing? Notice, that functionally speaking you get similar results.
Sometimes the narrative becomes the reality. In fact, in humans it is largely how we get by.
It's not "artifice" it's desire.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Bad analogy...we don't try a whole lot of types of sexual partners and then decide that we like some types and dislike others, as we do with food.
There are no "cultural markers" for my taste in women, no "type pattern" as to which women turn me on and which don't.
Cars aren't in our genes either, but people often desire them, and for various reasons. People desire all sorts of weird and wacky things. Just keep listing things off that are more absurd and arbitrary, that are harder and harder to tie to some "real" desire that the car represents and is somehow genetic (which I am saying it isn't).
Quoting Janus
The analogy isn't that all these types are tried out in both, but that "personal preference" for why something tastes good / is desirable can't really be used to support some genetic theory or at least, is a wash, and doesn't tell us much either way.
Quoting Janus
By cultural markers, simply desiring at all is in the culture before you were born. Even celibate societies are defined a lot of the time, by what they are not, so it is in the culture as the taboo contra of what is going on in that society. It is not completely "unknown".
It's not "some genetic theory" it's simply genetic diversity; even my dogs have different preferences for various foods.
In any case, I think the evidence points to the idea that human sexuality is inherently other-directed, as we are in general; we desire the company of others, and we enjoy being able to be physically intimate with those others who awaken that desire within us. We are not so different from other social animals.
Also we produce gametes and have specific organs for delivering and receiving those, and those organs respond to arousal in particular ways to facilitate that transfer, ... There are a thousand ways in which we are designed to reproduce and the idea is that all of this is maintained down through the generations but that so far as natural selection is concerned it just gives you the wherewithal to reproduce but leaves the rest entirely up to you and your culture, the actual behavior part, actually putting your elaborate sexual toolkit to some use, responding to those hormones flooding your system, making some babies -- nope, natural selection has had no effect. It builds your reproducing body just on the off chance that you might choose to.
No, the opposite.
Natural selection is clearly able to select for behavior as well as physical traits, at least by tweaking the endocrine system, and it's generally accepted that among all other animals there is something amounting to an instinct to engage in sex at the time and in the way required for sex to lead to reproduction, and I find it absurd to think we are any different. (And if our ancestors were like other animals, natural selection would keep us that way.)
Of course we're not compelled to reproduce, but our sexual characteristics and sexual behaviours were selected for because they lead to reproduction. That's how natural selection works. If there's one thing natural selection is not going to fuck up, it's this.
Well, yeah.
Quoting Janus
The question is not whether we want children and whether that desire is instinctive or not.
Our interest in and capacity for sex is down to its reproductive function, and hence an obvious result of natural selection. We don't choose when and whether and how to be sexually aroused, we just are. It's your hormones. And we are that way because reproduction matters. Natural selection didn't make sex pleasurable and all but goad us into acting on the impulses it arranged for us to have so that we could unwind after a long day of surviving and adapting. It did all this so the surviving and adapting would lead to reproduction.
Thank you. I've done no googling.
It seems we part company here, as I don't believe our interest in sex is entirely down to its reproductive function. Sexual interest can be cultivated or allowed to languish, like any other habit. I agree that the existence of sex in the first place is down to reproductive function, but that is almost tautologically, and hence trivially, true. I think we also agree that sexual desire is in part hormonal and in part conditioned by socio-cultural influences.
Fair. That was poorly expressed. With the word "interest" I was trying to point at the physiology of sexual desire, why these arousal effects were selected for in the first place, not to say that we have a specific interest in and desire to reproduce. The way you have an automatic response to someone in your environment who may present a threat, without any awareness of what about them triggered that, without necessarily even being aware that your awareness of them is threat-awareness, that's the kind of thing I was going for, the response to potential sexual partners that you don't experience as voluntary, noticing someone, finding them attractive, etc.
I'm also hungry right now and trying to ignore those signals to finish this post. I'm not forced to act on what my body is encouraging me to be interested in doing.
Quoting Janus
I would have thought so, yes.
Quoting Janus
Yes, of course, and obviously culture plays a huge rule in the range of behavior open to us as acting on those desires. But I think of culture primarily as channeling desire, controlling it, leveraging its existence for other purposes (selling things!), and so on. I'm not at all sure culture can reach deep enough to be a source of desire itself, directing your attention without your permission, quickening your pulse, releasing hormones. Your body has its own ideas about who you ought to be interested in right now and why, and I don't think culture is nearly so powerful or reaches so deep into your physiology.
As I've said, I think the big lesson of the last hundred and fifty years is that we're apes that wear clothes.
Eek, that article is EXACTLY the kind of EP I am talking about. And of course becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Cringey.
Quoting psychologytoday
But you are steeped in these tropes from the beginning! Functionally speaking, it all results the same. Who is to say what you might be attracted to "naturally". Maybe there is a baseline, but cross-cultural studies are always going to have the problem that is in the name itself, it's studying people ALREADY steeped within a culture. Not only this, but some of this stuff is truly subjective. "Dominant" means people like them? That they are loud? That they are prone to fight? That they take charge? You can start making lists, but then that just becomes arbitrarily picking things out. Who determines who is dominant and how? And no, this isn't "self-evident". It is human-made categorization that fits assumptions that then fits conclusions.
The problem is, we have very little we can test for adult behaviors that are not already pre-determined culturally. Because by the time you test someone, they are already in the culture. And to say, "But if ALL cultures do this". That still only proves that there is cultural value in various behaviors that are preserved. That doesn't mean necessarily that something is genetically/biologically driven beyond culturo-social learning. For sure, cultural mechanisms are working on more basic biological mechanisms, but in that case, the whole conversation is moot because we are not arguing whether things like concepts and brains and complex behaviors aren't correlated with physical substrates, but rather the nature of how "if/then" the biological "programming" is driving the behavior from socio-cultural elements.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If that lesson were more generally taken on board, with the realization that we are not as god-like as we like to believe, I think we would have a better chance of dealing with the real problems we currently collectively face.
Quoting schopenhauer1
For that we need to look at the few primal cultures still around and at animal, particularly primate, behavior in order to get an idea of what is predominately culturally determined and what is not. Of course, the other aspect of this question is as to whether it really matters very much, and whether it is not a distraction from what does matter.
I suspect your underlying motivation for wanting to believe that sexuality is entirely culturally conditioned is your attachment to anti-natalism. In a couple of ways I'm a kind of anti-natalist myself: firstly, for myself I never wanted nor had (as far as I know) children, and secondly, I think overpopulation is a huge component of the problems we currently face, so I would encourage people not to reproduce, but to adopt children from the less prosperous regions, for that reason. But, that a whole other can of worms.
Cheers. Let's hope I said what I was trying to say then.
Perhaps that's all any of us can reasonably hope for.
To be fair, I don't really care either way too. I'm just providing an alternative to the EP assumptions. To me, it just seems too simplistic. It's the inherent problem of studying our own behavior. Are we reading "if/then" into things because it makes sense in other animals? We want to find those determined factors but it seems like it might be straining.
Quoting Janus
I mean we discount a lot of reasons for our motivation. Can sexuality be a case where we "overlay" on top of non-biological reasons, biological reasons so that we can have a narrative?
There are a ton of reasons we do things that other animals might not. Boredom is a big one for us. You have something that is pleasurable and you have a stressful day.. You can do a bunch of things to make the day "worth it". Sex might be one of them amongst a whole bunch of other things. Is that evolution at work? I guess in the fact that something is pleasurable. But the drive to seek out and have sex, that again, that all could be cultural edifice. Mating strategies could be self-reinforcing.
It's like you see mating strategies in birds and mammals and you say, "We are mammals, so therefore we must have mating strategies like the other animals." But no, our whole way of life is very different, not just in degree even. We are very much a culturally-driven species. There is our big niche. But being culturally driven in such a large way changes many things. One of these changes may be that we have a sort strategy that can mimic (superficially mind you) other animals, and since we can make analogies pretty easily, we look for those similarities and then say, "Look, see this behavior is like that behavior."
Going back to the OP, I agree that EP, in its extreme from is implausible. I don't buy the idea that the genesis of every social phenomenon can somehow be comprehensively explained in terms of its being reproductively advantageous.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Right, but I haven't been saying that; I have been, more modestly, saying that given our animal ancestry and our hormonal commonalities with animals, it is plausible to think that there remains a basic, animal, instinctive component to human sexuality, which would mean that it is primordially other-oriented. In just the same way as our basic sociality is not plausibly thought to be, by me at least, to be entirely socio-culturally constructed.
1. Genetic drift. This is most important in small populations. Genetic drift can overcome selection if the selection coefficient s is less than 1/N, where N is the effective population size. For humans over the past 200,000 years or so, N has been estimated as around 10,000. In very crude terms, this mean that if a bad allele kills less than 1 in 10,000 it can go to fixation despite being deleterious. We don't know what N was for human ancestors for earlier times.
2. Hitch-hiking genes. Selection acts on a gene (with a relatively large positive s), and drags along a nearby gene (which has a smaller but negative s) to fixation.
3. Pleiotropy. Genes often have multiple functions. It may be that selection in favor of an allele for one function impairs another function.
4. Natural selection.
A lot of people don't seem to know about anything except 4. @Srap Tasmaner did mention genetic drift, but does not seem to understand what it can do. The important thing is that 1, 2, and 3 can all result in an entire population acquiring a trait which is deleterious. It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial.
An example involves vitamin C. Humans cannot make vitamin C, so if we don't get enough from our diet, we get ill. Our close primate relatives have a enzyme which does make vitamin C, and you can find the region in our DNA, where our gene for this enzyme used to be. Somehow (probably 1, 2, or 3) it got broken. There are typically many mutations which can stop a gene working, but only a few (perhaps only the exact reverse of the one that caused the damage) that can repair it. So once every copy of the gene in the gene pool is broken, it can stay that way for ages, acquiring more damage by drift.
There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.
I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see. For example, cultures in different societies and periods vary widely in their attitude towards homosexuality, but the percentages of people with various sexual orientations do not. If sexual orientation is purely determined by culture, why do homosexuals continue to exist in very homophobic cultures? Why don't societies occasionally become 'very gay', with a large percentage of exclusive homosexuals?
Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to keep the focus on reproduction rather than adaptation.
Quoting GrahamJ
This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove procreative behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So lots of things here. First off, cool post as you do explicate other genetic mechanisms for species' change besides natural selection and it's good to be reminded of those.
Second, what you say there about attitudes towards sexual orientation and culture is a bit of a misrepresentation of what I am saying. I am have not really made any position as to why homosexuality (or any other orientation) exists. For the sake of this argument, I am leaving that as it simply differs with the individual. You can perhaps pinpoint why some children don't like chocolate but their parents do, and one could imagine this might be the same thing. But is it fully genetic? I don't know. But either way, that would be besides the point of my argument, though I can see how that is being used as a sort of "control" or analogy.
Rather, I am saying that other-oriented sexuality (i.e. wanting to be sexual with a partner(s), who presumably one finds attractive) is largely cultural. Think about all the steps from point a to point z.
1) The other person's physical appearance (and perhaps their personality traits) has to arouse, excite, or incentivize you in some way.
How can we isolate this to be purely innate or genetic and not something that the culture instills over and over and thus is so foundational that it seems innate? No one has to explicitly teach you anything for early connections to be made by "This stimulus should bring on this response".
2) People can get off even without being "attracted to anything". With the right stimulation, presumably, organs can still produce the same results of pleasurable sensations.
How do we know the connection from "finding someone attractive" and then "the desire to get off to/with that person because they are attractive" is not itself a culturally/conceptually created phenomenon?
It's impossible to tell to any real degree without isolating people in their own island without any awareness of sexuality and see how it plays out. Of course, there's the whole chicken or the egg thing. Obviously people who got to the island were reproduced, so.. that would have to be indeed an extreme experiment to cut all ties with what came before it.
This is to say that, all of this is very complex sociological interplay going on. Evolutionary Psychology's (with uppercase EP) premise is that, not just global brain mechanisms (generalized features like language, long term potentiation, and such) are evolutionarily selected, but specific conceptualized behaviors. So for example, there are EP theories on leadership, mating strategies, capacity for morality, etc. etc. But this link has to be proven to be innate and not cultural. Does simply doing "cross-cultural" studies "prove" any of that? I am not so sure. Culture itself, can have evolutionary-like qualities akin to natural selection, but that isn't natural selection. Rather, "cultural tropes" can stabilize such that it makes sense to act in such-and-such way. For example, women generally menstruate monthly if left without other factors like birth control, etc.. Might this affect how men and women act in a cross-cultural fashion? Perhaps, but even this reality still creates cultural strategies around it (perhaps men can journey longer because of this or end up becoming praised for their "resources" they bring back). But the biology is not selecting the behavior directly through some selective genetic mechanism, but rather the culture is compensating for the bio-physical realities of their situation.