Natalie Angier’s new book The Canon is out, and I really want to get around to reading it when it shows up at Half-Priced Books, but in the meantime, the release reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read her 1999 book Woman: An Intimate Geography for a long-ass time now, ever since Lauren recommended it to me probably over a year ago. For those who are sick to the teeth of the Steven Pinker/David Buss/Robert Wright half-witted evolutionary psychology that exists mainly to excuse male dominance as too instinctual to overcome, this book is a welcome respite. Angier makes it very clear from the beginning that her book is a “fantasia”, in the sense that she’s willing to entertain outlandish theories as well as delve into much more scientifically proven material, but her respect for science pushes her to be very clear when spelling out this theory or that whether or not there is substantial evidence for it or if it’s mostly conjecture at this point.
The book is best described as an ode to the biology of the female body, and it’s absolutely fascinating. It really drove home to me how little I knew about the biology of even my own body. While the parts of the book about the biological basis of human behavior were interesting and all, I was just as fascinated by the sections that simply describe the complex processes behind female body functions. (The non-gestating uterus, an organ that looms large in the political landscape of this country as many right wingers bemoan its very existence, is actually very small and charmingly floppy. Why that fact makes me happy, I can’t say, but it does.) Angier spends the first big chunk of the book examining the female body part by part, looking at the biological and social implications of each piece, from the human egg (the part where she describes the layers of protection the egg has to make sure that it’s fertilized by only one sperm that must be human is so cool) to the breasts and all the parts in-between. She talks about the controversy over hysterectomies with a sympathetic eye to both sides of the debate and definitely towards the women caught in-between, suffering from both a desire to hang onto the uterus and a desire to get rid of the fibroids. She makes an amusingly feminist argument for the idea that breasts evolved for aesthetic reasons that poo-poohs the 20th century male-centered notion that the particularly favored breast implant shape today is somehow a marker of fertility. (Her point is that the entire body has a lot of superfluous curves and protrusions that appeal to the eyes, so why should breasts be any different?) Just the body part by body part sections would justify this book.
But then she approaches the much more touchy area of the biology behind human behavior, and that is when she makes fools of armchair evolutionary psychologists, much to my delight. She freely admits that some theories about human behavior and biology appeal more than others, such as organic grandmother theory of menopause that suggests that women’s reproductive systems shut down to create an old age where they help their grandchildren survive, but always maintains that standards of evidence should apply no matter how much a theory appeals to our prejudices. But most of all, she carefully constructs a view of human biology that is properly complex and understanding that animals are products of their environment, to varying degrees, and not just a set of immutable instincts and urges. The insistent EP theory that men want to fuck everything in sight while women simply have some sort of wedding dress-and-fidelity gene is exposed as, if nothing else, too ridiculously simple to be real science and too obviously wishful thinking on the part of some anxious men.
Angier’s prose is a little heady and overwrought for my tastes, but I do appreciate that she’s trying to overcome the unfortunately widespread prejudice that states that knowing the mechanics of the human experience somehow undermines the passion of it. I’ve never completely understood that viewpoint, but a lot of people have it, as if knowing that your brain is dumping oxytocin when you’re feeling a warm feeling of love somehow makes that feeling less authentic. Or knowing that we’re primates somehow makes us less, not more, human. I can see how Angier’s at-times overwrought prose could persuade people who have these prejudices that more knowledge makes experience deeper and more meaningful, that knowing that we’re primates can add, not subtract, meaning in our lives. So I forgave it and highly recommend this book to anyone who’s still struggling with the prejudice that knowledge takes away from some all-important mystery that gives meaning. The myth that menstruation was women’s punishment for being naturally sinful has always made me angry, but the knowledge that menstruation might just be the byproduct of an evolutionary process that allows for humans to have large, well-developed brains makes me very happy indeed, and much less resentful of having a period. That said, Angier also has a straightforward, commonsensical approach that won’t try to bullshit you into thinking that it’s somehow really fun to menstruate, or imply that if you don’t like it, you’re somehow secretly self-hating.
At the end of the day, what makes this book such a breath of fresh air is that Angier sincerely loves women and completely understands that unless you love women, you cannot love humanity. Part of the trick of the patriarchy to keep women down has been to heap scorn on women’s bodies and minds, to characterize us as born weaker than men, dirtier than men, more insipid of brain and body. And she cleverly sets all that aside, happily describing women’s bodies to themselves in straightforward, biological terms that just so happen to expose that women’s bodies are just as amazing and beautiful as men’s. It’s like taking a break from feeling bad about your body and taking a chance to marvel at its functions. At the same time, she avoids that horrible trap that makes me uncomfortable of pulling the Earth Mother female-worshipping thing, fully understanding that there could be rational reasons women aren’t particularly happy to sit still for hours at a time breast-feeding or suffer through the pains of childbirth, which can actually be fatal in some cases. She portrays a perfect balance between talking about the universals of the female body while fully respecting the wide individual variation, which is a difficult trick to pull off for anyone writing about gender. Plus, for trivia nuts, it’s like the motherlode.
*Though for some reason, they do think women can exercise free will when it comes to modifying our behavior to manipulate men’s “natural” urges that can’t be modified through willpower. For instance, Angier quotes Robert Wright advising women to stifle sexual urges and play coy with men to get married…..because men can’t stifle the inborn tendency to categorize women as either madonnas or whores. That there’s more evidence that sexual desire is more a biological urge than the need to have a bride in white does change his sense of which biological urge is easier to stifle.
96 Responses to “Women are carbon-based life forms and other interesting facts”
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Yeah they claim we’re an intelligent life form but they don’t really trust us do they? I mean especially not if we might be carrying a (possibly male and therefore sacred) child around with us. The BBC’s attitude to pregnant women sucks a lot!
totally off topic (tho the post is wonderful and i really want to read this book now) i am completely unable to see any comments on any posts, i see a blank white space proportionate to the size of what comments have been made, but nothing else. im on the newest version of IE.
im sorry to threadjack, i just miss being able to read the comments especially on a great post like this.
And Bio Geeks of America welcomes its newest member! I’ve been in since ‘95.
Anyway, the book sounds excellent and I will definately pick it up. I recommend “How the Leopard Changed its Spots” by Brian Goodwin. It’s a couple years old but it does a really good job of explaining how complexity works in bio. The evolutionary perspective is true, but lacking–Dawkins might tell you “Women menstruate because there is no evolutionary pressure not to do so.” Well, sure, but that answer is so much less evocative and interesting than pointing out how it enables us to be a thinking species. This is important since the viewpoint that gender roles are justified by biology is so prevalent.
Spirograph!
Can I just say that Woman is one my favorite books of all time. I would kill to be able to write like Angier.
Ah, the joys of talking about or trying to teach about the body, as though there is such a singular thing. One of the ways I try to stress the idea of biological differences, particularly when I’m teaching gender, is to stress the rhetorical difference between “females/males as a group tend to …” vs. “women/men are….” That alone makes a big difference.
The other thing that I do with it is to point out that although there are these two large groups, the boundaries between them are fuzzier and less clear cut than we think (love using Fausto-Sterling’s “Sexing the Body,” some stuff from Thomas Laquer on medical illustration and the growth and institutionalization of the idea of sexual dimorphism). It’s hard to talk about bodies because they’re so infused with meaning before we ever get to the mechanics of what they hell is going on in them. I guess we’ll never get to Foucault’s renunciation of sexuality in favor of simply bodies and pleasures because to do so would be to transcend the social, to cease being human.
I could have sworn i used an end blockquote….and after y’all added preview and everything.
In the spirit of stating the obvious, if there *was* an evolutionary push for female behavior in this sphere, it wouldn’t be for sexual fidelity. A woman wouldn’t care (evolutionarily) *how* many children he sired with other women; it’s not like he runs low on sperm.
MAJeff, that reminds me of some recent articles on how human “bodies” can really be seen as collections of cooperating bacterial communes. What we call a body includes so many other organisms (in our guts, skin, everywhere) that we’re much more like walking ecosystems than anything else.
Which is kind of awesome, and kind of disturbing.
MAJeff, that reminds me of some recent articles on how human “bodies” can really be seen as collections of cooperating bacterial communes
The staggering number that I have seen is that there are an estimated 10X bacteria cells compared to your own cells. (Bacteria are much, much smaller than human cells.) The only quibble I might have is with “cooperating” - my metaphor would be more that of an ecosystem, with all the various complex relationships that entails.
And to amplify the browser issue described above, I see the following:
Firefox and IE6 - looks OK, IE7 - cannot see comments.
….the knowledge that menstruation might just be the byproduct of an evolutionary process that allows for humans to have large, well-developed brains makes me very happy indeed, and much less resentful of having a period.
Are you sure most human brains are well-developed? You say this sincerely in a country that *reelected* Bush?
A woman wouldn’t care (evolutionarily) *how* many children he sired with other women; it’s not like he runs low on sperm.
I disagree - given the heavy investment it takes to raise a child, the woman would want the man to help raise her child and not all the many childred sired with other women. Now if our reproductive biology was like the codfish, I’d agree.
I disagree - given the heavy investment it takes to raise a child, the woman would want the man to help raise her child and not all the many childred sired with other women.
Presupposing, of course, a society where men “help” raise children and women can’t do it without them, rather than one where women raise the children in groups (aka allomothering).
That’s based upon an assumption that a man who has sex with another woman is going to help that other woman raise her children… which is to say, it’s based upon a natural assumption of fidelity that we’re calling into question.
*IF* there’s an evolutionary urge to get one mate, then women would want social fidelity (maybe the wrong term - she wants the man coming home) , but wouldn’t care about sexual fidelity.
“I disagree - given the heavy investment it takes to raise a child, the woman would want the man to help raise her child and not all the many childred sired with other women.”
Presupposing, of course, a society where men “help” raise children and women can’t do it without them, rather than one where women raise the children in groups (aka allomothering).
And also presupposing that we evolved knowing the exact links between sex and reproduction, and that women got to choose precisely who they had sex with.
The “females are invested in fidelity” idea can’t really be labelled as either biological or cultural - besides, sexual jealousy for both sexes seems like a perfectly reasonable evolutionary mechanism.
the woman would want the man to help raise her child and not all the many childred sired with other women
And also presupposing that this idea is anything that has actually played out otherwise in our culture.
If we had biologically evolved to reject any kind of reproduction that introduced the possibility of a lack of paternal participation, single mothers, deadbeat dads, “baby mama drama”, infidelity, etc. could not possibly occur in our society. Or, at best, it would be some kind of rare congenital condition or something.
Which is another obvious point the EPs don’t seem to have grasped yet. If we evolved not to exhibit X behavior, then we won’t exhibit it, or the presence of it will be exceedingly rare and obviously traceable to genetics. If there’s something out there in the world that exists in large numbers for social reasons rather than biological ones, humans obviously cannot have selected against that trait. It’s like deciding to say that all humans evolved to have blond hair. Er, what about the 90% of people who missed the memo on that?
Isn’t the stereotype that men are far more worried about sexual infidelity and women about emotional infidelity — and that this makes a certain amount of sense, since each worry is in regards to what the other can take away that is truly valuable in evolutionary terms?
I can’t stand Pinker and this idea that it is “natural” for males to dominate (He tries to sugarcoat it by stating that females also have natural advantages that will eventually be recognized). How the hell is coercion natural? I expected him to next state that war is peace.
And what about self-control? Morality requires free will so if males are biologically incapable of that, how the hell do they do they have any credibility in morally condemning the entire female gender with blatant slurs (e.g., slut, whore, etc.)?
Last, this entire “Coercion is natural” bullshit depends on one assumption that is impossible: women and girls are not human beings. Only then, can such abuse of rights be remotely valid.
Biologically, a woman who wants a child can get one by having sex with a man. But for survival’s sake, the fact that human female genitals don’t get super engorged like an in season baboon’s helps her convince the male that the child is his. The first is about bodies, the second example is about our bodies evolving because of social needs. Much like peacocks needing to look prettier and dogs needing to sniff each others’ hindquarters.
Hunting, gathering, Earth Mothers, Father Skygod, and all the rest are most likely evolutionarily less important than “I guess he looks like me” to the stronger male who is capable of all sorts of things to women and children.
MAJeff: bodies and social stuff are much easier to teach if you can get people to stop using gender to mean sex. Sex is biology: male or female (and variants in between.) Gender is social: masculine and feminine, which is based on a society’s ideal behavior for males and females (and variants in between, if it can admit to the existence of such people.) I hate getting asked my gender, since it depends on what I’m doing or thinking about at the time. And the available answers are never Masculine or Feminine.
I disagree - given the heavy investment it takes to raise a child, the woman would want the man to help raise her child and not all the many children sired with other women.
As noted above, the pattern of a man helping a woman to raise her children is not common in human cultures, looked at overall. (Except for very distant values of “helping”.)
But, even supposing humans were a pairbonding species (which we are not) and had evolved that way so that the mother and her pairbonded partner looked after their offspring (which is not the usual pattern in human cultures) it still wouldn’t mean that the offspring were genetically related to both parents. DNA testing enabled scientists to show that, though many species of birds pairbond, this does not mean the birds are sexually faithful to each other: a high proportion of the chicks born to mated pairs are not genetically related to the male of the pair.
(Or either parent: same-sex pairbonded couples can and do adopt/foster when orphaned chicks become available.)
jon writes:
“…the fact that human female genitals don’t get super engorged like an in season baboon’s helps her convince the male that the child is his.”
What? How does having genitalia not become engorged have anything to do with paternity?
Besides (God, help me I don’t remember the damn source) I read that there are 4 areas of the body that are copies of either the maternal or paternal side of the family: ears, hands, feet, or nose. One of these must be paternal (either a copy of the father’s or from his family). That, I interpreted, was nature’s way of avoiding Maury Povich type drama.
Now, on the subject of “gender” versus “sex.” I realize that gender is widely associated with behavioral models, but I prefer saying gender to sex when talking about biological maleness or femaleness because when people hear “sex” they can’t help think of sexuality and I want a separation between the two. Besides, use “black” and “white” to not only describe skin pigmentation but culture as well.
It depends on one’s perspective, but I think I have an explanation as to why this prejudice exists among some.
I would say this prejudice is based in part on a fear of an overwhelming scientism that reduces humans and their experiences to the mechanics of physics, biology, and chemistry. The result, from the perspective of this fear, is an expansion of the cultural authority of science to a point where other forms of discourse are rendered irrelevant or superfluous. So a painter or a poet or some other artist will portray the human condition in a way that is consonant with his or her style of discourse, and someone with a scientific point of view will come along and say, “Well, that’s all nice and pretty, but what’s really happening is this…” ; in essence, a truth-claim in which the perspective of the original creator is marginalized, almost as if the “scientist” knows what the “artist” is doing better than the “artist” herself or himself.
I think it doesn’t have to be that way, and I don’t think it will, if for nothing more than the fact that even professional scientists don’t want to live in a world in which only their discourse is considered worthwhile, but I can understand this anxiety.
This discussion points to *exactly* why this book is valuable. Angier has a long part at the end where she explains that it’s a tad silly to think men and women have a singular reproductive strategy. She interviews one actual primate biologist who points out that in the species she examines (I forget which one), males have various mating strategies. Some are promiscuous. Some are faithful and help raise their offspring. Some are a hodge-podge. All have success. You can’t say that men evolved to help raise children or not; some men do, some don’t, so clearly both strategies are in play.
The fatal flaw of EP is that it forgets that the number one strategy of larger-brained mammals is flexibility. Males of a primate species really can’t have just one strategy, because the multitude of reactions from flexible-brained females (and any EP pusher worth his salt tends to assume women are flexible, and that we can, for instance, modify our behavior to compensate for males’ natural inclination to rape/cheat/only want to marry virgins/whatever human misbehavior they’re trying to excuse) will create a situation where they’re always outwitted. If all men were promiscuous, then women couldn’t be coy as EP fans hope, because who would men be promiscuous with? Men and women both would reproduce much more successfully if they had a hodge-podge of competing desires and made their decisions based on their social cues.
What really shows how much EP is wishful thinking is the “women are coy” part of it. If you really believe that women are naturally monogamous, how is it there’s *no* evidence for it in human society? Women cheat almost as much as men, and in a society that has a double standard, which means that women are under a lot more social control not to cheat. Most women who cheat overcome a lot more social obstacles than men to do so, which would almost incline me to think women are more motivated to cheat than men naturally, except I’m smart enough to remember, oh yeah, most cheaters have a hodge-podge of real life reasons for their behavior. You know, reactions to the environment.
What people fail to understand is that we can figure out human nature from boring old human nature a lot. What we learn from looking at human nature is that we are flexible-brained social creatures who have a bevy of possible reactions to all sorts of very subtle situations. It’s incredibly complicated.
Or, what opo said.
Sorry, I should make it clear that I don’t think Evolutionary Psychology is right, if only for the simple reason that our behavior is mostly not encoded in our genes; and Amanda Marcotte’s last is pretty close to what I think. I was merely pointing out a fallacy in the Longhairedwierdo argument.
As I said, one of the problems is that these bodies are already suffused with meaning, as are terms “male” and “female.” It’s not as clear-cut as the biological vs. the social.
In reply to Longhairedweirdo:
*IF* there’s an evolutionary urge to get one mate, then women would want social fidelity (maybe the wrong term - she wants the man coming home) , but wouldn’t care about sexual fidelity.
Ah, but each woman would want social fidelity, and how can the man come home to several homes? etc.
If we had biologically evolved to reject any kind of reproduction that introduced the possibility of a lack of paternal participation, single mothers, deadbeat dads, “baby mama drama”, infidelity, etc. could not possibly occur in our society. Or, at best, it would be some kind of rare congenital condition or something.
The opoponax, variation is an essential part of the mechanism of evolution. We all have pretty much the same gene for something (say haemoglobin) when most variations don’t work well and so are strongly selected against. Even so there are variations. The existence of variation cannot be used as an argument against evolution. Wide variation in a trait may mean that that trait is not strongly selected for or against.
The point about evolution is that fitness is measured purely by the number of viable offspring; or going a bit deeper, the number of offspring with copies of genes (which needs to be invoked into order to give a evolutionary basis to altruism).
The important point about human biology is that offspring cannot be independent for a long time. Parental or community resources are needed for their survival.
Evolutionary psychology takes these two and adds to it the idea that our behavior is coded in our genes. It is this last where, IMO, the fallacy lies. E.g., to take an extreme example, definitely some set of genes make it possible for the brain to do mathematics. However, doing mathematics is not coded in this or any set of genes, any more than your favorite videogame is implicit in the Intel processor design.
I think one key reason for this fear is that real science is often overwhelmed, in the culture, by ideological pseudoscience. Even valid scientific hypotheses tend to get cherry-picked, dumbed-down, and turned into “Just-So Stories” with an agenda to uphold the status-quo. I’ve often commented on the general dumbness of the vast majority of armchair “Evo-Psych” and how these claims, which let us call charitably “sincere but half-baked guesses,” which we might charitably, for the sake of argument, suppose their proponents have just not thought through, contradict what we know about the actual social forms human beings had when evolutionary concerns were relevant, the options opened up by agriculture having not been available until under 10,000 years ago, a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms, especially for a species as long-lived as ourselved. (I also think that aside from the lack of generations in which natural selection could have its effects, that the exponential growth of human population since then reflects our largely successful effort to exempt ourselves from selection.)
I think that people have much less of a tendency to be averse to valid science, because a valid, tenable argument must by definition allow room for the breadth of irrelevance of simplistic causes for sweeping and deep effects and significances of actual human behavior. But in matters of human nature and potentials, and our social institutions, we rarely entertain dispassionate scientific thought, because the political stakes at every level are so obvious and immediate. Living under dominator societies as we do, we are overwhelmed with propaganda being more or less sincerely generated by serious thinkers who are however deeply committed to justifying the status-quo, both to others and themselves. So we rarely see serious social science without a compromising socio-political spin.
The sort of smug self-satisfaction that pervades the armchair evo-psychologist suffuses the whole pseudo-science of marginalist “economics,” for instance. The very fact that mainstream academic economic reasoning generally makes very little sense and offers no comfort to anyone but the already rich is held up as a virtue by its acolytes. Yet we are told relentlessly that this “science” has proven that things as they are are for the best, and the only improvements to be made involve getting rid of the very institutions and practices that, most people’s common sense and experience tells them, are the only ones that stand between them and total disaster.
Longhairedweirdo said:
To me, the obvious follow-up to
would have been something that related directly to, you know, female behavior — about how many partners females had for whatever biological purpose — not something about males’ behavior.It just struck me as oddly ‘all about the menz’. I would think that (evolutionarily) females would have just as much a vested interest in multiple partnerships as males.
Amanda, of course, has already covered this.
Unlike most other organisms, human women bear few if any external signals of ovulation - which is why “natural” family planning is so poorly effective - which means that men have no idea when a woman’s fertile period is just by looking at her.
Which means nobody can be sure who did or didn’t father a child; if the male has no idea who was having sex with the female during her fertile period, he would have no idea whether or not the child was his or someone else’s.
That combined with the fact that infants have evolved to show as few distinguishing characters as possible - for instance, caucasian babies tend to be born with blond hair and blue eyes, regardless of their mature hair and eye color - means that paternity is nearly impossible to establish (short of scientific means or very obvious racial difference.)
Sounds like a great book, and one that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The latter is one of my concerns about the most strident criticisms of Ev Psych and Sociobiology. (I have seen them referred to as bogus pseudosciences and “akin to phrenology”.) There certainly has been some abuses of the findings and some very bad science by some practitioners as with any new arena of scientific endeavor. (And I do think that some of the basic premises of Ev Psych probably need to be recast, but I will not say that of sociobiology in general - all but the last chapter of Wilson’s, at the time, comprehensive Sociobiology are non-controversial and the unraveling of the genetic underpinnings of insect social societies is one of the triumphs of evolutionary biology.)
Further to the point there is much that comes out of our deepening understanding of ourselves as animals with an evolutionary history, that can positively contribute to the progressive cause. For instance what if everyone agreed to the following:
Given the fundamental role of sex and sexual selection in evolutionary mechanisms, It is to be expected that our thoughts and feelings about sex are linked to a vast array of powerful and potentially conflicting emotions of which we are not completely under our “rational control”. Therefor any discussions of societal policies and norms that involve issues of sex or sexuality should proceed with particular care to not get lost in a welter of hot-button responses. People who seek to inflame these emotions in these contexts will be treated as social pariahs and will be excluded from any serious discussions,
variation is an essential part of the mechanism of evolution.
While that’s certainly true, EP’s aren’t saying “there is a variety of reproductive strategies it is possible for humans to inherit: here are the different options with some of those nifty punnet squares so you can see how this works out.” They’re saying “All women are monogamists, and all men are horndogs.” If they were advocating the former, I’d think they were pretty silly (it’s fairly obvious that something like infidelity or being a single parent is not directly genetic in the way that, say, your blood type is). But at least it would be an attempt to describe what actually exists in the world. However, EP’s description of the world and the world as it really is are so far apart from each other that their ideas just cannot possibly be true.
Further to the point there is much that comes out of our deepening understanding of ourselves as animals with an evolutionary history, that can positively contribute to the progressive cause.
Just because a particular theory agrees with my own political beliefs does not mean that the science behind it is good. So far, I haven’t seen much scientific scholarship (especially out of the EP field) that has made a good case for human reproductive social behaviors being genetic. The main problem with this premise, in my mind, is that if human reproductive social behaviors were genetic, since we are primates, they would probably have to look kinda-sorta similar to those that exist for other primates (by and large, they don’t, and even if they did, EP doesn’t seem to be interested in the actual sexual behavior of primates we’re closely relatied to). Since all the EP’s can do is talk about how our reproductive behaviors are like The Flintstones, I can’t really be bothered, sorry.
caucasian babies tend to be born with blond hair and blue eyes, regardless of their mature hair and eye color
Not to be a hopeless pedantic, but I’ve seen a lot of caucasian babies, and while the blue eye thing holds some of the time, most babies are born with the basic haircolor they’re eventually going to have for the rest of their lives. Or sometimes it’s different, but you certainly can’t generalize that “most” caucasian babies are born with blond hair. I can only think of 5 or 6 blond newborns among my family and friends, and all of them grew up to be blond children (and in those i’ve had a chance to see become adults so far, most of them had blond or very light brown hair as adults). I was born with dark hair, went blond as a child, and then it went dark again as I went through puberty.
Now what I really want to know is whether that thing someone said above, about the ears, noses, hands, and feet, is really true? I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of theories that say babies and small children tend to resemble their fathers, because my anecdotal understanding indicates this cannot possibly be true in any consistent way. I know just as many families where all children strongly resemble the mother’s side of the family. Including my own — we all grew up to resemble our dad, but when we were kids, we constantly got “oh, you are the spitting image of your mommy, aren’t you?”
Miller, re: baboon genitals:
If women were open in their displays of when they are impregnatable (or whatever the term is,) it would be obvious who the father is if a certain man had sex with her, killed or drove off anyone else who tried, and she became pregnant. That’s what the in season baboon is displaying: now’s the time, come and get it. That’s all.
I’m not sure how this came about evolutionarily, why we aren’t like baboons in this manner, or if women just started to wear something to cover their asses, but I’m pretty glad we aren’t baboons.
Right… each woman would want social fidelity, a mate who considered her the woman he wants to come home to… and doesn’t care who he actually has sex with, because she still can get pregnant (and thus have children).
Sex does not instantly create this social fidelity, and a woman who has a man who will come home to her wouldn’t have any reason to care if another man gets her pregnant; she already has her helper/protector (if we were to assume that this was an evolutionary drive - I’m not granting that it is, just saying that it’s one of the assumptions made). Nor would she have any reason to care if her man got another woman pregnant, so long as he was planning to come home to her.
Evolutionary Psychology is a valid field of study; what we are, as biological beings, helps determine our behavior. But before anyone can claim there’s an evolutionary imperative to something, it would require that something to have a much higher chance of reproducing, and not doing that something would have to lead to a much, much lower chance of reproducing.
Having a woman want sexual fidelity from her mate simply doesn’t fit. Sexual fidelity will not improve her chance of reproducing.
If we assume - and I don’t grant this is a valid assumption - that women want something as an evolutionary strategy, it would have to be something like the “social fidelity” I mentioned. I don’t think there *is* any such thing in evolution… it takes a huge amount of time for evolution to stick something in behavior, and we’ve only had maybe 8-10,000 years where social mores could develop, and they’ve changed many times in many ways. Claiming evolution caused something that varies in human societies is pretty silly, and no one society has had and enforced rules long enough to cause any evolutionary changes in something as complex as the brain to hardwire it for one particular relationship model.
It’s much more reasonable to assume that any such issues are the result of socialization, not biology.
It’s pretty simple game theory, once the possibility of deception is introduced, to show that a spread of strategies is the likely outcome. Even very simple games give mixed strategies as their equilibria.
So Steven Pinker, Robert Wright, Lawrence Summers etc. should be excluded for any serious discussion. Sounds about right to me.
He did the next best thing - he classified Camille Paglia as a feminist, in The Blank Slate.
a woman who has a man who will come home to her wouldn’t have any reason to care if another man gets her pregnant
This is actually how it plays out in the chimpanzee/bonobo world, iirc.
While the females will generally compete for the attentions of the alpha male in order to secure the best provider (in species that follow the alpha model, i’m not sure bonobos do), it turns out that when you do genetic testing on the offspring, the alpha male isn’t terribly likely to father any more children than the other males in the group, and in fact males who don’t invest overmuch in the alpha thing are often more reproductively successful because they are able to focus better on relationships with the actual objects of their reproductive interest, the women.
Chet, I’m not sure on what you based your comment about babies, but it’s pretty ridiculous. Do you think that a child never looks like its father, so a man can never, ever tell if a kid looks like him?
Some of us are capable of both a scientific and artistic point of view and know that they are two almost completely different things.
And yes, there could certainly be a situation in which the scientist knows what the artist is doing better than the artist themselves - depending on how you define “what the artist is doing”
There’s a brand new modality…could even be ultrasonic or brachyradiotherapy or freezing…can’t recall just now…for fibroids.
Uterus sparing.
Wait a bit , girls, before you get that little (mostly firm-’floppy’, flattish-pear-like thing…yanked.
Yanking also purses up the top of well.., you know…, the…mm
Some of us are capable of both a scientific and artistic point of view and know that they are two almost completely different things.
that said, it annoys me to no end when some IT wanker comes along and tells me that the esoteric theologians obviously just ate moldy rye, and that lead plumbing is the reason Bosch was so weird, etc. etc.
I don’t think information technologists are the ones who came up with the moldy rye or lead plumbing theories.
But that aside - you prefer to believe theology and Bosch paintings are the result of the supernatural?
Or is it OK to consider theologian/Bosch personalities, or societies, or mental illnesses etc?
If so, why can’t personality, society or mental illness be examined via the scientific method? What method would you prefer?
Who cares who the “father” is? Why this slavish devotion to establishing paternity? The one and only thing we’ve ever known for sure about a baby is who its mother is. Why isn’t that enough? In terms of gender influence, matrilineal societies focus on a woman’s brothers as the primary male figures in the child’s life, which puts a very different slant on “family”.
As I write that, of course I answer myself that we care about the mother being able to support and care for the child, particularly in a society of social inequality. But we could alternatively envision that as the responsibility of her family, her sisters, her brothers, or society itself (social welfare, a la France), or anywhere else. But it’s unclear to me why the need for support must be linked to biology and intercourse.
This also relates somehow to an annoying friend who refers to his sister-in-law constantly as a woman who “has three kids by three different fathers.” Why is that a bad thing? She should stay with the first asshole?
s.,
brainfarting somewhat, but speaking as a single 41-year-old professional who is a week overdue to give birth to my first baby
It’s much more reasonable to assume that any such issues are the result of socialization, not biology.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
I’ve been reading stuff online recently written by certain Climatologists. These Climatologists are using scientific evidence to claim that global warming is a big hoax.
They say there’s nothing Homo sapiens has done, and nothing we can do about Earth burning up because it’s just part of a natural cycle.
I hate Climatology !
It’s a pseudoscience !
Maybe even a cult !
Won’t someone start a thread on this ?
Warning - the following has no historicity. It is from the Mahabharata and from the van Buitenen translation which I don’t particularly like. The point is simply to point out the great plasticity of human behavior. I’m subtracting out all literary adornment too.
The context is that the king Pandu cannot have children, he is trying to convince his wife Kunti to find surrogate fathers.
“Now I shall tell you the Law, the ancient Law the the great-spirited law-minded seers saw.
In the olden days, so we hear, the women went uncloistered; they were their own mistresses who took their pleasure where it pleased them. From childhood on they were faithless to their husbands, yet not lawless, for such was the Law in the olden days. Even today the animal creatures still follow this hoary Law, without any passion or hatred. This anciently witnessed law was honored by the great seers, and it still prevails among the Northern Kurus [Pandu’s dynasty was called the Kurus], for this is the eternal Law that favors women.
But in the present world the present rule was laid down soon after —
There was, so we hear, a great seer by the name of Uddalaka, and he had a hermit son who was called Svetaketu. It was he, we so hear, who laid down this rule among humankind, in a fit of anger - now hear why.
Once, in full view of Svetaketu and his father, a brahmin took Svetaketu’s mother by the hand and said, “Let us go”. At this, the seer’s son became indignant and infuriated, when he saw how his mother, as if by force, was being led away.
But his father, on seeing him angered, said to Svetaketu, ‘Do not be angry, son. This is the eternal Law. The women of all classes are uncloistered on earth. Just as the cows do, so do the creatures each in its class.’
Svetaketu, the seer’s son, did not condone the Law, and laid down the present rule for men and women on earth, for humans but not for other creatures. Ever since, we hear, this rule has stood.
‘From this day on,’ he ruled, ‘a woman’s faithlessness to her husband shall be a sin equal to aborticide, an evil that shall bring on misery. Seducing a chaste and constant wife who is avowed to her husband shall also be a sin on earth. And a wife who is enjoined by her husband to conceive a child and refuses shall incur the same evil’. Thus did Uddalaka’s son Svetaketu forcibly law down this rule of the Law in the olden days.’
— presumably this story sounded plausible to the generations of people who preserved it.
This also relates somehow to an annoying friend who refers to his sister-in-law constantly as a woman who “has three kids by three different fathers.”
“What’s the matter, [Annoying Friend]? Are you that jealous that she’s gotten laid three times more than you have?”
Did I say that? No? Then that’s probably not what I meant, then, is it?
No, but look. There’s a reason why everybody’s baby looks like Winston Churchill, and one potential explanation is that babies of obscure paternal lineage are less likely to experience infanticide because they don’t look like their ostensible “father.” If they look like everybody or at least most people, then there’s no telling whether or not its not yours. That’s a survival advantage for the infant.
I mean, how many “switched at birth” stories do you have to hear about before it’s obvious that babies actually have obscure features at birth, regardless of all the BS about “he has his father’s eyes?” It’s ridiculous to deny it, as you seem to.
Well, evolutionarily speaking, a father might. If the purpose of mating is to pass on your genes, it doesn’t make much sense to devote the extensive resources involved in parenthood unless it’s actually your own offspring.
Personally, though, I don’t think the purpose of human mating is reproduction. It seems obvious - in the face of how hard hostile the female body is to sperm - that the purpose of sex in humans is pair-bonding, or even just a good time. Reproduction, it would seem, is just a side-effect of that.
Oh, I see. I “certainly can’t generalize”, but you generalizing from personal anecdotes? Perfectly fine!
you prefer to believe theology and Bosch paintings are the result of the supernatural?
I never said that.
Personally, I prefer to believe that since those people lived centuries ago, and they didn’t leave behind very strong paper trails about why they thought what they thought, we cannot possibly know.
Isn’t it possible that they were simply creative individuals who had fascinating ways of putting their ideas on paper? And what does it matter, anyway? There’s a reason I attributed this sort of thing to “annoying IT wankers” — it doesn’t bother me that scientists try to figure out why creative people do what they do. If it turns out Van Gogh painted what he painted because of a specfic cocktail of neurotransmitters, that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.
What bothers me is when some asshole who doesn’t respect creativity at all uses unproven pseudo-scientific drivel he saw on the Discovery Channel to diminish something he doesn’t think is worthy of understanding. People who can’t just let there be something beautiful and transcendent and unknowable, who have to pathologize it and explain it away as meaningless.
Chet, if i’ve seen 100 caucasian newborns in my life, and 6 of them were born blond, “most caucasian babies” are hardly born blond.
Nancy:
Oh, certainly, and I wasn’t implying otherwise, at least not from my perspective. I was merely trying to point out why there may be some who fear certain implications of scientific explanations of such things as emotion, creativity, etc. I’ve studied this kind of thing during my own academic career (if one can call it that), and so I thought Amanda raised an interesting question that I tried to address.
Again, I don’t disagree, particularly since you’ve included the crucial caveat of “depending on how you define ‘what the artist is doing.’” So, in some contexts, yes, I think you’re right.
I think the opponax illustrates what I was explaining in these statements:
And so the anxiety I’ve talked about in my comments comes from, I think, the sense that the larger culture will be persuaded to connect the two threads opponax mentioned: “specific cocktail of neurotransmitters” as evidence used to “explain it (creativity, emotion,etc.) as meaningless”, i.e., a concern that the artist’s perspective about his or her own work will no longer tell us anything significant because we now know what’s “really” going on.
Now, I think there’s some problems with that anxiety, particularly since people, as Nancy suggests, can think about things in different ways in differet contexts. I think Mark Foxwell’s point about politicized science/pseudoscience is important to, as such things lay the cultural groundwork out of which such anxieties as I’ve mentioned come.
I should also say that the reason I have the opinion on the matter that I do (that we have to be careful how we use science to evaluate art) comes out of my own personal experience.
Back about 10 years ago now, I was an arts/humanities student at a magnet school which had a slight majority of more science/tech focus students, and in the middle of the dotcom bubble when everyone thought the answer to all the world’s problems was to get into Caltech and go be a software developer. Many classmates actually tried to use stuff like “But obviously Coleridge was a drug addict, so therefore his work is just meaningless hallucinations and I shouldn’t have to take English!” to get out of taking anything outside math, science, and CS courses at the high school level.
And then there were the administrators who actually tried to completely gut the arts and humanities departments in order to get better computer equipment and offer more CS courses, because what’s the point of arts and literature and stuff when obvs they were all just a bunch of headcases, and wouldn’t everyone just be better off learning to program so we would all have a much better chance of getting into Caltech and becoming software developers? There were some administrators who wanted to keep music classes, though, because A) it’s more obviously just a function of math and physics, and B) everyone knows playing the violin will help you get into Caltech, etc.
Again, this is at the high school level. Imagine your kid’s high school not offering English or philosophy or art history, because why bother, obvs it was all just a bunch of hallucinating drug addicts, right?
Oh, I see. I “certainly can’t generalize”, but you generalizing from personal anecdotes? Perfectly fine!
Agreed, that was pretty darn weak. Since we’re tossing anecdotes around blithely, everyone in my family, now med-dark-haired adults, were fair-haired children. Take that, opoponax.
Now, can a real biologist step up and give some data on this phenomena ?
Well maybe it’s because I don’t watch the Discovery Channel much, but I’ve never seen such a thing on TV. Do you have some specific show/asshole/incident in mind?
The closest I’ve seen to what you’re describing is Steven Pinker’s attitude towards the humanities in his book The Blank Slate, but he was speaking for the cause of Evolutionary Psychology. Not science.
Oh sorry, my poor reading skills. Not an asshole ON the Discovery Channel, what the asshole SAW on the Discovery Channel.
I don’t know, I just don’t think there’s a gang of science thugs going around destroying the self-esteem of artists, which is what you guys seem to be alluding to.
In my own experience in the arts worlds - I’ve been involved in painting and theatre - the problem isn’t science guys refuting artists’ persepctives, the problem is an obsession with artists’ biographies and gossip and love affairs which eclipses the work.
And in fact, I would maintain that rather than too much science and rationality, there’s far more worship of the irrational, not to mention the incoherent, illogical and egomaniacal. The arts world could use a bracing splash of hard science now and again.
There’s a reason why everybody’s baby looks like Winston Churchill
Never trust an Englishman…
omg yall are such freakin men, Chet and Erick.
I have seen a great many caucasian babies in my time. Many. Many many many. Hundreds, at least, if not thousands. Some personally related to me and a great many not related to me at all. only a very tiny minority of those caucasian newborns I have seen have blond hair at birth. However, I’ve noticed that the proportion of newborns with blond hair and newborns with dark hair is about the same as that of non-newborns (i.e. newborns are as likely to be blond as adults are).
Therefore, it is mathmatically virtually impossible that “most” caucasian babies are born with blond hair. And likely that “most” caucasian babies are born with the color of hair they’re going to have for the rest of their lives.
Wow, this is so dumb.
@ Nancy — I have a comment in moderation that will explain EXACTLY why I think this is somewhat of a big deal.
I’m certainly not alluding to gangs of science thugs; again let me say that I’m explaining a perspective I’ve seen from others and how they’ve arrived at that perspective. I’ve seen this from some research I’ve done; this perspective is not my own.
I should mention that I’m not an artist, but an historian of science by training, and one of the issues our field deals with concerns how notions of what is and is not certain and/or useful knowledge has changed over time, what is objectivity, and so forth. So this is a very interesting issue for me.
Sounds rather postmodernist.
Not necessarily; there’s a wide range of views on that in my discipline. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be.
So whose work do you consider representative of discussions of notions of what is and is not certain and/or useful knowledge has changed over time, what is objectivity, and so forth?
Oh, for God’s sake. If by “man” you mean “not inclined to accept half-assed handwaving as a legitimate rebuttal”, then yeah, guilty as charged. I’d never dream of asserting your sex as responsible for some kind of mental deficiency; it’d be nice to be extended the same courtesy.
Suggestion? “Data” is not the plural of “anecdote.”
I’ve never seen a caucasian infant born to caucasian parents that wasn’t blond, and I could just as easily claim to have seen “thousands” of infants, too. My guess is that “infants seen by opoponax” doesn’t represent a diagnostic sample. Neither, of course, is “infants seen by Chet.”
Oh, come on. This is almost never true. Certainly not true for anyone that I know, which by your logic, makes it “mathematically virtually impossible” (though I guess I’d like to see the math on that.)
You mean, arguing as though one’s own personal experience is an authoritative data set? Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.
There’s a pretty vast literature on this, but off of the top of my head, there’s Charles Coulston Gillespie’s The Edge of Objectivity, which tends to take a “progressive” view of objective knowledge, i.e., scientists historically have been getting closer and closer to ideal objective knowledge.
An interesting book that takes a somewhat different view - though it’s not a direct response to Gillespie, having been written much later - is Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth. You may also be interested in the book he co-wrote with Simon Shaffer, The Leviathan and the Air-Pump, about the disputes between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over his air pump experiments.
no, actually, i meant men as clearly you never pay attention to babies. or maybe i should have said “omg, yall are such Scandinavians, Chet and Erick!”
but, y’know, whatever.
this is was a really pedantic point of mine from the outset which has now grown so silly as to not be worth talking about.
while i generally agree that the plural of anecdote is not data, a lifetime of noticing babies is probably more in the range of “data” and not “anecdote”. “data” is not some special magical thing that can only be captured by specially qualified scientists in arcane situations.
i’ve seen maybe 10 blond newborns, ever (all of whom were blond children born to at least one blond parent). out of hundreds or thousands. i’ve never seen any blond newborn who turned out to be a brunet child, or any blond newborn born to brunet parents. I don’t live in Italy, where blondness is exceedingly rare, or China, where caucasian babies are exceedingly rare. therefore, it is a rational assumption that most caucasian babies are not born blond.
the only people i can see making the assumption that most caucasian babies are born blond are people who live in Sweden or people who don’t pay much attention to babies outside their immediate family. or maybe people who are blind and trying to fake everybody out?
So let me get this straight. You are delighted because there is a completely made-up science book, chockers with feminist myths, that counters completely made-up science books, chockers with patriarchal myths.
Well yes, I suppose you are.
Luckily, discerning why we evolved one way or the other is very difficult, which permits the likes of Pinker to project their fantasies onto nature. But one hopes that nature is a feminist, for your sake, because not all EP explanations are readily dismissed, even if some are rather fanciful.
The woman wants a husband myth clearly suits men though, not women. Assume that men and women both want to produce evolutionarily fit children that carry their genes. It’s important to men to sequester women, so that they can be sure that any offspring have their genes. For the woman, it’s immaterial how many partners she has, so long as all are fit. You’d have to doubt the “woman needs a man to help raise the child” because men simply do not have that role in hunter-gatherer societies, and there’s no reason to think they had it when we were apes. And even if they did, there still is no reason for the woman to favour fidelity.
Or maybe - and I’m just spitballin’ here - you shouldn’t have assumed that ad hominem arguments carry much weight with intelligent people. If my statements are wrong, they’re not wrong because I’m male, or because I’m Scandinavian (especially since I’m not - I mean, WTF? How do you get “Scandinavian” from “Chet?” Seriously?)
Yeah, and funny - I would have thought that I was pedant-proof when I said “most” and not “almost all” or “all.” Yet the phenomenon that babies tend to be born with much lighter hair color than they usually wind up with - and hardly ever the reverse, I might add - is sufficiently well-known to be mentioned in every encyclopedia entry on “infant.”
But, you know. Never happens. Right.
No, actually, it pretty much is. Even a lifetime of “noticing things” is pretty suspect; you don’t overcome confirmation bias simply with time. (In fact that actually makes it worse. Your recollections are even more suspect since they apparently cover such a long duration.)
Data is evidence collected under specified, constant conditions. Your memory does not constitute a data set, as much as you’d like it to be.
Or, alternatively, you’ve forgotten all the instances that contradict your initial assumption - you know, like nearly every single human being does.
Do you see why I keep having to remind you that your personal experiences are not data? I mean, what’s the deal here? Is it just that you’ve never heard of confirmation bias? Or are you telling me you’re the only human being in history whose memory is immune to it?
Seriously, Opo. You’re wrong. Get over it. Maybe it doesn’t happen all that often, so it’s a new experience for you. Nonetheless, it’s happening now. Jesus.
Well, personally, I was born with blond hair (well actually I was born bald then grew blond hair) and was blond for several years. Now, not so much.
My eyes stayed blue, though (but both of my parents were blue eyed, so that was a given). The blue –> brown eye thing did happen to some of my cousins. However, I noticed that it seems like the ones it happened to usually had a blue eyed parent (meaning they definitely carried a recessive blue eye gene) and the ones it didn’t happen to had two brown eyed parents (so potentially pure brown/brown genes). I’ve hypothesized that there’s a connection, but I’ve never really looked for proof.
So let me get this straight. You are delighted because there is a completely made-up science book, chockers with feminist myths, that counters completely made-up science books, chockers with patriarchal myths.
No, I enjoyed reading a scientifically accurate book that respected standards of evidence that also gave the smackdown to armchair evolutionary psychologists who pick and choose evidence to fit their prejudices.
But nice try!
Maybe it would help if you understood that Angier is actually a well-respected science writer, as in respected by actual biologists. She doesn’t piss on their work, like most evo psych opportunists do.
Amanda, thank you for the useful review. I’m going to have to add Angier’s book to my “things to take out of the library and read” list. It’s getting ridiculously long, but if I don’t keep it, I end up hearing about books and then later forgetting that I had previously had a “hey, I want to read that” moment.
Hee. I use my Amazon wishlist as that list. Just delete things off it after I get them.
The Opoponax, agree it’s overkill to claim that most Caucasian babies are born blond, but the proportion of blond babies to brunette babies must be higher than the proportion of blond to brunette in the general population, because it is true that some Caucasian babies are born with blond hair that darkens as they get older. So you get more small children who are fair-haired than you do adults who are dark-haired.
Bloody hell. I mean, “more small children who are fair-haired than adults who are fair-haired”.
An afterthought - I think Evolutionary Psychology makes much of the fact that in principle a man can have many more children than a woman, and so men’s and women’s reproductive strategies must be different.
But in practice, if on the average men were more efficient at transmitting their genes to the next generation than women, then it would be advantageous to have male children and the gender ratio would not be 1. So men and women are equally effective as gene transmitters.
So it is true that occasionally a man (e.g., Osama bin Laden’s father, 50-55) will have more children than a woman can have. (my example is wrong as per the net “The most prolific mother in history was a Russian peasant who had 69 children in the 18th century, 67 of which survived infancy. Between 1725 and 1765, she endured 27 multiple births, which included 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.”, but I’ll leave it in).
The unsettled question to me is - does evolution select for a strategy for the average based on what works for the occasional exception? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.
Here’s where having someone like PZMyers commenting on this board would be highly useful.
I think this “because men simply do not have that role [of providing for children] in hunter-gatherer societies” is a bit of a myth. The hunters share with the entire group and this is interpreted as provisioning the group rather than specific children. How large is a forager group? 20-30? The sharing of food makes certain that normal fluctuations in a male’s effectiveness are evened out.
Nextly, e.g., you can find easily on the web various things, such as on Hadza society:
“Fathers do more playing with children than mothers (Marlowe, 1999b).
All caretakers whether mother, father, grandparent, sibling, or others appear to be equally sensitive to fussing and crying (something I recorded but have not analyzed) but mothers seem to be far more effective at soothing the child. Fathers will sometimes hold a crying infant in the middle of the night and sing to get the infant to go to sleep. Both girls and boys appear to be closer to their mother and spend more time with her, though once boys are six or seven years old, the time they with their father increases”.
( http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hbe-lab/acrobatfiles/who%20tends%20hadza%20children.pdf
)
Finally, presumably the hunter-gatherers are in a group rather than a nuclear family because it increases the chances of survival. Supposed grandparents, uncles, aunts etc. then do have an interest in who the real parents of the children are in order to invest time and effort in them (if one goes by the idea of trying to improve the survival of closely related genes). So merely being in the group constraints reproductive strategies.
One could also wonder whether the surviving forager societies have something peculiar about them (apart from geographical circumstances) in not having moved to more effective survival strategies like the rest of humanity. How much can one infer about our ancestors based on these?
I think this “because men simply do not have that role [of providing for children] in hunter-gatherer societies” is a bit of a myth. The hunters share with the entire group and this is interpreted as provisioning the group rather than specific children. How large is a forager group? 20-30? The sharing of food makes certain that normal fluctuations in a male’s effectiveness are evened out.
Nextly, e.g., you can find easily on the web various things, such as on Hadza society:
“Fathers do more playing with children than mothers (Marlowe, 1999b).
All caretakers whether mother, father, grandparent, sibling, or others appear to be equally sensitive to fussing and crying (something I recorded but have not analyzed) but mothers seem to be far more effective at soothing the child. Fathers will sometimes hold a crying infant in the middle of the night and sing to get the infant to go to sleep. Both girls and boys appear to be closer to their mother and spend more time with her, though once boys are six or seven years old, the time they with their father increases”.
( http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hbe-lab/acrobatfiles/who%20tends%20hadza%20children.pdf
)
Finally, presumably the hunter-gatherers are in a group rather than a nuclear family because it increases the chances of survival. Supposed grandparents, uncles, aunts etc. then do have an interest in who the real parents of the children are in order to invest time and effort in them (if one goes by the idea of trying to improve the survival of closely related genes). So merely being in the group constraints reproductive strategies.
One could also wonder whether the surviving forager societies have something peculiar about them (apart from geographical circumstances) in not having moved to more effective survival strategies like the rest of humanity. How much can one infer about our ancestors based on these?
I mean, how many “switched at birth” stories do you have to hear about before it’s obvious that babies actually have obscure features at birth, regardless of all the BS about “he has his father’s eyes?
Not many, actually. I hope you’re not basing your evolutionary arguments on “number of times you have heard of such a story”. I’ve never heard that “most” Caucasian babies are born with blonde hair, either.
Babies probably tend to look like Winston Churchill because there’s an evolutionary conflict between “developed enough to survive outside the womb” and “head still small enough to fit through mother’s pelvis”. If you have some evidence other than Chet Speculates! to suggest that there’s a different reason, I’d be interested to hear it. Otherwise, what you’re proposing is that cuckolded men killing their rivals’ offspring at birth occurred often enough to create evolutionary pressure favoring generic-looking babies, in a way that did not lead to their deaths (”This baby doesn’t look like me at all! DIE!”)
I give you credit though, Chet–it takes some chutzpah to scold other people with “confirmation bias” for daring to question your aloud-musings.
One latest thought - if anyone is using evolution to justify the way things are, please remember evolution only constrains us, it does not tell us the way things ought to be.
Otherwise, it would seem that railing against patriarchy is wrong, because after all, it is the most widespread and therefore successful social organization of humans.
Just chipping in with another book recommendation — if you like Angiers, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature is excellent.
Otherwise, what you’re proposing is that cuckolded men killing their rivals’ offspring at birth occurred often enough to create evolutionary pressure favoring generic-looking babies, in a way that did not lead to their deaths (”This baby doesn’t look like me at all! DIE!”)
And yet, the fact that most men serving convictions for murder were convicted of killing their intimate partner doesn’t convince you that men - at some point - must surely have been willing to use murder to enforce their own parentage?
Although honestly I think obscure parentage evolved long before humans did; it’s a trait we’ve inherited from our ancestors.
I’ve never said that my own experience - or anybody else’s - makes one thing or another “mathematically certain.” I’m just saying, there’s a lot of indications that what I’m saying isn’t ridiculous. But as for evidence that primates practice lineage-selective infanticide:
Males as infant protectors in Hanuman langurs:
For other assertions that I’ve made:
Maximization of fitness through limiting the number of offspring in the evolution ofHomo sapiens
Reactions to children’s faces resemblance affects males more than females
Whom Are Newborn Babies Said to Resemble?
Sorry for the data dump, but I’m just trying to say - there’s really no scientific contention anymore about the ideas I’ve put forward here. They’re hardly my “speculations”; it’s the consensus science, as I understand it.
Otherwise, what you’re proposing is that cuckolded men killing their rivals’ offspring at birth occurred often enough to create evolutionary pressure favoring generic-looking babies, in a way that did not lead to their deaths (”This baby doesn’t look like me at all! DIE!”)
And yet, the fact that most men serving convictions for murder were convicted of killing their intimate partner doesn’t convince you that men - at some point - must surely have been willing to use murder to enforce their own parentage?
Although honestly I think obscure parentage evolved long before humans did; it’s a trait we’ve inherited from our ancestors.
I’ve never said that my own experience - or anybody else’s - makes one thing or another “mathematically certain.” I’m just saying, there’s a lot of indications that what I’m saying isn’t ridiculous. But as for evidence that primates practice lineage-selective infanticide:
Males as infant protectors in Hanuman langurs:
For other assertions that I’ve made:
Maximization of fitness through limiting the number of offspring in the evolution ofHomo sapiens
Reactions to children’s faces resemblance affects males more than females
Whom Are Newborn Babies Said to Resemble?
Sorry for the data dump, but I’m just trying to say - there’s really no scientific contention anymore about the ideas I’ve put forward here. They’re hardly my “speculations”; it’s the consensus science, as I understand it.
because i like to poke arguers, I’ll just mention (aside from the fact that I love this book) that my brother, like all the men in my mom’s family, was born with platinum blond hair that has darkened to a mid-chestnut color (well, under the dye). he did keep his very very blue eyes (two parents with green-gray eyes; i’m blue as well).
An afterthought - I think Evolutionary Psychology makes much of the fact that in principle a man can have many more children than a woman, and so men’s and women’s reproductive strategies must be different.
But in practice, if on the average men were more efficient at transmitting their genes to the next generation than women, then it would be advantageous to have male children and the gender ratio would not be 1. So men and women are equally effective as gene transmitters.
The average man cannot be more efficient at transmitting their genes than the average woman - every child has one mother and one father only (save, perhaps, Jewish carpenters). If a man has a better chance at transmitting their genes than the average woman (i.e. Genghiz Khan), it is at the expense of many other men (i.e. all the people the Mongols slaughtered). Conversely, the fact that a woman is more limited in terms of the number of offspring she may have implies that offspring as a whole might be more democratically spread. Polygyny (along with men competing for women, and unequal status) is considerably more “natural” than polyandry, whatever “natural” means when humans are involved.
A better first order determinant might be “bang for the buck” - the amount of investment a parent has to put into raising a child of either gender. This (obviously) varies from human society to society, but I don’t think it stays the same enough for it to have an evolutionary effect.
As far as I know, gathering was of considerably more importance to hunter/gatherer tribes than hunting, and there’s no particular reason why a woman would be that less valuable in terms of survival value to the tribe just because she’s dragged down by a baby on the teat.
There are some who consider Shapin to be a postmodernist, so my saying that what you described sounded postmodernist wasn’t so far-fetched:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/campa20051125/
Hrdy is an Evolutionary Psychologist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Blaffer_Hrdy
I think moderation ate your comment.
Thus refuting the notion that “all things in moderation” is a worthy goal.
Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson of the cultural materialist school, demonstrates the company that Hrdy keeps:
http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol8no3/ferguson.html
I think Chet obviously hasn’t spent much time looking at “Caucasian” newborns in southern Europe or the middle east. Either that or he’s confusing bald babies with blond ones. And since we’re getting all anecdotal, northern European me was born the red hair and grey eyes.
On topic, I really have to get this book.
And yet, the fact that most men serving convictions for murder were convicted of killing their intimate partner doesn’t convince you that men - at some point - must surely have been willing to use murder to enforce their own parentage?
Now, where was that goalpost? I was pretty sure you set it down right here just a minute ago.
See, Chet, your original argument was that babies evolved to all look alike so a father wouldn’t be able to spot whether or not a baby was his. In support of this, you offered your own observations (asking if we hadn’t heard of switched-baby stories, for example) and speculations about how men being jailed for intimate-partner murders proves your point–all the while scolding others for relying on ‘anecdotal’ evidence. And “My theory is not ridiculous!” is not what we would call a high standard of persuasiveness.
To actually make the case that babies evolved camouflage, you’d have to show that
–babies do, in fact, look alike (really, the theory fails right about here)
–this alike-ness is successful to the point that fathers can’t tell somebody else’s child
–resembling a different dad *after* infancy has no effect on mortality
–it’s plausible to imagine enough differerent-dad babies being killed by angry fathers that we can assume there was a selection pressure.
One of the links you, yourself, posted speaks rather strongly against that theory. If all babies look alike, why does anyone say “she has her daddy’s eyes” when it’s patently obvious they’re indistinguishable?
Nancy, Hrdy is a feminist evolutionary psychologist — which is important. She has a very keen eye for the androcentric & patriarchal myths that permeate the field; she’s well worth a read.
I’ve no idea what she said about Yanomamo stepfathers — and the piece you link to doesn’t provide a citation. But if you want to talk about who she keeps company with, Natalie Angier refers to her as “one of my favorite evolutionary biologists.”
Disingenuous as usual, Mythago. Look, I’ve been trying to give two kinds of evidence - evidence from human life that could be interpreted as the “remnants” of a certain behavior, and evidence from the world of our primate relatives engaging in that behavior.
If you want a video tape of Ancient Man engaged in these behaviors, well, I don’t have a time machine to go back and record that for you. You wondered if it was reasonable to suggest that a man would kill another man’s offspring by his mate. It seems to me that the fact that a pregnant woman is twice as likely to be murdered as a non-pregnant woman is evidence of that. If a man can kill his own mate, why on Earth would he balk at killing an unrelated infant?
I’ve provided more than enough evidence to convince a reasonable person that these influences are good conclusions. If you’re determined to be unreasonable, and to draw no inferences at all from what is factually true about the world, there’s no evidence I can present that will convince you.
Did you read the article, Mythago? Or just the title? If you’d done your homework, you would have read:
People say “she has her daddy’s eyes” to overcome the father’s skepticism of paternity. The evidence they provide for this is that people claim evidence of paternal features in infants far more often than evidence of maternal features - yet, genetically, the contribution to the infant’s features should be about equal. As the article says:
Again, if you’re determined right now to view the world as a series of unconnected facts from which no inferences can be drawn, then no amount of evidence I provide is going to be anything that can convince you.
Regarding evolutionary psychology (from Wikipedia):
So, just because Steven Pinker et al (although Pinker is the only one I have read) are trying to explain certain misogynistic behaviors, they are not endorsing them. Maybe even if we understand where this comes from, we will be in a better position to act against it. In How the Mind Works, Pinker addresses this issue many times.