It’s so confusing why it might be more appealing to be the fun good guy than the priggish bad guy.
Via Feministing, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that indicates that women are “more comfortable” with the idea of childlessness than men. I use the quotation marks, because I found the phrasing interesting, in that it implies that most people think of having children as the default and that not having children is a deviation of the norm that one doesn’t embrace so much as tolerates. It seems to me that if you ask the question, “Are you comfortable with the idea of never having children?”, you’re going to get much different answers than with a more straightforward “Do you want children?”
If in fact they asked the first question instead of the latter, they may not have been measuring just the desire to have children, but also a willingness to be flexible about the future. Women, having it hammered at us non-stop that we can’t “have it all”, have probably on average spent more time than men reconciling themselves with the idea that they may have to relinquish having children for relationship reasons or career reasons. In fact, the study shows that the more educated women are, the more “comfortable” they are with the idea of having children. The researchers seem to think this is because a college degree makes you more aware that kids can be a pain in the ass.
The finding that women’s acceptance of childlessness increases with the amount of education they have shows that “the smarter you are, the more you know about the costs,” Goldenberg added. “You understand that it’s difficult to do both things. The whole idea of doing both is really tough. Doing both at a high level is maybe possible for only a few women. Ordinary women can’t handle it all.”
I quarrel with the idea that education makes you smarter in the way that would make you more aware of how much trouble kids are. In fact, I can see women living and working in the traditional “man’s world” of the professions as underexposed to children as such men are, and that might make it easier to mentally downplay how hard it is to have kids. Also, the more educated you are, likelier the more money you make, so you are insulated from some of the biggest costs, because you can pay for child care, etc.* Again, if they asked about comfort with not having children, they’re sweeping in not just the willfully childless, but also a lot of people that would like to have children but won’t be overly sad if that doesn’t happen. And they may just have picked up on the fact that women who are moving up career ladders have heard over and over that their careers might be an obstacle to having children, and they’ve decided they can live with that. Men, who rarely if ever hear that they can’t have both a career and a family, have less cause to characterize themselves as “comfortable” with losing certain opportunities to others.
Even though there’s some sloppiness in either the research methods or the reporting of them, at least the researchers were quite aware that differences between male and female desire to have children probably stem more from social reasons than anything else—their analysis is that men pay less costs in terms of time or effort to having children and therefore are more eager to buy. Makes sense, and I wish that they had more direct research (or reporting) to demonstrate that. For balance, however, this article has to dig up someone who is willing to talk out of his ass, because god forbid we ever, ever admit that gender might have a social component and not be completely hard-wired by nature.
That male attitude may come from their most primal being, explained Barry Ginsberg, a Pennsylvania psychologist specializing in relationships. “For a man, the loss of having a family and carrying on the gene pool makes men helpless, because they can’t give birth,” Ginsberg said.
From an “evolutionary standpoint, men would go around impregnating all the women they could find, so that at least one of those women would survive” and produce a child, he explained.
Science for choads. He’s just using this opportunity to hammer at the evo psychologists’ greatest hope, which is to convince the world that they need to screw around a lot while simultaneously getting sexual fidelity out of women. It has zip to do with men wanting children, but wedge it in anyway. Someday it will work and women will roll over and start giving over their fidelity and their pussies without asking for an ounce of respect, if you keep plugging at it. For further mockery, see sabotabby.
*For everyone fixing to protest that they are the exception, by definition, studies like these measure averages. The diversity of examples doesn’t disprove the averages.
183 Responses to “So comfortable with it that they’re first in line to sign up?”
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The evolutionary… psychology… (i have trouble putting those in the same sentence) explanation is so. bunk. Why would the article even need to air a totally non-scientific explanation when it’s *about* a grounded explanation that’s been shown empirically?
unless… the Men in Charge are afraid they might have to produce actual *evidence* for the way they act about wage work, marriage, and children… no, evidence is definitely only for those who can’t cram a lazy explanation down everyone else’s throat.
Why would not carrying on the gene pool make a woman any less helpless than a man? Also, what evidence is there than early humans didn’t exist in family units — evidence indicates they lived, at the very least, in very cohesive smallish groups. They probably all boinked each other like madmen, in this reporter’s feverish imaginings.That said, of course our behavior is the result of evolution — why would our brains be any different than the rest of our bodies? Why would our brains be a special case, a blank slate and thus unique among the animal kingdom? Sounds like religion.
And no, evo psych is not science and never will be in the sense that assertions can be tested and proven/disproven. So any jackass, like that clown above (or this clown below) can say whatever bunkum they want and justify sexism, racism, all manner of folly. Conjecture is most certainly better left on an over-beers basis, but you’ve got a bad case of hubris if you think your behavior has no basis in the evolutionary development opf your brain, which is part of your body.
I’ll state again that I am not making an apologia for this Barry Ginsberg asshole’s preposterous and manifestly flawed assertions.
Yeah, cause my not reproducing means I *am* carrying on the gene pool. Whaaaa? Oh, I have it: my not giving birth gives me more power in giving birth. Wait a minute. O.K. here it is, my need to not be helpless means I should be pregnant, but pregnancy can make me more helpless, so I… Whisky Tango Foxtrot, people? What does that last bit of horseshit even mean?
Oh, and I think the research shoulld include not just women’s awareness of the costs, but their basic (but new) understanding that they don’t have to reproduce. Very simple. Many people used to understand the costs, but didn’t think they could get out of it anyway.
It’s so fun to watch Godmonkey bend himself into contortions trying to simultaneously stress his feminist creds while defending the (crap, sexist, racist) evo psych field.
*gets popcorn*
Women who are educated are likely on a career path and are keenly aware that if they have children, their career, rather than the father’s, is (typically) going to bear the brunt. Their careers, representing considerable investment on their part, will suffer.
At least some of them will likely change their minds later. In such cases, the fact that they once were “comfortable not having children” will bode well, since they will obviously be going in with eyes wide open.
“differences between male and female desire to have children probably stem more from social reasons than anything else”
Or possibly not.
Suppose an average looking female and male in their 20’s made a bet with each other as to who could get laid first with a stranger in a town where neither of them knew anybody. The stipulation was that the sex was to be freely given, e.g. no cash, booze or drugs. Who do you think would get laid first? And likely by days or even weeks and perhaps months! In some cultures, the man might have to get married first.
What does that have to do with the urge to have children? Until very recently if woman wanted sex and/or had sex, she was likely to get pregnant. Just a simple fact of natural life. And since it is far easier in nearly all cultures for an average woman to have sex on demand than an average man whether with a husband or boyfriend, it seems plausible that Mother Nature would hard wire a stronger urge in males to have children. The more difficult to get, the more motivation needed.
Hey look, kiss my ass, will ya? (spoken good-naturedly) It’s true I go to greater lengths than I would elsewhere not to be misconstrued — mainly because that can turn into a runaway train (or, more accurately, the old game of “telephone”) at Pandagon. Say, “our fight-or-flight mechanism is a survival strategy developed through evolutionary mechanisms” and 50 posts later, you’re being roundly excoriated as a date rapist.
I mean, Godmonkey is right in the most basic sense: evolution produced our current psychologies and brain chemistry. And social pressures, in some ways, also evolve: they exist because they were successful, defined in very limited terms.
None of this, however, means that random guesses by people with an agenda accurately predict how evolution has worked on humans in the past 2 million years, nor justifies it even if somehow, they did manage to prove certain things were ‘innate.’ We can, as it turns out, get past our basic instinctual make up on purpose, and we can overcome whatever negative behaviors we believe to be ‘innate.’ Pop evopsych is just a cop out.
I think you hit the nail on the head here:
I think part of the return to the “housewife” status that some women embrace is an acceptance of that idea that we can’t have it all. That we must choose between doing one thing well or doing two things at a mediocre level.
This would also explain why men seem less willing to adopt than women. Not sure if that’s true; just seems to be the case from my experience.
I bet if they did a study of men who want to have children and men who don’t, they’d conclude that men who want kids tend to be more faithful. That’s just a guess though.
The thing about this evo psych is that they must be looking at a very different evo from the rest of us. It actually tends to run the opposite way - the best thing for the female of the species is to have a kid with one of the alphas but raise it with individual attention from one of the betas.
First of all, I don’t think Godmonkey has said anything objectionable, in principle
But I also think if fight or flight might be innate/evolved/what have you behavior, but it is among a small group of human behaviors that can be put in that category. (Startle reflexes would be another). When it comes to anything as heavily shaped by the social fabric as gender behavior and sex, though, I don’t see how we can peel off enough layers to find the “true” “natural” human instinct in there. Minus a time machine, at least.
Which is what makes evo-psych so annoying. It’s as though the people making these pronouncements just can’t understand how ludicrous it is to expect to be able to posit about the “true” human nature after millennia of humanity being self-aware and socialized beings. And since we don’t have a time machine, they can never be proven wrong, despite the utter lack of evidence about what prehistoric humans thought, felt, or believed. Might as well argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!
Because we are self-aware, socialized beings, we simply can’t be 100% objective when studying ourselves, even if we’re simply looking at people living now. To think we could do so for people who lived before recorded history is the height of arrogance. We can hypothesize, but we cannot prove, and we certainly can’t fire off lazy pronouncements about humanity’s essential nature to pad out media fluff pieces–at least, responsible and ethical scientists cannot.
What really drives me nuts about “evo-psych” (and I suspect it drives godmonkey nuts, too, since he seems like a sensible guy) is that they do stuff like look at the rape rate in a small number of neighborhoods in one city in the US and then declare that it proves that all men, throughout all of time and across all cultures, evolved to be rapists.
I mean, WTF?
I think it’s useful to try and figure out what parts of our culture are influenced by evolution, but we ain’t going to find that out by declaring that evo-psych proves that all women love pink because you tested college-age women in a lab. At least start with some freakin’ babies that haven’t had 20 years of cultural experience, okay?
Though I also want to say, the mom’s bath from the ad really needs an I Rub My Ducky for the full effect, not Ivory soap.
Just sayin’.
Yes, Jim, we’re aware that it’s convenient for sexists to write off oppression as natural. And that it’s doubly convenient for guys who can’t get laid to blame Mother Nature instead of all the social disapproval of women’s free sexuality/their own unattractiveness.
Women are free to be more comfortable with childlessness than men.
But Biology cannot be averted. No children, your genes, ideas, values die.
Many great civilisations toyed with plummeting birth rates and childless ness. They died in part as a result.
This is not negotiable, nor something that can be ideologically bargained with.
No Children results in the death of a society, group or culture.
The future belongs to those who procreate.
By accounts, many Feminists, Liberals, Single Career Women, Homosexuals will not be in the future.
That’s your choice. You are free to make it.
Who do you think would get laid first?
Given that women in our society are frequently raped by both dates and supposedly “platonic” friends, why in the hell would a woman go home with a strange man she only just met who doesn’t know anyone in town? She could end up in a shallow grave with her throat slit for all she knows.
And yet somehow that never makes it into the “evolutionary” story, does it?
JimB: And since it is far easier in nearly all cultures for an average woman to have sex on demand …it seems plausible that Mother Nature would hard wire a stronger urge in males to have children. The more difficult to get, the more motivation needed.
Seriously?? Right, like early man had a hard time getting laid. After a long day of flinging feces, he still couldn’t get the gals to give him any.
Oh! Sorry…I just saw Amanda’s response…I’ll shutup.
I wonder if anybody has surveyed men about their childhaving aspirations with conditional situations thrown in. For example, “would you like to have children”, then “would you like to have children IF you had to stay home to care for them” or “if you didn’t have a partner” or …
I think it would strongly speak to what their understanding is of gender roles, and how much men expect of the female half of the relationship when children enter the zone. My hypothesis would be that IF female support for most of the heavy lifting and time commitments in childrearing were NOT available, enthusiasm of males to procreate would similarly wane.
Delurking to mention the aphorism:
Men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them.
Another explanation for why it’s “easier for a woman to get laid than a man.”
Dipshit.
Relurking now.
These right wingers really need to think about things a little more…
Women probably don’t want to reproduce because of A) They work too damn hard during the day to put food on their family B) their healthcare situation sucks so bad that they can’t afford to get pregnant just on the cost of the birthing and the first years medical costs and C) because this world that we live in blows such huge chunks of nastiness that the thought of all of the above PLUS having a kid abused, maimed, killed, programmed, abducted, shot, drugged, etc really causes them to stop and question the idea. Well, and since women actually have to carry the offspring for up to 9 months, shouldn’t it be the women who decide?
If democrats ruled the country, there would be more pregnancies, more happy pregnant women. I figure that there would still be two income families but there would be more flexibility I’d guess…
Or maybe I’m wrong…
Personally, I feel a loss at not having kids. The ‘big unanswered question’ that I’ll likely take to my grave is what kind of father would I be…
Well, and DAMN where the hell did this come from?
That’s just too ‘out there’ for much more comment than: Shit dude, join a gym. Call ‘Dr. 90210′. Get a better lube. Get laid, by anything…
These right wingers really need to think about things a little more…
Women probably don’t want to reproduce because of A) They work too damn hard during the day to put food on their family B) their healthcare situation sucks so bad that they can’t afford to get pregnant just on the cost of the birthing and the first years medical costs and C) because this world that we live in blows such huge chunks of nastiness that the thought of all of the above PLUS having a kid abused, maimed, killed, programmed, abducted, shot, drugged, etc really causes them to stop and question the idea. Well, and since women actually have to carry the offspring for up to 9 months, shouldn’t it be the women who decide?
If democrats ruled the country, there would be more pregnancies, more happy pregnant women. I figure that there would still be two income families but there would be more flexibility I’d guess…
Or maybe I’m wrong…
Personally, I feel a loss at not having kids. The ‘big unanswered question’ that I’ll likely take to my grave is what kind of father would I be…
Well, and DAMN where the hell did this come from?
That’s just too ‘out there’ for much more comment than: Shit dude, join a gym. Call ‘Dr. 90210′. Get a better lube. Get laid, by anything…
Mnemosyne: The evo-psych crowd does this “generalize to the entire human race from a weensy li’l sample of Americans” an awful lot. There was one infamous study a few years ago which purported to show how men had an “evolved preference for submissive wives.” The evo-psychs drew this stunning conclusion after interviewing a few hundred University of Michigan students. I never knew U of Mich served as a vortex uniting all human societies and cultures across space and time.
Elaine: Social science research bears out that yes, women usually ARE more eager to adopt than men. It is very possible that this is why it is easier for adoption agencies to place girls than boys. Women drive the adoption decisions in most families or as single moms, and women tend to want daughters.
As for this Barry Ginsberg choad, I have this to say: throughout most of history, people didn’t HAVE “family names” to pass down, nor prized possessions either. If I may get all ev-psych on everyone’s asses, our “ancestral environments” likely involved owning only what could be carried on one’s back (i.e. nothing to pass down) and no family names either (surnames are a medieval invention for census and tax-collecting purposes). Most people, throughout most of human history, probably didn’t HAVE much to hand down except stories and memories, and handing those down don’t require blood relatives or any relatives at all, just people willing to listen.
I think I just filled in a couple of spaces on my bingo card there.
As for the study itself - my university library gets the JMF, so when it comes out in November I’ll be more than happy to read it and report back on what it really says without the media filter. I wouldn’t be surprised if its conclusion is “Women are more reluctant to have children because they see a greater cost to themselves by doing so.” Which doesn’t require a sociology PhD. to notice. I find it laughable that the MRAs are all paranoid about baby-hungry women stealing their sperm - talk about projection!
My comment won’t post… *sigh*
(I’ll try again, not that it’s that important)
These right wingers really need to think about things a little more…
Women probably don’t want to reproduce because of A) They work too damn hard during the day to put food on their family B) their healthcare situation sucks so bad that they can’t afford to get pregnant just on the cost of the birthing and the first years medical costs and C) because this world that we live in blows such huge chunks of nastiness that the thought of all of the above PLUS having a kid abused, maimed, killed, programmed, abducted, shot, drugged, etc really causes them to stop and question the idea. Well, and since women actually have to carry the offspring for up to 9 months, shouldn’t it be the women who decide?
If democrats ruled the country, there would be more pregnancies, more happy pregnant women. I figure that there would still be two income families but there would be more flexibility I’d guess…
Or maybe I’m wrong…
Personally, I feel a loss at not having kids. The ‘big unanswered question’ that I’ll likely take to my grave is what kind of father would I be…
Well, and DAMN where the hell did this come from?
That’s just too ‘out there’ for much more comment than: Shit dude, join a gym. Call ‘Dr. 90210′. Get a better lube. Get laid, by anything…
This stupidity about primal urges seems exactly backwards. For longer than there’s been ev psych, the whole thing has been that men don’t have to have families to pass on their genes. They just have to get someone pregnant. So the idea of not “having children” in the conventional sense of the term should (in really bad theory) be more attractive to men than to women.
But when you’re talking about someone who characterize the viciousness of our society toward mixing career and children as “ordinary women can’t handle it all”, sense is pretty much the last thing you’d expect.
(oops, gotta go rock to toddler to bed)
I bet if they did a study of men who want to have children and men who don’t, they’d conclude that men who want kids tend to be more faithful. That’s just a guess though.
I’d actually guess the latter, if only because men who want children are more likely to be old-fashioned and therefore wink at the idea of men getting a little on the side. Also, having children means that your wife can’t up and leave you nearly as easily—since the fear of the loss of the primary relationship is the major factor in curtailing infidelity, then having that fear lessened through her dependence must make cheating a bit more attractive.
On the adoption thing: I agree. Adoption will have an opportunity cost appeal to women since they don’t have to give birth themselves, but men don’t care as much for obvious reasons.
There’s a logical disconnect in there somewhere but I’m not nearly educated enough, and therefore smart enough to see it.
Because the ability to get the education has nothing whatsoever to do with anything like social class, at all, at all.
No one’s arguing with biology, Jim. Some of us just aren’t such giant egomaniacs that we think that the world won’t go on without 50% of our genes, then 25%, then 12.5%, etc. And some of us have other ways to sooth our ego, our talents and lives, and don’t need to have children to fill the void.
Not that everyone who has children disclaimer. But it’s always amusing to me when people try to threaten you into having children. Trying to make other people comply indicates a certain uneasiness about your choices, imo.
From an “evolutionary standpoint, men would go around impregnating all the women they could find, so that at least one of those women would survive” and produce a child, he explained.
I read somewhere, and this will bother me until I find it, that it makes (within the framework of evo-psych) more sense for a guy to stick with one woman rather than to cavort about town. That’s because women don’t have clear indicators of fertility, so sticking with one means he has more of a chance of hitting a fertile cycle.
Well, the notion that women are naturally faithful and men aren’t is belied by eons of men being paranoid about female cheating. I doubt men would be so intent on controlling the sexuality of women who always behaved as men wish they would.
I have a tremendous, irrational urge to kill rapists without giving them the benefit of a fair trial. So I suppose that’s a result of evolutionary biology, too, right? I should be given two glocks and a badge, right?
Evo-psych was used to declare that melanin content was irrevocably linked to intelligence. This sort of thing was never “debunked” — it was bullshit from jump and responsible scientist called it as much. It just became less socially acceptable to publish. We have the same pheonomenon now with misogyny.
Men impregnating all the womens so their offspring can live? In an evolutionary environment?
This posits that our society’s medical/scientific knowledge about pregnancy and its partibility or lack thereof was available to early males of our species. An assumption that is invalidated by studies of primate behavior.
The best book on this topic is called The Woman Who Never Evolved by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I didn’t read the whole thing until I was confined to the couch, but it’s well worth perusing if you’re interested in a scientific exploration of the primate behaviors we’re all stuck acting out.
XtinaS and Amanda:
It makes sense for women to have their children by an assortment of fathers. Because you don’t know which one will work out best in the DNA department, so by having a variety, you maximize your chance of passing on your own genes.
This is not Mr. Nice Guy by the way. It’s Mrs Nice Guy. I gave up bothering with your sign in system, and because the Mr is logged in already, I’m just using his name.
Oh, and Amanda, I’ve borne kids and I’ve adopted them, and believe me, under the current system it is much cheaper and especially much easier to just grow your own. My husband and I however were motivated to take some of the many kids in the world who have somehow lost their families and let them use ours. So we paid the extra cost in both money and annoyance, no, make that rage.
Mrs Nice Guy again.
And since it is far easier in nearly all cultures for an average woman to have sex on demand
WHAT? There are cultures that KILL women for having the sex that they want. How is that easier? You mean, because they can have sex with willing partners if they don’t mind getting killed for it? Whereas men are relatively unlikely to find partners who don’t mind risking death for a bit of nookie? If that is what you mean, I call you insane and deluded. There is no way on earth it is easier, by any rational definition of “easier”, in those cultures for women to have sex.
Now, have a little think. Consider comment #16 while you are thinking. Can you think of any other cultures where the risks and social penalties for having sex are different for men and for women? Cultures closer to home? Cultures like the one you are living in…. by George, I think he’s got it!* Jim, the reason you can’t get laid is not in your genes, but in your culture.**
*probably not.
** and in your personality, snap-judging by these posts
Amanda — see what happened to Pinky (above)? That’s why I don’t want to mess with your comment system.
Jim: I am a feminist, a liberal, have been a single working woman and mother, and most people find my sexuality to be at best ambiguous, at worst downright confusing. And I have nine kids, some by birth, some by adoption. All of them have been exposed to, and have largely adopted my liberal, feminist views. I expect that people like me will help make up for all the liberal feminists who don’t have kids. And what about the students of the non-kid-having liberal feminists who teach in schools and colleges?
Mrs Nice Guy
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/10/28/the_difference_myth/
Boston Globe Magazine article on why gender stereotypes aren’t a great way to sort out humanity in general and children in specific.
Also, I have re-read the Goldenberg quote a bunch of times, and I can’t help thinking the reporter must have got it out of context or mangled it a bit. If the costs Goldenberg referred to are opportunity costs, then it makes sense. The more well-educated you are, the more you’d have to give up to have children and the more conscious you are of the career you’d be giving up. Because the alternate intepretation seems too silly for anyone to have actually said.
The October and November issues of the Journal of Family Issues are dedicated to childlessness. In a tight little nutshell (and I’ll be glad to offer specific citations and quotes if asked) it seems that older, childless men who are never-married, divorced, or widowed are disproportionately likely to be socially isolated and uncared-for. (The articles didn’t add, but I will: divorced men who DO have kids, but have alienated them, fall into the same boat.) Unmarried childless women, by and large, have social networks - family, friends, church cronies, neighbors - and so are very unlikely to wind up alone and isolated as they age.
So perhaps men are so keen to have kids because they don’t want to be old and alone and their death detected only because the neighbors notice an awful smell coming from their decaying corpse. The MRA’s are projecting like mofos when they rant about “lonely old cat ladies;” the real phenomenon is lonely old MEN, with or without cats. Of course, children are not, by any means, a bulwark against a lonely old age, and anyone who has kids so they’ll have someone to look after them is making a poor gamble.
Is Hrdy the one who pointed out to her colleagues that while the alpha male chips were busy beating the crap out of each other, the female chimps were sneaking off into the bushes with the beta males, thus invalidating the “fact” that the alpha males were the only ones who mated with the females?
Probably my favorite was when the people studying red-winged blackbirds discovered that the most “successful” males — the ones with the largest harem and number of fledglings — weren’t always the fathers of those fledglings. Yes, those nice little blackbird housewives in their harems were gettin’ some on the side and shocked the hell out of the researchers. So much for “females are always faithful.”
“it’s convenient for sexists to write off oppression as natural”
There was never a magical time in prehistory when oppression did not occur. Before machinery and the energy to drive it was developed, humans oppressed other humans with impunity to obtain their forced labor and will again when the energy is gone.
Oppression of women was, is and will be a fact of human life. The fact that it occurs at all times and in all cultures makes it “natural”. Mankind is part of nature, remember? To prevent it, women must convince a majority of men that engaging in woman’s oppression is not in men’s best interests. This has been partially accomplished in modern times by only a few cultures and is not likely to become universal.
I hate to bust anyone’s bubble, but the whole point of living is to reproduce. If you don’t, you’re DNA is history. We alive today are just the living skin over a skeleton made up of all our dead ancestors. We have the baton in a relay race that started at the dawn of mankind. If you fail to pass the baton off and create the next generation, your team loses. Think about the intense hardships and the incredible odds your ancestors endured through the ages to get the baton to you. Does it really matter to a cold universe if you don’t reproduce? Not a wit. But think what it would mean to those before you, whose struggle and survival allowed you to be, to know you didn’t when you could have.
“By accounts, many Feminists, Liberals, Single Career Women, Homosexuals will not be in the future.”
-Oh, no, Jim, honey: we’re busy brainwashing innocent minds ALL THE TIME, so our warped ideals will live on, mwah, hah, ha!!!
As for “what it would mean to those before you, whose struggle and survival allowed you to be,”–it won’t mean a thing, They’re dead, Jim.
“By accounts, many Feminists, Liberals, Single Career Women, Homosexuals will not be in the future.”
-Oh, no, Jim, honey: we’re busy brainwashing innocent minds ALL THE TIME, so our warped ideals will live on, mwah, hah, ha!!!
As for “what it would mean to those before you, whose struggle and survival allowed you to be,”–it won’t mean a thing, They’re dead, Jim.
If you’re going to be evo-psycho, you ought to agree that people who might pass on deleterious traits ought not to reproduce. To avoid a blatantly eugenic argument (which I don’t endorse at all), I’ll stick to mental and emotional health issues. If I suffer from clinical depression, I would prefer not to pass this trait onward to my children.
Especially because males with clinical depression often express it as anger, inflicting it upon their families, coworkers and subordinates, and expressing it through nihilistic political philosophies such as. . . but I won’t go there.
If the stress of working and raising families at the same time is too much for some women, perhaps it’s better that they don’t have children; as SAHMs they would pass on to their children their sensitivity to stress.
Caveat: I am NOT an evo-psycho. I merely show that their arguments can be used against them.
But think what it would mean to those before you, whose struggle and survival allowed you to be, to know you didn’t when you could have.
My ancestors don’t know me and never did. They’re dead. They didn’t live so I could reproduce; they lived so they could live. That a person could get indignant on behalf of my dead ancestors because I’m not carrying on their genetic legacy tells me that person badly needs to get laid.
I hate to bust anyone’s bubble, but the whole point of living is to reproduce.
No, the whole point of living is to reproduce. If your life feels that meaningless, get a hobby. Better yet, try religion. I hear that works pretty well.
Oops, that should be “the whole point of living is to live.”
I am not a xerox, I am a human being!
JimB - are you seriously trying to argue that because there was never a magical time without oppression, we should just shrug and wander back to the kitchen to have more babies?
There was never a magical time with computers, or spaceflight until this century either. Doesn’t seem to have stopped us. Social constructs are both subtler and trickier, but if these great big brains aren’t good for improving our own lot in life, what the hell good are they?
Also, nice conflation of social learning with heredity AND confusion of wanting having or not having children to be a choice with never wanting children.
Now I have to go put my K-selected offspring to bed.
(skipping many posts to answer one)
JimB, I did NOT want to know you can only get a hard on when you think about maternity wards. Somehow, most men I’ve actually met are motivated to seek sex by the desire to have sex.
Just because something is self-perpetuating, like the phenomena of living organisms, doesn’t mean its purpose is to be self-perpetuating. Projecting the human notion of purpose onto non-concious entities like genes and DNA is useful for scientists to explain how they operate, but in the end, natural selection is an automatic process of sorts.
In relation to the entire article, I believe it’s easier to reconcile a particular, defined situation, which you can plan for and make other oportunities available. I’d suggest that the opportunity cost for women (of investing one’s time in something other than having children), is easier for them to quantify and thus plan for because we have a relatively finite fertility window. You only have to be open to the idea of children for a while, and if you miss it you’ll need a plan b. For men, on the other hand, you have an idea that you’ve got your whole life to have kids, and at some point that oportunity is going to turn up. No need to reconcile yourself to the other possibility then.
If you fail to pass the baton off and create the next generation, your team loses. Think about the intense hardships and the incredible odds your ancestors endured through the ages to get the baton to you. Does it really matter to a cold universe if you don’t reproduce? Not a wit. But think what it would mean to those before you, whose struggle and survival allowed you to be, to know you didn’t when you could have.
You mean all those oppressive ancestors busily taking slaves? Yeah, I really give a shit about their feelings.
“But Biology cannot be averted. No children, your genes, ideas, values die.”
Many of my genes live on in my cousins, who are healthier than me and therefore will pass on a better genetic combo than I can. Further, risking my own death in the hope of producing a (sickly) child, makes NO sense to a rational person.
Ideas and values are not genetic. Amanda passes her ideas and values to people by writing her blog. And yes, many people who start off with reservations about her ideas see the point of her arguments after reading them a few times and becoming wore aware of reality.
My brother is likely to remain childless/child free, but he is a teacher. Every year, he will be passing ideas along to tens of students. And most people had at least one favorite teacher who was a strong influence on them.
I will never have children, but I make friends easily with younger people. Young adults are still developing their values, principles and ideas. I know I have been an influence on friends.
Oh hell Jim- I’m a liberal feminist and I seem to have acquired these children. I don’t know it must be a fluke- they act like me, they look like my husband, but yet, they must not be mine because I’m too busy working and doing the world a big huge disservice by not having kids. I think they’ll be disappointed to find that out though- they are quite attached to me.
I cannot even begin to describe how much that attitude pisses me off. Yes, many woman do not want children, and I think that’s great for them, but there are still quite a few of us, even the evil liberal feminists who would like to have a child or two. We’re probably not going extinct anytime soon.
‘In fact, the study shows that the more educated women are, the more “comfortable” they are with the idea of having children. ‘
In this context you meant to say that they’re more comfortable with NOT having children, right? At least that’s what I can discern from the neighboring sentences.
Otherwise good discussion across the board.
I wrote it up to my first day with Leopard… Who knows…
So far I’ve had good times with it. Beats Vista to death.
I once made the argument that our entire purpose in living was to ‘eat, drink, shit, piss, fuck and die’. I was immediately labeled a Nihilist and actually a libertarian… It was on a chat room a long time ago.
At the root, I don’t think anyone expects us to be happy, least if whom ourselves. There are too many people, like me, living a life that they didn’t know that they had chosen.
But, ‘life goes on’…
Society has changed, and not for the better. I am sure that there are many people like a couple that I know who have told me, separately, that they wish they hadn’t had children. I don’t know if they know that the other feels the same way. I just get caught up in thinking about their kids, 2 incredible boys who are full of ‘piss and vinegar’ and very fu to be around (which I’m sure could ‘get old’ quick on a day in/day out basis). I certainly hope that the kids don’t get the idea that they aren’t wanted. I know what that feels like…
Humans ruin each other with such glee and abandon. It’s no wonder the environment is in the crapper…
I have the study open on my pc and will provide a link to it shortly. It’s a quant study that analyzes 11k+ responses to survey data from the late 1980s and 1994:
“Using two surveys has allowed us to examine both kinds of attitudes. Specifically, we examine responses to two statements regarding the parenthood imperative: whether ‘‘it is better to have a child than to remain childless’’ (in the NSFH), and whether ‘‘the main purpose of marriage these days is to have children’’ (in the GSS). We also analyze responses to a common warning about the negative consequences of remaining childless: that ‘‘people who have never had children lead empty lives’’ (GSS).”
I may post more with other excerpts and comments but I will be back with the link, for sure.
Per my comment above, the authors ran a regression based on people’s responses to those questions accd’ing to a Likert scale of 1 - 5 (strongly agree to strongly disagree).
Here is the study. You should be able to download it. Let me know if you can’t.
Shoot, don’t think I did the link correctly. Sorry!
http://www.grahamad.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=197
It’s worth keeping in mind that Ginsberg is a clinician who counsels couples, and not one of the study’s researchers. (I’m implying we should ignore him.) The fun part for the researcher in quant studies is that they get to crunch the #s but then hypothesize like the rest of us on actual causality. Ignoring Ginsberg’s hunter/gatherer nonsense, here are some excerpts from the paper’s discussion on the “contradictory moral dilemmas” for women, and the structural role of education that seem esp. prevalent to Amanda et al.’s comments here:
“Our findings show that attitudes about marriage play the strongest (though still only partial) role in helping to explain the gender gap. Women’s less traditional views of the importance and permanence of marriage reduced the observed gender difference in attitudes about childlessness by about 30%. Women were more likely than men to disagree or give neutral responses to the statements that ‘‘it is better to marry than to remain single’’ and that ‘‘marriage is for life.’’ These results indicate that women may be less optimistic than men about the benefits and permanence of marriage. As marriage is still regarded by many as the preferred context for parenthood, women may be more likely to accept childlessness as a possible or preferred outcome compared
to the risks of an unsatisfactory marriage or of single motherhood following divorce. Greater opportunities for women in the labor force have allowed women to define their identities, accomplishments, and economic status independently of marriage and family, but they have added
new moral dilemmas as both men and women navigate the conflicts between work and family commitments (see Gerson, 2002; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004).
…we find that the influence of education is also conditioned by gender in this age group, with a considerable gap in attitudes between men and women with a college education. These results suggest that the costs and rewards of parenthood may be most divergent at higher levels of education, where women’s opportunity costs may be most acute, but fathers’ enhanced status translates into more substantial social and economic rewards (Blair-Loy, 2003; Coltrane, 2004).
Further, more educated men and women may experience more overt social and moral pressures with regard to personal and family decisions (May, 1995), even as their careers
offer less flexibility for combining professional success and family responsibilities (Blair-Loy; Hertz, 1997; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004).
For women, competing moral frameworks regarding devotion to work and family, which are deeply encoded in social
structures and culture, provide a contradictory and morally charged environment within which to consider motherhood (Blair-Loy).
Most Americans still value children and childbearing, and few adults express highly critical views of parenthood. Instead, these responses indicate greater acceptance of childlessness, particularly among women, as one possible life path, whether chosen or shaped by circumstances.”
JImB:If you fail to pass the baton off and create the next generation, your team loses.
Or until nature, in it’s quirky way, decides that there are just too many of one species, using too many resources and choking out all others and decides maybe to mutate some kind of virus or rapid cell generation to keep that species in check.
No, no, no Jim. Not “all cultures” in “all times” oppressed women. That is another sexist fallacy meant to convince us that such a system (we call it patriarchy) is Normal. There are many, many anthropological studies (dont’ make me find them) of cultures without oppression of women. We just conveniently do not talk about them in polite western society. Stop talking out of your ass.
But Biology cannot be averted. No children, your genes, ideas, values die……The future belongs to those who procreate….By accounts, many Feminists, Liberals, Single Career Women, Homosexuals will not be in the future…That’s your choice. You are free to make it.
You should tell my parents that…as very conservative Christians, 3 out of their 4 children are liberal agnostics, and it’s too soon to tell about #4. They’ve done a good job of raising children to be the exact opposite of their own values. I say, let the evangelicals keep on havin’ them, and a fair percentage will convert to feminism/homosexuality/liberalism.
For men, on the other hand, you have an idea that you’ve got your whole life to have kids, and at some point that oportunity is going to turn up. No need to reconcile yourself to the other possibility then.
That’s a good point. When you’re a man and you can (theoretically) sire children until the day you die, there’s no need to close the door unless you’re 100% sure you don’t want kids. All you need is a woman willing to have your child and you’re all set.
If you fail to pass the baton off and create the next generation, your team loses.
What does the winning team get? Free Oreos for eternity? And it’s complete nonesense to even pretend reporduction is some sort of unavoidable dodge. Throughout history people have managed go through their entire lives without once ever popping out some sort of offspring. However, I guarantee you not a one of ‘em were able to go more than, say, a week without having to take a dump.
Christ, it’s bad enough that there are people who’re apparently convinced that nearly 8 billion human beings just isn’t enough, but laying a guilt trip from my ancestors? That’s cold, man. My mom pulls the same sort of shit, but that’s Momma and she’s allowed.
That should be “reproduction is some sort of unavoidable chore”. I’d apologize, but the truth of the matter is I’m just stoned and my mind wander for a bit. It happens.
Ordinary women can’t handle it all
Wow. It’s amazing how much classism they managed to pack into one little sentence, isn’t it?
NAME ONE. Because that sounds like apocalyptic bullshit to me.
Actually, you know one great, famous civilisation that died? the roman. And they had laws forbidding contraception and abortion, mind you.
The greek? their women were locked down in their homes, having a bunch of kids while their husbands were all around philosophizing.
Some old civilizations in mesopotamia were known for having their young people fucking around happily at every occasion they had…
So, where are the great civilisations that died because of childlesness? Atlantis perhaps?
“There are many, many anthropological studies (dont’ make me find them) of cultures without oppression of women. We just conveniently do not talk about them in polite western society. Stop talking out of your ass.”
What’s your qualification for this statement? I’ve never seen a study that passed mustard in this regard. A lot of the anthropological canon that was used to suggest it has since been shown to be skewed.
If you fail to pass the baton off and create the next generation, your team loses.
Gosh and and I always wanted my team to win!
But now it seems that my team will lose.
Where will I find another team like the one that could have won for me?
How will I live down this loss by my team?
Aside from the weird stoned-oracle grammar–
Well, my parents are Patriarchial, Republican, Married, and Straight, and they set about Procreating to Secure the Future for their genes, ideas, and values.
So, at this point we seven offspring are split 50/50 between crazed reactionaries in their mold (sort of) and us perhaps equally crazed progressive revoltionary types, with my baby sister being the undecided swing vote. (She’s currently attending a music college in Boston–and she’s into Buddhism…at least of the hippie variety…and she writes poems…)
One of my sisters (the one clearly in my left-wing camp) has actually transgendered. But she Reproduced first. Between my four sisters (one of whom I hope doesn’t Reproduce any time real soon; she’s still kind of young to) I have 8 (or is it 9–hard to keep track of the middle sister’s brood) nephews. So whether or not I ever Procreate myself (seems unlikely at 42) my Selfish Genes are pretty well taken care of. As for my Ideals, Values, Culture–it seems that reason is capable of overcoming reactionary conditioning pretty well on its own. Otherwise I’d hardly be thinking and saying the things I do today.
So the fact that 6 (or 7?) of the nephews are in the hands of the middle sister who in so many ways replicates our mother’s ideas and values as well as looks doesn’t mean much. I figure half of them at least will go Left.
Any genetic component of gayness seems to be holding its own quite well in terms of self-replication, despite the obvious odds against it.
Actually the only part of my Precious Genetic Heritage I have the slightest worry about dying out is my Grandma Kitty’s kickass mitochondria. Mitochondria only pass down directly from mother to all her children, you see, unchanged by anything but mutation–they don’t participate in sexual genetic reshuffling. So, Grandma Kitty only had one daughter–my Mom–and while my Mom had 4 daughters, who have between them had 8 (or 9?) offspring, none of them are girls.
I hope some of Kitty’s older sisters (she was youngest, only one born in the USA, the others were all born in Sicily) had some daughters who had some daughters etc. But it’s hard for me to keep track of that side of the family.
As for the Future of Humanity–it belongs to those who make sense to the offspring, no matter what their parents say should make sense.
JimB, before you make your sweeping declarations about how all women have always been repressed and therefore it’s “natural,” at least try reading Who Cooked the Last Supper? Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles. It might make your brain explode, but it’s worth the risk.
Now excuse me, I have to go bring home the bacon ‘n’ fry it up in a pan, and never never never never let my husband forget he’s a man…’cause I’m WOMAN!
(bonus round; name the perfume from the above ad)
In past times, people reproduced many so that they might get a couple to adult hood. It is a strategy that one takes in the absence of family planning options.
Some, like a number of my ancestors of record, managed to bear 12-14 children with nearly 100% of them reaching adult age. That’s a freak show, however, and may have had something to do with the tendency to keep moving each generation to exploit fresh resources, and to intermarry with indigenous populations (could be both a genetic and a behavior/adaptive factor there).
In modern times, it is sufficient that my grandparents have two biological grandchildren as they are both likely to reach adulthood and may/not have kids of their own (up to them - not my business).
Enjolie?
Bzzt! Wrong!
There is no evidence whatsoever that gatherer-hunter peoples ever did any of this.
The economics of a GH band suggests why. GH people had practically zero productivity, in material terms; they just made some clothes, some minimal shelter, some carrying bags, a few weapons and scrapers and the like, possibly some small pottery–no more than they could carry around, and everyone had the opportunity to acquire at least some passable skill in making any of the artifacts they needed. So there would be nothing rational to be gained by attempting to withhold one’s material products to try and get leverage in bargaining with others; the attempt would just create ill-will. It was much more rational to simply share, and expect sharing in return; this also generated good will. There is no reason to regard GH women as being oppressed, individually or as a class, by men systematically, or vice versa for that matter. Children weren’t apparently oppressed or abused either, neither were elders who survived the accidents that, according to my anthro profs, were by far the leading cause of deaths among GH peoples. To the contrary; elders had the longest memories of oral tradition and were accordingly respected (though not kept alive by any heroic measures as they got to be too infirm to keep up with the band’s migrations). Nor is there any evidence that any GH bands systematically or even sporadically raided or otherwise exploited their neighbors. Again, there was little or nothing to be rationally gained by such behavior; GH people could only benefit from such articles as they could carry about, they already knew how to make as much as they needed themselves, with plenty of leisure time left over, and they’d only incur bad will by such shenanigans. Nor did they poach on each others’ traditionally established ranges–a range was adequate to the needs of its band, and while there is zero evidence of GH people engaging in aggressive war, they have been observed to defend their ranges from aggressors (from more “advanced” societies) by stalking and hunting them; treating invaders as dangerous animals, not negotiating. Such defensive violence had none of the glorification commonly associated with warfare in dominator societies; it didn’t gain its participants particular prestige let alone determine any kind of social hierarchy. In GH bands there was no hierarchy other than age, and actually even the children in some senses “ranked” above the fertile, active adults; the most important social structure was a somewhat blurry division of labor by gender.
So–these are the people we are all descended from, and this is how our species spent the large majority of our existence. To be sure, agricultural societies must have produced by far the majority of individuals who ever lived, since they enabled population densities thousands of times greater.
But it is nonsense to claim that human beings automatically and casually exploit others. Perhaps we would if there were no resistance whatsoever, but GH bands were not composed of saints either–they had conflict and resentments; it’s just that they managed these by damping out rather than enhancing inequalities, and by discouraging rather than encouraging heedless arrogance.
So–we could do the same. And so could any of our ancestors, at any time. It is legitimate to point out that perhaps societies with such nurturing values were at a disadvantage against societies that promoted aggression and conquest–that I think is the basis of our bloody and brutal (post-agricultural) history. But the trick then is to enable the best of both worlds, not shrug at the “inevitable” brutality of humanity.
yes indeed, the I’m a Woman song was indeed used to advertise Enjoli perfume.
While you’re up there rooting for your team to win, I’m under the bleachers gettin’ drunk.
I win.
They can add men who didn’t father a single child because of his female spouse’s infidelity and homosexual men to the study of childless men (if they haven’t already).
Now…as for you, Jim. Procreation is the only reason to live. Oppresion of women is normal. You, sir, have some very fucked up views. Pretty obvious that you want women back into the kitchen.
Even to this day, women are being oppressed by governments worldwide — including right here in the USA. Men rights’ politicians from Atlanta, Ga. to Columbia to Washington to Managua to Riyadh to Yangon have imposed sharia laws on women’s bodies. Maybe that is why childless women are happier than childless men. Women see pregnancy as misogyny. For one thing, women are shouted down when they exercise their right to choose. Then, the hospitals exploit women for their own profits when she gives birth.
And to those who say that children are more likely to be the opposite politically from their parents — you all have a point. Look at Ron Reagan. And if wondering about a wingnut child who was raised by progressive parents, look no further than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
And Matt T. you are correct. Women and men have been proven to live beyond 50 without children — further defeating the argument that every person who died childless were all killed in their 20s and 30s.
What Mark Foxwell and Nothip said. I, too, can provide references dealing with egalitarian societies; I have a shitton, being as how I wrote a forty-page academic paper on that subject. For starters, I recommend the works of Peggy Reeves Sanday and Christine Mathieu. (CM once taught at my school. DAMMIT, she went back to Australia before I attended. Waah. I would have loved to have taken a class with her.)
My research has shown that MOST hunting-gathering and horticultural societies, which have not been affected by colonialism (and today they don’t really exist because of colonialism) do not oppress women. By and large, they were gender-egalitarian. A few horticultural societies (the Moso of China, the Iroquois and some of the Pueblo societies in the American Southwest) can actually be said to be matriarchal in some ways. (Alice Schlegel reports that among the Hopi, it is girl children, not boys, who are thought of as special blessings.)
Most Native American societies were strongly gender-egalitarian and non-hierarchical; there were no “Indian Princesses” or chiefs in the sense of authoritarian rulers. What happened was the white invadors only wanted to deal with men and wouldn’t give women leaders or elders the time of day; also they tended to pick some guy and anoint him “chief” and expect him to behave like a king, when any existing “chiefs” were in fact more like what we would call coaches or advisors and had no authority to coerce or command.
Mark, from posts you’ve made in the past I take it you have read Riane Eisler? If you haven’t read Sacred Pleasure I suggest you do so. Her Chalice and the Blade is more famous, but IMO Sacred Pleasure is better researched and written; she has so much interesting material on dominator vs. partnership societies, how the oppression of women also meant the dehumanization of men, and so on.
Oppression of women was, is and will be a fact of human life. The fact that it occurs at all times and in all cultures makes it “natural”. Mankind is part of nature, remember? To prevent it, women must convince a majority of men that engaging in woman’s oppression is not in men’s best interests.
Or, women can just stop reproducing and end the madness once and for all.
Seriously, why would I want to create more people to perpetuate/suffer in this oppressive and, according to your heartbreakingly sad worldview, unchangeable society? How can you paint this bleak picture of the world and then tell me The Point is to create more people for it? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
“But Biology cannot be averted. No children, your genes, ideas, values die.”
I beg to differ. Mom’s ideas and values will live far longer than yours. And genes? I have 29 first cousins alone. My genes are *everywhere*, whether I reproduce or not.
Mandolin, I’ve never passed mustard, but given how much vinegar is in it, it must be pretty painful.
Except that Hasslebeck has yet to perfect the “stay home, breed, and shut up” aspect of feminine wingnuttery.
Got the hypocrisy down pat, though.
Yes, anony, but you see at some point the “mommy track” kicks in and from that point on the poor little female things just don’t have any choice left, being totally at the mercy of hormonal inevitability.
Because all the ancestors are lined up pushing all those little baby spirits down onto the planet, and if there aren’t little baby bodies for them to inhabit, they’ll become ghosts and wander around haunting all the feminists and Liberals and Lesbians and Career Women. And pity the poor Liberal Lesbian Career Woman Feminists, because they’re going to have FOUR.
Won’t someone think of the spirits of the poor homeless baby spirits?
Some people just wait for ‘the perfect time’ and, well, life happens in the process and, well that ‘perfect time’ just never happens…
Plus there is a rather large undercurrent against pregnant women in society. They are ‘fat’, ‘bloated’, ‘moody’, gross (eating ashes and kitty litter with Ben & Jerry’s and pickles) and full of stretch marks.
Well, like hello! Sign me up for some ‘ah dat stuff’…
Meanwhile, hordes of fundies are churning out kids from their ‘clown car’ (still love that picture) vaginas and I fear the future run by the spawn of these baby making machines, home schooling, knuckle dragging, woman repressing, fearful freaks. Tell us how you really feel.
When the future is uncertain, like it has been for years, people also don’t reproduce. Well, thinking people don’t.
Excellent Amanda. I will use this in my classes. You show clearly how bias in social science frames the questions and ‘fishes¿ for certain kinds of answers. The evolutionary psychologists are the masters of this, shaping their contradictory ‘theories’ to their preconceived ideas about society and then forcing the evidence with ad hoc arguments.
Have you seen the book ‘’Neo-liberal Genetics: The myths and moral tales of Evo Psych’ by Susan Mckinnon? I think you would enjoy it.
Geez- I’m so sick of this crap. Maybe this was true in 1952, or something, but since I’ve been around (I just turned 32) that has NEVER been the case. I’m an average looking female, and I have never noticed it ti be any easier for females to get laid then males. What IS different is the way the two groups go about asking for it. Men often try the game-playing “pick up” lines crap, which frankly, tends to DECREASE the chance of getting laid (in my experience). For whatever reason, women tend not to engage in this behavior.
If it is “hard wired” into men to play assmonkey games, then yeah, there may be some “evo psych” basis to why women find it easier to get laid. If not, I’d just say men need to change their approach.
Oh– and here’s a real mind-bender. FOr every female who finds it “easy” to get laid, some man is scoring an easy lay to (assuming they are all hetero). Oh noes! How could that BE? Does Evo Psych have an answer for me?
My research has shown that MOST hunting-gathering and horticultural societies, which have not been affected by colonialism (and today they don’t really exist because of colonialism) do not oppress women.
And the Yanomami?
It’s been a while since I read Marvin Harris, but doesn’t he record a range of different levels of warfare in different tribes, and relate this to material conditions?
There was never a magical time in prehistory when oppression did not occur.
More importantly, there was not a magical time in history when god/evolution would have made you a hot stud with a harem of faithful females to do your bidding. Have your fantasies, but quit insisting they’re reality.
I hate to bust anyone’s bubble, but the whole point of living is to reproduce.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the random, godless process of evolution that resulted in our existence can’t be said to have a “point”, much less one you can lean on to give yourself an ego boost about being male because you can’t feel good about yourself as a person.
The Yanomami have been heavily affected by colonialism, as Brian Ferguson has demonstrated. They were brutalized and killed in large numbers by rubber tappers, and before that raided for slaves by the Portuguese and Spanish. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that the so-called “living fossil, primitive” tribes of the Amazon are in fact remnants of complex horticultural societies, devastated by epidemics and slave raids. In short: affected by colonialism, and how.
Ferguson has further demonstrated that not all Yanomami oppress women - mostly the ones who are fighting for introduced Western trade goods.
Now one of the few hunter-gatherer societies that is/was patriarchal are the Inuit - and this is because men make all the contributions to subsistence, because they do all the hunting, and the Inuit rely on animals for all their food and clothing needs. Women are dependent on the men, therefore they are considered inferior. Whereas in most h/g societies women contribute heavily to subsistence, whether by gathering or helping participate in the hunt; therefore, they enjoy equal status.
Neko-Onna
October 28, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Suppose an average looking female and male in their 20’s made a bet with each other as to who could get laid first with a stranger in a town where neither of them knew anybody. The stipulation was that the sex was to be freely given, e.g. no cash, booze or drugs. Who do you think would get laid first? And likely by days or even weeks and perhaps months! In some cultures, the man might have to get married first.
Geez- I’m so sick of this crap. Maybe this was true in 1952, or something, but since I’ve been around (I just turned 32) that has NEVER been the case.
^^^ ^^^ ^^^
Sorry I just walked in on the conversation but the subject matter caught either the eye of Discovery or TLC and they recorded a special. When women asked men for a hook up the percentages were over the top (I believe over 90) and the converse was true when men asked women (I believe around 15).
Amanda Marcotte
October 28, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I hate to bust anyone’s bubble, but the whole point of living is to reproduce.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the random, godless process of evolution that resulted in our existence can’t be said to have a “point”, much less one you can lean on to give yourself an ego boost about being male because you can’t feel good about yourself as a person.
^^^ ^^^ ^^^
NOW I understand you much better. I feel bad for you and how those ideas must mess with your psyche, and hope and pray that you realize one day that life and procreation is not at all pointless…
Take care of yourself,
Bernie
I don’t want to get into a bathtub with any “cake” I can’t actually eat.
Ms. Kate: Enjoli is right! You must be, I’m sorry to rat you out, somewhere around the age of 40.
And if it’s any comfort, I’m a lot closer to 50 than to 40.
But I digress.
A friend just linked me to a great website called
http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/
JimB and others may find it quite interesting.
The Yanomami have been heavily affected by colonialism, as Brian Ferguson has demonstrated.
Noted, although no library I have immediate access to appears to have the book. Got a cite more likely to be available, and pitched at a dumber level?
Your opinion of Marvin Harris’s comments?
I feel bad for you and how those ideas must mess with your psyche, and hope and pray that you realize one day that life and procreation is not at all pointless…
You might consider that she doesn’t need your pity, because the idea of life not having a “point” doesn’t depress her the way it depresses you. It might also be that her life isn’t so inherently meaningless that she needs to believe in imaginary gods and churn out squallers to calm some ridiculous existential emptiness. The things that “mess with” your particular psyche don’t necessarily bother other people, so you might want to get out of your own head before condescending to feel sorry for another person.
Also, why is being a god-botherer the new trend for losers who can’t get laid? Is “have my babies to give your life meaning” a popular pickup line?
Wow. How Confucian.
You know I might be able to explain any reticence on the part of women in teh who gets laid first scenario. Sorry JimB - it ain’t biology either. Women have to evaluate whether the fellow understands that sex involves pleasure for everyone, not just him. Our Culture teaches men that sex means they get off, not the more egalitarian everyone has a good time model we invoke in feminist circles. Thus, women (along with the challenges mentioned above to evaluate whether he plans to kill her) have to figure out if there will actually be any sexual pleasure for her before hooking up with a stranger. Sorry about the hetero bias; I’m just responding to the hetero-normative example provided.
junk science
October 28, 2007 at 8:29 pm
I feel bad for you and how those ideas must mess with your psyche, and hope and pray that you realize one day that life and procreation is not at all pointless…
You might consider that she doesn’t need your pity, because the idea of life not having a “point” doesn’t depress her the way it depresses you. It might also be that her life isn’t so inherently meaningless that she needs to believe in imaginary gods and churn out squallers to calm some ridiculous existential emptiness. The things that “mess with” your particular psyche don’t necessarily bother other people, so you might want to get out of your own head before condescending to feel sorry for another person.
Also, why is being a god-botherer the new trend for losers who can’t get laid? Is “have my babies to give your life meaning” a popular pickup line?
seebach
^^^ ^^^ ^^^
She does and I will. I am not very religious, and you are in no position to give Amanda Marcotte’s opinion so really this is a moot discussion. Let her speak for herself. I addressed the post to her and not to you. As for me what you think depresses me does not.
Psychology also teaches us those that are the bullies or have to belittle people with words like the one you used “looser” are those that have the inferiority complex and are trying to make themselves feel better by belittling others. Therefore, you too have now earned my compassion
Furthermore, your last paragraph, I do not even know how to address it because the point is silly and ridiculous. I have been married for almost twenty years now and have three beautiful children. That is a blessing to my life and everyone’s that they touch, not a meaning and they along with all things great and small bring meaning to the world.
I am sure if you do not wish this type of existence you can buy a deserted island somewhere and isolate yourself from others and the mutual interaction that comes with such a great responsibility. Oh but then again by communicating here, you prove that you really do not believe in that lifestyle and prefer the company of others. Perhaps for those that follow us we owe them that companionship also.
“She does and I will. I am not very religious, and you are in no position to give Amanda Marcotte’s opinion so really this is a moot discussion. Let her speak for herself. I addressed the post to her and not to you. As for me what you think depresses me does not.”
Ya know, Bernie, you’re turning into kind of a dick…
“That said, of course our behavior is the result of evolution — why would our brains be any different than the rest of our bodies? Why would our brains be a special case, a blank slate and thus unique among the animal kingdom?
The theory of evolution can give us a way to talk about past adaptations, but it doesn’t give us a way to predict what adaptations might be demanded of us in the future. Or, to re-phrase that, evolution does not predict the future. It’s possible that for the last 2 million years males were under certain adaptive pressures, but that doesn’t tell us what adaptive pressues they will be under in, say, December of 2007. The theory of evolution is being mis-used any time someone makes normative statements about how a human society (or human males,or human females) should act, The competitive, evolutionary pressures we face can change at any time. They can change tomorrow. Given the vast changes of the last 5,000 years, and even the last 500 years, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that we all might be facing different competitive threats than what our ancestors faced 500,000 years ago. What worked for our ancestors will not necessarily work for us.
Bernie, I’m glad you’re happy with your marriage and children. Are you self-aware enough to realize that these parts of your life hold meaning for you because you’ve decided that they are meaningful? Other people are different, and they define meaning in different ways.
… you do understand that other people are different, don’t you?
Mike I did not call anyone a looser junk did
I did not call anone a dick you did
Grammar you do understand that other people are different, do you not? (I sure you mean to include me in that…humm
Mike the quote you pulled from my post… is that not true?… trouble on blogs alsways start when other people speak for other people and inter ject their opinions in place of some one elses
Amanda Marcotte
October 28, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I hate to burst your bubble, but the random, godless process of evolution that resulted in our existence can’t be said to have a “point”,
^^^ ^^^ ^^^
Grammar this is what I was referring to and this quote seems like Amanda thinks life is meaningless…now that I admit is an assumption by me and that would be for her to reply to and correct me if that is a wrong assumption…so you point about different people applying different meanings … is … well… meaningless… LOL
Really not a shot it is what I took from the quote and I threw in a little levity to boot…
Mike, what kind of dick? LOL
“I hate to burst your bubble, but the random, godless process of evolution that resulted in our existence can’t be said to have a “point”,”
If i may, Bernie, it doesn’t seem at all that she thinks her life is meaningless. I can’t speak for Amanda, but I, too hold the above quoted view, and don’t believe my life to be meaningless.
The above quote is simply stating the fact that the process of evolution that resulted in our existence does not possess volition or intent. Yes, there was no design or intention behind my life being creating or existing now, but it’s a huge stretch from that fact to saying that life is meaningless because of it.
Your kids are a blessing to every life they touch?
hahahahahahahaha….*cough* Oh. You’re being serious. Sorry.
Only one “o” in loser, Bernie.
Mark Foxwell said: “accidents that, according to my anthro profs, were by far the leading cause of deaths among GH peoples.”
Mark, you need to get some new anthro prof’s that espouse fewer fairy tales to prop up their agenda.
Try rereading Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel page 277 starting at the 13th sentence.
Bernie, Amanda was responding to an earlier commenter, JimB, who said that the “point” of living is to have children.
Previous humans bred and caused us to exist; this is a fact. But this fact does not imply “meaning”. DNA is handed down from generation to generation, but “meaning” is not part of that package. Schrodingerneko explained this very well earlier in the thread:
Amanda was not saying anything especially different from that, and she wasn’t making a personal comment that her own life is “meaningless”, as you’ve imagined. She makes meaning for herself just like nearly all humans do. I am not “speaking for her” but restating what I think she has already made very clear.
You, Bernie, appear to lack basic reading comprehension skills, if you failed to grasp all of the above. Yet in spite of your personal failure in this regard, and in spite of others’ generous though exasperated attempts to help you follow the conversation, you’re not satisfied with gentle correction.
You’ve admitted that you’ve projected your assumptions onto Amanda, and now you’ve made multiple demands for her to respond personally to you and disabuse you of your prejudices. You’re well into the territory of pathetic attention-seeking now, when you relentlessly cry out for her recognition, even after you said: “She does [need my pity] and I will [lavish it upon her tragic atheist existence].”
Sorry, but you may have to settle for nothing more than my scorn.
Jovan1984 thinks I meant “Procreation is the only reason to live.”
No, I said that “the whole point of living is to reproduce.” I don’t make up the rules down here, I only state them. From the point of view of our organism, that is what the game is about. You can choose to play it or not. That’s up to you. If you think there is a higher purpose, I’d like to know what it is. At the end of the day, it’s whose left on the field that’s counted. If you or yours are not on the field, you loose.
Bernie, you’re hideously boring. The fact that someone as self-righteous as you is inflicting their genes on the world is mildly depressing to me, and I hope your children have the sense not to turn out as dull and trite as you.
I’ll say it again. Just because you need to assign some external meaning to the world doesn’t mean everyone does, and if they don’t, that doesn’t mean they’re any less happy than you are. I hope you’ll find it in your compassionate heart to forgive me for speaking for Amanda, but if you had read anything she’s written on the subject, you would know enough not to stupidly accuse her of thinking life is meaningless. You would also know enough to either say something interesting or fuck off.
No, I said that “the whole point of living is to reproduce.” I don’t make up the rules down here, I only state them. From the point of view of our organism, that is what the game is about. You can choose to play it or not. That’s up to you. If you think there is a higher purpose, I’d like to know what it is. At the end of the day, it’s whose left on the field that’s counted. If you or yours are not on the field, you loose.
Wrong.
Substituting basic evolutionary logic for common sense is stupid. My live matters because my life matters. For example, Amanda is not going to have kids; she’s been clear on that, and I wish more people who didn’t really want kids would follow her example.
But Amanda has an effect on society. She has influenced my opinions, and that has influenced the way I teach my daughter. And I am not the only one, I’d suspect. So Amanda leaves no genetic descendants. So what? All of us humans are overwhelmingly more similar than different. If Amanda makes the world better, then dies after a lifetime of arguing for equality…well, maybe you see that as a failure, but I don’t.
The rules are what we say they are. You can say from a purely Darwinian standpoint that she who leaves the most descendants is the winner. I say that she who dies content and satisfied wins. Maybe it doesn’t matter to the universe or to the world, but it matters to us, and I fail to see why that isn’t enough.
Anony said: “Or, women can just stop reproducing and end the madness once and for all.”
It’s a thought, but you could NEVER get universal agreement among all women to do it. You would just end up creating space and surrendering resources for those who won’t.
“Seriously, why would I want to create more people to perpetuate/suffer in this oppressive and, according to your heartbreakingly sad worldview, unchangeable society? How can you paint this bleak picture of the world and then tell me The Point is to create more people for it? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Seriously, that’s a good point about The Point. It doesn’t make any sense to someone of moral sensibility. Nature has endowed you with virtues, vices and emotions to aid in your survival, but has none itself. We evolved having strong urges to unwittingly play natures game of survival and reproduction.
“I hate to burst your bubble, but the random, godless process of evolution that resulted in our existence can’t be said to have a “point”,”
True. Staying alive long enough to pass life to a son or daughter doesn’t have any more point than trying to win a baseball game. We exist in a cold, indifferent universe. That’s why I put on some Sox tonight and I’m feeling pretty warm right now.
“much less one you can lean on to give yourself an ego boost about being male because you can’t feel good about yourself as a person.”
I don’t see how you get that out of what I said.
Jeff, maybe Amanda’s genetic makeup predisposes her to want “equality” and if she doesn’t reproduce and leave offspring that share her genetic predisposition for “equality” there will be less probability that “equality” will ever be achieved in this world. Ideas come and go, but genes are forever (almost) if you reproduce.
Look at what Christ preached and what Christians in the New World wrought in his name. His message kind of got muddled down through the ages, but if more sensitive and empathetic people had out reproduced the aggressive and selfish during those intervening centuries, the result might have been different.
JimB, don’t take this as a judgment of your character for what I presume is an honest mistake.
What you are saying here is fucking ludicrous.
How could a person have a genetic predisposition for desiring panhuman equality? Assuming that such a mutation could arise in the first place, it would be eliminated by genic-selective subversion, because it is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. You are effectively claiming that the rules of natural selection did not apply to humans’ ancestors; somehow we ended up with “nice” genes that every other species on Earth lack.
(Breaking up this comment to accommodate multiple links.)
Ignoring that, and pretending that genetically-dictated behavior can take forms other than evolutionarily stable strategies, when did this mutation occur? It would have to have been in the last couple hundred years, since the notion of panhuman equality is pretty darned new. You mentioned a particular dying-and-rising god for moral guidance. But this fellow (pretending he existed) was cool with slavery. Where’s the evidence for an “equality gene” before the most recent centuries? Evolution does not occur this quickly in species with large, dispersed populations like humans.
The trend toward equality for all people is a cultural invention, folks. It’s not in our genes. There aren’t any genuinely altruistic behaviors in our genes, because there can’t be, because genuine altruism (as opposed to reciprocal altruism or kin selection) is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. Cultural inventions such as equality spread by word of mouth.
Anyone interested should see James Miles on unscientific trends in evolutionary psychology (PDF file) for more info.
“Ideas come and go, but genes are forever (almost) if you reproduce.”
Oh, that’s cute. Do you seriously not understand how reproduction works? Within a generation, half your genetic information is lost, the rest rescrambled. By contrast, the words of Christ are holding up relatively well after 2,000 years, and they’ve been pretty heavily fucked with.
The ideas we create can survive at least as tenaciously as genetic material. Richard Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene by coining the term “meme” and suggesting that information created by the human mind propogates in much the same way as the information carried on our genes. In other words, our intelligence has given us a way of transcending genetics, of allowing bits of ourselves to survive through means other than biological offspring.
William Shakespeare has no descendents walking the earth today. I don’t think his life was lived in vain, or that he left nothing to future generations. Maybe you do.
Grammar this is what I was referring to and this quote seems like Amanda thinks life is meaningless…
I don’t need a Sky Fairy setting out my life before me (whether I like his imaginary decisions or not) for my life to have meaning. The wonderful thing about admitting there is no god is you get to make your own meaning. The irony of all the people who anxiously worry about atheists having no meaning in life is that the vast majority of the worriers would shove a lifestyle down my throat that would be so unendingly miserable I’d probably develop a drug problem to cope as many thwarted housewives did. I don’t buy the phony concern about an empty life from a single soul who has worried that culture is degraded or voted for an anti-choice politician.
As Bernie doesn’t consider me a full human being, but just an ambulatory womb whose “purpose” is fulfilled by making babies, I really, deeply reject his phony concern for my soul.
True. Staying alive long enough to pass life to a son or daughter doesn’t have any more point than trying to win a baseball game. We exist in a cold, indifferent universe. That’s why I put on some Sox tonight and I’m feeling pretty warm right now.
I’m not a baseball fan and your silly assumption that everyone must be or they “lose” some cosmic game with the rules made by you is paper thin and blows away twice as easily. Whoops! Turns out it’s a cover story for retrograde assumptions about gender roles that conveniently allow you to feel superior to half the human race to calm the dread (and appropriate) fears that in reality, you’re nothing special.
Simplified for logical clarity: “X is not the meaning of life” does not = “X had no meaning”.
Furthermore, “There is no purpose to life” does not mean “You cannot give your life purpose.”
In BOTH cases, the first statement is a rejection of a BLANKET statement. Nuns and monks, for instance, tend to consider their lives meaningful, without needing to reproduce to do so. For them, they find purpose and meaning in religion. A doctor can find meaning in healing the sick; a lawyer, in the pursuit of justice. A musician may wander for years seeking the perfect moment in a jam session, and consider the time well spent.
And parents may find the meaning of their lives in their children.
But actually, I hope all of them have *additional* things to give their life meaning. Because stuff happens, and people who don’t have a rounded view of life that finds meaning in work, friendships, enjoying a sunset and a multitude of things, probably suffer most when the thing that gave them purpose is gone.
Amanda, I think, will cope better than most with the inevitable losses in life.
because the idea of life not having a “point” doesn’t depress her the way it depresses you. It might also be that her life isn’t so inherently meaningless that she needs to believe in imaginary gods and churn out squallers to calm some ridiculous existential emptiness.
Having kids to please other people = exploitation of the kids = bad idea
Having kids to try to *fix* something you think you are missing = exploitation of the kids = bad idea
Jim’s problem is that women are on to these “bad idea” reasons, and aren’t buying into the “fix my voids/family issues with a kid you will pay a high price to rear” arguments. Breeding creates new people, it doesn’t fix existing people or families.
Well, first of all I’d much sooner trust the word of someone like Dr Thayer Scudder, head of the Anthropology Dept of the California Institute of Technology back when I was enrolled there in the mid-80s, or even Dr Elvio Angeloni, who “merely” was a teacher of Anthro classes (perhaps also serving as Dept head) at Pasadena City College a few years later, who agreed on these points, than the word of someone who attempts to counter a claim I made directly, spelling out what I was saying and taking responsibility for it, by merely appealing to a page/line reference of some text he arrogantly presumes anyone should have read, and not bothering in the least to even summarize how the cited passage purports to counter my claims. A short quote would be nice, a decent, honest summary of the point Diamond makes there perfectly acceptable. But if you want to play dueling authorities, I have a fair number of them to toss at you. I can only guess whether Diamond charges the anthro community, as you do, with politically-motivated fraud, or whether he even addresses the damn point–leading cause of death among GH peoples–directly at all.
Fortunately for Diamond’s reputation this book has come recommended to me by nicer acquaintences than you; I am making a rather extraordinary effort today to borrow a copy, because this challenge of yours interests me.
So, I’ll go to Forestville and grab the only copy available to me, and turn to p 277 (you know–books have different editions, so it isn’t really a citation unless you specify the edition or provide some other alternative way to find the section you mean–like, oh, say, stating the friggin’ argument…) and see if Diamond poses some real challenge to the consensus of the ethnographers or not. I’m betting it’s some damn irrelevancy, or that Diamond is just as much into irresponsible axe-grinding ‘agendas’ as you accuse responsible members of the profession of being.
If there is something to it, I will think the better of you. If it’s as much a red herring as I figure it would be coming from you, karma is gonna get you.
OK, off to pay my library fines and to Forestville I will go now.
…uh, happiness?
Perhaps more specifically, self-actualization?
Neither of which imply sex, although it can be a good way to get there, at least for a little while.
Hmm. Does this count as evo psych? I’ve read a few arguments - on what I believe to be reputable science blogs, such as Panda’s Thumb and Talk Origins - that there is physical evidence that monogamy doesn’t come naturally to humans of either sex.
Exhibit A? Testicle size. Seriously. Gorillas have very small testicles relative to their size, because gorillas have a harem-based social structure where the dominant male chases away all rival males physically so he doesn’t have to compete genetically. In contrast, Bonobo chimpanzees (our closest relatives) have huge balls relative to their size because the whole troupe hangs around all day with everybody banging everybody else, so a higher sperm count than rival males is a definite advantage. Human balls are somewhere in between. The implication? There was a time in our evolutionary past when a big load was a reproductive advantage. We may not be as promiscuous as bonobos, but we’re nowhere near as exclusive as gorillas.
An argument I’ve heard much less often, and from less reputable sources, but which remains interesting, is that the head of the penis is shaped the way it is to “clean out” (via both suction and sweeping) the sperm of rival males from a female’s vagina.
What this implies to me - and here, I admit that I drift into the realms of speculation, mostly based on the way the Bonobos work (see above) - is a situation where couples may pair off (they’ve recorded the biochemical reactions that accompany “falling in love”, after all - it’s as natural a process as any, and thus a result of evolution), but they have enough “affairs” so that no male - and indeed, no female - is 100% sure who fathered which children, so it’s to the male’s advantage to work together to contribute to the troupe’s survival, because you never know…
Of course, none of this is how we work anymore, and as sentient beings, education and socialization has a huge effect on how we choose to express our natural urges. But, all scientific arguments aside, it seems illogical that female subservience and fidelity is “natural”. If it was, why would so much effort over the course of human history be devoted to suppressing it - and never 100% succeeding?
JimB
wtf?
You are seriously citing Jared Diamond in order to argue that hunter/gatherer societies were as guilty of using oppression as a tool as modern societies are?
His whole freakin’ hypothesis is that the accumulation of wealth that made societies with “guns and steel” more powerful than those without it also encouraged the kind of warfare that made it easier for such societies to continue accumulating wealth.
I don’t remember off the top of my head what he argued was the leading cause of death among hunter/gatherer societies, but it sure as hell was a lot closer to “accidents” than “warfare.” (I think, but can’t be certain, that it was stuff along the lines of “disease and illness.”)
the more educated you are, likelier the more money you make, so you are insulated from some of the biggest costs, because you can pay for child care, etc.*
I have to disagree with this as the person with the most education is more likely to have greater sunk costs they need to recover but not necessarily make the most. A doctor tends to cost more than a masters which tends to cost more than a bachelors. Each step up in education does not come with an equal increase in payment (education after the social base level - currently a BA/BS - tends to have reducing monetary rewards).
Mickle, instead of guessing what Diamond wrote, next time go to the page I cited in my post.
Page 277 of G, G, and S: “Anthropologists formally idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent…” “Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals murder is a leading cause of death.”
You need to understand that hunter-gatherers were simultaneously hunted-gathered by the large carnivores of the day and by unfriendly species competition. The reason we’re fortunate to find so many Neanderthal bones at the back of caves is because they had such a strong urge to have the neighbors over for dinner.
Grammar: “How could a person have a genetic predisposition for desiring panhuman equality?”
That fact that humans have a universal a set of emotional capabilities means that there is a genetic origin to them, but certainly not a singular gene. Empathy is a human emotion and the range of that emotion varies individually. Some people have more empathy than others just as some are more artistic, athletic, etc. than others. The origin of the range of the capability for empathy is genetic.
When a notion like panhuman equality is “invented” and spreads through a population as a germ would, some will have less resistance to it than others and act in accordance, others will have high resistance to it and won’t. Whether panhuman equality will be a “good” germ and maximize the offspring of individuals with higher empathy is determined by natural selection. If it doesn’t, the germ will cause its hosts to die out over time as any “bad” germ would.
The Shakers come to mind; great idea, but no offspring. It’s now on the dust heap of history.
Mickle, I have the paperback version, chapter 14, copyright 1999.
Shaenon: “William Shakespeare has no descendents walking the earth today. I don’t think his life was lived in vain, or that he left nothing to future generations.”
It may be why no one else has ever risen to his level since. Now if he had impregnated a hundred women in his day, maybe we’d all be the richer for it with far better tube programming and movie scripts.
“much less one you can lean on to give yourself an ego boost about being male because you can’t feel good about yourself as a person.”
“Turns out it’s a cover story for retrograde assumptions about gender roles that conveniently allow you to feel superior to half the human race to calm the dread (and appropriate) fears that in reality, you’re nothing special.”
Do I owe you a fee for the psychoanalysis? By the way, do you have a sense of humor? It really doesn’t come across in your posts. Displaying one would help deflect the suspicion by many that you’re a zealot.
“Mickle, instead of guessing what Diamond wrote, next time go to the page I cited in my post.”
Yeah, cuz, as Mark pointed out, I was going to dig through my copy - which that may or may not have the same page numbers - just because you were too damn lazy to give us the actual quote in the first place.
Now that you’ve bothered to do so….
“is a” =/= “is the” =/= “is as much the….as in modern times”
“Anthropologists formally idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent” =/= hunter/gatherer societies have the same kind of violent and oppressive hierarchies as modern society.
Again, his main hypothesis is exactly the opposite, that surplus food and specialization of labor leads to ruling classes and empire building. In fact, he really isn’t even trying to argue this, he’s mostly accepting it as fact and then explaining why he thinks geography affected how different hunter/gatherer societies around the world developed into different kinds of agricultural societies (or not at all), and so on and so forth.
Whatever the faults of the book, Diamond has made it very clear - both in the prologue and in interviews - that the book itself came about in an attempt to discover how the great disparities in wealth around the world came to be. At no point does he give “because people are genetically hardwired to be assholes” as an explanation - nor anything that can be remotely construed to mean such a thing. In fact, he specifically rejects such a reading of his work and cautions against others doing so.
I hardly think anyone here is shocked to discover that murder developed long before agriculture. What we are arguing is the same thing that Diamond argues - that a surplus of wealth encourages hierarchies.
Again, wtf?
We aren’t even really sure who Shakespeare was but we’re sure he had no illegitimate children?
Now if he had impregnated a hundred women in his day, maybe we’d all be the richer for it with far better tube programming and movie scripts.
Dunno - the Mongols haven’t done all that much conquering and pillaging recently, despite this factor.
JimB, i’m still trying to figure out who it is doing the counting in your universal game. though after seeing that last shakespeare post, i’m pretty sure there’s no way you can be serious.
The Shakers come to mind; great idea, but no offspring. It’s now on the dust heap of history
As opposed to all those children Christ had, obviously.
No, it doesn’t necessarily mean this at all. It could also be explained by a cultural development that predated the Australian and American migrations, which would make it equally universal.
So you claim, with zero evidence. Do you even understand what an evolutionarily stable strategy is? Clearly not, so my advice to you is to refrain from pulling inventions like this out of your ass whenever you need to show off. You’d be better served by admitting that you’re scientifically illiterate and then asking other people to walk you through the concept. Look, lots of people don’t understand evolution. You’re not alone, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you’re not so arrogant as to refuse to ask questions.
If there is a genetic component to empathy, then that genetic factor can only account for “enough” empathy to effectively simulate others’ predicted actions, for the sake of interacting with them in ways that advance the individual’s genes.
There cannot be a significant genetic fluctuation favoring “extra” empathy, because this would make the individual vulnerable to genic-selective subversion. If such a mutation ever arose, it would be quickly eliminated by such subversion, because it does not represent an evolutionarily stable strategy.
What you are proposing is impossible in population genetics. So, maybe, you know, quit proposing it and get your brain around this concept. For fuck’s sake, ask questions if you’re oblivious.
Panhuman equality, genuine altruism, enhanced empathy: all have to be cultural inventions, because it is literally impossible for them to persist in the genome.
Seraph, testicle size and penis shape can give clues, but it isn’t really necessary to rely on these indicators. There’s one really obvious factor that settles the question:
All ape species are either openly polygamous (like bonobos) or they commonly cheat from nominally-monogamous pairings (like gorillas). There are no genuinely monogamous ape species, and in the nominally-monogamous species, both males and females cheat. It would be bizarre to postulate that humans’ ancestors deviated from this norm. It would be especially unlikely since apes are so intelligent; intelligence just allows more ways to plan and succeed in cheating.
In order to make infanticide a counterproductive strategy for males, there has to be a lot of cheating going on. Bonobos accomplish this in part by open polygamy, and in part by female dominance of groups. Bonobo females will gang up on males, hold them down, and brutally bite them to establish dominance. The females are more cohesive, so males do not get the same opportunity.
This amounts to a twofold strategy against intra-group infanticide. Males cannot know which infants to kill, and they cannot kill infants without in turn being injured or killed by females. There may still be inter-group infanticide, though this has not yet (to my knowledge) been observed, it is anticipated, and dominant females will likely join in the killing of other groups’ infants.
Anyway, it’s difficult to speculate on exactly how much cheating was going on in human ancestors. There has to be quite a bit before it becomes disadvantageous to kill suspicious infants. I don’t think we have anything approaching reliable data on human ancestors’ sex lives to judge one way or the other, and we may never. Though again, we can say with confidence that there was some cheating by both males and females, since this is universal among apes.
This is a worthwhile observation and it bears repeating whenever these discussions come up.
This is gibberish, unfortunately pervasive gibberish, and it has to stop. Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes split from one another after their common ancestor split from the ancestor of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the two species are exactly equally related to us.
It would be like if your (now deceased) aunt had two daughters, Bonny and Cindy, and you told people that Bonny was your closest living relative, even though they’re both your first cousins.
But what if empathy is tied to intelligence? I suspect that the basis of the Homo line’s escalation of brainpower is connected to our human propensity to personify–to project intentionality on the things we observe. There is a theory of autism that suggests that the nature of an autistic person’s dysfunction is that they do not have that kind of compulsive projection; they don’t tend to automatically speculate on what another person, or for that matter animal or thing, is thinking and feeling. If this has any validity than it points to that characteristic compulsion normal to the non-autistic as a more or less hard-wired feature. The thing is, the autistic would then typically be saner than the rest of us, in a literal sense. We are right to imagine minds in other people, even in animals–but clearly not in clouds, the Sun, the sea, etc.
And yet, this error, though quaint, is a fruitful error. It is wrong to suppose that mindless things have minds, but looking for mind where there is none can lead to observation of patterns in their activity. Naively attributing that regularity to intention can serve as a good first attempt at grasping and predicting those patterns. Of course in trying to outwit animals having some notion of what they are probably thinking–some idea what the world looks like to them and hence what they are likely to do about it–is entirely worthwhile.
And when this propensity is turned on other human minds, obviously feedback begins to apply.
I suspect that this quirk of ours arose as a mutation, and eventually defined a particular population within proto-hominids who wandered off chasing our peculiar delusions, and this demanded–and rewarded–a rapid expansion of brain capacity, while the peculiar mechanism was refined.
So if, not strictly speaking empathy, but a more general propensity to think about the point of view of other beings, is at the root of human intelligence, then empathy as such clearly has a special opportunity to develop. There would in fact be no need for a special empathy reflex; the habit of imagining what other members of the band are thinking and feeling might be plenty of basis for the altruistic features of human society, especially given the basic economic incentives to cooperation inherent in GH band structure. Mutations favoring defection might not have much effect if the increasingly conscious social norms are merely enforced the more strongly against those who deviate from them.
Mark,
I like thinking of empathy (in the sense that you’re talking about) as being the basis for our intelligence. That’s a pretty theory.
Thank you, but before I do, I should correct it to say “devoted to suppressing female independence” or something like that, because as it stands, the sentence says the opposite of what I meant it to say.
Hmm. Interesting. Well, I don’t claim to be an expert myself. As I said in my original post, I’m paraphrasing people whose expertise I trust. The question then becomes: are they our closest relatives? Are my cousins Bonny and Cindy in fact my closest relatives, or do I have living brothers and sisters? If Bonny and Cindy are my closest living relatives, then my statement that Bonny is my closest relative is inaccurate, but it isn’t so far wrong as to be “gibberish”. It certainly isn’t wrong enough to undermine my argument - though, as you pointed out, I don’t need to focus on our closest relatives to support my argument. All of our relatives do.
Children really are hard. What you thought was going to be fun is such a chore. It’s 90% self-sacrifice, worry and guilt. When your children are adults, they can be very unkind. What was the point of it all when your children feel they have no obligation at all to include you in their lives?
There cannot be a significant genetic fluctuation favoring “extra” empathy, because this would make the individual vulnerable to genic-selective subversion. If such a mutation ever arose, it would be quickly eliminated by such subversion, because it does not represent an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Kin selection and mutual benefit. Being a bastard in a collection of saints isn’t a good strategy if the benefit your genes in your body gain is outweighed by the disadvantages to your genes in other bodies.
By the logic you seem to be using, social insects shouldn’t exist - and instead they’re the most successful animals on the planet.
If Bonny and Cindy are my closest living relatives, then my statement that Bonny is my closest relative is inaccurate, but it isn’t so far wrong as to be “gibberish”.
Yeah, but if Bonny is a sex-loving hippy and Cindy is an up-tight spouse-beater, it’s a little bit misleading to paint yourself as inclined to being a sex-loving hippy because of your closest relative. Attempting to draw conclusions about human nature from other chimpanzee species is dubious to start with.
I seem to remember some speculation that the difference between the two was related to gorilla ranges - IIRC, chimpanzees developed competing for food resources with gorillas, while bonobos had additional access to resources such as fruit treees encouraging cooperation.
Heh, I actually noticed that only after I responded. I knew what you meant… the meaning was so clear as to survive misstatement.
Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes are our closest living relatives now, yes. If Homo floresiensis were a species, as I’m somewhat persuaded that they were, then they may have survived into recent prehistory to become the origin of the Ebu Gogo myth among the people of Flores. They would be recently dead brothers and sisters; Homo neanderthalensis may have been as close or closer but died sooner.
Here’s a family tree. Pongo are orangutans and Hylobates are gibbons.
If you were the only person making this mistake, it would not be a big deal; but it’s very common so I find it pretty frustrating. The worst part is this mistake seems to be trafficked among certain leftists as some kind of “friendly” evolutionary psychology abomination, and used to imply that “humans should act more like bonobos!”
Well, bonobos are sex-loving hippies, and they are also spouse-
beating-biting cretins. They certainly are not role models.You didn’t take it into prescriptive evo-psych territory, but some people do, and that’s when it gets really embarrassing. It can amount to gibberish. I hope I was not too insulting; I merely want to provide stern correction and I thought it preferable to biting you.
Haplodiploidy. Social insects’ sexuality differs so radically from our own that you should not assume my logic is intended to apply to them. Haplodiploid species share 75% of their genes with their sisters, instead of 50%, and this alters their evolutionarily stable strategies exponentially from the strategies that can work for diploids like vertebrates.
Termites are diploid social insects, but they achieve their eusociality through worker sterility and intense inbreeding, which can bring sibling relatedness even higher than 75%.
So kin selection is a much more powerful strategy for social insects than vertebrates. It works for both, but social insects reap much higher rewards from it than we do.
You’ll notice I mentioned kin selection before you did. But in diploid species it only accounts for cooperation among small groups. Apes live in communities of a few hundred at most. Humans achieve communities of millions. This cannot be due to kin selection; only culture can account for it.
I also mentioned reciprocal altruism, which is as much “mutual benefit” as you’ll ever see in nonhuman animals. Reciprocal altruism requires memory, so you can recall who’s returning favors and who’s trying to get a free ride.
Being a bastard in a collection of saints is a fucking excellent strategy if no one can remember that you were a bastard and punish you for it. The benefit to your own genes by killing your siblings’ children and raping their mates is tremendous. Your own children always have 50% of your genes. Your siblings’ children only have 25% of your genes. There would be no loss to your genes whatsoever if you killed your nieces and nephews and impregnated your brother’s wife. Your genes would benefit from this behavior, if there was no chance of retaliation against you or these new children. Memory does allow for retaliation, though. Mammals do recall who participates fairly in reciprocal altruism and who does not. But memory is limited, and it can only foster cooperation among small groups.
Unfettered selfishness always beats kin selection when resources are scarce. In diploid animals, kin selection acts a a great icing on the cake when resources are plentiful enough for both you and your siblings to have children. But kin selection is only a side benefit. It is no substitute for unfettered selfishness, when you can get away with it.
Humans do rise above this behavior, but there is no genetic basis for doing so. Genetically, we can be no more cooperative than any other ape. Only by culture do we achieve our levels of cooperation, that allow us societies of millions.
James Miles is your assigned reading, Pho. Born Cannibal if you can find it; and the free paper I linked to earlier in the thread.
But regardless of which species of great ape might be our closest living relatives, genus Homo is very distinct from any of them. I don’t have the numbers memorized, but weren’t australopithicines already fully bipedal something like 2 1/2 million years ago? Certainly the very definition of our genus includes a stance completely unlike any other ape, and that implies hands that are permanantly freed up for manipulation, and I don’t know how much physical evidence there can be for the evolution of language ability but surely that didn’t just sprout up at the last minute either. Unless perhaps such a possibility is implicit in my “human mind evolves via compulsive projective imagining of other minds” theory–but even then we do have a certain amount of physical evolution necessary to allow us to articulate a useful range of sounds, plus of course we have well-developed brain mechanisms specialized for language.
So however economical natural selection has been in reconfiguring our bodies and brains with a minimum of genetic divergence from chimps, the phenotype is significantly altered.
A little bit of conventional wisdom I have kicking around from reading I did back in JR high is that a lot of the differences between us and great apes can be accounted for by neoteny–that is, we retain juvenile or even infant-like characteristics into adulthood, compared to great apes.
How much bearing might that have on enabling a very different set of sexual drives than the perhaps more stereotyped ones of the apes?
Anyway, I always think it’s important to point out that if genetically coded drives were sufficient to guide animal behavior, they’d hardly need brains. By providing stereotyped sets of responses they may focus behavior for survival, but I think it is crucial they need to offer a variety of options for the brain to choose, based on situational awareness and judgement.
That’s a very good point. That being said, if the up-tight spouse beater and the sex-loving hippy (and me)share a trait in common, it might be worth asking if that trait runs in the family.
Heh. That it is. No offense taken; just a bit confused by the vehemence of your response. Or I was. I can see how that could be frustrating.
I didn’t know some of the nastier facts about bonobos, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Nothing in nature is completely cute, fluffy, and harmless. Still, there are times when it seems like their way couldn’t be any worse than ours. The thought of the neighborhood mothers ganging up and gnawing a child-abuser to death has a certain appeal…
In any case, I’ve never been one to argue that “the way it is is the way it should be”, whether “the way it is” is cultural or “natural”. Still, a realistic assessment of “the way it is” is necessary to sucessfully work toward “the way it should be”. Knowing that monogamy doesn’t come natural to humans because that’s our heritage as apes is more helpful than “the devil is tempting me by making me look at people other than my spouse”, let alone straight-up denial like “humans are a pair-bonding species” or MRA wish fulfillment like the subject of this thread.
Aye, Seraph, but when I say the females use violence to establish dominance, I mean they do it specifically for dominance, and not merely for retaliation.
“There are even reports from zoos of female bonobos brutalizing a male so badly that his penis was severed.”
Maybe. Pretend for a moment that human ancestors really were male-promiscuous female-monogamous. That would not be an argument for ethics, or how humans should interact in modern culture, or what women should learn to put up with, etc.
It’s kind of like how “homosexuality: genetics or choice?” misses the point. Doesn’t matter which it is; it’s unethical to discriminate against people for it.
I guess it can be a helpful argument with people who refuse to stop conflating “ought” with “is”, if anything can be a helpful argument with such people.
Mark Foxwell, I’ll be making a (hopefully interesting) reply to you later, but I might be delayed by handing out candy soon.
Eh, my last post didn’t explain things like I wanted.
There’s good reason we should be suspicious of human behavioral argument from genetics. Specifically, culture is so powerful that we do not know if modern human promiscuity is related to genetically-coded promiscuity at all.
Culture is so powerful that we could be genetically coded for promiscuity, yet culture could override these tendencies so well that people would behave monogamously.
We could even be coded for promiscuity, and yet culture could be overriding that so effectively that we could be promiscuous for entirely cultural reasons, and our genetics might not be peeking through at all.
There’s precedent for this, odd as it sounds. Humans engage in infanticide, but we do it in very different patterns than other apes do. Surely we are genetically coded for infanticide; we are apes, after all. But we don’t do it in the patterns that other apes’ genetics dictate. So it looks like our genetic predisposition is being completely overridden, and there are instead cultural patterns of infanticide that get behaviorally expressed.
Sex or infanticide or whatever… just because we do something that other apes do, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing it for genetic reasons.
Fun Dawkins quote: “Civilized human behavior has about as much connection with natural selection as does the behavior of a circus bear on a unicycle.”
Ah. So the “spouse-beater” description is much more literal than I understood.
You’ll notice I mentioned kin selection before you did. But in diploid species it only accounts for cooperation among small groups. Apes live in communities of a few hundred at most. Humans achieve communities of millions. This cannot be due to kin selection; only culture can account for it.
Er, we evolved in groups of between 50 and 150 people. Any attempt to trace “human nature” to an evolutionary basis has to take this as an assumption - that it may not have evolved in collections of millions might apply to Moties, but not humans.
Actually, I’m going through “Our Kind” by Marvin Harris again, and he makes an interesting observation about reciprocal exchange (not altruism per se) (”Was There Life Before Chiefs?”).
In a hunter gather situation, there are no banks. There’s little ability to save food, and there’s little advantage to be gained from extra effort in a bad situation. Primitive groups - before villages, sans some special situations - seem to have a habit of expecting total generousity, sharing all food equally despite the effort used to get it. You busted your hump getting the food, and then everyone in the group shared in it at the end of the day, including the freeloaders. The advantage of this, of course, was that if you were unlucky you didn’t starve.
You (or someone) commented about “having poor memories”. I bet people’s memories of those that they were pissed off at lasted long enough for said person to starve, or at least regret pissing them off.
JIm @ 15: No children, your genes, ideas, values die.
Oh please. How many children did Aristoteles have? Archimedes? Jesus? Thomas Aquinus? Buddha? Confucius? How much of a difference made the number of their children to the influence of their ideas?
And if you’re worried about your genes, you can just as well help your siblings’ children to reach maturity.
Amanda @ 121: The wonderful thing about admitting there is no god is you get to make your own meaning.
Also, if there is no fixed point, you cannot miss it, and can spare yourself a lot of angst.
Jim B. @ 133: It may be why no one else has ever risen to his [Shakespeare’s] level since.
If Shakesspeare had to support a brood of kids instead of only three, he hardly would have had the time for that much drama. A few sonnets, maybe.
Cart does not pull horse. The ability to simulate others’ expected actions requires already existing brainpower. This is not exclusive to apes, though, which I’ll get to later.
I alluded to this above, when I said “If there is a genetic component to empathy, then that genetic factor can only account for “enough” empathy to effectively simulate others’ predicted actions, for the sake of interacting with them in ways that advance the individual’s genes.”
Let’s be clear about what each of us is saying here. I am saying that there is a baseline of genetically-coded empathy that humans in general can have, enough to effectively anticipate others’ actions. Jim is saying that there can be some individual humans who are genetically coded for more empathy than this baseline. I am saying this is impossible. You appear to be saying that humans in general have a very high baseline of empathy. If that’s all you’re saying, I don’t disagree.
Consider a baseline of empathy; sufficient for “the habit of imagining what other members of the band are thinking and feeling.” Remember that the only reason for this empathy is to benefit the individual who has it; it’s a visualization tool and it’s not useful in excess of necessity.
Apes whose genetics supply them with more than the baseline are in trouble. If they are inclined to be more generous and understanding than their peers, they will be taken advantage of. Their behavior will always be subverted by others’ less empathetic behavior. When there is a resource crunch, the most empathetic apes are going to be the first to die; they’ll be giving more than they can afford to give, and their less empathetic peers will not be reciprocating at that level. There is always a resource crunch.
The apes on the baseline have an evolutionarily stable strategy and they will survive. The apes who have a new mutation for enhanced empathy, beyond the necessity, will be subverted and will fail to pass on their genes over the long term. This is why I said “Panhuman equality, genuine altruism, enhanced empathy: all have to be cultural inventions, because it is literally impossible for them to persist in the genome.”
Now, humans apes have culture, and culture is very powerful at causing behaviors that genetics cannot cause. We can have tremendous amounts of empathy, much higher than the aforementioned baseline. But the source for this enhanced empathy has to be culture. Because it wouldn’t be a stable genetic equilibrium, it’s mathematically impossible for it to be in our genes.
(more soon)
Now, Mark, I see a couple of other problems. Maybe I’m going to misinterpret your message here, but bear with me.
I’m pretty sure it was Nicholas Humphrey who first put forward the argument you’re advancing, that higher consciousness developed from empathetic simulation. In his book The Inner Eye, he mentions that he thinks this has happened also in wolves, whales, elephants and nonhuman apes.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that rats and mice have empathy too, because I think the experiments summarized here are convincing. I am not saying that the rats in Church’s study were being genuinely altruistic. They seem to be willing to suffer only for rats who they know, so this looks like reciprocal altruism only. But for them to look at the other rats and understand what was happening, I think they had to have empathy in the sense of simulating others’ feelings. If even rodents have this, it’s probably very widespread among mammals. If most mammals feel others’ pain, by the way, I think this is yet more incentive to go vegan.
Yeah, I’ll say that empathy requires some intelligence. But if it’s showing up in wolves, the level of required intelligence is way below human ancestors, and if it’s showing up in rats, then it’s lower still.
Okay, hang on. This is where it doesn’t make sense to tie intelligence to empathy in any strong relationship. Autistics are not all unintelligent. There are conditions like Asperger’s Syndrome that are on the autistic spectrum, and affected people are still often extremely intelligent. There’s other forms of high functioning autism as well; Temple Grandin is autistic and has a Ph.D.; she is not unique in this regard.
It doesn’t make sense to say that empathy is required for intelligence, since these people do not automatically simulate others’ experiences, and do not in that sense have empathy, yet are often very intelligent. (There’s another sense of the word “empathy” that they do have, though. Ask an autistic person and they will tell you that they do care about your feelings, and want you to be happy, but they just don’t always understand how to interpret the social cues that communicate those feelings.)
Raine, is it still a pretty theory if it’s deeply insulting to autistic people? Someone, for example, who may disagree.
Pho, are you agreeing with me now? I’ve been saying all along that it’s culture that accounts for most of the things that we casually think of as human nature, and not evo-psych. Kin selection cannot allow apes to hold together societies of more than a few hundred, and reciprocal altruism (what you’re calling reciprocal exchange) requires memory and so also cannot hold together societies of more than a few hundred.
No, I didn’t say it was “poor”, per se. I said “memory is limited, and it can only foster cooperation among small groups”, like, say, 50 to 150 or a few hundred apes. Further altruism can’t be in the genome; there’s no way to fit it in (see post 151). But it can be learned through culture. We have ideologies that encourage genuine, nonreciprocal altruism. Ideologies, but not genes.
That is why reciprocal altruism works, yes. If groups are too large for memory to keep track of interactions, then reciprocity breaks down because freeloaders are able to take without giving and without being punished for not giving. In too-large groups, honest players get punished. Reciprocal altruism, then, is an evolutionarily stable strategy but only up to an upper limit, and that upper limit is a function of memory. If our ancestors lived in bands rarely larger than 150, then that’s probably a good indicator of where the memory limit is in our species. Of course we can remember more people, but the core of this is to remember who owes what sort of debts to you, and who you owe debts to, and who you’ve seen cheat others, etc. David Brooks’s nightmare.
Grammar,
I’m not saying that Mark’s theory is right, and I think you have made some effective arguments against it. I certainly don’t have the knowledge base to make any sort of judgments about it.
I still think it is a pretty theory, though, as pretty as any possible myth. And after reading the essay you linked to (thank you for that, I enjoyed it a lot) I still believe that. In my eyes, what Jim Sinclair is describing is an enhanced empathy in autistic people–one brought about in part by necessity, perhaps, but enhanced nonetheless.
As he says, “If I know that I do not understand people and I devote all this energy and effort to figuring them out, do I have more or less empathy than people who not only do not understand me, but who do not even notice that they do not understand me?” I think that one could effectively argue that he has more empathy.
I’m thinking of empathy in this sense not in assuming that the other person thinks as you do, but as in the ability to understand that they may not think as you do…
Raine, lest I be misinterpreted, I am not saying that some humans cannot have “enhanced” empathy, over and above what other humans have.
I’m only saying that the difference cannot be genetic, because that hypothesis violates certain mathematics of population genetics. Jim had been saying that if people like Amanda don’t breed, there will be less genetic empathy in the world. I responded to say that if Amanda is more empathetic, it’s something she picked up by culture: her family, friends, teachers, and/or reading habits.
Jim Sinclair may well be describing an enhanced empathy. It’s interesting to me that he knows he’s learned it, whereas neurotypical people tend to assume it was innate to them (apparently without remembering their own cultural indoctrination, like all the times their parents scolded them with “how would you feel if someone did that to you?”).
Above should read “JimB had been saying that if people like Amanda don’t breed”, since I’m invoking too many Jims now.
Now I’m just going out into speculation. Is this empathy at all? As usually defined, empathy is to actually feel the emotions that another is feeling, as opposed to sympathy usually defined as feeling bad for someone but not “feeling their pain”.
Jim Sinclair makes a good point here:
But “being able to understand a perspective that is different from one’s own”, on the level of empathy, requires that we must be able to imagine ourselves actually experiencing life as that person does. I think culture limits this ability.
For example, I can empathize with a Republican who believes the fear messages from the White House, because I live in the same culture and I’ve been afraid of the US and its nuclear weapons; I’ve lived in fear that someone was going to do something to make civilization collapse. But I can’t empathize with a Muslim who looks forward to walking in circles around the Kaaba and kissing the Black Stone. I simply cannot fathom it; this is not similar to anything I’ve ever been taught to desire.
It seems to me that at least in some situations, “the ability to understand that they may not think as you do” is actually the ability to say, “I cannot empathize with you, because I recognize that I cannot really understand what you are going through.” One may still be able to sympathize, though.
Yes, I definitely do not agree with JimB. I do have to admit, and this is quite possibly coming completely out of an ignorance of populations genetics, that Mark Foxwell’s original idea that intelligence may have developed out of a mutation that allowed for maybe not empathy but the ability to recognize or maybe to look for other perspectives or consciousness outside of our own minds. Its the type of idea that works more as a philosophical question than one that genetics might address. I think I just like it because the thing I like most in other people is that ability to understand that others are different (and it really distresses me when someone seems to be unable to imagine that people have different experiences than they do). It was kind of fun to think for a little bit that that could be the very basis of our intelligence. I’m typically much more of a nurture over nature, culture over genetics type person…
My original post referred to empathy as the ability to feel someone else’s pain and act accordingly. The ability of the human brain to do that is genetic in origin. How it is expressed within a population is cultural. It is a fact that some people feel more empathy than others. The magnitude to which someone is capable of feeling empathy is also genetic in origin.
If a concept is invented such as panhuman equality and it is transmitted between individuals of a given population, some will see great merit in adopting it while others will see little advantage. Let’s assume those with a genetic makeup that causes high empathy will fully accept panhuman equality as a good and reasonable thing and change their behavior towards others accordingly.
As time goes on natural selection will decide whether panhuman equality is a good idea or a bad idea based on whether high empathy or low empathy genes in a population is increased, decreased or remains stable.
Obviously if the concept of panhuman equality reduces the number of high empathy causing genes, there will come a time when the concept will die out because those who would likely gravitate to it have diminished in population.
Raine, it is a plausible idea and it is being kicked around among biologists and philosophers.
I think we have to be careful because it seems autistic people can be very intelligent without this kind of empathy, or without this kind of empathy taking place automatically. With this caveat, I am at worst saying that the idea needs reformulation and constraints. It could be part of the answer to consciousness, though.
I’m trying to distinguish that baseline of empathy, and the idea of the evolution of empathy in general as Mark has put forward, from the idea that some and not other people can have genetically-coded empathy above and beyond the baseline. This is impossible, not because such a mutation could not arise, but strictly because the mutation could not persist. It would be wiped out by genic-selective subversion. Hopefully that’s been well enough explained in post 161. But obviously it hasn’t been, since I have to scold JimB again in a moment.
Raine, Pho, Mark, anybody whose opinions are worth anything, have I explained this impossibility well? Is it comprehensible as I’ve outlined it? Are there related questions that need to be answered that aren’t obvious to me?
JimB,
That’s also what I was originally addressing.
So you claim, without supporting evidence.
Jim, I’ve explained why this is impossible. You are wrong, and this is not a matter of opinion or politics. Your premise is mathematically impossible and is not sustained in population genetics. You aren’t responding to that, so I’m suspecting that you just don’t understand what I’m saying (in which case you should not be pretending to understand what you’re saying).
Go through my posts (I suggest 117, 118, 119, 139, 149, 161), find the quotes you disagree with, and explain how and why you disagree.
Grammar,
I think you’ve explained it very well…I think our last few posts in response to each other have been more about feeling out details than the bigger ideas.
And if JimB hasn’t gotten it yet, he’s not going to…
Raine, Pho, Mark, anybody whose opinions are worth anything, have I explained this impossibility well? Is it comprehensible as I’ve outlined it? Are there related questions that need to be answered that aren’t obvious to me?
I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between a “theory-of-mind” (modelling other people’s opinions) and actual empathy, feeling for them. Autistic people seem to have a serious deficit in the former, whereas sociopaths don’t have the latter.
As regards evolution, the impression I got was that while proto-human intelligence started off godsknowswhy, it accelerated because of the theory-of-mind element - trying to keep track of what Ug thought about Grog disliking you, and whether Wheema knows Grog is chasing Doona.
Alas, we’re running over the boundaries of where I feel confident in pulling opinions out of my ass without further study.
Maybe so, and good point. I’m still interested in the proposals that say the latter derives from the former. But I can’t evaluate this one way or the other, and as I understand it the question is very much open.
My statements that “such a mutation cannot persist” apply to any claim of extra “feeling others’ feelings” in the genome: the common parlance sort of empathy.
There’s another hitch here. If you divorce “feeling others’ feelings” from “theory of mind”, then what is the adaptive benefit of “feeling others’ feelings” at all? In what way is it useful to the organism? Open question. I’m not sure anyone has an answer.
Grammar said: “I am saying that there is a baseline of genetically-coded empathy that humans in general can have, enough to effectively anticipate others’ actions. Jim is saying that there can be some individual humans who are genetically coded for more empathy than this baseline. I am saying this is impossible.”
Grammar, you are making a few assertions I would challenge. They are:
1) The empathy baseline can’t change with time.
If I read you correctly you are saying when a population evolves enough, that’s all it gets and everyone gets the same amount. I say it can be selected for like any other genetically caused trait. If we shared a common ancestor with the great apes and now both human and ape populations have distinctly different empathy baselines, how did that differential occur if not by natural selection of gene mutations in humans having higher empathy than their peers? And why would selection for higher empathy at this point in human existence be complete? I can imagine a drastic, prolonged change in the physical or cultural environment humans exist in would be enough to accelerate its selection in one direction or the other. I would predict that if an objective measure for empathy could be devised, you would find geographical differences.
2) No individual can have more than the baseline response as predicted by your theory.
Does that go for intelligence? Does everyone really have the same baseline intelligence? If average intelligence is good enough as we know it is, why do some seem to have much more or less? Is there no such thing as genetically caused low or high intelligence? Is it an illusion or simply culturally caused? What good is a genetically caused human trait if it can’t be selected for? Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom realizes that environments change, sometimes abruptly. That’s why she allows a genetic variation about the mean of human traits as a way of insuring survival for an unpredictable future.
3) You assume all humans have the precisely the same amount of empathy baseline at this point in time.
I personally know adults who have a high degree of empathy and they exhibited it in early childhood while their siblings did not. I know this is anecdotal. I know adults with high empathy, but that doesn’t preclude culture or experience causing everyone to ACT like they have the same or a different amount. What’s needed in an objerctive measure of it.
4) You assume above average empathy is a negative survival trait.
How do you know this? High empathy can be useful for the owner as well as others. What if a person, because of high empathy invented a social philosophy that caused her resident band, tribe, nation, state to thrive in numbers compared to another group?
There’s another hitch here. If you divorce “feeling others’ feelings” from “theory of mind”, then what is the adaptive benefit of “feeling others’ feelings” at all? In what way is it useful to the organism? Open question. I’m not sure anyone has an answer.
Evolution doesn’t work at the individual organism level - it works at the level of genes in a population. Further, that a trait is adaptive does not mean that it is precise - a trait which increased the transmission rate of genes might have other effects.
Consider that the human love for helpless looking things with big eyes promotes the survival of yelling screaming babies - but equally promotes the survival of feline freeloaders. Being empathic might promote group survival, group solidarity and may be an element in sexual competition - especially if the “sneaky fucker” factor is taken into account.
Come on, Pho, I’ve been talking about genic selection since sixty posts ago. And in the meantime we even had a chat about kin selection, which I couldn’t have spoken sanely about if I didn’t understand genic selection. Surely you noticed this? But it isn’t out of line to ask “what is the adaptive benefit to the organism”, because the organism is the one who expresses the phenotype, the organism is the one who dies or reproduces, and the organism is the vehicle that holds together the collection of genes that travel together. The organism is usually a very useful (and more intuitive) stand-in for the genes. I hereby assert my right to use conversational shortcuts.
Yes, and I should hope this understanding is implicit in any evolutionary conversation. But merely noting that “it may be the case that this helps in nonobvious ways” teaches us precisely shit. So I ask the question explicitly.
Other mammalian infants display similar proportions. Are all mammals subject to this sort of visual cue? Rhetorical question. I don’t know if there’s data to answer it.
Fair point, and I won’t lecture you for giving the casual appearance of talking about group selection.
The Nicholas Humphrey book mentioned earlier is keen on this; the wolves, elephants, whales and apes he mentions are all social. Seems a decent hypothesis. I wish I knew enough about mirror neurons to factor these in too.
JimB, there are interesting answers to some of your questions, but… good heavens…
No, I make no similar claim about intelligence. Why on Earth would you think I’m saying anything like that? Now I’m certain you don’t understand what I’m saying about empathy and ESS. Intelligence is not a trait that is vulnerable to others’ selfish subversion, like generosity and empathy are. I would be awfully surprised if there are evolutionarily stable strategies that pertain to intelligence, and I’ve certainly never heard of such a thing.
Man, I thought I was being pretty clear what this argument applies to (and by implication, what it does not) when I laid this out: “Apes whose genetics supply them with more than the baseline are in trouble. … There is always a resource crunch.”
If I’m not getting through then I don’t know if I have the patience to go over this again. I’m going to need a lot of bourbon real soon now. Good luck to you.
Grammar RWA, altruism is altruism whyever it evolved. There’s also a lot of evidence that evolution can take place at the group level as well as at the level of individuals or genes.
See the latest New Scientist, for instance:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19626281.500-evolution-survival-of-the-selfless.html
Grammar RWA, altruism is altruism whyever it evolved. There’s also a lot of evidence that evolution can take place at the group level as well as at the level of individuals or genes.
See the latest New Scientist, for instance:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19626281.500-evolution-survival-of-the-selfless.html
“Children really are hard. What you thought was going to be fun is such a chore. It’s 90% self-sacrifice, worry and guilt. When your children are adults, they can be very unkind. What was the point of it all when your children feel they have no obligation at all to include you in their lives?”
This observation strikes me as carrying a great deal of truth. I wonder why I don’t hear this point made more often in conversations such as this? It’s almost as if there are forces at work that prefer to avoid dealing with the idea that children can produce hardship.
Michael, I disagree that “altruism is altruism”.
The term of art “reciprocal altruism” was coined particularly to distinguish it from genuine altruism, giving without care of reward, that philosophical enigma that many have denied exists even in humans (often with the snide “giving makes you feel better so that’s the reward you seek” rebuttal).
Reciprocal altruism certainly takes place throughout many species; in species whose brains are probably not equipped for the memory accounting that apes use, their social interactions are usually constrained such that they give and receive from a group of the same individuals.
Genuine altruism though, giving in ways that could not be reciprocated, has never been observed outside of humans. That’s why I’m keen to say it didn’t “evolve” at all; it’s recent and appears entirely culturally driven. We have a lot of cultural propaganda about unconditional generosity, and this is probably what overcomes a genetic disposition to not engage in such behavor.
As for group selection, yes I already know that David Sloan Wilson and a few of his groupies are still pushing that boulder in hell. I’m not persuaded.