While you have a point, it’s not quite that simple. Women could and often did choose their sexual partners; it just wasn’t their husband. If anything I’d expect the female infidelity rate to be far higher in the past, since they lacked modern paternity tests, and forcing a woman into a marriage is hardly likely to generate any sense of loyalty to her husband or even mean she finds him attractive.
I’m sure there were plenty of cases of children being a product of adultery, or fornication for that matter. But adultery and fornication were also frequently serious crimes, which were often punishable by death. This was more common for cases of adultery and was much more common for the woman, but frequently the other man could be punished as well.
In addition, one would have to consider children conceived in acts of prostitution or rape.
Nope, it’s the type of marriage where your wife calls you before a court to answer an indictment. 
SoEvil… I hear ya.
But how far back into history are you projecting? Do we have much data, either way in prehistoric times, especially as far back to the dawn of Homo Erectus (or even our earlier ancestors)? We’re talking in the range of a million years ago, or more. Think BIG picture here. What were the fundamental driving forces of sexual attraction that drove each of the two sexes to appear the way we do, and attract each other the way we do.
Even at a hunting/gathering tribe level, you’d be assuming just as much about arranged “marriages” if they even had such a concept back then.
Most of our physical traits we have now, were already in place probably before we could even communicate at the level we do now.
Also, think of other higher lifeforms, like the apes we share this planet with. At some point, our distant ancestors probably behaved in similar ways. I can only assume that before civilization, or even speech, H. Sapiens’s physical appearance was far ahead of the curve before our intellect kicked in, raising us to an entire awareness, that brings us everything from fire, wheels, pyramids and this Mac I’m typing on.
In other words, our bodies are most likely largely the result of the more animalistic behaviors of pre-humans. Then, a million years later or so, we decided to make the whole affair (heh) complicated.
Btw, I’m just spit-balling numbers here. I’m certainly no anthropologist.
I suppose that appearance enhancemet could alter the human race over time. So could hunting technologies, agriculture, metalworking, military sciences, medicine, textile manufacturing, and of course politics.
Genetic manipulation seems much more likely to provide the big scary, though. And that would be lightning fast, by comparison.
Tris
100% agreed.
Whatever the case, it seems likely natural selection will be replaced by artificial selection, very very soon. Evolution, as a blind force of nature, will not be relevant.
So, if we cancel out natural genetic mutation with our technologies, we’ll be designing our own. Makes you wonder, this seeming a likely outcome, what we would become thousands or millions of years hence, if we don’t tamper with our DNA.
Yeah, if we are talking big picture, genetic engineering would probably be far more relevant than plastic surgery.
Some modern hunter/gatherers have had mind-boggling complex marriage rules - not much your parents arranging your marriage, but who your parents where, what clan they were, determined who you could even begin to consider as a marriage partner, then there were rules on incest/cousin marriages… in some cases it boiled down to not a lot of choice. I’m most familiar with this happening in some Australian aborigine tribes, but it pops up again and again. So I’d say there’s some evidence H/G’s had limited choices that had little to do with appearances. Not to mention that, in such lifestyles, being a really good hunter, or really adept at finding wild plant foods, might mean a LOT more than good looks in terms of survival.
Well Homo Erectus used fire, built shelter, made tools, and probably practiced some form of ritualistic cannibalism (at least there is evidence that would imply some of them did). They also lived in groups that probably had hierarchies, like many other primates do. Maybe pretty much everybody had sex with everybody else, the way bonobos do.
Psychologists are rather divided on the subject, but a popular theory is that romantic love in humans means something biologically, and that this biological change lasts about a year. If these theories are correct, it may imply that early humans paired off together for about a year. But how they would decide to pair off is a bit more of a mystery. Dominance hierarchies probably made a difference. But many different factors beyond physical appearance probably helped establish these hierarchies. Maybe caveman (yes, a misnomer) Og is in charge because he’s the best tracker, or the best tool maker. Maybe he’s in charge not because he’s personally the best at fighting off rivals, but because he’s the best at forming alliances with other males to fight off his rivals. Maybe they were matriarchal. Maybe there were separate hierarchies for males and females.
I will never figure out what is the specific pleasure people get in making up stories about cavemen. Maybe it is the same narrative urge that lead us to invent gods. Maybe it makes them feel important that their piddley sex life is part of the grand human drama. Or maybe it makes them feel better about an attraction to teens, distaste for monogymy or occassional thoughts of sexual violence. I have no idea.
If you want to talk about changes in mating, isn’t it about a billion times more relevent that we bear children decades later, exponentially less often, and basically do nothing cavemen did? Here we have changed to having at best a couple kids in the tail end of female fertility, and you think nose jobs are the gamechanger?
It’s a way of guessing why we behave the way we do. Because we clearly have an innate human nature, with a great many inborn drives and tendencies; the claim that we are some blank slate is a purely ideologically driven one that contradicts the evidence and probably isn’t even possible. We’re just like every other species, the product of evolution; not some super-special creatures born pure of “animalistic taint” or whatever the blank slaters are so afraid of.
I’m not sure these “blank slaters” exist. Who, exactly, are you talking about? Can you give even on example of someone who believes there are no human instincts? Maybe some ultra religious people (is that your stake in it?) but nobody credible.
Human behavior is a complicated and diverse mix of instinct, individual variation (I mean, what’s up with the loads of people freely choosing not to have kids?), current material circumstances and in most cases 10,000 years of agriculture. There is almost nothing universal- even obviously maladaptive activities like cutting or eating shit- have their advocates. Culturally, you can find examples of just about any family structure, from polyandry to modern American hookup culture. There is usually a relatively recent material expaination for these variations. The instinct is there, but how those instincts manifest themselves is extremely complex and not given to cute stories.
As for cosmetics- selection for beauty was probably a bit like selecting for fatty food. When the pickings are slim, it can be a big deal. If the unclaimed women in your band are a wide-hipped eighteen year old, a sixty five year old, and a twenty year old with a raging staph infection, looking for beauty will increase your chances of successful reproduction. In a modern singles bar, full of a wider variety, healthier, on the whole older and more birth-controlled bunch of women than any caveman could ever imagine, it is less esential as an adaptive trait. Of all the “messing with human nature” stuff going on in that bar, cosmetics are barely a blip on the radar.
Ahh, right. So you saw Fight Club too, then! Curb the tired “you are not special. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake” rhetoric.
If I wanted to feel self-important and fish for attention, well, I guess I’d be so desperate as to barge into a discussion to express how asinine I find it. If you truly have no idea, and can’t figure this thread out, why even respond? I have heard it’s common for those with feelings of insecurity, self-importance or those who seek validation to compensate by becoming so paralyzingly cynical, their very protests seem disingenuous; and if sufficiently desperate, might throw in thinly veiled "assumptions"of a pejorative nature as to try to tint or discredit the character of your opposition.
Actually, I didn’t hear that. I’m just going with my gut on your vibe, here. I mean, christ, it’s not like I’m working on a thesis. Right in the OP, I cover my ass on just this sort of post you made. The examples of deviant, aberrant, and downright evil acts of sexual human behavior does nothing more than betray you have no other objective here than to provoke and condescend. Save it. If you’re telling me that humanity has transcended the physical draw, lust and fetishes of their own sexuality and have learned to move past these horrible, “dehumanizing” feelings of superficial physical attraction, then I’ll cite you about a zillion porn sites.
I’m here, because I enjoy banter, sharing ideas and perspectives, and every so often, the ability to gain some knowledge from honest discussion, rather than rote research.
Besides, “cavemen” were real. Gods… not so much. Der Trihs already addressed the rest of the points I’d have made if I were more eloquent.
Absolutely. And if you would have read the entire thread, you’d have comprehended that this is the entire point of the thread. I made a poor choice by only focusing on “cosmetic surgery” in the OP, as some are getting fixated on that particular aspect of the modifications we’re able to make to not only our bodies by knife, chemicals and tissue, but soon enough, on a genetic level, at which point the line will blur even more between “cosmetic” and “corrective”.
So, yes. Makeup. Nose jobs. Fake tits. Liposuction. Gastric Bypass. Gene therapy. Stem cell research. Life extension… and so on.
This thread is two-fold: Sex as recreation, now that our technology has brought our hedonistic nature to staggering heights, we have the luxury to indulge our sexuality far more, and with so little consequence, it’s all too easy to dismiss that most still desire to have kids. And get this… they use sex to do this! Weird, right?
So, to dismiss cosmetics and corrective procedures, past present and future, is to dismiss our nature to indulge, and inflate our physical appearance for mostly sexual reasons, whether for recreation or procreation. Which, ultimately is tantamount to never asking the question: How far will this go, and could it produce tragic consequences?
I don’t think that’s unreasonable to speculate on at all.
I doubt it will make anything more than a dent in our ability as a species to survive. As we gain more technological control over the planet and raise our standards of living and education, birth rates will fall. They won’t ever truly fall beyond what is needed to keep us going healthily as a species though. Too many people love children and want to have them. If anything this trend is positive as it is slowly ensuring that more children are the result of prepared parents rather than oops mistakes. It also means that those who do not desire children are not forced into having them for the sake of a sexual companion’ nor are they relegated to a mostly sexless bachelorhood. (either gender)
That’s being a little harsh on “cavemen,” isn’t it? Homo erectus/ergaster (there’s a debate as to whether they were the same species) had some habits that could be considered downright heartwarming. The fossil evidence strongly indicates that they provided for and protected elderly and injured members of their group, and that they taught each other tool making techniques. And who’s to say that they didn’t practice monogamy? As I previously posted, there is some evidence that humans might be biologically inclined towards (at least temporary) monogamy. I also noted in a previous post that any speculation about the mating habits of prehistoric human ancestors would be just that, speculation. But that doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy said speculation, or possibly even guide it into more likely avenues based on what we know from the fossil record. For instance, we know that members of the genus Homo possessed less sexual dimorphism than members of the genus Australopithecus. We also know that Venus figurines, Venus figurine - Wikipedia were some of the earliest forms of art produced by humans. Now we’ll probably never know what the purpose of these figurines was, but they probably had something to do with fertility.
In your post, were you trying to express distaste for the theory of biological determinism?
In reality, I see it the same way. For the sake of speculation, as I said upthread, I’m slightly being my own devil’s advocate here. Whatever the future tech of human modification holds, it’s highly unlikely to make any negative waves that’ll overwhelm us with unforeseeable consequences. Still… It’s quite a profound avenue I see humanity headed toward: being able to alter our bodies at such a fundamental level.
Put another way, cosmetic modification today only really affects the life of the individual who decides to undergo whatever procedure (and those, indirectly, in their lives) and stops there. No big whoop, so far. That is until “cosmetics” enters the realm of genetics, in that it can be passed through hereditarily. It’s one thing to get a boob-job, and quite another until we start introducing such inflated cosmetics into our genetic code.
Think about introducing genetically designed strains of plants into the wild. I think it’s generally considered a bad idea, even if these strains are pretty innocuous. Despite any safeguards, it’s likely inevitable.
A great real-world example is Africanized bees (killer bees) – whoopsy!
Scientific application isn’t so homogenous that we can ensure some group, somewhere, won’t abuse new technology in that regard, despite any safeguards we attempt to enforce. So by looking at human nature today and how our hedonistic technology is becoming ever more commonplace (in regards to physical modification for the sake of “looking more attractive”, or other “corrective” modifications), it’s a bit concerning.
There are so many analogous examples of how human nature, and our pursuit for pleasure, has created a pandoras box of irreversible damage, because applied science isn’t easily fenced in. Look at designer drugs for instance. Cocaine and heroin were huge hits when they were first introduced. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube now, and the web we weave is getting so much more complicated. How many lives destroyed, since? How huge an economic impact? The DEA, local law enforcement the legal penalties, the prison costs, rehab, therapy, etc… All HUGE strains on our economy and lives.
If the history of applied science in pharmaceuticals and biology is any indication, progress will be uneven, abuse will occur, and there will be unforeseen consequences, because sexuality is so fundamentally woven into our happiness, what will happen when the cosmetic equivalent of heroin becomes hereditary?
I think even sven’s post was at first an attack on the premise of the OP, then the next sentence seemed to be making presumptions, not about cavemen, but about some ulterior root percieved on sven’s part to justify his/her disdain for such speculation and discourse.
If I was in err on that, I apologize.
Let’s not practice genetic engineering on humans. Instead, we should be experimenting on chimps and other non-human great apes. What could possibly go wrong?
I have no problem with the OP. My main issue is with people who want to say “I like Fruit Loops because berries are round and in cavman days it was adaptive to eat a variety of berries to get different vitamins…” and other far-fetched and unverifiable just so stories, especially when these are used to justiy some sort of social policy.
Here’s what people can’t seem to understand about genetic disease. If the genetic disease is a recessive trait, then the number of carriers in the population is the square root of the number of people who have the disease. That means, if there’s a genetic disease that 1 person in 10,000 suffers from, that means 1 person in 100 is a carrier for the disease.
It also means that if we let the person who suffers from the disease die, or sterilize them, but let the carriers alone, we’ll have reduced the incidence of the gene from 0.01 to 0.099. There are 100 times more carriers than sufferers. Reducing the trait by 1% per generation is a pretty piss-poor method of addressing the problem of genetic disease.
And remember, the rarer the trait gets, the less it becomes expressed, and the less the selective pressure against the trait becomes. If 1 person in 1000 is a carrier, then only 1 person in a million will express the trait, and you’re reducing the trait by 1/10th of 1% per generation by sterilizing the sufferers.
If you really want to eliminate genetic disease, you have to sterilize the carriers, not just those who express the trait. The only problem with this is that lots of people are carriers for one or more serious genetic diseases, and to eliminate the carriers you’d have to sterilize most of your population. See Haldane's dilemma - Wikipedia.
I should point out that many of those carriers of bad genetic traits are also carriers of GOOD genetic traits we want to keep. If you sterilize the carriers and by extension most of the population you’ll be reducing the good genes as well as the bad, and may even inadvertently eliminate some completely.