Natural selection is the differential transmission of genes to the next generation. Are you really asking how prioritizing your own children’s welfare over other children could result in more of your own genes (rather than other people’s genes) being transmitted into the next generation?
That’s a dubious conclusion. When men do not suspect non-paternity, the probability of non-paternity is 1.7%. When they do suspect non-paternity, the probability is 29.8%. So non-paternity is 17 times more likely when there are suspicions.
True. But your inference that concern for paternity is not adaptive is wrong. That’s conclusion is logically equivalent to saying that if people only fall off a certain cliff 30% of the time, they should not be concerned about walking along that cliff.
It’s not just about what you might do after suspicions are raised. It’s about what a father might do to increase the probability that a child is his own. Something as trivial as expressing displeasure to his wife if she flirts with another man, so that she understands he doesn’t like it, which may reduce the probability of her following through and committing adultery.
Sure. I’ve said explicitly several times that prosocial behavior is adaptive. The key feature of humans is cooperation with one another for mutual benefit. That’s the principal reason that our species is so successful.
Do you also agree that a preference for the welfare of your own children is not mutually exclusive with prosocial behaviors toward non-kin? A preference for your own children does not imply a callous disregard for other people’s children.
Well, it doesn’t hurt, that’s for sure. If I found out a lady friend I was dating was loaded, I might be a bit more forgiving of her other flaws.
I read an article the other day about how Charlize Theron claimed she was “shockingly single” (real humble huh), and I assumed that was because she was cray-cray, a huge bitch, or some other negative reason. But I’d still give it a shot and date her of course. She, of course, would not date me. She probably wouldn’t consider the average schlub.
Do I think wealth Trumps every thing else? No, I don’t. I think that is an individualistic thing. Wealth obviously signals security, which I think everyone wants, but might some woman overlook that and take the more handsome guy, the funnier guy, the more intelligent guy? And not wait out for someone loaded? Sure. Happens all the time.
Well yes - it is. Behaviors are always predispositions, average behaviors. So when I said “that prosocial behavior is not present”, I meant precisely that it’s not the average behavior.
And we were talking about adaptive prosocial behavior, instinctive behavior. Prosocial behavior can also be cultural, or it can just be the result of reasoning - moral reasoning, for example. I may reason that it’s morally right to devote equal resources to my step-child. That’s what (I hope) most people actually do in modern societies. That’s not an adaptive behavior.
Natural selection will, by definition, favor behaviors that get your own genes into the next generation. So yes - we certainly require an evolutionary account of this behavior. I’m not up on all the literature, but there’s evidence that the co-fathers in a group are more closely related than average. That would mean that the kids that you are co-fathering are all more closely related to you than kids outside your co-fathering group.
Do you have some links to this, I’m not familiar with it, and a quick search reveals no society that functions quite this way? Again, if something like this is happening, it challenges us to provide an evolutionary account. But I assume that you’re not challenging basic principles of evolutionary theory, and suggesting that a behavior could evolve by natural selection that ultimately favored getting someone else’s genes into the next generation in preference to your own?
Again, it’s not about what sometimes happens, it’s about average behavior.
And while you seem inexplicably resistant to the idea that a preference for one’s own children is adaptive (when it’s very obvious from an evolutionary perspective why that should be the case), you seem to be taking for granted that all these instances of prosocial behavior that you are describing are adaptive - rather than cultural, or a result of moral reasoning.
Yet again:
Our heritable instincts are a component influencing our behavior, but they certainly do not constrain us. Our greatest defining features as a species are a huge and complex culture, and extremely high intelligence - and these are the ultimate determinants of our behavior and our ideals. We may have instincts, but we are unique among animals in that we are not constrained by them.
If you mean “not average”, I wouldn’t instead say “not present”. Certainly not if trying to be precise. I don’t think those two phrasings mean the same thing at all.
No time right now, but will find some. Generally goes along with matrilocal societies, AIUI. Less common, but multiple examples on multiple continents.
I’m saying that behavior that directly favors getting someone else’s genes into the next generation can indirectly favor getting one’s own genes into the next generation.
No, I agree that it’s adaptive. I’m disagreeing that it’s the only strategy that’s adaptive.
Granted, out of context. But there was context. A context in which in this thread I have - several times - explicitly debunked the straw man that anyone is ever claiming absolutes of behavior - genetic determinism, “biological imperatives” that can never be modified by other factors. Adaptive behavior is always a predisposition, and actual instances of behavior will always depend on multiple factors. When we’re talking about an adaptive trait, it’s perfectly reasonably vocabulary to say the trait is “not present”, and not expect to have to debunk that same straw man every single time.
Agreed, that was never in dispute.
Kin selection.
The evolution of altruism.
But then, you understand why the claim (without context) that in avuncular societies an uncle cares more his nieces/nephews than his own children must be misleading. It requires context and a broad understanding of everything that’s going on in that society in order to make sense of it. Because if there were nothing more complicated going on, if any species did this other things being equal, it would clearly be non-adaptive behavior. So in these societies, obviously other things are not equal.
No to be argumentative, but so what? What matters most to your point is the likelihood that primitive men were wrong when they suspected non-paternity.
When you consider that there are multiple clues that can tip off non-paternity (not just how the kid looks, but also who is in contact with a woman around conception time, her behavior around potential paramours and their history, how promiscuous or monogamous she tends to be), it kind is surprising that men could correctly guess non-paternity so infrequently.
An assertion that is not supported with evidence is just an assertion.
Your argument is like saying if a cop correctly judges a pedestrian as a criminal 30% of the time, then he’s a good cop. Even though this means 70% of the time, he arresting or even shooting an innocent person.
For natural selection to work in the way you’re proposing, kids not getting a man’s resources have to suffer just enough to be less fecund than other kids. If 70% of the time, he’s misjudging kids and they end up suffering like this, then he’s a crappy father.
And see, I think this idea makes sense. Much more sense than theory you presented earlier. Romancing his wife ensures his access to sex, which has nothing to do with assuring paternity and all to do with keeping his woman happy. His kids benefit from the attention that their mother gets and it decreases the likelihood that another man’s kids will sneak into the household. But these perks are just icing on the cake. They aren’t the cake.
So perhaps this is why cuckhold rates were low. In a society that doesn’t control female sexuality, men work hard to keep their mates satisfied. Maybe that is what motivated them when they did all that hunting.
No, it’s not. Thorny locust’s claim was that if men are wrong in their suspicions about paternity 70% of the time, that implies that men should never be concerned about trying to assure paternity. That’s not a valid inference. If you want a crime analogy instead, it’s like saying - if the cops are bad at identifying who the thieves are, it’s pointless to bother to lock our doors to ensure that theft cannot occur.
The rate of error is high enough to suggest acting on a suspicion would cause more collateral damage than it’s worth. You need an action for it become an adaptive trait selected by evolution. Do you not see this? I need you to see this.
It seems to me that many people in this thread are determined to resist any notion that any human behavior that we find morally objectionable might have any instinctive basis. Presumably because you think that somehow undermines our modern social agenda for equality, our ideals for what we want human society to be.
I think this this is misguided, and also a risks undermining any agenda of social progress. It seems to grant the damaging premise that what is possible for our society now and in the future is constrained by the past; that it’s important to prove that we don’t have any innate undesirable instincts, for fear that we might not be free to choose to act differently. But this muddling of is with ought is dangerous. If we hitch our wagon for social progress to proving that we don’t have morally objectionable instincts, and that it’s all a result of (say) the cultural influence of recent patriarchal culture, we are overwhelmingly likely to be wrong. The core mechanism of evolution by natural selection is that genes with “selfish” properties have been the genes that won the battle for survival. So we know with certainty that even when an adaptive behavior appears unselfish, when we instinctively act for the benefit of others in our social group, the ultimate objective must be selfish - the preferential transmission of our own genes (rather than the genes of unrelated humans) into the next generation. The fundamental mechanism of natural selection is in direct opposition to any notion of fairness or equality.
The remarkable thing about humans is not that we don’t have any morally objectionable traits. It’s that we evolved a strategy of cooperation, of proximately altruistic behavior; with complex culture and extremely high intelligence. Our instincts for prosocial behaviors grant us insight that working together can achieve remarkable things; and our intelligence allows us to extend that into moral reasoning that we believe in true altruism, that humans have fundamental rights. We are probably unique in humans that we have the ability to modify our instinctive behaviors to accord with our ideals. And we should expect that this will continue to be necessary, whatever we might achieve in changing society’s cultural influences on the next generation. It is a naive and implausible notion that we have no genetically determined behavioral predisposition.
You are supposing that the only possible type of action is resource re-allocation after the fact, based on discerning non-paternity (which we are bad at). Yes, acting on suspicions would be a poor strategy.
But that doesn’t imply that any type of concern for paternity cannot be adaptive. How does that invalidate the obvious fitness benefit of preventative action such as mate-guarding that reduces the probability of non-paternity happening in the first place?
ETA: and also, of course, suspicions of non-paternity are only an issue when paternity is in dispute from uncertainty about adultery. In many cases knowledge of the non-paternity is certain - step-children born before a couple came together, for example.
I’ve read about it. From memory, its a way of pretty much eliminating the “risk” of expending resources on a false paternity. The tradeoff is that you expend said resources on children that have a lower, but guaranteed, percentage of your genes.
If you count kinship down the maternal line only, you are pretty certain of how your maternal sisters and their children are related to you. Women are very rarely wrong about whether a child is theirs or not.
If the risk of nonpaternity is sufficiently high, it can be evolutionary advantageous to favor the sure thing strategy, even with a lower payoff.
What is the harm incurred to the male’s chances of passing on his genes maximally by devoting large amounts of resources over a long term to a child that is not his? Pretty high. One presumes that if he did not expend those resources investing in that child he would have the wealth to attract another mate with whom he could have greater confidence of a child that has his genes. Big cost.
What is the harm incurred to the male’s chances of passing on his genes maximally by denying parentage of a child who is in fact half his genes? Fairly low as he has invested little so far and the child may in fact still reach reproduction himself without the father’s ongoing investment at all. Pure bonus if it happens.
Given the very great harms from the genes’ perspective to choosing to invest long term parenting a child not carrying your genes, and the small investment to date lost by denying parentage of one that does, a male would want to be overwhelmingly confident that the child is his to make that long term investment worth it and any reasonable doubt would make abandoning the woman and child. In point of fact if evolution actually ran it out that males would make that investment with even a 30% chance of it being a child that was not of his genes, only 70% sure of genetic parentage, I’d be surprised. The exception could be if raising that child somehow actually otherwise increased your chances - partnering and taking on a stepchild being a route to earning a chance mate and have a child with that woman that the male would not otherwise have, for example, especially if that woman also came with other resources, be they physical or in social connections and status, or helping increase the survival chances of children the male already has from a previous partnership.
This whole hijack about paternity started when you made this comment:
I’ve called bullshit on this idea because it’s not obvious that selective pressure for any parternity hangups would’ve been present in the social environments humans emerged in. And in a manner that’s common with armchair evolutionary psychologists, you’re using this specious claim to argue that socially-imposed restrictions on female sexuality has an evolutionary basis. Not a cultural one, but a biological one.
Now, after this theory is picked apart, you’re arguing something else. Hand wavy stuff about “mate-guarding”. Which has less to do with the paternity of a man’s children and more about not letting his wife rendezvous with someone else. Which doesn’t really need a “just so” story to explain, because of course a man is going try to keep his beloved in love with him and him only for at least as long as he’s in love with her! Women do the same thing. This a human thing.
But note the adversarial connotation of “mate-guarding”. Why should we characterize early man’s actions with his partner as “mate-guarding”, rather than simply positing that pair-bonding men and women potentially enhanced their reproductive fitness by optimizing the allocation of care and resources to their children? It’s still just a theory, but at least it doesn’t read like something an incel wrote. The incel-ish framing doesn’t just overcomplicate the picture, but it also creates the impression that the same slut-shaming misogynistic anxieties that plague us today also plagued our ancestors.
And I see no evidence of this. Anthropologists consistently find that hunter-gathering tribes are highly communal, egalitarian, and socially permissive. As much as has been studied about these groups, if there was evidence that concerted efforts were made by men to control women and limit their sexual opportunities, it would’ve been documented. But it’s just not there.
Well first off, you have to wrongly assume that early man expended “large” amounts of resources to children sufficient to affect his chance at scoring a mate. If resources are pooled, a man is but one of several contributors to the pot that feeds everyone. Not just your immediate family, but them plus your neighbors. You weren’t going to get away with taking more than your fair share especially if somebody’s kids were crying for more.
I think y’all are stuck on looking at this from the nuclear family model. We didn’t always partition ourselves this way.
Yes, but in order for paternity concern to become an adaptive trait through natural selection, a father’s bio kids presumably must be advantaged over his non-kin sufficient for them to not only outcompete them reproductively but also inherit his discerning eye for paternity detection.
So if no great harm would come to his these kids if he gave them less meat than half siblings, then you don’t have selective pressure.
And since this is an unfounded assertion, everything else that follows from it is uncompelling.
I have to admit that I’m really confused by DSeid’s WAG.
DSeid, you seem to be positing that it is advantageous, fitness wise, for men to essentially do the bare minimum. Throw peanuts at the kids you could have sired, not mammoth steaks. Cuz chances they will be a’ight with the bare minimum and you’ll be a’ight not wasting any more resources on them than you have to. There is some sense there, I agree.
So if men evolve this “bare minimum” strategy, why shouldn’t we expect women to also evolve a strategy that responds to it?
If the “bare minimum” strategy is adaptive for males, then it seems to me that it would be quite necessary for women to have coevolved along with it. Now, this term makes no sense, really. “Coevolution” is a term generally reserved for different populations (species) who either under pressure to be ecologically collaborative (mutualisms) or be at war with each other. But let’s not be pedantic and just put that aside for a minute. Men aren’t having sex with each other. They presumably are looking for sex partners who can tolerate their “bare minimum” providership. A man who just wants to throw peanuts at his kids for fear they aren’t his is only going to have an advantage if there are enough women to put up with this kind mess. If most women expect him to give them mammoth steaks before they will consider opening their jungle books for him, then he’s going to be persona non grata if he only offers them the bare minimum. That is not conducive for fitness.
But women who will take the bare minimum from one guy because she’s taking the bare minimum from lots of guys is actually going to be a’ight. And so will her (and their) kids.
For Mr. Bare Minimum’s kids to be OK, he’s gotta rely on “his” woman to be friendly with other males. Because if this woman isn’t friendly with other males, Mr. Bare Minimum’s kids won’t be OK and neither one of them will be evolutionary success stories.
you with the face, I’m kind of at a loss to understand exactly what you’re disputing and what your position is.
The basic mechanism of natural selection: a genetic trait is by definition subject to positive selection if it results in the transmission of more of your own genes - and correspondingly less of other people’s genes - into the next generation.
I assume that you understand this, and it’s not in dispute.
You seem to think my claim is far-fetched. Yet it’s your “calling bullshit” that is far-fetched. Your suggestion that it’s not obvious where the selective pressure comes from is bizarre. Remember that the definition of selective pressure is when more of your own genes and less of other people’s genes get into the next generation; yet you think it’s no more than a just-so story to suggest that a desire to devote more resources to the children that carry your own genes might be a good way to achieve this? It is virtually tautologous with the definition of natural selection.
Now, there are many possible strategies in various species (and, no doubt, among verious human societies) by which males may try to devote resources preferentially to their own children. Not every behavioral strategy will always be workable in every social structure, of course. But conversely when we do see such behaviors, it is highly likely - not a just-so story - that they are adaptive, because they are such a *direct * means of getting your own genes preferentially transmitted.
This, on the other hand, is a just-so story:
You really think “not letting his wife rendezvous with someone else” is not about paternity? Do you think bears shit in rest rooms? Mate-guarding involves restricting or discouraging female activity. It sometimes takes extremely unpleasant forms - FGM, encouraging veiling, cloistering women, foot binding, etc. Yet your just-so story is that this is all about increasing the amount of mutual love, so that the kumbaya factor bonds them together? Do you really think that’s more plausible that the very obvious and direct explanation that it’s about getting more of papa’s genes - rather than someone else’s genes - into the next generation?
Because a hypothesis about adaptive behavior may be hard to prove definitively, but it at least requires consistency with the fundamental principles of evolution by natural selection, and natural selection doesn’t care about any of that. Natural selection is about selfish genes. Sometimes male and female evolutionary objectives are in direct conflict.
All I can think is that you’re demonstrating that my speculation at post #210 is correct. You are resistant to the idea that we might have any adaptive trait that you find morally repugnant. You will be disappointed.
