There is a tendency to anthropomorphize the process of evolution as if it has goals instead of being a process that simply occurs, and we tend to imagine that traits are conscious tactical choices by individuals rather than the results of altering the odds in populations of many individuals.
The players in the game are the genes. The game will unfold in a way such that genes that cause traits that cause more of that gene to occur over multiple generations of play relative to other genes will be selected for. Accomplishing that means incurring the least fitness costs for the most fitness benefits. An action that has risks of low cost can have risks of low benefit to be selected for, so long as the product of risk and cost is less than the product of risk and benefit. An action of certain high cost OTOH has to have high odds of high benefit that exceed the high cost value to be selected for.
Hopefully we are in complete agreement so far.
Traits that in which the riskbenefit product are greater than the riskcost for fitness will be selected for. Behaviors that result in those things will be selected for.
For the male side the act of bringing a child into the world is a low cost item. IF a male has high confidence of paternity then behaviors that cost more, investing over a long period of time and not having as many other children, may be worthwhile to for the payoff of increasing the odds of that child with those genes getting to be able to successfully reproduce his or herself later. Behaviors that would result in investing in a way that does not result in an adequate genetic fitness return on the investment will be selected against. Men have an option of a small bare minimum and an option of making a substantial investment and traits that select the one that pays off better over many rolls in different circumstances will be selected for. Walking away if there is not high confidence of paternity is one play that works if the environment is such that doing such gives them more opportunities.
Women in general have no choice but to make a costly investment to have a child, one that literally risks death a fair fraction of the time over history. That cost is their bare minimum investment but their minimum is high. There is no option to make low cost plays in female reproduction.
Part of human evolution has been our brains trying to be part of the competition and cultures altering the competition landscape in ways that our traits cannot keep up with.
So of course yes, an exceptional culture can arise in which the man has no option to make the big investment with certainty and is left with only the option of trying to spread his lower stake bets and diversify his investments. That result can only happen if all the women keep paternity in doubt. I would be curious to see information about those cultures rather than just having been told they exist as I suspect that there must be specific circumstances that have resulted in the circumstance.
Okay. Trying to find some sources for those cultures I’ve found this and maybe not as exceptional as I would have thought. Still it does seem to result from certain circumstances.
The multiple males are also sometimes related, such as brothers as in the Tibet example, hence some assurance of kin selection may be operative as well.
It’s about access to sex. Paternity is a natural consequence of this, but when we talk about biological impulses and instincts, what we really should be talking about is a man’s sex drive.
Drawing this distinction matters because it explains why so many men are deadbeat fathers today. It also accounts for the success of strips clubs and prostitutes. *Left to their “natural” devices, men frequently expend more resources trying to get sex than they will taking care of their offspring. * It takes the influence of culture, child support laws, and intellect to override this.
All this shit came into being relatively recently, when we became farmers. My point from the beginning is for most of our evolutionary history, there is no evidence these practices occurred, so positing an evolutionary basis for them is without merit. Human aren’t predisposed to hack off women ‘s clitorises.
I’m actually surprised you think this is so crazy. It’s not a “just so story” if it has evidence behind it. See this paper:
This in the conclusion:
This supports my “kumbaya” story. You have no support for yours.
Evolutionary speaking, a males sex drive is a means to the end of reproduction. Males will expend more resources seeking sex than taking care of their offspring because in a situation where sex is plentiful, producing a greater number of offspring has a bigger evolutionary payout.
So guarding the tribes women from strangers was unheard of? Killing other males for access to preferred mates was not necessary?
*"In the model presented here, male provisioning and female faithfulness coevolve in a self-reinforcing manner. At the end, except for a very small proportion of the top-ranked individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning females who have evolved very high fidelity to their mates. Overall, females are not predicted to become completely faithful, but rather, the level of their faithfulness is expected to be controlled by a balance between selection for better genes (potentially supplied by top-ranked males) and better access for food and care (provided largely by low-ranked males).
Overall, my results confirm the theoretical plausibility of what has been viewed as a critical step in the evolution of our own species—the transition from promiscuity to strong pair-bonding. The model shows that such a sexual revolution could have been initiated by low-ranked males who started provisioning females to get matings; after the process got underway, it would lead to a kind of self-domestication, and the end result is a group-living species comprised of provisioning males and largely faithful females."*
Did they use the words “alpha” for top-ranked males and “beta” for provisioning low-ranked males?
Honestly, that is not evidence, it is a plausible model. Not the same thing. And what they are saying that there are competing strategies at work which may result in a balance where true paternity is the rule but false paternity a not terribly rare exception. Something that male reproductive strategies will respond to.
That is what co-evolving means.
Also, to my eye that paper models the transition from a chimpanzee/bonobo type sexual interaction to the human pairbonding one. Other posters in the thread has explained to you how reproductive strategies function within the current setup.
How feasible was it to guard women from other men when they off tracking big game? What were the implications to tribal harmony and stability if killing sexual competitors was par the course? If you are in a tribe with your closest male buddies and relatives, your inclination is not to treat them like enemies. You need these people to hunt with.
The best evidence for how our ancestors behaved is seen in present day hunter-gatherering cultures. Can you find reports of them doing all this killing and guarding?
The best evidence for how our ancestors behaved is seen in present day hunter-gatherering cultures. Can you find reports of them doing all this killing and guarding?
Humans currently display multiple reproductive strategies. Even in American society, this is true. You find folks in lifelong monogamous marriages and you find folks of both genders who are players. And you also see everything in between (like the popular but ever vilified lifelong pairings with some secretive creeping on the side). If we did not have religions that make adultery a “sin”, then it would be quite reasonable to surmise that lifelong monogamy would not be the prevailing norm.
It is certainly not immediately apparent how limiting males to a single sex partner for any significant period of time would be advantageous ecologically or evolutionarily. So the more parsimonious explanation is that monogamy (or at least the illusion of such) is advantageous for social/cultural reasons. In other words, there may be some ecological benefit to societies that promote/elevate monogamy–even if that benefit doesn’t extend to the fitness of individuals. There are likely some big trade-offs to indiscriminate sexual activity in a population. Societies that have some codes of conduct may able to avoid or mitigate those trade-offs better than societies that lack them.
Well, I would say that historical hunter-gatherer societies are better models. There is a wide variety in aggression in hunter-gatherer societies, and the currently extant ones are not only often stressed by the presence of state societies, but also the product of a selective proceeds where many HG societies failed to make it to today. (I feel I should still point out the Sentinelese lethal reactions to strangers)
But in general, hunter-gatherer societies are incredibly violent, vastly more so than state societies. “Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers” by Allen and Jones is a good work on it.
However, a lot of the basic numbers can be found here.
Much work could be, and have been, done on answering that. I’ve seen an interesting article on how humans appear to act in a semi-polygamous fashion.
Haven’t gone away, but need to do a complicated answer, and no time right now for complicated answers. Weather has dried out (allowing fieldwork) and may not stay that way. Will come back to this thread sometime within the next couple of days.
Prehistoric groups went to war with one another, and they didn’t take a kind view towards strangers. This was especially the case when resources were limited.
This is not necessarily evidence that tribesmen regular killed each other over women or practiced oppressive “mate-guarding”.
OK. The weather’s drying out and I’m pretty much running out of time for this; but here’s something, at least, even if I don’t have time to work out everything I wanted to say.
That was harder than I expected. I found lots of references, but not much in the way of clear descriptions of specific societies; maybe my search skills aren’t up to it (what I did find was more under “matrilineal inheritance” and less under “avuncular societies”; maybe there are more useful search terms than either which I don’t know about), and I really don’t have much time for this this time of year. But here’s some reading on the subject, anyway:
Lots of things are “average” behavior; this doesn’t mean that the outliers don’t matter, or that the outlying behavior hasn’t evolved just as much as the average has.
You’re making a distinction that I’m not making. Human cultures have evolved, and culture is adaptive. Moral reasoning is also something that’s evolved. A preference for one’s own children is evolutionarily adaptive, and yet again I’m not arguing that it isn’t – but there are situations in which not showing such a preference is also evolutionarily adaptive.
Some species have evolved systems in which many individuals never mate at all. Doesn’t mean those systems don’t work from an evolutionary perspective.
That’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is people saying that behavior that we find morally preferable also has an evolved basis.
Where do you think it comes from, if it’s not evolved?
Indeed. And men do often (though not always) raise their stepchildren as if they were their own.
From the context of your posts, when you say “evolved basis”, I infer “developed as a best practice”. I don’t get the sense you’re talking about natural selection as it relates to biology and genetic traits. Am I correct?
When Reimann posts about selective pressure and adaptive traits, I infer he is talking in biological terms. Not so much what is and isn’t a best practice, but rather, instincts, drives, and genetic predispositions. Hardwiring, in other words.
I believe we’re creatures that rely more on “best practices” (which are taught) much more so than “instincts” (which are in-born habits). These are two different things in my mind, and it’s possible they are getting conflated in this discussion. And it’s possible this is where disagreement is coming from.
I quibble with your use of “best” though I agree with your larger point. I think when it comes to either biological or cultural evolution, we see “good enough” emerge more frequently than “best”. Because “best” assumes that all the possible options have been tested and that what we see in the present-day is the “victor” among all those possibilities. But I don’t think “best” is always the victor. Sometimes we wind up with something that works “good enough” and it becomes fixated in a population due to sheer chance more than anything else.
Natural selection (or either genes or cultural values) is just one way of explaining a particular fact pattern. And it isn’t even the most interesting one.
No, you are not correct. I’m talking about biology and genetically-based inherited abilities.
Societies and individuals make different choices about what to do with those abilities; and certainly the choices we make are dependent on what we learn (and on what we decide to teach.) But we’re not doing anything we haven’t evolved to be able to do.
thorny locust, you may find this article interesting. It’s part of what gets broadly referred to as “the grandmothering hypothesis.” Our species increased lifespan included women living past reproductive age with men staying fertile longer, thus the fertile Age Sex Ratio (ASR) potentially became skewed to more fertile men then women, and grandmothers who could help their daughters (and maybe even great grand daughters) take care of more children into adulthood themselves.
In this context I find the emergence of polyandry in which several usually closely related males bond with one female generally in circumstances of extremely skewed ASR, all the more interesting as it makes perfect sense in terms of tradeoffs of better guarding from unrelated competition with the price being some closely related competition may also contribute to the children the highest status male works to provision.
My grandmother (on my father’s side) had nine children: seven boys and two girls. It was (still is) a blue-collar family; of the nine, only one went to college.
Each of the seven men went into the skilled trades. They worked their asses off and did pretty very well for themselves.
My two aunts sought out - and married - millionaires.
Oh yeah. This thread is about female mate choice …
Let’s back up. Basic principle: if there is a feature that females of a species who can choose, choose preferentially to mate with, then that feature is highly likely to be selected for. The features females are likely to select for are those that increase the odds of their investment paying off with more children with their genes able to reach successful reproduction themselves. That could be by virtue of “healthy” genes, or by other factors that increase the odds of survival to reproduction of the young with their genes.
Humans have big enough brains that behaviors can be predisposed to be different in different circumstances.
Is there really any argument over that?
Now given a circumstance in which there is zero provisioning provided by a male, the male mates and then does not contribute differentially to his own young than to any other young, if at all, then females who select for the males whose genes are likely to produce the healthiest children, children most likely to be able to not get killed by a predator or in other aggression, most likely to get food and resources, least likely to get disease, so on. Some of that assessment is made by evaluation of physical traits, and possibly some by what resources the male has (as a sign of having the toolkit to get those resources, some of which may be genetic in origin). A female that did not select for those things that were in fact correlated with better odds of the young with their genes surviving to reproduction would be selected against. There is no plausible mechanism by which a female who selected for males likely to produce less healthy and less able to procure resources young would be selected for.
In a circumstance in which males do provision then females that did not select to bond with males who showed better ability to provision would be selected against.
If in that circumstance males with more provisions were not the same males who were likely to produce the healthiest progeny then there may be some advantage to a female choosing the healthier over the wealthier if the health was more likely to contribute to survival of the young to reproduction, or in that circumstance, was was able bond with the male who could provision the best but mate with a “healthier” male, and if the female could get more than one male to contribute provisions better yet. More provisions and healthier the children, the better.
Note: in a culture without much resource differential wealth is best thought of as status of the member in the group, the social capital.
Again, CULTURE can swamp genetic predispositions, in short to medium terms anyway, and can change faster than genetic adaptations can keep up. We have brains big enough to decide what is right that are other than what was the most effective fitness choice over evolutionary history. But the toolkit we have which allows for such cultural impacts, including ones in which specific ideas and changes in values can spread over a short to medium term, even with negative fitness impacts that would manifest over the longer term, is also the product of selection.
Will read all that in more detail, including the linked article, as I have the chance.
But human females, at least (quite possibly females of other species also), need to select for an additional quality which you’ve missed: we need to select mates who aren’t likely to significantly damage us. A woman who gets injured is going to have more trouble staying alive and also more trouble keeping her children alive.
I think there’s also considerable evidence that human women select for mates who can tell/sing good stories. That’s probably both an indication (on average) of greater intelligence and an indication of being better able to function in human societies; but it’s not necessarily related directly and obviously to either health or most versions of wealth, though it can lead to those indirectly. (It does help gain social capital, so if you’re defining that as wealth then it does match. But in the current society I’m living in I’ve run into people with huge amounts of social capital but very little money.)
A very good point on the not likely to damage and one that likely counterweights the selection pressure of being a male who dominates other males (as that may also be a male more likely to be abusive). That said the number of women who stay in abusive relationships suggests that the historic advantage of having that dominant male was bigger.
Which of those forms of wealth are more attractive now? My WAG is that in modern Western circumstances the same male at median material wealth or even a bit less with high social capital would be more attractive than at higher material wealth but less social capital.
I tend to agree with your WAG. My WAG is that the extent to which women fetishize wealth is directly proportional to the magnitude of income and gender inequality in a society. So your WAG is consistent with this.
The OP uses the disclaimer “all other things being equal”, but the reason this is unrealistic is that wealthy men are not the same as non-wealthy ones. Not just in the traits that have helped them become wealthy, but also wealth itself affects what kind of mate you’re going to be. Between a middle class guy and a rich guy, who generally is going to be more forgiving of their mate’s physical flaws and not pressure them to get expensive plastic surgery to stay attractive? Who is more likely to see it as their duty to wake up at 2am to rock the toddler to sleep? Who is going to feel like they always have the upper hand in the relationship and therefore, can forget anniversaries, birthdays, Valentines, and their kid’s baseball games with impunity?
Women who don’t fetishize wealth can do this risk assessment and figure out that, even if they theoretically possessed the necessary traits to attract a rich man, finding one that would be a good long term mate (based on their personal values, which are usually shaped by their own upbringing) is going to be very hard to do. This is most certainly the case if they’ve ever had brushes with self-entitled rich guys; millionaires fall off the pedestal fast when you see how money affects their behavior and expectations.
I don’t see why these same dynamics wouldn’t occur in the far off past.
I do know some quite rich couples. While there is some plastic surgery being done I’ve heard it as usually over the man’s objecting to it and the woman making the choice for her own reasons. Since wealth is also correlated with education and education with more liberal values I see more of the wealthy with involved hands on up in the middle of the night fathering than in lower middle class families anyway. And I see both groups with equal numbers of men who worship their wives.
I am sure there are some actual “trophy wives” but I do not think that such is the norm, or that middle class men are less likely to be wanting to broadcast their status by the beauty of their partner, to their ability to afford to do so.
You seem to have some cartoonish soap operaish stereotype in mind of wealthy men in relationships but I do not know what sort of basis that stereotype has in actual fact.
