I certainly agree that evo-psych is overburdened with plausible-sounding hypotheses and precious little evidence; and that it’s misused to claim support for regressive social agendas, on the fundamentally flawed notion that Darwinian fitness among remote human ancestors has some bearing on what’s right or appropriate for modern society; or on some flawed notion of genetic determinism that it limits what’s possible for modern humans.
But bad science and the misuse of science in this area does not imply that the equally misguided blank slate social science model is correct.
To be crystal clear, in the discussion earlier in this thread I was only ever talking about a likely genetic component of human nature. I was not implying any notion of genetic determinism, and I was certainly not suggesting that there is anything “right” about such instincts - in an ethical sense, or in the sense of what we believe is appropriate for female/male roles in a modern civilized society.
But let’s be clear - the blank slate model of human nature is preposterous. Natural selection influences animal behavior as well as animal bodies, and human animals are no exception. We do have an instinctual endowment from the ancestral environment in which we evolved, because evolution doesn’t work fast enough for everything about our the genetic component of our behavior to have changed completely in the few thousand years of modern civilization. Many aspects of that ancestral environment, including female/male roles, were not in accord with what’s right for modern civilization, so it’s likely that we have some instinctive behaviors that are somewhat in tension with the ideals of modern society, and I do think that’s an essential aspect to consider when thinking about what we want our society to be, and how to achieve it.
But if the consensus is that the vocabulary “hard wired” was generally understood to be synonymous with genetic determinism - then of course I agree that’s completely wrong. Our heritable instincts are a component of 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.
No, I’m criticizing “just so” stories that are presented as fact and also don’t make any sense once you understand 1) which strategy always “wins” in a natural selection game, and 2)you look at the world we live in, where the women making most of the most fecund offspring are NOT the ones wedded to the “good providers”.
I mean, why isn’t my “just so” story just as good if not better than yours? At least might fits with the available facts.
“Nothing”? I beg to differ!
While mammoth hunters are out hunting for days and weeks on end, which kind of caveman “wife” do you think is happier? The woman who keeps her cave door closed? Or the woman who keeps her cave door open to any guy who might come by? Guys who will likely bring her things to make it worth her while to be friendly? Happy woman = healthy woman. She’ll have the energy to chase after her toddlers before they tumble off the side of the cliff. And having a FBW might also be useful when the two of them are out gathering grubs, because she’ll need an extra pair of eyes in case a lion is stalking her (as well as her kids). I mean, it’s not like male companionship all by itself doesn’t offer a shitload of ancillary benefits that can improve the fitness of one’s offspring. If I had a cave full of kids and my “man” was out hunting, I’d really appreciate another guy standing watch over us, being our protector, bringing us firewood and stuff.
Hard-working dudes tend to be hella tired when they come from slaying mammoths. Guess who’s got plenty of sexual energy? The lay-about guy who’s only been tending fires and watching cave entrances all day. So why should we assume that Hard-working Dude puts it down exactly like lay-about Guy does? Lay-about Guy may be twice as fecund as Hard-working Guy not just because he has more free time to fuck, but because his energy is allocated more towards reproduction than towards labor. He not only has more energy for sex, but more energy to woo.
Yes, I can come up with “just so” stories the same as anyone here. Thing is, I know mine as “just so” stories. And at least mine make some sense! “Women are hard wired to be attracted to good providers” actually doesn’t. I know this because 90% of teenaged girls are attracted to boys who run the gamut of the “least likely to succeed” spectrum–much to their parents’ chagrin. I can explain why this is the case with my stories. Your story, not so much.
What we see in other species is that male partners have to demonstrate some value to potential female partners. They sport bright feathers, sing loud-ass songs, and do funny-looking dances to show the wimmens they got it going on. And that is exactly what human males do. These behaviors don’t map onto “wealth”, though, as much as we might want them to. A woman who swoons over a guy with big muscles and swagger isn’t attracted to his “good provider traits”. She’s attracted to his bright feathers, loud-ass songs, and funny-looking dances. And that’s really all we can say without concocting a story.
So it seems to me that it is you who is making humans out to be “different”. At any rate, anyone who is familiar with my posting history knows that I’m a huge determinist. I’m just not a fan of attributing everything we do to evolution, at least not without separating culture out first.
You know who has more babies in American society? It isn’t the women who are waiting for guys with high-paying jobs. Because those women are waiting until their 30s and 40s to have kids and are only having 1-2 kids. You better believe that women who are totally OK with a guy who just makes them laugh and brings them snacks sometimes are having more kids than that. Even if they only have one or two kids more than the “waiters”, they are still “winning” over the women who are more selective. And this is not something you can just wave away as me telling a “just so” story. This is a fact.
Thudlow has articulated the issue that I’ve been having a problem with (besides the “hard wired” bit).
No one has bothered to really define what kind of “attraction” is being discussed.
There’s attraction in the sense of “Ooh, I’d really love to have sex with someone like her/him!” And then there’s attraction in the sense of “Ooh, I’d love to have a wife/husband like her or him.”
The former is almost certainly biologically driven. But the latter is much more dictated by cultural/social factors. Sixty years ago, there were hardly any black-white interracial relationships. Is that because black people had a biological aversion to white people? Or is it because the cultural/social factors that caused members of the two races to not even consider each other as potential life partners? Kind of the same way that there are cultural/social factors that cause women of a certain socioeconomic class to not even consider men of a certain socioeconomic class.
If we were a communal society, one where there was no marriage and all resources were shared, do people really think women would still be driven to seek out the “good providers” like a bunch of automatons? How would this biological imperative even manifest itself in such a society? Is having a relationship with a guy who comes bearing gifts akin to selecting a guy for being a “good provider”? Or it more like selecting a guy for having good manners and being sweet?
P.S. - You keep accusing those you disagree with of telling “Just so stories”, but it’s me, DSeid and Riemann who are bringing the cites. Where are your cites showing that the positive effect of wealth on Male attractiveness is primarily cultural?
Well, clearly I won’t convince you on prima facie plausibility grounds, but I leave that aspect for others to judge.
So it will have to be evidence. And there’s strong cross-cultural evidence (cited earlier in the thread) that resources are an important factor in the attractiveness of a mate - and overwhelmingly much more so for women and men. This is exactly what we see in other species that reproduce in a similar way. And if you’re disputing that female humans are generally more selective in mate choice than male humans, I’ll have to question whether you are really a human being or Kodos in a mask! Of course, it’s difficult to untangle genetic from cultural factors in these behavioral phenomena, but at least this behavior is consistent with my hypothesis; it contradicts yours.
You’re jumping to modern society. Our instincts didn’t evolve in modern society. I think the principal reason for having this discussion is to understand how instincts may have evolved in an ancestral environment that was quite different, and how they may sometimes be in tension with what we believe is appropriate and right in modern civilized society.
I think what we’re saying, ultimately, is that when women say that a wealthy man doesn’t imply an “attractive man” to them, there isn’t anything incongruous about this. It’s what you’d expect in a society where there is gender equality.
Just about every hunter-gatherer society obtained most of its caloric intake from what the “gatherers” produced than what the “hunters” produced. But gatherers were the ones who kept everyone alive and healthy. The hunters brought happiness since meat is delicious.
I mean, if we want to talk about the “state of nature”, then let’s talk about it. In a state of nature, there would be no real concept of “wife” and “husband”. Everyone would be living communally, sharing resources communally. So a woman, by virtue of living in that society and contributing to that society, will benefit from the “good provider’s” efforts even if she never has sex with him. She’ll benefit the same as the chick who has twelve babies with the “good provider”. So there is no cost to her at all if she has sex with the guy who’s too lazy to go hunting and would prefer to bang on his drum to chase the hyenas all day. She and her kids are going to be taken care of regardless. In this kind of society, it would actually be disadvantageous for a woman to be too particular about who she has sex with, since doing so might actually alienate her from guys who would otherwise be her friend and look out for her.
In hunter-gatherer societies the bulk of nutrition is brought in by the foragers, not the hunters. So, actually, the guy with the small useful muscles who knows where to find the good berries and shit is the one you want. And those guys are spending more time with the women who were mostly foragers too, giving them more access to randy ladies and therefore more opportunities to reproduce. Big muscles require a lot of protein to maintain and are the first things to go when food gets scarce. The strongest evolutionary advantage went to the smart ones who could remember where the good food was and how best to prepare it to get every usable calorie from what was brought in. Hominids may LIKE meat but it’s not a requirement aside from those in far northern climates where there’s basically no growing season worth mentioning. So for as much as modern humans would like to fetishize the big strong hunter, those are not the most successful ones at actual survival.
With all due respect, that sounds very much like a just so story.
Earlier you asked me to provide evidence that women considered wealthier men to be more attractive. I cited a study showing that women in America, Europe, and China, when rating photos of men out of 10, rated the same men two points higher when they were told he was rich. There were no confounding variables. The results were true across cultures, including one ostensibly Communist culture.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. If you think this can be explained by cultural influences, please provide studies showing this.
And, bringing all this back around to the attractiveness of wealthy men, in my experience rich people have a remarkable lack of resiliency. The bulk of them come from wealth to start out with (the myth of the “self made man” is persistent but not actually congruent with reality for the most part) and they have a very scarce tool box with which to cope with life–basically, if they can’t throw money at it they don’t have a clue how to get around a problem. Rich people tend to be whiny when you get them into a situation where their money doesn’t do them any good and they’ve never learned any other ways to cope so they tend to bitch and complain and bluster rather than getting on with the job of fixing stuff. Which, as far as I’m concerned, removes ANY attractiveness they might have had initially. Being around a bunch of rich inconvenienced people (Fyre Festival, anyone?) is a sure fire cure for ever thinkig you might want to bang any of them. Too much money and privilege makes people weak, pissy, brittle, boring and absolutely no fun to be around. Anyone who can put up with that shit is probably pretty damaged themselves so good luck to the lot of them. They deserve each other.
It seems to me that self-made wealth and inherited wealth are probably correlated with diametrically opposite traits. The former is likely correlated with assertiveness, resourcefulness, etc.; the latter with the opposite, for the reasons you describe.
I never said that women aren’t more selective than men are…(although to hear men talk, they’d like you to believe their penises only get hard for slender blondes with big boobs). Women have a vested interest in “manning the gates”, given the high risks she’s taken on with pregnancy. Plus, sex for women has a high likelihood of being very unpleasant. A guy can bust a nut in just about anything with a wet hole. A woman isn’t going to let just any ole guy grind up against her unless she knows there will be something in it for her–even if it’s not an orgasm.
But none of this has to do with biologically driven wealth-seeking propensities in women. Like, why assume that women are driven to seek out men who fit a certain profile (good-looks, good physique, confidence, etc.) because these traits because these are associated with wealth? Does it not make more sense that these traits map onto physical health and well-being? Is a female song bird that hears a male singing a really loud piercing song likely making the same assessment? “Healthy males sing that way. Healthy males produce healthy offspring. Ergo, let me get some of that dick.” If we are going to reduce women’s decision-making to the most basic calculus, why not jump to this conclusion than the one that actually isn’t born out by evidence in modern society?
I mean, we can assume that “healthy men = good provider”. But in a society where men aren’t expected to singularly “provide”, then that particular spin to the calculus is totally unnecessary. Men being the singular provider is not a human norm. That’s a modern invention.
Instincts don’t get wiped out just because we’re in “modern times”. At any rate, you could look at any snapshot in human history and find plenty of women having sex with low-status, ne’er-do-well men and having more kids than their more cautious, selective sistern. All you need is a good number of not-very-discriminating sexual active women in a population to totally thrwart “hard wiring” of attraction towards any one kind of male sex partner. Since women seem to love all kinds of men (except for the angry violent misogynistic fucked-up kind) , then I speculate that the genes of the not-very-discriminating women are the ones most women have inherited.
That is a very good point and actually covered in research quite a bit. Both both are considered to have significant biological contributors.
The first is a marker for gene quality selection and the second for resource selection that increase the likelihood of having progeny survival to reproduction themselves. Of course there is much overlap. In terms of women selecting men the first includes more of what gets often lumped as “masculine” features and the second is more status features. Culture definitely has impacts on this but in complicated ways.
TL/DR? As a nation becomes healthier physical aspects of masculinity are less the drivers of partner choice by women.
If we lived in a communal society I would expect people to cheat on the rules and soon have a world in which everyone was equal but some more equal than others with that translating eventually into reproductive success.
Smart Aleq, cite please that in most HG societies men are mostly foraging. Oh there are some examples but HG is a wide selection of cultures, including temperate, subarctic, arctic, and maritime environments. I can this anyway.
But it isn’t. “Wife” and “Husband” are constructions of our society, and so is the concept of “monogamous marriage”. Hell, you can find modern societies that don’t follow this framework. So of course we should not apply our standards to our caveman ancestors. I invite you to do some basic research in anthropology if you haven’t.
I’ve shared my thoughts on this already, but I’ll do it again.
These facts do not lead us to a biological-based explanation. But they do point to a cultural one. Yes, even with the evil communists thrown in there. Because even in a communist culture, wealth is associated with status and prestige. Why wouldn’t that enhance someone’s profile? I’m sure if we showed pictures of average looking women to a bunch of guys and told half the guys that these women were high-fashion runway models, they too would rate their attractiveness higher than the guys who weren’t given that information. All this tells me is that people are highly suggestible. It doesn’t tell me anything about their “hard wiring” with regards to male attractiveness.
Okay, so what in theory would you accept as good evidence, because from where I’m sitting it sounds like your hypothesis is completely unfalsifiable. It seems like there’s no possible evidence I could present, even if I was given free rein to just make it up, that would convince you. If I’m wrong, tell me; what would convince you?
You have been given a compelling cite that it does.
You’re just revisiting the same straw man again. Nobody has suggested that women are instinctively concerned about the wealth of a partner to the absolute exclusion of all else. Just that it’s a component. Of course women in the ancestral environment were also concerned about the genetic physical endowment of any potential mate.
Evolutionary fitness is not determined by the number of babies you pump out. It’s determined by the number of grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. Humans are one of the most altricial species, and also one of the species with the greatest amount of Male Parental Investment in particular. Unlike the scattergun approach of (say) frogs, we have a small number of offspring, and devote a great deal of effort to raising them successfully. Fitness is highly correlated with the amount of resources that parents bring to the table, both during gestation and for the very long postnatal period when children are highly dependent on their parents for survival.
Sex serves social purposes in humans, not just reproductive purposes. Note that we don’t just go into heat during limited fertile periods and save our energy the rest of the time.
If additional sex makes the men more likely to hang around and help raise the kids, that’s a plus. If additional sex with multiple men makes it more likely that not only one, but several men will be likely to help raise the kids, that’s a plus. If additional sex makes both/all participants more likely to feel good about each other and want to cooperate with each other in general instead of either wandering off or beating each other up, that’s a plus.
Seems to me you can make just as good an evolutionary argument for us to behave like bonobos.
ETA: I don’t think ‘you can get this answer by showing people pictures along with an extremely limited amount of additional information’ is a compelling cite. That situation hasn’t got much to do with what people do in practice.
Are you talking about the cite that DSeid posted? Because that’s another one that doesn’t allow us to draw conclusions about biology and attractiveness.
High status men have historically showed greater reproductive fitness that other men. I don’t think this is too shocking of a finding. All other things being equal, a guy who can bring home more mammoth meat is a better economic deal than one who can’t. So pragmatic women will more likely tie their wagons to him. And as long as he keeps bringing home that meat, having his kids won’t be a big ask. In contrast, men of lower status might be loved and lusted after by their women just as much as Mammoth Guy, but if they reproduce less because of poorer health and quality of life (leading to more infertility, maternal-infant mortality, or even more abortion and infanticide), then they will leave behind fewer progeny.
None of this should be conflated with attraction. Like I said before, men may not see rich women as automatically more beautiful than non-rich. But how much do you want to bet they’d turn a rich woman down if marrying into luxury was a possibility?
It was a biological reality (before DNA testing) that maternity was certain but paternity was not. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s obvious to the point of tautology that there would have been strong selective pressure in the ancestral environment for males to avoid devoting resources to children that they did not father. Therefore, it has historically been a widespread feature of human society that men are (in various ways) concerned about “policing” female sexual activity.
In modern society, such concerns are largely irrelevant, even under some flawed assumption that evolutionary fitness is an ideal that we should aspire to. And more important, through intelligence and cultural growth we now have sophisticated ideals about what a civilized society means, about fairness and equality. We voluntarily adopt children who don’t carry our genes. And even if a man is obsessively concerned about paternity, we have DNA testing. Such concerns should have absolutely no bearing on a woman’s sexual freedom and autonomy.
So, if someone tries to portray their regressive slut-shaming attitude as something noble, that female chastity is specifically a virtue as part of god’s plan or some such nonsense? Well, I think the evolutionary context helps us to challenge this kind of crap. An obsession with female chastity is not some kind of noble god-given morality. It is quite literally the behavior of a dumb dirty ape. These people are weakly rationalizing the primitive instincts of stupid animals who have no choice but to follow primal instincts, who are incapable of elevating their values to any kind of true reasoned morality. Humans are better than that.