Y’all might be interested in this part too:
My whole thing is that there is no compelling reason to think that “low status” men don’t have just as many kids (if not more) than high status men.
If we took 10000 randomly prison inmates ages 18-34 and compared them to 10000 randomly 18-34-year-old males working at Fortune 500 companies and compared the two group’s fecundity, would it really surprise anyone to learn that the former has more kids than the latter? My WAG is that the fecundity of the prisoners’ offspring will also be higher than the fecundity of the C-suite. Their kids’ will likely have more emotional baggage than the C-suite’s kids. They will likely have poorer health outcomes and a shorter life expectancy. But their fecundity will still be higher, probably because those kids do have more emotional baggage. They could pop out three kids before they turn 20 and then be killed in a drive-by, and they’d still “win” over the guy who won’t have his first and only kid until he’s 35.
Higher status guy can only have higher fitness if he makes more babies that produce fecund offspring than the low status guy. Again, I am looking around me wondering how can anyone can come to an assessment that the “high status” are making more babies, since I see a lot of low status guys pushing around baby strollers and carrying around infants and talking about multiple “baby mamas”, while I hear a lot of high status guys only talking about their single child. Or talking about how his and his wife’s struggle with infertility. Now, maybe this time is a blip in history and at other times, the high status guy could always be counted on to out-reproduce the low status guy. But it is hard to imagine how this could be outside of very unusual conditions, such as long periods of famine*, given the proclivities of families and communities to pitch-in to help raise children when certain parents can’t or won’t provide for them.
I think it’s very easy to overstate the degree to which our ancestral forefathers prized paternity assurance. Just because men do so now doesn’t mean it has always been a concern.
From the cite I just linked to:
Human societies have allowed for monogamy and polygyny and everything in between. What is practiced probably depends on culture rather than biology. The more collectivist the culture, the less resource inequality there is. Men and women who went out of their way to horde resources for their biological kids were going to create enemies, and enemies don’t share food and water with you. They also don’t help you delivery your baby and the thousands of other things that readily kill humans.
You seem determined to refute any suggestion that humans have any instincts, any genetic predisposition to certain behaviors, by citing exceptions or complexity. Is that what you believe? Or do you accept that we do have instincts, but you disagree on what they are?
If it’s the latter, can you describe an evolutionary mechanism by which indifference to paternity could proliferate in a population?
https://akademiai.com/doi/abs/10.1556/JEP.12.2014.1.1
“The male model was rated significantly more attractive when presented to females in the (luxury high-rise background)…compared to the neutral status context…”
“These findings add to a growing body of work high-lighting the importance of contextual, evolutionarily relevant status cues in male attractiveness judgements.”
Thanks for the lesson, but nothing I said contradicts this definition of fitness.
Actually, humans are interesting because they exhibit multiple reproductive strategies, depending on their environments. We see this when we contrast the reproductive rates of poverty-stricken, war-ravaged undeveloped societies versus the reproductive rates in economically developed, politically stable societies. In the former, resources are allocated towards offspring quantity, with not a whole lot of investment directed towards getting each kid to become self-actualized Nobel prize winners. You could try to do that, of course, but then who’s going to help you carry water seven miles a day? Who is going to help you in the fields? Who is going to help you rebuild the hut when the winds blow it down? People who live subsistence lifestyles need children to be an extra pair of hands. They don’t need them to be healthiest, most self-fullfilled, most status-having people in the world–since these goals really do require a major investment.
In chaotic environments with a high degree of scarcity and uncertainty, it is actually not advantageous to be very particular about the company you keep. This goes for both friendship and sexual partnerships. Because your hard-working husband might just get eaten by a hippo one day, leaving you with a hut full of little ones. Is it advantageous for you to wait for another hard-working dude before you have sex? Or is it advantageous for you to holler at the first guy who catches your fancy, because even if he’s not as hard working as the last guy, he will at least be another person to help with something, whether it be carrying water, chasing away vermin, or bringing in firewood. You know, all those activities that you and the kids have been doing…that practically anyone could do as long as they are somewhat ambulatory and have two brain cells to rub together. All those activities that your hard-working husband excelled in, but for little benefit to himself since now he’s dead.
I guess what I’m trying to say is “good provider” is an awfully low bar to meet when we’re talking about our evolutionary heritage. Since the beginning of time, women have figured out ways to get their needs met without having to get the “best” guy to do it. Somehow single mothers have always managed to raise fecund offspring, and frequently they do this by keeping a steady string of boyfriends who help in a variety of ways. Even though these boyfriends are often quite unremarkable in the “good provider” category. Because it turns out that human societies, despite their cruelty, rarely let single mothers or their kids shrivel up in the wilderness. Men don’t have any problem keeping them company, and the kids have no problem reaching puberty and having their own children.
Since humans aren’t known for having many instincts beyond the most basic, it takes a lot to convince me something is one. Especially when all it takes is a google search to find groups that don’t exhibit that something.
The number and confluence of conditions it would take to make a trait advantageous from a reproductive standpoint is nothing to sneeze at.
Some societies have dealt with this issue by making the primary “paternal” relationship not the one between father and child, but the one between mother’s brother and her children. The mother and her brother came out of the same womb – no question but that her children are related to him. There’s less genetic relationship, but more certainty.
Sure.
Man #1, comes home from a trip, finds his partner with a baby probably not his. Throws a fit, murders her and the child. (Happens sometimes now.) Or even just tosses her out, lots of tribal opprobrium, she and the child aren’t actively killed but the kid doesn’t survive due to lack of resources for proper care and maybe the mother doesn’t either. Man #1 stalks out in a fury looking for somebody to get laid with, but everybody else is guarding their wives and/or the other women are too afraid to take him on; look at the example he just set for what could happen to them, after all.
Man #2, comes home from a trip, finds his partner with a baby probably not his. Says great, what a healthy baby, glad to have it! Come here, honey, long time no see, let’s get it on! – a day or so later, drops in and visits the neighbor whose husband’s not around at the moment, and who has no reason to be afraid to accomodate him if she feels like it; with a pretty good chance that this kid will survive as well as the one he just engendered with his partner.
Which of these guys do you think is going to have more surviving children? Which of these social groups do you think will raise more children to adulthood?
The OP asked whether a man’s wealth was attractive, independent of his other attributes. While wealth is an attractive quality, it’s certainly not the sole determiner of attractiveness.
To me, it’s similar to asking if athletic ability is an independently attractive quality. Of course it is. Why do we find athleticism appealing? We certainly don’t need men to hunt or protect us against rival tribes in 2019, but it’s not a huge leap to theorize that the ability to kick a ball into a net, or tackle another man, is the modern expression of ancient skills required for hunting and protecting.
So even though men don’t hunt or engage in hand-to-hand combat anymore, and therefore those skills aren’t necessary for our survival anymore, we are still hard-wired to find athleticism attractive. Our culture evolved, but our predisposition survives.
Yes, that could work. But it relies upon your supposition that Man #1, who cares about paternity, must also be antisocial brute, so that he’s ejected from society altogether. You’re taking a trait that is adaptive almost by definition - caring about whether it’s your genes going into the next generation - and rendering it non-adaptive only by associating it (for no good reason) with psychopathically antisocial behavior.
Is that really more plausible than the far more straightforward idea that among men who all follow the general principles of not being murderous psychopaths, among men who all participate in a mutually cooperative society where we help one another for mutual benefit, that those who also tend want to devote more resources to offspring that are likely to carry their own genes are likely to get more of those genes into the next generation?
You’re describing group selection here, and it’s worth noting that there’s a broad (not complete) consensus among evolutionary biologists that group selection is not a significant force in evolution. There are rigorous technical arguments based on population genetic theory, but the gist of it is that a trait that benefits your group, where the benefit is diluted among all members of your group, will usually lose out to a trait that focuses a disproportionate benefit only on (genetic) kin within your group. Essentially, the diluted benefit of pure altruism to your group as a whole, giving your group an advantage over other groups, is rarely large enough to outweigh the benefit from traits that favor your own kin over other members of your group.
That’s not to say that cooperation isn’t extremely important in human societies. But it’s important in how we expect such cooperation to operate. Rather than a genetic predisposition to “blind” altruism toward non-kin, we expect a predisposition to cooperate but with careful mutual social supervision that all members of a group are pulling their weight. We work together for mutual benefit by default, but we have a powerful sense of “fairness” within the group, we are extremely sensitive to policing freeloaders who aren’t contributing.
Jerry Coyne, quoted in that Wikipedia article, sums up the consensus:
I’ve not convinced that isn’t generations of social conditioning that makes us venerate money and athleticism. At first glance I wanted to answer the OP in the affirmative - who doesn’t like money, and when has society never held wealthy men in high esteem? But when the question goes to me personally, I’d really much rather plan my life around my own money instead of someone else’s, and I can’t say I hold wealthy men in high esteem. We learn the social order of things, we’re soaking in it, but it all goes to hell when it comes to actual mating. So no. A person’s bank balance or net worth is a very indeterminate feature, either by itself or added to an otherwise great person.
The mention of Elliot Rodger in the OP affects the question because, pre-meltdown, we know that he wanted only the most sought-after women, because they’re the best women, and they in turn were looking for high status men (Rodger’s words) because of their high status. So here are two different entities that deserve each other, kind of like Anna Nicole Smith and her billionaire, which is a social thing of a whole different kind.
A while ago, we discussed this very topic in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=633480&highlight=Evolutionary+psychology.
Then, as now, posters found it hard to believe that prioritizing paternity assurance may not be associated with reproductive success, and could in fact, hurt it. I find this fascinating. Maybe it comes from men overestimating the contribution of primitive men to the survival of women and children? During the vast majority of human existence, children were largely raised by mothers with the assistance of other women. Men provided resources and care to their families. but these investments were not critical and could be compensated for if dad died.
Well, you seem to be assuming your conclusion in your first sentence here.
I think the blank slate notion that humans are infinitely malleable is a “species-parochial” one: we are “on the inside of human behavior looking out”, so to speak, where we are much more sensitive to the differences among members of our own species, rather than the commonalities. The same kind of phenomenon as the cross-race effect in facial identification, but at a species level.
And again, to be crystal clear - nobody is claiming genetic determinism here, that we are mindless slaves to any instinct. Behavioural traits are always probabilistic, they are predispositions toward certain behaviors ceteris paribus. Citations of occasional exceptions and of complexity are not a compelling counterargument. Actual instances of behavior will always depend upon a complex interplay of instinct, culture, and (I hope) reason.
All I can say is that I find this perspective astonishing! Are there any other species that you feel the same way about?
Humans are exceptional in the extraordinary complexity and significance of culture, and in our extremely high intelligence. But I think you can only take that exceptionalism so far. We are still fundamentally the product of evolutionary processes, and more than just a trace of that remains.
I hate to interrupt your kumbaya moment, but that’s simply not true. While modern civilized societies have, indeed, created social assistance programs to care for widows and orphans, these safety nets didn’t exist until the mid-19th century in the form of poor houses aka workhouses, which were wretched places with sky high mortality rates, and barely an improvement over letting them shrivel up and die.
Before that, in Europe and North America, the church provided basic services for the poor, but it’s a gross exaggeration to say that human societies as a whole rarely turned their backs on widows and orphans, unless you consider “alms for the poor” to be a satisfactory safety net.
Today, the poorest countries STILL have no safety nets for the poor. In India’s poorest states, “46% of the population is below 17 years of age.” and there is simply no money for adequate housing and food. These children live in filth and malnutrition, disease and death is a real threat to them.
In Somalia, which has faced a severe drought for years, international aid cannot be distributed because food cartels and soldiers are usurping supplies sent in from charities and withholding it from their own people.
“In some cases, even after the United Nations airdropped food, soldiers ransacked villages and stole the provisions from civilians.”
So, please, let’s not over-romanticize how wealth isn’t important any more. It may not be important to an educated American woman, but it is still the difference between eating and not eating to a significant portion of the world’s population.
Please re-read my post. I didn’t posit that Man #1 got ejected from society, only that he can’t find another partner immediately. It’s Man #1’s wife who (if he didn’t kill her) got ejected from society, because the society was actually backing Man #1. The sort of society that puts a high premium on being certain of paternity does often go in for that sort of thing.
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It’s not a complete consensus. And I’m not sure how social species develop without it.
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What I described doesn’t only rely on group selection. Note that Man #2 in my example, while he may well wind up helping support a kid who isn’t his, also produces on that visit home two pregnancies that are of his own engendering; while Man #1 winds up producing none.
– now my scenario obviously doesn’t always win out, because here we are, not for the most part behaving like bonobos. But the challenge was “can you describe an evolutionary mechanism by which indifference to paternity could proliferate in a population?” and I think I’ve done that.
I can’t. Now, can you name a society in which women held or hold a disproportionate share of the power? I don’t mean a matrilineal society where women are bossed around by their brothers and uncles instead of by their husbands and fathers. I mean one in which women own property and men are property, or at least one in which women out-earn men on average.
Here’s an alternative hypothesis: humans are hard-wired to seek power and status, and culture tells us how to get those things. In patriarchal cultures, boys and men are taught to work or fight for power and status, and girls and women are told to get power and status from men. Show me a society in which women still seek wealthy men despite having access to their own wealth, while men still care less about their partner’s wealth, and I’ll believe women are hard-wired to look for good providers.
No, but it is a strong consensus. And with all due respect, if you don’t understand how prosociality could evolve without group selection, that’s just a gap in your knowledge of mainstream evolutionary biology rather than argument that it can’t happen.
Yes, and that wasn’t my primary objection. Your scenario required that a genetically determined association between paternity preference and antisocial behavior that’s sufficiently extreme to preclude mating opportunities so some significant degree must always be present in order to remove the paternity preference trait from the population.
Sure, but I wasn’t playing some kind of gotcha that such a scenario could not possibly exist. You haven’t provided a plausible or sustainable evolutionary scenario.
In your scenario, once these highly antisocial Man #1 types have disappeared (i.e. the genetic determinants of that behavior are lost from the population), we are left with a population where men all believe in the fundamental principle of a mutually cooperative and supportive society. Among these men, any genetic tendency to also want to preferentially devote somewhat more resources to children that bear their own genes (provided that can be done without alienating everyone else) will tend to proliferate.
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but how do we actually know with any kind of certainty how cavemen lived, when there’s no record of their culture? We actually have no earthly idea how “the guy who goes out and hunts the mammoth” and “the guy who hangs around singing songs” and “the woman who goes out and looks for berries” conducted themselves in life, right? All we have are skeletons and some primitive drawings - how can we possibly make any inferences about the kind of society that these people lived in, or their attitudes about relationships?
The modern world, obviously - per studies cited above that women on average across all modern societies show a significant preference for wealthy men, other things being equal. That’s not to suggest that women have equal access to wealth in any modern society, but female access to wealth varies considerably among modern societies, and we’d expect to see a negative correlation between female access to wealth and female preference for wealthy men if there were no genetic predisposition to the trait. I’m not aware of any evidence for that?