The fact that so many men are willing to provide for step-children and adopted children tells me it is safer to assume culture is at is the wheel rather than genes. It is the biological urge to have sex–not necessarily reproduce–that makes men willing to sacrifice resources to get what they crave. That his biological children benefit from this sacrifice is just an added benefit! All one has to do is go to a strip club and see the amount of “resources” the ladies walk away with it; this is money that could easily be going to their customers’ kids but instead is going to complete strangers (and presumably other men’s kids). This shouldn’t even be a thing if men are hardwired to protect their precious resources against non-kin.
Policing and controlling women’s sexuality is another phenomenon that is very tempting to ascribe to paternity assurance, but that shouldn’t be assumed. Why isn’t the explanation simply that once small tribes of trusted klansmen expanded to become villages peopled with less trusted strangers, men became more territorial, possessive, and hierarchal as resources stretched. These traits created more competition and inequality; men had more of an incentive to horde and protect what was “theirs” as the haves accrued more power over the have-nots.
A woman who was free to love whom she pleased could drop a man as soon as the going got rough. Not a big deal if you can readily woo another woman to take her place, but if you can’t readily woo another woman? Then the game changes. All it takes is a few men to start using their physical advantage to coerce women into submissiveness. These men will have more consistent access to sex than less coercive men. These men can also focus their time and energy on amassing more resources rather than wooing new girlfriends. Over time, all men operate like this. And it doesn’t require genes to keep this going. Just culture.
It is thought by many evolutionary anthropologists that only with the settling down to agrarian (permanent residence) culture did it become commonplace that a child was dependent primarily or exclusively on their parents for food and protection and whatnot. Our tribal ancestors more likely took the attitude that the band as a whole took care of children, as well as generically sharing food and resources amongst all the members as a general rule to begin with.
We should revise assumptions about “female people are hardwired to seek a provider”. The tendency to do so, rather than being ingrained in our genes, is more likely a response to the actual situation of being dependent on a male’s ability to provide (especially in the context of being allowed to choose a mate once and then being stuck with that choice), plus the phenomenon of each girl growing up in a culture in which that is what is eroticized and romanticized.
If their wealth is a reflection of a strong and successful personality, definitively. I don’t have any interest in a guy in his thirties who is still working for McDonald’s.
If they’re wealthy simply because their daddies happen to be rich and they have “spoiled rich kid” personalities, then no.
It occurred to me that women can get some guys to do whatever they want without even having sex with them. Just giving a guy the idea that you might have sex with him is all you need to do to encourage him to kill you a squirrel, gather you some wood, or save you from a bear. If you can play the temptress to enough guys, then you can choose to have sex with only one of them (the hottest one) and use the others to compensate for his “good provider” shortfalls…as long as you occasionally flash some titties or show off those gams.
I am the least sexual person I know, but you better believe I would open to flashing some titties if it meant the difference between me starving to death or not starving. And I would flash my titties to any guy (or woman) who didn’t look straight-up evil. Waiting for Mr. Right to show up would not be advantageous, especially since I would be OK with just getting some nuts and berries. My boobies aren’t worth a mammoth steak anyway.
Couldn’t the policing of women’s sexuality also be a way for rich, powerful men to overcome deficiencies in sexual attractiveness by rigging the game in their favor? Let’s ponder this.
Just because Mr. Rich Guy is rich doesn’t mean he knows how to lay pipe. In fact, pipe-laying skills are often orthogonal to money-making skills; there are opportunity costs when you spend time thinking about how to give women the best orgasms and romantic experiences. Mr. Rich Guy doesn’t want to incur these opportunity costs.
But Mr. Rich Guy has what it takes to get a wife. And not just any wife–a gorgeous wife. Maybe multiple gorgeous wives. Because he’s smarter than the average bear, he knows that these women are only with him because of his money and power. After the excitement of being chosen by a rich man wears off, these women are going to be checking out other men. Because women are sexual much like men are.
Mr. Rich Guy needs laborers to run his farm. You have all these hot, sweaty, muscle-bound specimens of masculinity now in close proximity to your women. What do you do? The laborers are stronger than you so you can’t easily threaten them. You’re also dependent on their labor, so this limits your options too. But you can easily control women. They are weaker.
So you insist on them being virgins before marrying them so that they can’t compare you to anyone else. You bemean them when they show any signs of lustfulness towards other men. You segregate them away from men as much as possible. You deprive them of economic and political power so you don’t have to worry about them having the means to live on their own. You don’t let them become educated because ignorance keeps them helpless and controllable. You even go so far as to mutilate their genitals…
Not saying this is the story of it all, but it certainly isn’t inconsistent with history and reality.
Um yes. If civilization fell apart the world would be a different place and “fitness” from the evolutionary perspective would manifest differently, and populations would compete differently. Could be broad tribes or roving bands of mutants … who knows? Would women in that alternate reality, with survival itself more on the line, be less likely to experience men with greater power and resources (wealthy in ways meaningful to that nightmare world) as more attractive for that fact than they might otherwise be?
As for
Selection of traits is not a conscious process and we can, for reasons of culture and otherwise, do things that are in specific individual circumstances not in service of evolutionary fitness … it is what the impact is on population frequencies of those traits overall that matters.
From the perspective of evolution a male of any species does not have be driven by a conscious desire to reproduce, the drive can be exclusively for the act of sex and often is, it is the result of the trait that matters. The drive to have sex is what many species have, not a conscious thought that they want to reproduce. But reproduction does sometimes result even if they do not appreciate the connection.
The drive to have families and to see children get to adulthood and to having families themselves is strong. Across populations that drive is something that has been selected for even if some of the time that drive results in an outcome that does not pass on the genes more for some specific individuals, especially if the circumstance is not one that has an adverse outcome. (The option of biological children being born and their survival if so is not negatively impacted.)
When the zombie apocalypse happens and I’m having to forge an existence with just me and my kids (we won’t talk about what has happened to my poor husband…he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him not to go investigate that noise in the basement), I’m going to be open to any man who isn’t afraid to kill and steal to protect us. So yes, that means dudes from Cell Block 99 will have a chance when they never would’ve had one in less desperate situations.
As to the op itself again … Velocity I doubt many of us of any gender are all that able to separate out what are the weights of individual factors that attract us to someone who we are attracted to. I’d guess that the stories we tell ourselves about why we find person X or Y more attractive are the just so stories made up after our primal and subconscious brains, operating with wiring from evolution modified by culture and personal experiences, have already made up our minds for us.
Is it how she looks at me? Her confidence? Her tenacity? Her kind words? Her sharing my sense of humor? The shape of her face? Her figure? Her clothes? Her hairstyle? A similarity or a difference to someone of my childhood? Am I making up the reason after the fact has occurred?
You are I am sure very familiar with the concept of implicit biases? We as individuals are often clueless about how much certain factors bias us in how we think about others. The usual context is in regards to race and sex. A person who has no conscious awareness of holding racist stereotypes, who honestly deny them, may still judge people based on those factors without any conscious awareness of that occurring, only able to shown on tests in which nothing else but that factor is varied.
My WAG is that the same thing occurs with attraction. Much occurs without our conscious awareness of the factor even being a factor let alone of how important it specifically is.
you with the face, there’s your dude who says he’s willing to kill and steal but who currently has no possessions, no food, no weapons, no fresh water, and one who possess a large store of weapons, ammo, food, water, and even some wine, and a large heavily fortified bunker. Both with the same number of festering holes on their faces and same number of arms and legs left (three arms, one leg each), neither all that witty or fun … who will you choose?
Is wealth an independent factor in your finding one more attractive as a possible mate than the other?
You seem determined to resist the idea that any behavior is adaptive, as though a cultural explanation is somehow always more parsimonious, and the burden of proof lies with showing that any behavior is instinctive. Why should that be the case, especially when a trait, if genetically determined, would obviously be subject to strong selection; and especially when the behavior is widespread in human societies?
The mechanism of evolution by natural selection is for genes to get themselves preferentially transmitted to the next generation. Control of paternity does this in a very direct way, so (other things being equal) any genetically determined tendency toward such behavior would be subject to strong positive selection.
Human behavior is complex, and I think the likely answer to the great majority of nature/nurture questions is that both are involved to some greater or lesser degree. There are certainly major cultural aspects to the varied manifestations of paternity control in human societies - FGM traditions, foot binding with aesthetic rationalization, integration with religious belief, etc. But surely the most likely account is that both adaptive core underlying traits and cultural elements are involved.
As noted several times in the thread already, prosociality and favoring one’s own kin are not mutually exclusive behaviors. Favoring one’s own kin does not imply that we will do nothing for non-kin, or worse that will try to harm them. We typically do help non-kin within our group in many ways. We identify ourselves as contributing members of society, show that we are pulling our weight, in the expectation of reciprocal help if and when we need it.
Anecdotally from your experience, what proportion of parents who adopt have not first tried to have their own children? In a mixed family, what would you say is the average behavior of a father toward a step-child relative to his behavior toward his own child? Again, citing exceptions does not prove something cannot be instinctive, all behavioral traits are probabilistic tendencies, so it’s the average behavior that’s informative.
That’s fair. I ought to read up on that some more.
I wasn’t presuming a degree of antisocial behavior any greater than we see on the news with some frequency – or than is considered entirely normal in some human societies. Again, I didn’t say Man 1 necessarily murders his wife and the kid – though that does sometimes happen – but that he might only kick her out, which depending on the society might result in her being ostracized.
I wasn’t presuming that paternity preference would be entirely removed from the population. I took “indifference to paternity could proliferate in a population” to mean that it would become common, not that it would become ubiquitous. Maybe I misunderstood you.
I’m not denying that.
What I’m saying is that the situation isn’t that simple that it can be boiled down to saying that men have a hardwired preference for their biological children, or that women have a hardwired preference for richer men.
-- For one thing: human males do, and did, fairly often help raise other men's children. Whether that's a matter of straight out adoption of non-relatives, or of raising one's brother's children or one's sister's children, or of beliefs in partible paternity, or of helping raise the children of one's wife which she had with a previous husband before the mammoth fell on him or he drowned in a storm or slipped on the ice and fell off a cliff or died of an infected wound, or just of contributing to the food supplies of the tribe in general: it's a thing that happens.
And that is also evolved behavior. It didn’t get beamed into our conscious minds from outer space in 1950, or in 1950BCE. It evolved, just as much as parental preference did. We’ve inherited both of those impulses. One of them’s stronger in some people, the other one’s stronger in others. (A few men do behave like lions, and kill the stepchildren.) What different societies do with both the impulses varies. But they’re both there; and neither one came from anyplace other than our biological inheritance. Maybe it’s a matter of kinship inheritance, and that bleeds over to account for cases when there isn’t kinship; maybe there really is group selection; maybe there’s some other explanation. But it doesn’t work to just say we evolved to raise our genetic kids without considering that we also evolved to often raise other people’s.
-- For another, re the preference for wealth: sexual preference in humans is massively complicated, and made up of a whole lot of factors, both biological and societal. Both men and women have plenty of evolutionary reason to favor a partner who can help them raise the children -- who is good at functioning in whatever work that society gives to people of that gender. Money/financial wealth can be an indication of this; but a) it's not the only possible indication; b) both men and women have reasons to favor a resourceful person over one who isn't c) there are a number of other possible factors, any of which might outweigh the factor of wealth. All of the factors are going to be weighted differently by different societies and by different individuals within the same society. Any of them may be seen by an individual, and/or by the society, as a negative rather than a positive if it's present in "excess" even when seen as a positive when present in lesser quantities -- whether a given quantity counts as "excess" is again going to depend on the particular case.
So the OP question isn’t really a useful question; at any rate, if it’s being posed in the hope of getting a guide to recommended behavior or of getting an explanation as to why somebody’s not popular. If the question’s only ‘is this one of a myriad of factors that may affect sexual attraction in humans?’ then the answer is ‘yes, but it may affect people of any gender’.
That’s interesting. Can you provide some cites? And how did they count the societies that do believe in partible paternity?
How likely is it that I’ll cross paths with Bunker Dude? If he’s got common sense, he’ll bunker down for as long as possible, not coming out until all of his food and water are depleted. That could be months, maybe years. In the meantime, Cell Block 99 is out and about. Our paths are more likely to cross because I will need to come out of hiding to look for food, and so will he. He might even be breaking into my house when we meet.
Now CB99 just might kill me and/or my kids. That’s a distinct possibility. But it’s also possible that CB99 sees me and instantly falls in love/lust. If that happens, it is certain I now have a man who has the motivation to slay some zombies on my behalf. If he doesn’t have guns, he now has the motivation to find some. His criminal past also probably makes him better equipped to defend and procure, because he has experience fighting hard and dirty. He’s street smart, so he won’t do silly things like investigate noises in the basement. Being the pragmatic woman that I am, I am going to leverage his strengths as much as I can to ensure my survival.
The problem with presenting the two mating choices as if they equally available is that they are *not *equally available; they never are. Bunker Dude is an objectively better catch than CB99, but CB99 will be easier to find. This is the same dilemma that exists today.
You haven’t proposed a mechanism by which male concerns about paternity would become an adaptive trait. You’ve just asserted that it is, and then asserted that it is obvious that it is.
I’m not resistant to the idea that any behavior is adaptive. I’m just resistant to the idea that the things you’re saying adaptive are so for “just because” reasons.
The fact that he had the goal of striking it rich in the lottery is just one of the many things in his manifesto that reveals his serious mental problems. He bought into “the secret” and the “laws of attraction” to an absurd degree, he thought he could literally manifest things happening with his mind, as if he were God, and then flew into a rage when he was inevitably disappointed. But he continued playing the lottery, just like he continued his “strategy” of sitting for hours in public places thinking that girls would come up to him.
I haven’t ever gone down the rabbit hole of Incel “philosophy” online but I’m going to hazard a guess that not even most incels are that deluded. I don’t think that anything Elliot Rodger believed is relevant to any discussion of real life phenomena. If he did somehow win the lottery, and even if he did use that money to woo supermodels and even if he succeeded in doing so, there’s not a goddamn thing it could have done to change his outlook or make him feel better about himself. He would have still come up with a reason to be angry at the world and kill people. He would have just been the Las Vegas shooter, basically, who had access to vast amounts of money and women and was still fucked up.
But the question of the op wasn’t who are you more likely to meet, a very wealthy potential partner or a poor one? Yup in the real world individuals are more likely to meet average wealth potential partners or more accurately those of wealth not too dissimilar to their own. Probably less likely for a lower SES person and a very high one to be in the same dating community than it is you to meet up with BunkerDude. Hence the different worlds comment. The question is if as an independent factor if they did meet would their wealth be a factor that made one filter their other features more favorably? Is power an aphrodisiac? (Wealth and resources are power after all.)
And of course the fictional vision can be CB99 and CB98. Twin brothers. Identical in all ways you can tell except that one has some food clothes to share guns and ammo. The other has much less.
Is the greater wealth appealing?
And does that attraction happen logically or without even any conscious thought?
But the antisocial behavior must be bad enough that it damages his reproductive success significantly relative to the average person, otherwise your model doesn’t work.
Preferring to raise your own kids per se is obviously favored by natural selection other things being equal - because it has the very direct effect of getting your own genes into the next generation, in preference to somebody else’s genes. So the only way that a “control paternity” trait would not be favored by natural selection is if other things were not equal, which is the scenario you constructed. Your Man #1also had an “antisocial noncooperator” trait that reduced his reproductive success more than controlling paternity increased it.
But there’s a problem with this. This can only work in the long run if this second associated trait is controlled by the same genetic locus, so that everyone who has the “control paternity” trait must always have the “antisocial noncooperator” trait. And there’s no reason why this need be the case. It perfectly possible to behave in a manner that prefers knowing that you’re probably raising your own kids, without being so obsessive and controlling about it that you alienate the rest of the social group that you have a generally cooperative relationship with.
If the two traits are controlled by different genetic loci, they will eventually segregate independently in the population, the association between the two traits is not locked together. It’s genes (and their associated phenotypes) that are subject to selection, not people. The evolutionary paths of the two traits will eventually diverge, an “antisocial noncooperator” trait that reduces reproductive success will disappear, while a “control paternity” trait that increases reproductive success will proliferate.
And, anecdotally in modern populations, I think this is exactly what we see. We are certainly prosocial, we generally cooperate with non-kin in our social groups, we help others with the expectation of reciprocation. Extreme antisocial behavior associated with paternity control - “honor killings”, for example - are rare. But we favor our own kin, that tendency is not mutually exclusive with prosociality. What is the average behavior of a father who discovers unexpectedly that the child he raised for years is not his own?
I think I already answered the question about wealth and attractiveness. When I think “wealthy man”, my forebrain lights up. Not my nether regions. I think opportunity and stability, not sexy times.
And when I imagine what the hypothetical Bunker Dude looks like, I’m not thinking of a handsome, young guy with a nice set of broad shoulders and biceps. I’m think of a pudgy middle aged man with a receding hairline. Which is not exactly porn fodder.
So no, attraction isn’t occurring for me subconsciously or not. It’s pragmatism.
(The idea of a man risking his life slaying zombies for me does give me a tingle, though. I’m just saying.)
