I feel like a broken record on this point, but I feel it is too important to ignore or hand-wave away: the results do not even “suggest” an adaptation. Their results failed outright to show any heritability for the trait they were examining, and they did not even test for functionality of the trait for the purpose for which it allegedly evolved (that is, are blue-eyed males who pick blue-eyed mates actually cuckolded less frequently than any other eye-color pairing?). There is not even the slightest hint – much less a ‘suggestion’ – that this preference is adaptive, given the experiments performed. Sure, it may well be exactly as the authors describe: that the blue-eyed preference is adaptive; but these results do nothing to lend support for that idea. And that is my main exception with this study: it does not support that which they claim for it. Had they not made the leap to “adaptation” (be it a suggestion or otherwise), I likely wouldn’t have even commented on it in the first place.
They need to describe a potential mechanism by which a blue-eyed preference would emerge, based on what is already known about evolution. Otherwise you could cook up any explanation to explain an observation.
Say that I posited that hot weather causes malaria. I supported this view by pointing out how malaria patients are found exclusively in tropical climates. Also, persons who travel from temperate climates to tropical ones are more likely to develop malaria that persons who travel to temperate climates from tropical ones. I also conducted some fancy experiments to show that transmission due to food, water, and sexual contact are very unlikely. Would you find my hot weather theory very convincing, or would you need to see more before giving my ideas credence? Be honest.
Which is evidence against an alternative explanation, true. Biological plausibility for their explanation still remains addressed.
Which still doesn’t explain how their theory jives with what we know about genes, mutation, and evolutionary time scales.
Right, they cited one work for that. Still doesn’t address the biological plausibility of their theory.
I don’t know why think this is all that profound statement. Being social animals, we tend to gravitate towards people who we perceive as being like us. Those that we mark as “other” , we tend to avoid. And? As remarkable as all this is, I’m more likely to attribute this observation to socio-environmental factors than to biological ones.
The physical things that we cue on as indicators of likeness may be highly heritable, but there’s no reason to think that one has anything to do with the other. For instance, height is highly heritable and it’s also one of the more important things that people look for in mates. It makes since to me that a short man is more likely to prefer a short woman (and vice versa). But physical compatibility probably has more to do with that than any subconscious desires to produce offspring that look like mommy and daddy.
Anyway, all one has to do is look at the mating practices of racial minorities to see how generalized statements about human’s mating tendencies fall to pieces. Do you think black kids raised in white households tend to pair up with people who look like themselves at the frequency that black kids raised in black homes do?
I’m an epidemiologist.
Pssst, domesticus - you might want to check your wording because I believe you’re actually talking about stepchildren being more likely to be abused - there is no evidence that adoptive children are more likely to be abused (in fact, they may be less likely due to the unique factors of adoption). The social dynamics and underlying motivations of adoption are quite different from those involved in step-parenting.
If any idiot can make hypotheses which make surprising, specific and testable predictions, and those predictions are validated then the work of “any idiot” should be published.
Because such a hypothesis, even if it is not the end of the story, is advancing our understanding. In the short term at least being able to predict things has value.
I was referring to the requirement that EP provide descriptions to the gene level. Neuroscience cannot do this (in most cases), so by implication it is pseudoscience. Or not rigorous.
Once again, are there predictions here which are surprising (meaning: something we wouldn’t otherwise expect to happen), specific and testable? Be honest.
It’s not easy to find examples of well-formed and validated predictions nonetheless being bad science, is it? I think you should re-evaluate your position on this.
They did, where do you think this paternity assurance thing came from?
I think I am about done with your bad analogies at this point. Their fancy experiment included a test of a hypothesis. Your fancy experiments do not. Terrible analogy to be honest.
It’s not biologically plausible that blue eye color is recessive. Got it.
This should be good for a laugh: what about this is not possible genetically?
I’m bored of your new favorite vague-term: mechanism. I liked rigor more to be honest. You win there is no plausible “mechanism”, especially since you ignored or minimized everything written or said something vague.
You better be able to say how what we know about genetics makes this impossible or admit you’re wasting my fucking time.
Wow. it must be fun to watch somebody pull cites and work their ass off to support a point and then just write a pile of bullshit in response.
Nice cheap shot. So you ignored heritability of psychological traits, minimized the importance of it all, and then brought up a hypothesis not supported by the data in the study that I must be the only one discussing. Who gives a shit that you “attribute this observation to socio-environmental factors than to biological ones”? How do you think your opinion overrides the facts of the study and the linked review?
Actually I don’t care what new thing you harp on next. Mechanism, pfft. I guess all of genetics should close its doors then. Why did you even give credence to the heritability data if you are so concerned over mechanism?
Thank-you. That makes sense, I appreciate the correction.
I don’t disagree with you and posted a similar improvement earlier. I think they would like that kind of data too. I guess I am less bothered by the sentence. That said, discussing the results, given their pattern, in light of paternity assurance seems fine and I have no problem with it. I thought they could have dealt with the field results a little better.
Any idiot can publish anything. The relevant question is whether their findings carry any credence. That’s why we’re talking about scientific rigor right now.
I’m not holding EP to that level of stringency either. But anyone claiming that “paternity assurance” is a driver for mate preference needs to make a plausible case for how such a trait could evolve. I’ve noticed that no one in this thread, let alone the authors of that study, has even attempted to do that. Probably because to do so requires an embarrassing level of bullshitting.
Your emphasis on “surprising” predictions is interesting to me. In my experience, the more unexpected a relationship is, the more likely it’s spurious. If I predict that a nocturnal lifestyle is risk factor for cirrhosis, and lo and behold, folks with cirrhosis tend to stay up later than folks without it–even years prior to illness onset–would you find this impressive? Please tell me no.
You seem to be under the impression that the hypothesis regarding “paternity assurance” was testable using the author’s study design. If I can’t persuade you that this is wrong, at least consider what DF has posted.
Of course it’s easy. I just did. I’m curious as to what consistutes a “well-formed” prediction in your world.
It’s an idea pulled out of hat, as far I can see. The authors never explained how “paternity assurance” as manifested through mate preference could emerge based on our understanding of evolution. (I feel like a broken record at this point.)
No it’s not. Your failure to see this makes you awfully like an astrologist, to be honest.
Read what DF just wrote about adaptation. Then read it again. He succinctly summarized the salient issues that the authors conveniently never got around to explaining in their discussion, that would make their position a lot more convincing than it is.
Didn’t you just post agreement to DF when he posted this:
Where is the disconnect coming from with you? Either you agree that the paper is inadequate in explaining these things or you don’t. Either these things jump out at you as big gaping holes indicative of weak science or they don’t.
Actually, I have a question for you. How do you reconcile the “People seek mates with people who will produce children that look and act like them” theory with “Traits that provide paternity assurance are prefered by males as a defense against cuckoldry.” To me, these two theories are not in agreement with one another. In fact, they are odds. But you seem not to see this at all, so I wonder if there’s any point in explaining it to you.
How much exposure to the primary evolutionary psychological literature do you folks have? That is, can you give an estimate of how many peer-reviewed journal articles you have read - in their entirety - in which someone tested a hypothesis about a psychological phenomenon which was derived from evolutionary theory?
I don’t mean this as a snarky question. I’m genuinely curious.
I don’t know. Outgroup homogeneity makes me wonder if I am just blending a bunch of fields together and calling it all EP one day and BE the other.
They probably didn’t feel the need to explain it because of the brevity of the article and they are writing to their field.
Your ignorance, which you are so far demonstrating wonderfully but refusing to cop to makes it seem like astrology to you.
The principle difference between you two is that his are clear, precise, and stated in a manner that allows me to respond without guessing at the meaning. He is focusing criticism on a specific aspect of the study. I can reply to the specific problem by stating specific things. You are throwing everything at the wall in a game of coming up with ill-thought-out-shit which then makes me engage in a hobby I haven’t enjoyed in a long time: looking up evolution/ecology oriented behavioral research.
Highly heritable traits + Blue eye color = the obvious. I really hope you come up with the criticism to my reply that I am not expecting. It’ll mean you’ve finally turned into an EP.
Here’s an interesting article about rural Senegalese men and their sons. Independent raters examined facial (in pictures) and odor features (in worn shirts) of groups of men and a boy. One among the group of men was the biological father of the boy.
Male raters could figure out which shirts matched greater than chance levels. Male and female raters could match boys to their father at greater than chance levels.
All that just established which pairs could be best matched by independent raters.
Here’s the best part, they then examined the level of paternal investment, in a number of ways, as a function of how easily the son was matched to his father. They found that the more similar the boy to his dad, for both odor and features, the more the dad invested as a parent. They controlled for all the things that might keep a dad from investing time in his children such as work schedule and number of wives/children.
They addressed all the alternate interpretations you can think of. It really pays to read the introduction if you know absolutely nothing about paternity uncertainty and social behavior.
Father–offspring resemblance predicts paternal investment in humans [PDF!]
People who live together are more likely to smell the same. Well blow me down! Who’d have ever thought! And fathers and sons who spend more time together- perhaps eating the same garlicky diet, conversing at the same distance from the wood-fire, cuddling the same flea-ridden dog- tend to smell more like each other than fathers and sons who spend less time together.
But that is just petty nitpicking. THe real problem is that rural Senegal is a patrilnear, patrilocal, agricultural culture- all of which are cultural and economic arrangements that make paternity much more important than in other situations. Indeed, if you were looking for a culture that defines “old fashioned agricultural society,” rural Senegal would be a good place to look.
I would not be at all surprised if you find different results in one of those cultures where a child’s closest male relative is considered to be his maternal uncles. Indeed, a different pattern is inevitable, isn’t it? Given that men don’t have much to do with their offspring at all, right?
I also wouldn’t be surprised if this study came up with different results in our own society, with the roles of fathers and inheritance changing so quickly. The cynical side of me might even guess that played in to the decision to run this simple, cheap experiment in rural Senegal rather than in the US.
Well, I am avoiding the specific “rigor” concept because it seems quite true scotsman-ish to me.
My position is simply that if a prediction is specific, testable and unexpected, and it is subsequently validated, then it adds to human knowledge and is useful.
I mean “surprising” as in: we wouldn’t expect to be true otherwise. I once had to sit through a creationist talk about the predictions the bible makes. They were all things like the sun will rise every day i.e. things that I have independent reason to expect to happen.
Well, if there’s a very low p-value then yes that would certainly be of interest to me, and would suggest areas for further research.
I can’t comment further because you’ve only mentioned the prediction and not a hypothesis.
I haven’t made any comment about the paternity assurance paper.
I don’t think we should be discussing blue-eye to blue-eye preferences in a thread where some people are doubting that we can study instinct at all. I think we should look at more obvious instincts like fear of heights and the main differences in sexuality between the genders.
And I just pointed out why your example doesn’t apply: the predictions were of things we’d expect to be true anyway. We’ve known for millenia that malaria is associated with the tropics. That can’t be used as a prediction of any theory.
I’m defining well-formed to be: a prediction which is specific, testable and surprising/unexpected.
Well, then that would quite stupid of them. I guess they don’t want to be taken very seriously by other scientists who routinely take the time to do that in their papers.
I can’t help if you can’t parse what “biologically plausibility” means in the context of my critique, though. It’s essentially the same thing DF is saying. The authors failed to explained the mechanism by which a paternity assurance preference could evolve based on our understanding of adaptation and fitness. It makes no sense for you to argue heatedly with me on this point while then nodding your head in agreement with DF. It only makes you look idiotic and confused.
Right. Except, of course, when we’re talking about a blue-eyed woman or a brown-eyed man. Then for some reason the “People are biologically programmed to seek mates who will produce children that look like them!” is chucked out the window is favor of some other equally untestable theory about paternity assurance among a small fraction of the human population.
However, that’s not even where I see the biggest conflict between the two theories. The ability for a male to detect cuckoldry diminshes the more his mate looks like him. He’ll see his wife’s features in his child’s face and think that they are his, when they’re not.
I don’t why it seems that way to you. It ain’t like I just conjured up the concept of Bradford-Hill criteria myself.
Inbred just posted about a study which concluded that humans seek mates with people who look and act like them. The traits that mates match up on tend to be highly heritable.
If I attempted to test this theory using the blue-eyed preference study design and found that only blue-eyed males (in one set of conditions) exhibited a preference for blue-eyed females, while blue-eyed women and brown-eyed men/women did not, what would be your conclusion? I would conclude that this theory about people seeking mates with matching traits appears not to be generalizable with respect to eye color. While blue-eyed males did exhibit some preference towards blue-eyed females, this could be attributed to differences in how blue-eyed males are raised to view blue-eyedness in relation to their familial identity and their socially-programmed perceptions of female sexual desirability. More research is needed blah blah blah.
Alternatively, I could view my study results and conclude that they line up exactly how they should if paternity assurance was a driver for preference. Funny that. And I don’t even need to show my homework for that explanation. All I have to do is come up with a persuasive-sounding explanation to account for these findings and I’ll be good to go.
This is the problem with EP studies like this one. When confronted with results that contradict one theory, it’s extremely easy to re-interpret them in a way that supports some other theory. Which is not bad in and of itself. It’s just that when this is done in the complete absence of any attempt to explain the underlying process purported by the new theory, we have no reason to put any stock in it.
Inbred, it’s not like this is not interesting. It’s just not all that surprising.
Men generally prefer their kids to look like them. I don’t think we need a lot of research to show this. Most women want their kids to look like them too. We are all narcissitic that way. I have no doubt that a father will bond more tightly to his kids if he looks at them and sees his own face staring back at him. One of the kickbacks to having kids is seeing a little mini-me running around. I mean, I hate to say it, but duh for real.
To go back to the blue-eyed thing, has there been any research to look at whether blue-eyed fathers respond differently to their kids based on their eye color? Is a blue-eyed dad more likely to abuse or abandon his brown-eyed offspring? To take it further, are blue-eyed husbands more likely to divorce their brown-eyed wives? Is there any evidence at all that eye color is a factor in pair bonding or father-child bonding?
I ask this because I find it a stretch to extrapolate findings of this Sengalese study (which presumably took a holistic approach in assessing physical resemblence between fathers and sons, not just looking at eye color) to the preferences of blue-eyed men, when it remains to be seen that blue-eyed men even care about the eye color of their children. I find it implausible that a kid that otherwise looks like the exact replica of their dad–except for eye color–will be treated any differently than a kid who facially takes after their mom more but has their dad’s eyes.
Probably not. Keep in mind that the blue-eyed study that we’re focusing on is just one I found in doing a Google Scholar search for another topic; I just thought it was kind of interesting. It’s a small study from Norway, not a seminal work in the field of EP.
But turn your question around. Suppose someone, looking at the previous research, hypothesized that blue-eyed fathers are likelier to abuse brown-eyed offspring than they are to abuse blue-eyed offspring, but that a similar dynamic didn’t apply to brown-eyed parents or blue-eyed mothers. Suppose they then gathered data, and their hypothesis turned out to be true. Would such an experiment change your assessment of the underlying reasoning at all?
If so, why? If not, why do you ask if there’s such research?
In couples who look the same, if the offspring has traits that look like neither father or mother, nor any of the grandparents, then what possibility does that leave?
Remember, the mechanism is not supposed to be a deterministic paternity-confirmer. It is supposed to be a probabilistic cheater-detector. It can’t really ever confirm paternity, but it can raise warnings about genes that came from somewhere else.
Also, though paternity assurance is an important factor in selection over the long term, it is by no means the only one. If there were a circumstance where a prospective mate had obviously superior genes, then it would make sense for the male to risk cuckoldry to obtain that set of genes for his child.
They addressed that logically and statistically. Major Histocompatibility Complex. I think the rest of your post is as baseless as the beginning.
You have failed to ever impress on me that you have a specific construct in your mind when you say things like “biological plausibility”, “rigor”, “mechanism” etc. I get the impression that you are literally throwing every decent sounding criticism at it without knowing what it is you are specifically talking about.
Darwin’s Finch described a specific problem he has with the paper and offered means by which better data could be collected. It’s a typical sort of criticism.
You, on the other hand, offer up more general criticisms and then basically take on a “who gives a shit” about this paper attitude in any respect where their work was good, clear and logical.
Also, my estimate of your analytical abilities for behavioral data took a nosedive when you offered up the classics in sociological arguments against “sexual coercion as a reproductive strategy”. Here’s an example of the garbage sociological argument that is easily refuted because it is a strawman:
Who is saying this?
Except if a man is a cuckold then by definition his partner was fucking somebody else. I wonder what the kid will look like? For somebody that says that every other study is unimpressive because it is so obvious, you don’t seem to get it at all.
Those are excellent criteria for demonstrating cause in epidemiology. Your link also specifies how it is probably not applicable to the social sciences and I am not sure how it even addresses that type of associative data that’s usually readily obtainable.
I view this positively only because you are beginning to recognize the challenge of studying social behavior in humans. Good for you. Don’t forget their field work.
I see, so you still think they developed their hypotheses after the fact. I hope that is not the way you do your scientific work.
Well shit, here you were asking for a plausible genetic mechanism and then I go out and say, you know, I would like to find some evidence like that too. So I find this article that I figure would be cool for an epidemiologist since its got that MHC stuff in it. The outcome? As usual, you are totally unsurprised. You are unsurprised that paternity investment was predicted detectable similarities in the highly genetically determined MHC phenotype. You are unsurprised that only men seem to be able to do this through odor. You are unsurprised that they addressed and refuted all the other reasons for the predictive association. It’s like you already know everything! Us mere mortals found it interesting.
It’s funny how you can be so “for science” in some posts and then so “anti-science” in others. I guess it isn’t important to you to understand why these patterns of behavior exist. Why don’t men just not give a shit what their children look like?
Interesting, logical extensions of the study’s results which you would never bother to ask if the study had never been done. You certainly would not think to ask these questions or Darwin Finch’s questions if the study had not been done.
Well-designed experiments (although their study was mixed experimental/quasi-experimental) extract the effect of single variables, known as independent variables, on dependent variables, the variable measured. So they were looking at the experimental IV: photo eye color, the quasi-experimental IV: participant eye color, and their effects on participant preference, the DV.
I explain what you already know to remind you that experiments have different goals than field studies.
I just want to say that I was wondering the same thing as I scrolled through you with the face’s most recent posts.
So you don’t care to address how these concerns with paternity function in avunculocal societies?
If we are so badass at discerning paternity, what the hell is up with the extreme sexual controls on women? Doing stuff like breaking young girl’s feet or mutilating their sexual organs seems a little overkill when all you really need is a good whiff of the kid’s dirty laundry. If we have developed these paternity assurances, they sure seem pretty weak sauce, considering the ridiculousness our societies have come up with to supplement them.