I said it’s “pretty clear”. And the reason the bar-room case (whatever that is) is good is because the logic behind it is good. Go pick up a copy of Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” and read it if a casual message-board discussion isn’t good enough for you.
Well, you’ve got me there, I have no answer to the devastating criticism of “nuh uh, is not”. Happy holidays.
If it’s a ludicrous assertion, you could tell me why rather than wasting both of our time with this kind of response. (And I didn’t say “all” men. Just men in general. Absolutes don’t belong in this conversation.)
You still haven’t provided a plausible explanation for how having the most vaguest of vague suspicions of cuckoldry would improve a man’s chances of propogating his genes into the next generation.
Say he preferentially abused kids that didn’t look like him, leading them to die more frequently than kids that looked like him. Maybe this would be an effective way of killing off some proportion of some other man’s progeny, but given his inherent fallibility (and his ignorance of how wacky genetics can be), he’d likely be killing some of his own kids too. A woman’s reaction to all this abuse and killing also wouldn’t favor the man’s fitness either. Any unhappiness on her part could increase the chances of his progeny dying from infanticide, neglect, and self-inflicted abortion. It could also drive her closer into the arm’s of her cuckolding lover. Which means less sex for the abusive a-hole.
In contrast, a man that is loving (or at least tolerates) all the kids in his household may be investing more of his precious resources into another man’s children, but in exchange he has a happier mate who is more likely to bear his kids with a smile on her face. His less discerning personality also will probably make him more attractive to women other than his mate, increasing his opportunity to sire kids that will be looked after by another man.
How much feeding do you think men were doing? Your whole case hinges on the assumption that men invested significant amounts of time and energy on their children. Why should we assume this was the case then, when it hasn’t been the case historically up until very recently? Usually mothers (and other female relatives) do 95% or more of the heavy lifting when it comes to taking care of kids. Not only do women breastfeed, but they also do a lot of the foraging that make up their children’s diet. Men may bring meat into the house, but probably not enough to make or break the family if a few “love children” sneak into the fold. And when these “love children” come of age and are able to assist with hunting and gathering, they can make up for that loss.
You need to show evidence that the parental investment supplied by human males is anything comparable to species (like birds) where cuckoldry detection is thought to occur. Among our closest relatives (e.g. chimpanzees and gorillas) males invest very little in their offspring. Have they shown any signs that cuckoldry detection is a significant dynamic?
This is a nice story, but it’s not based on anything except supposition. While it’s heroic to think that men were dying to protect the children whom they loved as their flesh and blood, I take a view that is less romantic. Humans are territorial creatures and have a desire to defend their property. What consitutes their property can be any number of things. Do you not think men would care whether their homes were pillaged? Of course they’d care; it doesn’t all just boil down to protecting the women and children.
Women (and by extension, children) were viewed as property just like physical possessions were. Self-sacrifice has very little to do with it. And “genetic investment” has as much to do with why they’d fight off invaders as them protecting their tribe’s access to fresh water or any other thing.
He has several times. It improves a man’s chances of propagating his genes by allowing him to redirect resources toward children that are most probably his. The men in Senegal were doing it.
Or they’ll just focus their love on the children they are sure are theirs. Nothing conscious about it, they’ll just feel more attached.
I think this gets at an argument over whether paternal investment is for acquiring more mating opportunities or helping with offspring. Sometimes it seems like one and sometimes it seems like another.
Male chimpanzees bias paternal investment toward related offspring..PDF.
On the contrary, as you might suspect from looking at humans in the modern environment, humans, which are still humans, because they have all the human genes with their variants, act similarly in hunter-gatherer societies:
But read the rest of the article to see that it really does take a village.
The same Pinker who says that crime increased in the 60s because of that rock and roll music? :dubious: I’ll pass.
That guy is where you all get your defensive martyr streak, and while he does have a pretty good grasp of Western European cultures and its offshoots, his understanding of anything outside of the West is absurd. I don’t think he is even capable of talking about anything that goes on in Africa without throwing the word “warlord” into it, and he implied he is suspicious of claims that China has low levels of violent street crime because the government is “so closed” about reporting (WTF? Anyone who has spent ten minutes in China could tell you that. It’s not exactly behind the iron curtain these days)
No, that’s Strawman Pinker, Stephen Pinker’s retarded cousin.
If your interpretation of what Pinker actually says is that “rock and roll music increased crime” then your analysis isn’t worth all that much.
You showed that Senegalese men discriminate against kids that don’t look like them. But presumably, many of those kids that he is neglecting are biologically his. So while he may be keeping resources out of the mouths of another man’s offspring, his bias will also undercut his own genes. His means of deciphering paternity are not going to be very precise, especially if members of his tribe look like each other.
There’s no reason to believe the rate of human cuckoldry would be high enough to make an genetic-based defense mechanism worth it to men.
We could also ask ourselves how value added is paternal investment to survival of human offspring. In species where cuckoldry detection makes sense, fathers invest at least as much if not more to their offspring as mothers do. Coincidentally (or not), the survival of these offspring depends on their father’s taking care of them.
Men, in contrast, do assist in childrearing, but their assistance is not mandatory for offspring survival. Also, tending to children does not impede their ability to reproduce elsewhere. While cuckoldry definitely would matter to a male that devotes more resources to its offspring than it devotes to seeking sex (like certain avian species), it is less of a threat to males who leave most of childrearing to females like humans do. Because even on a good day, he’s a hands-off parent.
And this is why I find it implausible that human males would adapt any kind of genetic safeguard against cockoldry. It would make us unique among mammals, let alone other primates. And to extrapolate all of this from a weak preference for blue-eyed women among blue-eyed males is too imaginative to take seriously.
What are you basing any of this on?
Sharing genetic variation is the reason why sons look and smell like their fathers. Matching blue eyes is due to shared genetic variation. An extremely simple cognitive understanding of inheritance - that offspring look like their parents and siblings - is easily within the grasp of children.
You really ought to read that site and look at how much food males are providing in those hunter-gatherer societies. I figured you read the quoted section but I guess not.
Read the article I linked to regarding hunter-gatherer societies.
Please completely define what a genetic safeguard is. I really have no clue what you are talking about. The Senegalese study demonstrated favoritism based on a genetic mechanism.
Men supply a lot of food to their offspring, okay. But find me a study which demonstrates that human paternal investment comes anywhere close to animals that have evolved defenses against cuckoldry. You’re cite doesn’t show this.
You really ought to read the cite.
Also, name a species that you think human males ought to live up to before you think they invest enough and provide a cite or cites that show:
(1) level and type of paternal investment.
(2) the rate of extra pair copulation in both males and females.
(3) mechanisms by which males attempt to guarantee paternity.
Just for fun, here’s a wiki on sperm competition.