Very true.
And what is often overlooked by the amateur evo psychologists are the tropes about rich, beautiful women who fall in love with handsome and courageous men that are clearly poorer than them. These women are usually “promised” to rich men, but secretly pine for men who arouse them romantically. If women are innately predisposed to favoring rich men, then we’d find stories like Robin Hood and Pirates of the Caribbean too hard to swallow.
Do you mean the Robin Hood who was Earl of Huntingdon, and the Jack Sparrow who was the captain of his ship?
Regards,
Shodan
Then are you now agreeing with Manda JO for saying the following?
because you instead seemed to be insisting that even a fractionally greater number of initiated pregnancies would overwhelm all other considerations – see post 43, for instance.
ETA: how about Black Jack Davy?
No, I mean Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest. As if it matters.
Why do you think Jack Sparrow is even relevant? The love story was between William Turner (the blacksmith apprentice) and Elizabeth Swann.
Marrying any higher-status wealthier person, for people of any gender, means acquiring high(er) status and resources. It makes sense for people of any gender to desire that advantage in a mate, as in fact they do.
But none of these social/cultural phenomena in any way demonstrate that women are biologically, innately more sexually attracted to older uglier wealthier men than to younger handsomer poorer men. They may well mean nothing more than that historically dominant patriarchal society prioritizes women’s actual sexual preferences below practical advantage (and pressure to maximize wealthier men’s access to young attractive women, irrespective of the men’s own age or attractiveness).
Again, nothing about such a calculus demonstrates that the receptacle in question actually likes or desires the forty-year-old penetrator more than the twenty-year-old one.
Of course a society controlled by older males is going to be set up to maximize older males’ mating opportunities with the most fertile females. That doesn’t necessarily imply that that’s what (any) females consider truly optimal. The fact that older males like to believe that younger females are biologically programmed to desire them most of all doesn’t make it true.
But just because those disadvantages are addressed in (most of) human society by a patriarchal structure doesn’t mean that the patriarchal structure itself is biologically selected for.
And social history doesn’t care if you call it names like “evolution”. You’re assuming that a particular phenomenon is biological in origin without ever backing up that assumption.
Not everything that happens in human society, even in early human society, is biologically determined. Saying “this is the way it is, and I can suggest a plausible biological reason for it, so therefore it must necessarily be biologically determined” is logically fallacious.
See also: The Squire of Low Degree, The Brisk Young Widow, Her Servant Man, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and innumerable other examples of the theme of a higher-status woman choosing a lower-status man due to personal attraction.
Again, I’m not denying at all that most of human society is structured so that older, higher-resource males usually have more access to reproductive opportunities, irrespective of their attractiveness. I’m just pointing out that males are possibly kidding themselves when they assert that this structure is what females are biologically programmed to innately prefer.
I don’t see where post #43 insists that a fractionally greater number of pregnancies will overwhelm every other consideration. Neither do you, because it doesn’t say it. Again, you need to understand the difference between “averages”, and “always”.
Or it could mean that women’s actual sexual preferences reflect the evolution of their choosing higher-status, higher-resource men because of the practical advantages. And when we see it happening cross-culturally, and it also happening elsewhere in biology, among species with hardly any culture to speak of (in the human sense), that’s evidence of evolution.
‘Women prefer higher-status men, and men prefer younger, healthier women, and it’s because of the patriarchy’. :shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
Them’s always MY favorite.
It could, but nothing you’ve posted demonstrated that it does.
Nope, not given the fact that plenty of other cross-cultural human phenomena are historically rather than biologically determined. Almost every human culture uses the wheel, too: that doesn’t mean we biologically evolved to do so. (And there is too much variety in the sexual/social behavior of nonhuman species, including the sexually promiscuous matriarchal society of our very close relatives the bonobos, to provide conclusive inferences about the sources of human social practices.)
You’re misunderstanding the argument. The point is that everybody prefers higher-status partners, and everybody prefers younger, healthier partners.
The fact that human patriarchal society, which is controlled by higher-status older males, is set up to prioritize the preference for young healthy partners in the case of males, and to prioritize the preference for higher-status partners in the case of females, may be biological in origin, or it may be cultural. You have shown no convincing evidence for the former alternative, just a lot of circular arguments.
Generally speaking, this tendency is significantly more pronounced in women than men. There was a recent study where men and women were asked to rate photos of strangers of the opposite sex out of 10 for attractiveness. They were then told some of the strangers had six figure salaries. On average, the women then scored those specific people two points higher than before (so a 5 with a six figure salary became a 7). For the men, it made almost no difference at all. IIRC, for the men, when they were told the women they were grading were high earners, the average scores went up by something like 0.04.
ETA: These results held true over several different cultures, as the researchers carried out their test on volunteers in America, Europe, and China.
But that still doesn’t mean it was evolved.
It doesn’t prove it was evolved, but the fact that the results were basically the same everywhere the researchers went is pretty suggestive. By trying the experiment in different cultures and getting the same results everywhere they went, the researchers effectively ruled out culture as a confounding variable. It’s particularly interesting to me that the results were also the same in (ostensibly) communist China where, if anything, people have been socialised to believe that financial equality is a supreme moral good.
It’s certainly possible that I’m misunderstanding you.
Manda JO said this:
to which you responded by saying this:
which I took to mean that you were agreeing that “the slightest differences in fertility overwhelmingly dominate what men find attractive”.
Maybe you instead meant to agree with Manda JO that “I just don’t see any actual evidence that a woman who had a 90% chance of getting pregnant in a given year provided any actual reproductive advantage over a woman who had an 85% chance” because other factors – such as intelligence and persistence in raising the child to adulthood, or for that matter a greater chance of surviving to do so due to having slightly longer spacing between pregnancies – might well overwhelm that.
– Unreconstructed Man, what people do in actual practice and what they say when looking at pictures of strangers about whom they have extremely limited information aren’t necessarily the same thing.
ETA: I also don’t think you can say that finding similarities in three modern cultures – two of them closely related, and all of them currently intertwined – means those similarities are there because they evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Not really; as I noted, there are many other nearly universal aspects of human culture, such as the use of, say, fire or the wheel, that are the result of human history and cultural practice rather than direct biological programming.
People tend to forget that humans haven’t always been a vastly huge population with nearly infinite possibilities of variation. Population bottlenecks in our evolutionary past may have reduced the entire human population to several thousand individuals. Many characteristics that we naively regard as innate to human beings could have originated in historical happenstance in a relatively small population.
Just because a particular social model (i.e., patriarchal society) became almost universally dominant at some point in prehistory is not valid evidence that humans as a species biologically evolved to adopt that model.
Do you have a link to this study? This is the second thread that I’ve seen it mentioned and the scientist in me is wondering if wealth was the only attribute they tested like this.
If you did the exact same experiment but instead made test subjects think the photos were of people who were exceptionally smart or skilled in some way, it would be interesting to see what the results would be. And what about personality traits? Do men get scored as more attractive when women are told they are witty or heroic?
Excellent point.
The seemingly contradictory attitudes of incels towards women amounts to envy: they compare themselves to men who get laid as often and as easily as James Bond, and basically conclude that they were damned to be the “losers” of the mating game. Now to the incels, even that they could be unhappily resigned to if society honestly acknowledged this; but what they bitterly resent is being told that their lack of attractiveness is all their fault, that if they were nicer, less selfish, less narcissistic people they would do better; to which the incels scream “BULLSHIT!”
The impression I got wasn’t so much that they compare themselves to successful men, but rather, to women: that many male incels think that for women, dating is as easy as selecting one out of many suitors and deciding *which *suitor you want. (To be fair, there is a lot of truth to that; after all, many women complain about being catcalled or approached or asked for number or propositioned to. But plenty of women don’t get that treatment.) Plus, many of those incels have tried “being nicer, less narcissistic, less selfish” for many years and had no results, which is why they rightfully say bullshit.
But anyway, this thread wasn’t about incels - we have had plenty of threads about that. I just wanted to ask if the incel/MRA/PUA assumptions were right or wrong - whether **evolutionary biology **actually is correct or not.
This is a bit of a digression from the original thread topic of whether the evo-psych rationalizations invoked by incels actually have any scientific merit, but okay.
In the first place, I question your claim that “society” doesn’t “honestly acknowledge” that handsome, sophisticated, glamorous James-Bond types tend to get laid more easily and frequently than men who are awkward, boring and/or unattractive. ISTM that pretty much everybody recognizes this and pretty much nobody is trying to deny it.
In the second place, I question your claim that incels in general would be “unhappily resigned” to not getting laid if only “society” would “honestly acknowledge” that their chances of getting laid are low. Without attempting to generalize about all men who classify themselves as “incel”, it’s fair to say that a substantial part of incel culture is based on plain old misogyny and resentment of female autonomy, and desire for “honest acknowledgement” has little or nothing to do with it.
For a lot of incels, the fact that they don’t have a “hot babe” devoted and subservient to them is perceived as a burning intolerable injustice. They idealize a fantasy past era when economic and social pressures meant that attractive young virgins had little choice but to form monogamous bonds with even “merely average” men (since of course there have never been enough handsome glamorous James Bonds to go round). Many incels believe that this sort of societal setup is somehow their right, and that modern women’s economic and sexual autonomy has unfairly cheated them of the happiness they deserve.
So they constantly disparage women as “whores” and “sluts” and “femoids” and “roasties”, denigrate women’s intelligence and competence and integrity, and swap fantasies about how they might make women fearful or unhappy or humiliated. That’s not merely wanting some “honest acknowledgement” from society that they themselves are not very desirable as mates. That’s full-on sociopathic misogyny and sexism.
As I said, what a lot of self-described incels “bitterly resent” is the mere fact that women have a choice in the matter of relationships at all. They feel cheated simply because “society” isn’t “giving” them a hot girlfriend just for being a “decent guy”.
As for their lack of attractiveness being “all their fault”, well, I think we can agree that at least a substantial amount of it is. If a guy is nasty, selfish, narcissistic, misogynistic, and snaggle-toothed, then sure, the snaggle-toothedness is not his fault, and the fact that many women prefer men with more even teeth is just one of life’s little unfairnesses that he’ll have to endure.
But his being nasty, selfish, narcissistic and misogynistic doesn’t fall in the same category. Even if he’s not solely responsible for creating his own nasty personality, he’s the one solely responsible for fixing it.
And sure, I think we shouldn’t try to hide the fact that plenty of guys who are nice and unselfish and non-narcissistic and non-misogynist still don’t get laid, because that’s just the luck of the draw. A whole lot of nice and unselfish and non-narcissistic and non-misandric women don’t get laid, too. On the other hand, a lot of conventionally unattractive people, both male and female, who are nice and unselfish etc. do have happy fulfilling sex lives, although not all of their partners are the attractive young virgins that many incels feel they’re entitled to.
Yes, if anybody’s trying to tell you that being nice and unselfish and non-narcissistic and non-misogynist will guarantee you getting laid, of course that’s bullshit. But what’s not bullshit is the fact that being nice and unselfish and non-narcissistic and non-misogynist will indeed make you “do better” in life overall, and that being “involuntarily celibate” doesn’t exempt you from your basic human obligations not to be a shitty person. I have no sympathy for anybody who thinks that being unable to get laid gives them carte blanche to be horrible to others and/or a danger to society at large.
:dubious: I question whether somebody who merely “tried” being “nicer, less narcissistic, less selfish” purely in the hopes of getting “results” in the form of getting laid was actually being nicer or less narcissistic or less selfish at all.
Yes, being a decent person sometimes helps in obtaining something you want. But if you’re just trying to imitate decent behavior in order to increase your chances of obtaining something you want, I’m not sure that counts as actually being a decent person at all. Genuinely decent people are more apt to ask themselves “What’s the right thing to do?” or “What behavior do I expect of myself as a decent person?”, not just “How will behaving like a decent person increase my chances of getting what I want?”.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
I just wanted to ask if the incel/MRA/PUA assumptions were right or wrong - whether **evolutionary biology **actually is correct or not.
[/QUOTE]
As noted earlier in the thread, I think what you’re talking about is actually a particular form of “evolutionary psychology”, i.e., trying to explain cultural phenomena by ascribing them to biologically hardwired reactions.
And the answer AFAICT is that it depends on what specific cultural phenomena you’re trying to explain. Yes, there are solid biological reasons why humans in general prefer youth, health, and high status in a mate.
Are the reasons that some people privilege some of those preferences over others biological or cultural? That’s a harder call to make, at least if we’re being scientifically scrupulous about it. (If all we want is to make up a “just-so-story” with a superficially plausible evolutionary explanation and claim that it must be true, then sure, by those standards, pretty much anything can be found to be biologically hardwired.)