It is literally a pressure cooker of violence. The whole online movement is very fucking dangerous and it’s only going to get worse. It needs to be addressed somehow. Let me reiterate some of the points I’ve made:
Suppose you have 46 chromosomes one of which allows you to replicate half of another member of your species chromosomes and a biological system which allows you to collect such donations. If you had a “goal” of replicating your own chromosomes as much as possible in your life, but wanted to assure yourself that those copies would also have a greater than average chance of being replicated in a third generation, what strategy would maximize that outcome? Now include the factors of risk of reproduction, and a strong need for assistance and protection during gestation, birth, and a long period of high vulnerability of the offspring.
You are more likely to survive multiple childbirths when you are fully sexually mature, but still young enough to heal and recover from the process. That youth will be unlikely to be associated with the life experience we generally call wisdom. For members of your species who do not have gestational abilities, nonselective increases in procreation attempts are a viable strategy, this is not true for you.
You would benefit greatly from a close association with the donor member if that individual was willing to provide you with protection, and assistance in obtaining the extra nutrition you need to gestate, and nurse. A young, strong, active and healthy mate is your best choice. Statistically, if favor select mates for those criteria alone, and bear multiple offspring with his chromosomes you will survive two or more offspring.
High testosterone in young men is behaviorally associate with fertility and violent behavior. Mates selected for such in primitive cultural systems will be good providers of support for their lifetimes, but tend to die in violent circumstance at a younger age. Men of lower levels of testosterone will be more likely to survive into adulthood. After having two offspring by the first category of mate, it is highly beneficial for your probable dissemination of genes to pick one of them for a second mate.
Assuming survival of multiple childbirths, it would be much more beneficial for you to maintain the mate status of your mature protective mate, but obtain sperm donations from other high testosterone males. This strategy allows you to disseminate your chromosomes with a higher number of others, and maximize the survival of your own.
To assign some sort of morality to this behavior is totally absurd. Evolution is a consequence, not a a plan.
That’s a Daily Mail article, which gives no link to the actual study. I think I found the publication they say it was in, but couldn’t find the article (it may have been in there somewhere, I only checked the first few pages.) And I don’t trust the Daily Mail to report its findings either fully or accurately.
And therefore easily dismissed. Evopsych is bad enough as it is, but the armchair variety is just laughable.
I think, in a lot of ways, evolutionary psychology is a lot like epigentics. It’s a real thing, there is scientific validity behind it. However, the popular science theories that have arisen from the real science are overblown and deeply flawed.
Genetics and inheritance all comes down to proteins and enzymes. It may be fair to say that from an evolutionary / biological perspective women may be more selective about their mates, having inherited a brain chemistry that makes them less arousable than men. But the DNA of women isn’t expressing some highly specific mystery gene that is activated when money is smelled and makes them prefer rich guys. That’s learned behavior.
I am glad that you perceive me to be supportive of women’s rights.
a) They make the error of positioning themselves as antifeminist. You should not compound that error by viewing everything they’re saying as intrinsically antifeminist. It’s not – if you look at their complaints (in a vacuum, detached from the rest of their behaviors, statements, etc) they are complaining about the same sex-polarized rigid role structures that feminists have been complaining about.
b) I’m not defending incels. I am arguing with people who are in here ridiculing and dismissing the complaints that the incel folks have made about hetero courting and hooking-up behaviors.
I find nothing too objectionable about your theorizing, but I’m flagging out the part in bold because if we’re coming up with advantageous traits in a long-term male partner, your list looks incomplete in important ways. Youth, strength, and health don’t go very far if they aren’t bundled with nurturing, empathy, and the ability to form a strong emotional bond. When you consider that pregnancy and postpartum are not when women are their peak attractiveness or sexual receptiveness, women who want the best for themselves and their offspring will select for mates who won’t abandon them when their bellies become striped with stretch marks and breastfeeding dries up their libido. A mate who is faithful is of high value, in other words.
What is the basis for concluding that high testosterone men will be “good providers of support”? It’s not that I question that they’d be good at acquiring resources, but I do question whether this type of guy would necessarily be better at sharing resources with a woman impregnated by him, who is now on track to losing her status as a nubile waif with the 0.7 waist-hip ratio to becoming a woman with a mom-bod. There is no reason to suppose it’s violence and early death that would disadvantage them as longterm mates, when infidelity would be the more obvious detriment.
An even more obvious, to me at least, detriment to selecting men with a high propensity for violence is that they’d also be more likely to injure or kill their partners.
This would be a major detriment too, but I don’t think it would be more obvious than infidelity. A man who kills the mother of his child(ren) negatively impacts his own reproductive fitness.
ETA. He also makes his own death more likely, since the woman’s family members will avenge her murder.
If women are biologically driven to mate with the manliest men as evident by physique and behavior, doesn’t that beg the question of why there is such a diversity of male physique and behavior in contemporary societies?
Most of the guys I see are not oozing testosterone to the extreme as far as my eyes can tell. They may be more “masculine” than “feminine”, but only a few are clearly “macho”.
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Not unless you claim that that’s the only biological drive or determining factor they’re driven by.
On the other hand, a mate with some violent tendencies may well defend the woman against other men with violent tendencies, rape, marriage-by-rape, and defend his offspring against other people… which may or may not make the risk of black eyes/broken noses/etc. an acceptable risk. Which is NOT to say this is a defense of violence in any form, just people can be pretty nasty to each other and without a framework of law and authority it’s every man (or woman) for himself/the family. Having a mate able to defend you can be important to a woman pregnant and with a couple of other children to mind at the same time. This could result in a tradeoff between “violent enough to take on all comers” and “peaceful so as not to endanger one’s mate or offspring”. Either extreme could be a problem in the environment(s) humans evolved in.
All the girls want to fuck James Bond but they want to marry Sydney the Accountant. One has good genes (by some definitions) but the other is more likely to stick around and help raise the kids to reproductive age.
The reason there is such a range of physiques is because there is no one answer to the problem(s) of having kids and raising them. A short skinny guy who is reliable and works hard may be attractive from a stability viewpoint. The dashing adventurer is attractive from another. Women have had reproductive success with both types so both types continue to exist.
I know you are being glib, but no, not all the girls want to fuck James Bond and not all of them want to marry an accountant. A lot of them are fine with fucking any guy that shows her any positive attention and looks halfway decent, regardless of how close he resembles the archetypal male image. And a lot of them are fine partnering up with the ne’er-do-well because being a married woman with children inherently confers status. If you have family and village to help you raise your kids, you don’t need a partner to provide for you.
I agree with your second paragraph, except that I would say that there are many reproductive strategies out there rather than two. And this is why attributing any singular biologically-based motive to all of womenkind does not make sense to me.
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Yes, I’m aware not all girls want to fuck James Bond, some really do prefer to fuck Sydney instead, or the entire varsity football team, or the girl would rather fuck Sally and the occasional Sydney prefers Steve. Having her own sufficient resources these days means that if a woman prefers she might conceive via turkey baster and dispense with the sperm provider entirely (in the old days she had to tolerate the sperm donor briefly). Having an extended family makes a difference. In cultures with arranged marriages what the girls and boys want takes a back seat to what the organizers of the marriage want (although cheating is an option, even if it can also be a dangerous one if there are draconian penalties for getting caught).
Yes, there are multiple mating strategies for humans. Many humans even employ multiple strategies over the course of a lifetime (what a man or woman wants at 20 differs from what they may want at 70). Sex and reproduction are not as strongly linked in humans as it is in some other animals and sexual intimacy serves purposes beyond simple reproduction.
In the late 19th Century there was a fad among English aristocrats of marrying American heiresses, where the women provided the resources (wealth) and the man provided sperm and social status. At least some of the time it made both parties happy with the result even if it didn’t conform to the standard story of the man providing the money.
So while there may be some element of truth in some evolutionary psychology theories, the pop versions never seem to take into account that human sexuality is pretty complex and variable.
Ultimately the problem with ev psych or bio psych is that none of us gets the chance to look at human nature unmodified by our own socially-familiarized assumptions, let alone unmodified by the socialization of the people whose behaviors we’re studying.
We see what we see, and if we’re reasonable we say “Some of what we see is innate and inherent, and some of it is caused by society in one sense or another and could be very different”.
But that makes it sound like it’s additive, and I don’t think it is. I think trying to get a handle on how much of what we see is innate and how much is socially induced is like trying to figure out how many gallons of water in the swimming pool are due to the length and how many can be attributed to the width.
Thing is, when environmental selective pressures drop off, there is one factor that totally overwhelms support or testosterone: It is whether the male offspring is considered attractive by other females. Genetic payoff can be very high.
Also, my understanding of high-testosterone specimens is that they do not make for good providers. They tend to be short-term optimized packages, spreading their seed as much as possibly, before flaming out. High-risk behavior and aggression is common as is early death. Any resources are not generally expended on a single mate but used to attract more mates. Offspring tend to be raised by networks of realted females.
Theories relating mating success to social status and wealth would seem to be refuted by the “bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks” meme, where young women fall for a poor nobody rather than a scion of wealth and position. Look at Titanic for example.
ETA: Although upon reflection, Titanic has been regarded as an example of “true” (and therefore, doomed) love, which wouldn’t survive long years of dull domesticity.
That doesn’t seem to bother the (mostly) women who cultivate relationships with prison inmates, a phenomenon that recently made it to reality TV.
Some find danger exciting and compelling, even when it leads to physical abuse and find it preferable to what “Stanley the accountant” has to offer.
The number of women who gripe about repeatedly getting into relationships with physically abusive men (bad luck, one is led to believe :dubious:) seems to be roughly balanced by the number of men who gripe about how women ignore them because they’re too ‘‘nice’’ (boring).
What percentage of the population do you think that is?
– and exclude the ones who are continuing to cultivate existing relationships with people imprisoned for non-violent crimes, while you’re at it.
Not to mention that part of the point I’ve been trying to make through this thread is that there’s a wide range of who and what individual women – make that individuals of any gender – are attracted to, and also in how people relatively rate the balance of a wide varieties of attributes; so theories claiming that humans in general have evolved to be attracted to a specific few of those attributes to the effective exclusion of others are essentially flawed.