I’m getting really bored with explaining every single mundane human experience as some fundamental trait that goes back to pre-historic times when it helped our semi-monkey ancestors.
First off, it’s not science. We are making our claims about this based on how cute the explaination is- and that is always a bad scene. And it’s nearly always equally fun and easy to make an ape-explaination for the exact opposite. Like, someone recently mentioned they thought the general preference for long hair on females was because baby apes cling to their mother’s. Uh. Couldn’t you just as equally say females need short hair to keep babies from getting tangled up in it, or something? Really guys, we are just making shit up, that has nothing to do with anything, and then all nodding our heads sagely when someone comes up with something that sounds neat. It’s ten times worse than the worst folk emtomology.
It especially bugs me when applied to gender roles. I’m already sick of the myth that women are less sexual than men. It’s not helping to hear this explained as a fundamental human trait. Human sexuality takes a wide variety of forms, across a wide variety of cultures, and the 2000 years of Christian history behind our culture’s has a helluva lot more influence than our hunter gatherer years.
We have 10,000 years of human history behind us. During this time we have discovered great things- farming, alcohol, computers, ping pong. Our cultures are huge forces in our lives- to the point that Bob from NYC isn’t going to be able to call on his ape ancestry if he ever needs to fit in to, say, an Amazon tribe. Yes, we have instincts. But these arn’t what causes us to cuss at traffic or enjoy lattes or want to spend the weekend touring wineries. Instincts are molded and shaped and warped by culture in a multitude of ways, often rendering them unrecognizable, so that they apply to the world of concrete and screens most of us live in. Life is a wierd and amazing thing. There is no need to hange around making convuluted and unlikely explainations for how every moment in our lives can trace a straight path to early humans.
Yeah. We can attribute many of our behaviours to our evolutionary past, but there’s an awful lot of junk science out there on the subject. Frankly, I blame Desmond Morris for a lot of it. How he maintains the respect the he does among anthropologists, I’ll never know. His books are filled with wild speculation presented as fact. If the scientists can’t get things right, how on earth are the non-scientitsts supposed to do any better?
Similarly (though slightly tangentially), when a cultural or geographic phenomenon seems to have a connection with something biblical, mythological, or otherwise unconfirmable, it does not mean that that quasi-historical “fact” is somehow proven.
I don’t know what it is that makes humans want to explain every aspect of culture in terms of prehistoric survival. My own theory is that, when early man first encountered other clans that had similar cultures, they would wonder why. They would decide that it had to do with surviving the transition to the savannah. In this way, they were able to separate themselves from the other clan, and so compete with them without remorse. Those who came up with some sort of explanation like, “confirnation bias,” or “coincidence” were wiped out.
I’m fairly sure posting on the internet is derived from our simian ancestors’s habit of flinging feces at those they dislike. This OP seems to confirm my hypothesis.
I ordered a whole video series by him. At first I thought it was pretty cool, but the more I watch it, the less he looks like a scientist and the more he looks like a clown.
Maybe it is a way to simply explain things.
“Let’s make all human interactions/behaviours inate traits and then we can be done with it.”
Really, the whole human experience is so damned complex and confusing. The idea that we simply do every action in life as a function of the reproductive process also strikes me as just plain simplistic and silly.
Because we have such a long history and isolated cutural groups are nigh impossible to find these days there is no way to tell for sure what is purely an evolutionary throw back and what is a learned behaviour effected by the society around the individual.
Maybe women wear make up becuase their mothers and grandmothers did rather than as some mimicry of bird plumage to attract a potential mate to ensure their gene line continues.
But then I could be wrong and this is an attempt to find a new mate…
He’d do us all a big favor by putting some caveats in his pronouncements. Instead of “Scientists know that…”, how about “One hypothesis is that… but of course we don’t really know for sure”. And keep emphasizing that last part over and over again.
I haven’t heard this much. Can you give me some other examples besides the long hair? What other kinds of things are “blamed” on the monkeys?
I didn’t know this was a myth either. So, women would be equally as sexual as men if they weren’t repressed? How can we say/prove that Christian history has influenced sexuality more than being stuck providing resources for a kid as a hunter/gatherer influenced it?
On the one hand, I have not encountered this habit of making “everything” an ape trait, so I am not sure why so many posters are up in arms about it.
On the other hand, in the last 30 years (and subsequent to many of Morris’s published WAGs), we have discovered:
chimps “making war” on other chimp groups (when we had long thought ourselves the only animal that actually planned and executed warfare for territory–as opposed to the sort of territorial fighting that spontaneously occurs when two males meet during mating season);
chimps engaging in deliberately deceptive behavior (lying);
male chimps engaged in food sharing and other (apparently) bonding rituals following hunts;
chimps figuring out ways to use, and even make, tools,
all of which (aside from tool use were considered strictly human actions as late as the 1960s and early 1970s.
I think that if a person attempts to describe every single human trait as simply an ape trait “adapted” to humans, that person is both lazy and nuts. Of course, I have rarely encountered any person who could be remotely described in this way.
Evolutionary psychology is tricky. On the one hand, yes, a lot of it is wild speculation.
On the other hand, we are dealing with objective facts here, and some of them can be falsified. Some ways to do it:
-If a behavioral trait is genetically determined, then we should be able to find it in all cultures. Long hair on women is not, I believe, common to all cultures; there’s very little chance it’s genetically determined. If it is common to all cultures, there’s a pretty good chance that it is an inherited behavior.
-Behavioral traits that are common to all cultures AND that appear in our close nonhuman relatives are more likely to be inherited traits.
-Behavioral traits that disappear in victims of specific brain injuries are more likely to be inherited traits, inasmuch as the brain’s crude structure is inherited.
-Behavioral traits that appear in children even when the parents make a concerted effort not to encourage the traits are more likely to be inherited traits.
-Behavioral traits that are more likely to appear in separated-at-birth identical twins than in siblings adopted from different biological parents are more likelyto be inherited traits.
As bad as it might be to have folks saying that winery tours are inherited, it’s equally silly to posit that humans are little more than empty hard drives upon which the programs of culture are recorded. We’re immensely complex creatures, with many instinctive behaviors, and discovering these instinctive behaviors is a fascinating area of science.
And a love for lattes combines a love for sweetness and a love for creaminess and a love of the euphoria of caffeine–which of those traits do you think is culturally determined?
Jared Diamond’s book The Third Chimpanzee is another example of this. The whole book is an attempt to relate a lot of our behavior to our chimp heritage. One example I remember was that he said women are attracted to men who smoke because engaging in self-destructive behavior helps prove our ability to survive, as in “sure, that guy is successful, but I’ve managed to be just as successful while handicapping myself with a nicotene habit, so I’m clearly tougher than him!” He fails to explain, however, how this could have applied back in the days when everyone genuinely thought smoking was good for you.
Anyway, I get tired of this, too. I don’t even open threads anymore that start with “what’s the evolutionary advantage of…” They pop up all the time. What’s the evolutionary advantage of being a slacker at work? What’s the evolutionary advantage of a double chin? Blah blah blah.
Also, Even Sven, that 2000 years of Christian history has hardly said that women were less sexual; a lot of the inquisition’s worst excesses were based around the uncontrollable sexual desires of women.
Doesn’t the misunderstanding go in both directions, however? It seems to me that there are a lot of people, even on these boards, who think that humans have no instinctive behaviors at all, and even more people who think that human instincts can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I was going to say how studying Apes can help this prove what you believe, but you obviously don’t want to hear it.
While a lot of stuff on this subject that people are posting here are still WAG, there has been a lot of stuff that can help us learn more about ourselves. This new movement is in response to a relatively recent discovery that we are not so different than our closest relatives than we thought we were. For a long time, humans considered ourselves high above the animal kingdom and refused to acknowledge that apes could have personalities, culture, and intelligence anywhere near our own. The more I study Apes, the more I see how similar we are to them. We can learn a lot from studying them because they are also moved and influenced by culture rather than just instinct.
For a good intro book into this subject, I suggest Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal. It has a section on sexuality that I think you will find most interesting.
It’s all over the place. I just read someone on the board say that he thought ADD developed because it was a useful trait to
In some cultures, the woman is considered to be the more sexual one, and marriage is a “civilizing” influence that keeps their raw sexuality in check. This is common in Islamic culture, for example. The anatomy is pretty much the same- the big difference being that women have no refractory period and easily experience multiple orgasms. A written description of a male and female orgasm can’t be seperated. The idea that women don’t want or enjoy sex as much as men is cultural. My personal speculation is that these ideas come from our historical system of inhertence with it’s emphasis on legiitamacy and first borns, which makes control of female sexuality very important.
I don’t think we have no insticts. But just that the answer that is closer to home is usually farther from home. We can trace our love of suburbia to the evolutionary desire for wide hunting grounds, but more likely it’s a product of the GI bill in the 40s. We’ve picked up a LOT of baggage over the past 10,000 years, and it’s more likely that a given behavoir is done because it was adventageous in the recent past than in pre-history.
And there are some things that just can’t be easily explained. There are people who can only recieve sexual gratification from popping baloons. Is this related to something deep in the human phyche? Sure. Can we trace it directly and cleverly to some ape trait? No. Things get jumbled up and twisted around and put through infinite lenses before we start doing them and the path is rarely a neat and simple one. Thats what society does. Thats why we live on farms and not hunting grounds. Thats why I work on a computer. Because society takes humanity and channel’s it’s various energies and instincts in to new forms.
Thing is, mammal sexuality really IS different for males and females. There are species where one releases eggs into the water, and another releases sperm, and then they’re done. Except mammals aren’t like that, because females have to carry the babies to term internally.
And this means that it is very rare for male mammals to do any parental care at all. And it also means that a female can only marginally increase her reproductive success per mating season by mating with multiple males, while males can dramatically incrase their success.
Simple math.
Now, as to who wants sex more, male humans or female humans, it’s not neccesarily obvious. After all, every time a male has sex with a female, a female has to have sex with a male. So those surveys where women claim to have had x partners on average, while men claim to have n*x, where n>1, well, something’s wrong there. But I don’t think we can lay the blame on Judeo-Christio-Islamic brainwashing. China, India, and Japan were never Christianized or Judaized, or Islamacized. Yet they are patriarchal societies as well, along with pre-Christian europe. Yeah, yeah, it’s all the fault of the neolithic patriarchal sky/phallus god worshippers who subjugated the hunter-gatherer matriarchal earth/womb goddess worshippers. Except no hunter-gatherer society we’ve ever studied has been anything like this putative society. Not that you brought it up, I just wanna smack this theory around one more time!
Any way, bottom line, the consequences of sex for female mammals are different than for male mammals. It shouldn’t be shocking to find that they have different behaviors around sex. And it shouldn’t be too shocking to find that humans are pretty similar to our nearest primate relatives. Not exactly the same of course…after all, chimps aren’t exactly like gorillas or orangutans either.
