cracks knuckles Let’s piss some people off tonight.
This is sound mating strategy for homo sapiens.
Take yourself out of generational context. Forget religion, social mores and written history. Think back 100,000 years. Think game theory. Think only in terms of selfish genes.
A promiscuous female is a loss for the male. Whose kid is he raising? Massive waste for the male if it’s not his genes.
(Insert note regarding the hypothesis as to why our dicks are shovel shaped. Add observations of male mammals killing their rival’s offspring and note how we see this in modern men.)
A child requires an extraordinary output of time and energy, for both parties, far more than other mammals. Childbirth is also extraordinarily dangerous for big-brained primate females; big heads, helpless infancy and so forth.
The female needs her mate to stick around and care for her and her child during pregnancy through early child rearing. After all, she’s going to be the very definition of handicapped for a couple of years. (Insert note regarding the hypothesis that grandmothers partially fill this role and why women live longer.) If she hasn’t been picky and chosen a solid mate, her and her child may well die.
Now the male has to push back against this resistance. If he’s not the type to push, he doesn’t make babies, pass on his genes. To put a finer point on it, if he’s not attracted enough to effort the chase, he may be a slut who will run off. Refer to previous paragraph.
tl;dr: Evolution selected for hard-to-get females and pushy males.
What you’re essentially describing here is evolutionary psychology. Now, I won’t go as far as some have to say that it’s an entirely bunk field of study, primarily because I’m nowhere near qualified to make those claims. But I will say that it’s a field that has received a lot of criticism for being full of poor science and “just-so” stories without a basis in good science, and that even if some aspects of the field are valid, it has frequently been misapplied in popscience to promote incel/alt-right worldviews.
The bunk part is the overconfidence in the conclusion, not necessarily the ponderance.
Because people are more than someone else’s summation and over-simplification of their evolutionary history.
If they weren’t, then social evolution wouldn’t exist. Hence, the alt-right adoption.
That’s the bunk, that, and they were being a total dildo.
I know you’re trying to make an argument, but your word choice and way of presenting the arguments is giving off major incel vibes.
I expected this response because I frequently used the word “female”. This is a biology discussion, not a sociological one. I tried to take care to set and keep the tone scientific and not “in common parlance”. And perhaps I failed.
As to “incel”, I’ve had 50+ lovers in this life, the very opposite of involuntarily celibacy. What this says about my psychological needs, well, I’ve been thinking on that lately, not liking my own reflection. Thank god I’m with my wife and those days seem at a close.
As to the science of my post, I welcome challenges! Challenges to my ideas are how I learn.
Now imagine this: Every now and again a species makes a great evolutionary leap. Men respecting women’s decisions and women being honest about what they want could be the next stage of human evolution.
We can change and history and genetics show that our cultural choices really do influence our evolution.
Add observations of male mammals killing their rival’s offspring and note how we see this in modern men.
No, we don’t see this. Men do not routinely kill their rivals’ offspring and, if they did, the mother would want them locked up.
Most of your logic implicitly assumes that males and females pair up. The game theory is quite different otherwise. What makes you think that our ancestors 100,000 years ago did this, when you’re explicitly comparing them to mammal species that don’t?
You succeeded at line 1, I’ll give you that.
Yeah, this is some evolutionary psychology shit. A subject that is pure bullshit, we simply do not know enough about a biological history, or how the brain developed, and works, to truly, accurately, ascribe psychological phenomenon directly to evolutionary considerations.
The lack of evidence is one thing, but his argument contradicts itself.
He says that:
- the heavy investment that women make in their offspring means that they go to great lengths to make sure that their partners are committed
- we observe modern men killing their (the women’s) offspring in the expectation that those women will turn around and have children with them instead.
Apparently, the women failed to select fathers who would stick around to defend their offspring, and they’re happy to mate with men who kill the children that they have invested so much in. This strategy is clearly bad, so evolution would select against it.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/775/
Others have hammered on how incorrect this is but I do want to point one thing out
the female needs her mate to stick around and care for her and her child during pregnancy through early child rearing
This is assuming a 1950s style atomic family unit which is an extremely new concept. Evidence suggests our shared pre-agriculture ancestors lived in small hunter gatherer groups. These groups would share responsibilities, like a family, but not necessarily all be closely related. “it takes a village to raise a child” and everything.