But that entire realm of thinking doesn’t even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins.
Some hunter-gatherers would strongly disagree To put it harshly, wombs are always scarce resources and it is likely the evolution of human intelligence can be reduced to guys competing for women. (EDSC model). Another excellent resource is http://www.warandgender.com/ (the book), arguing how war and gender mutually create each other, and the root cause is probably competing for women.
(To the people helpfully downvoting the whole thread, they are probably feminists: for example War and Gender is a feminist book. You get exactly the same sort of theories from the better feminist sources, as at the end of the day there is no such thing as different truths, thus the difference largely being the tone of abhorrence vs. grudging acceptance.)
Argumenting with hunter-gatherers is always a bit iffy, though, as current HG cannot be typical HG: there must be a special reason they stayed HG while everybody else moved on, this making them atypical. Perhaps The Yanimamö are a better example than most HG as their special feature seems to be mainly remoteness.
At any rate, womb-competition is pretty much an inescapable fact of huge human brain sizes. It means difficult and dangerous childbirth, and it means long and time-sinky mothering, and it means males having harems is a reproductive advantage when and if they can pull it off.
I admit I don’t know the final answer, if there is one. I.e. how to explain the difference between e.g. the Yanomamö and Hazda people for example. Perhaps these instincts for competing for women are culturally suppressed. Perhaps I am wrong and it is not an instinct, although it makes perfect sense in evolutionary logic. Perhaps Hazda type people are more K-selected, i.e. fathers focusing more on fathering than on trying to build harems, fewer offspring, but higher quality. There is probably some mystery to unweil here which was not done yet. Perhaps it is a patriarchy vs. matriarchy thing, perhaps in matrilineal socities K-selected high fathering investment instead of harem-building gives more reproductive advantage.
Also note that this seems like there was such a thing as cultural differences already at the HG level, such as the Yanomamö and Hazda people. To get raw biology, if there is such a thing, we would have to go back even more.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
That’s partly the point—the fact that there’s variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with “chesterton’s fence” aren’t particularly stable in the first place. I’d also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they’re experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.
Downvoters probably just people who don’t want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I’m a feminist myself, there’s no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it’s just that politics in general is toxic.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group’s males won’t tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.
With bonobos, territory doesn’t matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn’t to say there is no mating aggression, just that it’s way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.
Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don’t get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.
So as far as evolution goes, I think what “prevents” it is the lack of scarcity. As for what “prevents” it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we’ve each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.
Hm, this sounds like a pretty solid evidence for the food-competition (scarcity) hypothesis. However the evidences for the mating-competition hypothesis are also fairly strong. Not sure if non-primates matter, but animals like deer or reindeer are walking knee deep in food ( grass) and the mating competition, antler fights, is pretty strong. What I find particularly convincing is humans having abnormally large maternal investments (huge baby head → dangerous birth, slow infant development → lots of mothering investment) which would suggest one hell of a mating competition. But it could also be used as an evidence of fathering investment and monogamy. I don’t really know how to construct at least a thought experiment to split the two without having an influence from culture. After all, if big heads are part of my hypothesis, i.e. intelligence is, intelligence pretty much means something akin to a culture must be there. Culture is probably way older than the archeological evidence for it—just the old versions lacking in artifacts. While lack of evidence is an evidence for lack, probably in case of archeology it is not true—it is a highly inefficient thing. For example, from much more recent history, Gaels were considered to be culturally inferior to Romans because they did not build roads and bridges. Turned out they did, but they made them out of wood, not stone, and that is far harder to find and evidence through archeology.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
Some hunter-gatherers would strongly disagree To put it harshly, wombs are always scarce resources and it is likely the evolution of human intelligence can be reduced to guys competing for women. (EDSC model). Another excellent resource is http://www.warandgender.com/ (the book), arguing how war and gender mutually create each other, and the root cause is probably competing for women.
(To the people helpfully downvoting the whole thread, they are probably feminists: for example War and Gender is a feminist book. You get exactly the same sort of theories from the better feminist sources, as at the end of the day there is no such thing as different truths, thus the difference largely being the tone of abhorrence vs. grudging acceptance.)
Argumenting with hunter-gatherers is always a bit iffy, though, as current HG cannot be typical HG: there must be a special reason they stayed HG while everybody else moved on, this making them atypical. Perhaps The Yanimamö are a better example than most HG as their special feature seems to be mainly remoteness.
At any rate, womb-competition is pretty much an inescapable fact of huge human brain sizes. It means difficult and dangerous childbirth, and it means long and time-sinky mothering, and it means males having harems is a reproductive advantage when and if they can pull it off.
I admit I don’t know the final answer, if there is one. I.e. how to explain the difference between e.g. the Yanomamö and Hazda people for example. Perhaps these instincts for competing for women are culturally suppressed. Perhaps I am wrong and it is not an instinct, although it makes perfect sense in evolutionary logic. Perhaps Hazda type people are more K-selected, i.e. fathers focusing more on fathering than on trying to build harems, fewer offspring, but higher quality. There is probably some mystery to unweil here which was not done yet. Perhaps it is a patriarchy vs. matriarchy thing, perhaps in matrilineal socities K-selected high fathering investment instead of harem-building gives more reproductive advantage.
Also note that this seems like there was such a thing as cultural differences already at the HG level, such as the Yanomamö and Hazda people. To get raw biology, if there is such a thing, we would have to go back even more.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
That’s partly the point—the fact that there’s variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with “chesterton’s fence” aren’t particularly stable in the first place. I’d also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they’re experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.
Downvoters probably just people who don’t want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I’m a feminist myself, there’s no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it’s just that politics in general is toxic.
Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group’s males won’t tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.
With bonobos, territory doesn’t matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn’t to say there is no mating aggression, just that it’s way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.
Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don’t get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.
So as far as evolution goes, I think what “prevents” it is the lack of scarcity. As for what “prevents” it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we’ve each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.
Hm, this sounds like a pretty solid evidence for the food-competition (scarcity) hypothesis. However the evidences for the mating-competition hypothesis are also fairly strong. Not sure if non-primates matter, but animals like deer or reindeer are walking knee deep in food ( grass) and the mating competition, antler fights, is pretty strong. What I find particularly convincing is humans having abnormally large maternal investments (huge baby head → dangerous birth, slow infant development → lots of mothering investment) which would suggest one hell of a mating competition. But it could also be used as an evidence of fathering investment and monogamy. I don’t really know how to construct at least a thought experiment to split the two without having an influence from culture. After all, if big heads are part of my hypothesis, i.e. intelligence is, intelligence pretty much means something akin to a culture must be there. Culture is probably way older than the archeological evidence for it—just the old versions lacking in artifacts. While lack of evidence is an evidence for lack, probably in case of archeology it is not true—it is a highly inefficient thing. For example, from much more recent history, Gaels were considered to be culturally inferior to Romans because they did not build roads and bridges. Turned out they did, but they made them out of wood, not stone, and that is far harder to find and evidence through archeology.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
There are a lot of idealists on the right (and “dark romanticists” on the left) as well, they just focus on different ideals.