This post doesn’t make a convincing argument for any of its points. You go all over the place, hinting that many people may be wrong, but you don’t nail it down that they actually are wrong. Your main objective seems to be proving that the ancestors of humans were polyamorous rather than monogamous or polygynous. If you believe this thesis, you probably have good evidence to support it. Why not just list this evidence instead?
Haven’t read the book yet, but here’s the supporting evidence I gathered from the Amazon.com preview and the authors’ website and blog. (I probably missed some so please add to the list.)
females have potential for multiple orgasms
higher popularity of pornography with one female and multiple males compared to one male and multiple females
it fits better with “fierce egalitarianism” of forager bands: female sexual exclusivity is necessary for males to determine paternity, but if all resources are equally shared, then there is little point in knowing paternity
ETA: our closest primate relations, chimps and bonobos, have “multimale-multifemale mating systems”
On a separate note, while it seems plausible that the authors of the book are right that our forager ancestors were polyamorous, it’s not clear why that matters to us in making our own choices, given that our ancestors switched over to monogamy/polygyny as soon as agriculture was invented.
female sexual exclusivity is necessary for males to determine paternity, but if all resources are equally shared, then there is little point in knowing paternity
This sounds weird. Your genes don’t want you to know you’re the father, they want you to be the father, and female sexual exclusivity helps with that.
Actually, your genes want both, since if you know you are the father then your genes can help direct you to giving more resources to your offspring rather than others. Indeed, there are plausible payoff matrices one can construct where one would rather have fewer offspring but be more certain which offspring are yours.
You actually don’t need to “know” which offspring are yours. You just need to direct more resources towards them. In fact not knowing a child is yours in a fiercely egalitarian culture might help you find good excuses for why you treat him preferably to other children. One just needs to “like” that child more for some reason and then the rationalizing mind will find ways to justify or conceal this preferential treatment.
A more finely tuned subconscious kin recognition system based on visual appraisal of facial features (if I recall right men do prefer children that are more similar to themselves) or perhaps something like smell might do the trick.
Your genes don’t want you to know you’re the father, they want you to be the father, and female sexual exclusivity helps with that.
Yes, each male’s genes would want him to gather a large harem and enforce sexual exclusivity for “his” females, even if he couldn’t preferentially contribute resources to his own children. But how is he supposed to accomplish this in an egalitarian forager band?
On the other hand, a female’s genes would want her to be sexually exclusive, voluntarily, if that meant her children’s father would preferentially contribute resources to them. Otherwise, they prefer sperm competition, since that gives her a better chance of getting the fittest sperm, and increases the genetic diversity of her children. (At least that’s my understanding of the authors’ logic.)
Your genes might also want you to signal that you don’t know who the father is so that your altruistic actions towards the child are seen as altruistic rather than selfish. It’s a just-so story, but not crazy.
Alternatively, sexual feelings might be radically genetically undetermined, less genetically determined than almost everything else about us, to partially prevent red queen’s races, runaway sexual selection, inbreeding caused by agreement with parents regarding sexual preferences, and excess conflict over fitness-irrelevant superficialities.
This combination of intensity and flexibility in a drive might make our sexual feelings radically flexible, and thus make them such a good lever for manipulating group dynamics that meme-level group selection reliably grabs onto them and adapts group sexual norms that shape our broader psychology to the group’s adaptive niche.
Yes, but sperm competition is an easier departure from small, reciprocally altruistic forager bands. Pre-agriculture, defecting in that particular Prisoner’s Dilemma led to either death or a much narrower selection of mates. Getting rid of the strict enforcement of resource sharing (by adopting agriculture) is the discontinuity that makes this counter-intuitive.
Men viewing erotic material suggestive of sperm competition (two men with one woman) produce ejaculates containing a higher percentage of motile sperm than men viewing explicit images of only three women.
(Ryan and Jethá, 231, referring to research by Kilgallon and Simmons)
I’m finding it a bit hard to draw that conclusion from this when there’s no precisely-one-male-present condition, and I don’t see any mention of any experiments that did do that in the actual article, either. It could just be due to the presence of a male, and not the number of them.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s also not clear that what pornography men like should correlate with what causes them to produce more motile sperm!
I would be surprised if a greater number of male actors does not also result in a salary increase for the actress. This does not contradict your point, but it may undermine it; I’m hardly familiar with pay structures. More significantly, what would you need to observe to conclude it was demand-driven?
I agree with you on this. However I think you need to realize something else. Hunter gatherers are relatively egalitarian, farmer communities and especially city dwellers are not.
A fair number of humans have been exposed to selective pressures since the dawn of agriculture and civilization. There is no doubt that we see changes of typical skeletal features in the last 40k years (especially the anomalous shrinking of brain size accompanied by growth in the “advanced” regions, which defies the previous trend of the past few 100k and perhaps even million years as shown by the fossil record to be the case among all hominids (not just Homo Sapiens)), modern geneticists also see many sweeps still taking place in modern populations. Harpending and Cochran postulate on this and other things that we’ve seen major genetic change, especially on genes that affect things like like behaviour, infectious disease resistance and digestion in historical times.
Perhaps we are ill suited to monogamy and patriarchal sexual polygamy (one husband many wives) because we just recently started responding to pressures in its favour (that have also recently nearly desisted with the advent of equality of the sexes and contraception). Evidence that at least some preference for monogamy may exist is the dropping rates of polyandrous marriage in the Himalayan region as soon as the economic circumstances allowed different arrangements, while people are today only slowly responding to the de facto legal, reproductive and financial disincentives for monogamous marriage.
However a counter point may be tropical Southern Chinese (a few smaller ethnic groups still practice this) and West African farmer communities where we don’t see such a patriarchal pattern. But perhaps this is due to the different economic trade offs of their particular type of agriculture.
Also at the end of the day maybe I’m mistaking pastoral patterns for agricultural patterns of selection since Eurasian and East Africans people’s have a fair share of those among their ancestors.
I don’t think that the point is that a particular view is right, so much as that a particular view is wrong. I don’t think that there’s quite adequate evidence to conclusively disprove such a hypothesis, only evidence to call it into question, which this does, if imperfectly. I think the author is erring on the side of readability and not enumeration of evidence.
This post doesn’t make a convincing argument for any of its points. You go all over the place, hinting that many people may be wrong, but you don’t nail it down that they actually are wrong. Your main objective seems to be proving that the ancestors of humans were polyamorous rather than monogamous or polygynous. If you believe this thesis, you probably have good evidence to support it. Why not just list this evidence instead?
Haven’t read the book yet, but here’s the supporting evidence I gathered from the Amazon.com preview and the authors’ website and blog. (I probably missed some so please add to the list.)
females have potential for multiple orgasms
higher popularity of pornography with one female and multiple males compared to one male and multiple females
female copulatory vocalizations
male anatomy indicating sperm competition
Coolidge effect in females
it fits better with “fierce egalitarianism” of forager bands: female sexual exclusivity is necessary for males to determine paternity, but if all resources are equally shared, then there is little point in knowing paternity
ETA: our closest primate relations, chimps and bonobos, have “multimale-multifemale mating systems”
On a separate note, while it seems plausible that the authors of the book are right that our forager ancestors were polyamorous, it’s not clear why that matters to us in making our own choices, given that our ancestors switched over to monogamy/polygyny as soon as agriculture was invented.
This sounds weird. Your genes don’t want you to know you’re the father, they want you to be the father, and female sexual exclusivity helps with that.
Actually, your genes want both, since if you know you are the father then your genes can help direct you to giving more resources to your offspring rather than others. Indeed, there are plausible payoff matrices one can construct where one would rather have fewer offspring but be more certain which offspring are yours.
Correction accepted, but it doesn’t apply in the “fierce egalitarianism” scenario that Wei Dai mentioned.
Yeah, I agree. If one assumes near complete equidistribution of resources then it won’t apply.
You actually don’t need to “know” which offspring are yours. You just need to direct more resources towards them. In fact not knowing a child is yours in a fiercely egalitarian culture might help you find good excuses for why you treat him preferably to other children. One just needs to “like” that child more for some reason and then the rationalizing mind will find ways to justify or conceal this preferential treatment.
A more finely tuned subconscious kin recognition system based on visual appraisal of facial features (if I recall right men do prefer children that are more similar to themselves) or perhaps something like smell might do the trick.
Yes, each male’s genes would want him to gather a large harem and enforce sexual exclusivity for “his” females, even if he couldn’t preferentially contribute resources to his own children. But how is he supposed to accomplish this in an egalitarian forager band?
On the other hand, a female’s genes would want her to be sexually exclusive, voluntarily, if that meant her children’s father would preferentially contribute resources to them. Otherwise, they prefer sperm competition, since that gives her a better chance of getting the fittest sperm, and increases the genetic diversity of her children. (At least that’s my understanding of the authors’ logic.)
Your genes might also want you to signal that you don’t know who the father is so that your altruistic actions towards the child are seen as altruistic rather than selfish. It’s a just-so story, but not crazy.
Alternatively, sexual feelings might be radically genetically undetermined, less genetically determined than almost everything else about us, to partially prevent red queen’s races, runaway sexual selection, inbreeding caused by agreement with parents regarding sexual preferences, and excess conflict over fitness-irrelevant superficialities.
This combination of intensity and flexibility in a drive might make our sexual feelings radically flexible, and thus make them such a good lever for manipulating group dynamics that meme-level group selection reliably grabs onto them and adapts group sexual norms that shape our broader psychology to the group’s adaptive niche.
Yes, but sperm competition is an easier departure from small, reciprocally altruistic forager bands. Pre-agriculture, defecting in that particular Prisoner’s Dilemma led to either death or a much narrower selection of mates. Getting rid of the strict enforcement of resource sharing (by adopting agriculture) is the discontinuity that makes this counter-intuitive.
Ah I’ve see you’ve thought of the effect of agriculture, I should have read all the comments before posting.
Your point was a good one. The societal changes wrought by agriculture cannot be emphasized heavily enough.
Supply-driven. Male actors are much cheaper.
(Ryan and Jethá, 231, referring to research by Kilgallon and Simmons)
I’m finding it a bit hard to draw that conclusion from this when there’s no precisely-one-male-present condition, and I don’t see any mention of any experiments that did do that in the actual article, either. It could just be due to the presence of a male, and not the number of them.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s also not clear that what pornography men like should correlate with what causes them to produce more motile sperm!
I would be surprised if a greater number of male actors does not also result in a salary increase for the actress. This does not contradict your point, but it may undermine it; I’m hardly familiar with pay structures. More significantly, what would you need to observe to conclude it was demand-driven?
I agree with you on this. However I think you need to realize something else. Hunter gatherers are relatively egalitarian, farmer communities and especially city dwellers are not.
A fair number of humans have been exposed to selective pressures since the dawn of agriculture and civilization. There is no doubt that we see changes of typical skeletal features in the last 40k years (especially the anomalous shrinking of brain size accompanied by growth in the “advanced” regions, which defies the previous trend of the past few 100k and perhaps even million years as shown by the fossil record to be the case among all hominids (not just Homo Sapiens)), modern geneticists also see many sweeps still taking place in modern populations. Harpending and Cochran postulate on this and other things that we’ve seen major genetic change, especially on genes that affect things like like behaviour, infectious disease resistance and digestion in historical times.
Perhaps we are ill suited to monogamy and patriarchal sexual polygamy (one husband many wives) because we just recently started responding to pressures in its favour (that have also recently nearly desisted with the advent of equality of the sexes and contraception). Evidence that at least some preference for monogamy may exist is the dropping rates of polyandrous marriage in the Himalayan region as soon as the economic circumstances allowed different arrangements, while people are today only slowly responding to the de facto legal, reproductive and financial disincentives for monogamous marriage.
However a counter point may be tropical Southern Chinese (a few smaller ethnic groups still practice this) and West African farmer communities where we don’t see such a patriarchal pattern. But perhaps this is due to the different economic trade offs of their particular type of agriculture.
Also at the end of the day maybe I’m mistaking pastoral patterns for agricultural patterns of selection since Eurasian and East Africans people’s have a fair share of those among their ancestors.
Thanks. Sounds like an interesting and plausible scholarly argument!
I don’t think that the point is that a particular view is right, so much as that a particular view is wrong. I don’t think that there’s quite adequate evidence to conclusively disprove such a hypothesis, only evidence to call it into question, which this does, if imperfectly. I think the author is erring on the side of readability and not enumeration of evidence.