That's way too simplistic answer and not true in many cases. Does Donald Trump strive to be a president to get more women? I don't think thats his primary motivation.
True but the Donalds are not the people we should measure but the regular Joes (and the Janes that seek same).
Now maybe its ultimately the same motivation but expressing different things. But I guess what makes the drug dealer seek status, the thief, the used car salesperson, the food truck operator, the barber...
I guess the only way to find out for sure would be to place lone stranded subjects on solitary planets with no chance to communicate or leave ever with anyone else at the end, come back and see what castaways did -knowing anything they did was for naught.
Maybe not official, or even expressed motivation. We humans tend to think high about ourselves (compared to animals), that's why we tend to rationalize our basic instincts.
We channel our hunting instinct in FPS computer games, or professions such as soldier or policeman. We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love". And we don't want to admit that we enjoy dominating others, so we call the jobs where we are in charge, such as governor or mayor "public service".
We humans tend to think high about ourselves (compared to animals)
What makes you think animals don't think high about themselves?
We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love".
Humans developed love? Seriously! Did we also develop gravity? Love is a universal (read: not limited to or developed by humans) attribute that we express to one extent or the other.
> We channel our hunting instinct in FPS computer games, or professions such as soldier or policeman.
Huh? I uh, huh?
> We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love".
Speak for yourself, I ain't ashamed of shit. Also, go buy a Labrador puppy. Or maybe google something like "monogamous animals" and/or "do animals feel love"
>> Does Donald Trump strive to be a president to get more women?
No, he gets the women because of his drive and social status. What the author fails to go into is that females have also evolved to seek men of high social status to father their children. The female genes are more likely to propagate if they mate with such a male, as their children will have similar traits. The other interesting omission is that women seek more masculine men when they are ovulating and less so when they are not - this has been repeatedly shown in studies. So women seek the alpha male for reproduction and the beta male providers the rest of the time.
power is a drug, it twists the mind of even the best makes them crave for more... a perpetual lust. that's what I like about democracy on paper - nobody has too much of it, and never for too long. clever those greeks were
IMO reasonably high testosterone levels is one of the best feelings in the world.
I run a startup and during the inevitable valleys where my self-perceived status is low, my testosterone falls off a cliff.
I've suffered from low testosterone in the past and now that I understand the importance of sleep, diet (greens!), and exercise I can mitigate the drops quite a bit - but status is still a big ingredient.
It has become taboo to discuss the importance of status and sex for male health, but there is an epidemic of males who aren't thriving.
Are you sure? As a counter anecdote, I was diagnosed with low testosterone and went on replacement therapy. The injections were enough that my numbers in blood tests were up by a factor of three even a week after the injections. Certainly right after the injections my numbers would have been even higher. Despite this large change, I noticed no difference. I got more erections at night, that was it.
I hypothesize that sleep, diet and exercise can improve your mood through a whole bunch of factors, with testosterone playing an overstated role. Or even a reverse causation: improved confidence leading to higher T perhaps.
I've since stopped taking the injections as it simply wasn't doing me any good.
I don't think you understand why you were downvoted. You made no effort to tie your comment into the OP. You then state a contrarian opinion as fact "my self-perceived status is low, my testosterone falls off a cliff." And lastly you use hyperbole "an epidemic" to describe your(?) situation which also expresses a lack of empathy for segments of society that really have it bad.
A reason to strive for status and money is because there is glory in it. The harder the struggle the greater the glory. So turn your "not thriving" situation into a personal battle. Let nothing hold you back. Fight brother! :)
My "epidemic" comment comes from my other life as an MMA coach. I observe men transformed every day from low energy insecure shadows into strong emotionally healthy men.
The worst cases tend to be desk-bound intellectuals like many of us here. As these guys transform the result is beautiful - less anxiety, more equanimity in the face of adversity, and a humble self confidence that looks nothing like Trump. :)
"but there is an epidemic of males who aren't thriving."
Shit diets, shit education, shit culture. It's nothing new, although it's been accelerating as society has become more dense and more concentrated on the top.
I say nothing new because I remember staying in the homeless shelter and just seeing entire lives wasted in abjection. Nobody held a decent hand to these men nor showed them another way. This utter abjection was intensified by the lack of positive models to emulate. When the zookeepers seem like a bunch of idiots, the caged animal thinks that, even for all of its trials, it is still more eminently wise and clever.
Terror Management theory (Ernest Becker's Denial of Death) would suggest that these needs are based on the psychological desire to transcend death - making oneself immortal - through gathering not only great wealth and status, but any achievement that would reach past that person's lifespan.
More seriously, most male/female social differences can be explained by the fact that women can have perhaps ten children in a lifetime, whereas men can have ten children in a day. Therefore the base sexual strategy of males is "many", and the base sexual strategy of women is "best". Men, therefore, must strive very hard for "best", particularly in winner-take-all societies. Lifelong monogamy attenuated both of these tendencies and, in my opinion, is the bedrock of civilization.
One man and a thousand women is a potential civilization, whereas one woman and a thousand men is a horror movie.
"One man and a thousand women is a potential civilization, whereas one woman and a thousand men is a horror movie."
Very well put.
"Men, therefore, must strive very hard for 'best'"
Aren't I getting a lesson in this. Spent most of my life in pure abjection until a doctor, with some actual competency, prescribed me some ritalin.
You would not believe how mad I am. Now I'm trying to play catch-up to be the best and it's absolutely infuriating to hear people tell me to "relax".
I went through unimaginable hell because the wrong men were promoted to higher positions and nobody told them to eat shit. I can't even recourse to a notion of ultimate karma and fairness because I've realized how ultimately such notions are a case of the sourest grapes over losing in the competition.
There are MANY terrible and incompetent men and I want to devour them all. But my wants are nothing compared to what I need to do (develop skills and behaviors that are marketable and which act like positive feedback on another). My apologies for the little detour but figured that someone here has an inkling of what I feel and it's nice to know that one's turbulence isn't a lone storm.
Imagine how maddening it is to have a million random thoughts swirling through your brain and you can't execute on any of them unless you "feel" like it.
It's life changing to have (better) control of executive functioning. And it's sobering if you have a lifetime of being moralized at by lesser people for things that aren't too much under your control.
I don't mean to imply you have this disorder. However, in my limited experience, I have found viewing anyone as inherently "lesser" has only been destructive for everyone involved, especially oneself. People are different, they all have their crosses to bear, just as you do.
Well NPD could be a possible "problem". The problem with that though is that when one goes through certain situations, where one is clearly the "brightest" guy in the room while "less bright" men have the reins of power, it reinforces that self-ranking system. If I have a complex analogous to NPD, it's because I've been through enough shit to give me a certain level of confidence.
"People are different, they all have their crosses to bear, just as you do."
Some people just suck and should be imprisoned, killed, or disbarred from any position of authority. A lot of sucky people somehow get into positions, including being responsible for the care of homeless veterans.
"Lesser" people do exist. But I know precisely I'm not the shit. A major irony is that as the capacity for directed work and improvement improves, I'm more and more aware how "far" I am from having a certain comfortableness in my present situation.
It's the anxiety of status, because one knows what happens to those with low status. It's the anxiety of death and waste because one knows what happens to bodies over time. It's the anxiety of regret because one is stuck with memories of one chemical regime while being in a more able one. The socialite is haunted by memories of being a dullard and .
"In earlier societies where marriage did not exist..."
I could stop reading right there. There are essentially no known human societies, past or present, in which marriage does not exist. (Possible exceptions for a few very small societies in highly unusual situations.) Marriage is considered a human universal by anthropologists.
But a bit further on:
"This study looked at research being done on 33 nonindustrial populations (nonindustrial = pre-marriage, pre-contraception)"
You're seriously equating nonindustrial with a lack of marriage? You understand that the industrial revolution was less than 200 years ago, right? And that people have been getting married for all of recorded history?
The Akans of Ghana, West Africa, are matrlineals. Akans are the largest ethnic group in Ghana. They are made of the Akims, Asantes, Fantis, Akuapims, Kwahus, Denkyiras, Brongs, Akwamus, Krachis etc.
"Matrilineal" means property is passed down through the maternal line on the death of the mother, not that of the father.
There are a substantial number of matrilineal societies, probably due to the ease of knowing who your mother is compared to your father, before genetic testing was developed. They are quite often not matriarchal, though.
Not saying your wrong, but I just read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari, and my take away was that there were plenty of matriarchal tribes before agriculture and industry. And, generally it's not an unusual thing for primates. He even goes into a lot of detail on why things changed within the last 12,000 years.
No offense, but I'd rather trust that guy's story than some random dude on the internet's.
Marriage stops the "natural" dynamic by tying every male to a maximum of one female
That guy must be kidding, right? Monogamy is one thing, but what about other forms of marriage that involves more than one man and one woman?
But the rest of the sentence that you quoted is even worse, but so that it makes more sentence, I'll quote the entire sentence:
In earlier societies where marriage did not exist, the most dominant males had children with many women, and the males at the bottom of the hierarchy did not get to procreate at all.
But in most societies around the world, the poor tend to have more kids. Who is the author of that article?
He's:
a 33 year old semi-retired entrepreneur (I co-founded the Swedish marketplace Fyndiq where I was CTO for the first six years). Nowadays I spend my days mostly reading, writing and photographing stuff.
Divorcing a man with a good income and getting custody of the kids is a good way to wind up poor. Poverty in the US tends to be dominated by women and their children. Most poor women were solidly middle class until they ended up pregnant, divorced or widowed.
Men who make good money generally have no trouble remarrying and having more kids with another woman if they want it. Stats I have seen suggest that women are more likely than men to have kids, men who do procreate are more likely to do so with more than one partner.
Iirc: about half of all men reproduce, about 80% of all women do. You can infer from that stat right there that men who do father kids have decent odds of fathering them on more than one woman.
Just about any introductory anthropology textbook.
I think the idea may have originated with anthropologist Donald Brown, who wrote a book Human Universals (which I haven't read) about traits that are pretty much ubiquitous across all cultures.
If you can tolerate a Wikipedia article, here it is:
Sorry, I was very sloppy with the wording. What I meant to say is that monogamous marriage of the kind that is popular in many societies today is a fairly new thing in the perspective of evolution. Most evidence suggests that we introduced monogamy when we went to agricultural societies. I have updated the text. But my argument still holds.
If the goal is to generate a lot of useless "just so" stories, then this is good advice:
"Take any behavior seen in all humans, ie. not something that is due to local culture, and place that behaviour in the kind of tribal group that we lived in during most of evolution. Then ask the question 'what would be the consequence of this behaviour?' "
But if the goal is to figure out why things actually are the way they are, rigorous agent based modeling would be a much better way to proceed.
Also, all notions of human happiness were also shaped by human evolution, so the whole essay is nonsense. If evolution shaped our understanding of happiness, then evolution does not, in any simplistic way, explain why me might do things that go against happiness.
While I normally detest simplistic evo-bio approaches to complex emergent social behavior (particular as it is frequently used to justify shitty, misogynistic behavior), quite a few of those examples could be chalked up to evolution taking a slightly longer view than "get everyone pregnant all the time".
There is probably a strong reproductive advantage for a population as a result of having reproductively disinterested members, and there are individual benefits to sex and sexual desire outside of it leading to pregnancy.
Pregnant women have sex because rewiring women to NOT want sex while pregnant would be evolutionarily pointless, not to mention sex is used to bond male partners.
Likewise, sex after menopause. Women still seek shelter from males post-menopause and also want males around for their children and grandchildren's sake.
Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of "infertile" if a woman appears otherwise sexually appealing.
I'm skeptical of the idea that 50% of young people identifying as bisexual, but if there is truth to this, I imagine that it is largely females who identify this way. And bonding between females is likely to strengthen the 'herd'.
Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of sperm banks. Even if they did, men are also selective in where they deposit their sperm, and in any case are largely motivated to reproduce through sexual desire. If sperm banks were the only way we reproduced, then we'd have evolved a desire for that.
The idea that there are any humans on Earth that aren't closely genetically related is absurd...
As for monogamy, it's a rational response on the part of males who want to be sure they are the father of their mate's children and who want a better mating opportunities than they might have if it was winner-take-all.
Obviously, I'm not sure of the veracity of any of these, but I think it's fairly simple to explain most of these from an evolutionary point of view. I think it is a mistake to assume that because the rational part of our brain can grasp more efficient ways to spread our genes (e.g. sperm banks), that we must therefore do that if we are wired to spread our genes. The parts of our brains wired that way aren't quite that literal and probably haven't had time to catch up with those concepts.
Your question seems along the lines of "if beaks are so successful, why don't all species have beaks?"
All animals are the way they are because of a combination of random mutation and environmental pressure. If a trait is successful in one species, it doesn't mean it will occur in another species. If it does occur in another species, it won't necessarily be reproductively beneficial depending on environment and other factors specific to the speices, so may not ever become a generalized part of the species.
Evolution is not an intelligent process, it's the result of random mutations. The more complex the adaptation the less likely it is to occur. A mechanism for "have sex whenever possible" is much more likely to occur than "have sex except for this long list of exceptions", or even less likely "evaluate this abstract function about genes". Complexity only evolves when there's a real fitness benefit. Evolving a mechanism to specifically avoid sex after menopause would have very little influence on your reproductive success, so there's no reason for it to be selected. The sperm banks example is interesting because that one actually does have a large reproductive fitness impact, but it's also too new and too rare for any sperm donation drive to have evolved. But maybe if the situation continues for long enough humans will evolve to want to donate sperm.
Because evolution is a local optimizer, not a global optimizer, and you can't account for all the factors an evolutionary process accounts for indirectly.
> Why do pregnant women have sex
> Why do women have sex after menopause
> Why do men stay with women who are no longer fertile
All of these are answered by the following:
A reason evolution would cause these "intentionally" is to help maintain social bonds outside of pregnancy.
A reason evolution would cause these "unintentionally" is because evolution created reward systems to encourage procreation, but never got around to disabling them when already pregnant/can no longer get pregnant.
> Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.
I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.
Anyway, there are plenty of evolutionary explanations for having a population with homosexual tendencies. It could be good for social cohesiveness, or for maintaining a more effective fighting force, etc. etc. Evolution is also imperfect, so it's entirely plausible that sexual desires just get accidentally subverted sometimes. I can't imagine that it's very hard to accidentally trigger the growth of the "wrong" sexual selection hardware during development.
> Why do sperm banks have to advertise for doners
Remember that humans only have a weak desire to reproduce in the abstract sense. It was much easier for evolution to make us want sex (regardless of its outcome) and to raise children.
> Why do people adopt kids, its not their genes
Any time people have an energy-intensive social relationship that doesn't involve their immediate relatives, you have to consider the fact that in the sort of environments anatomically modern humans evolved in, if someone was in your community, they probably had very similar DNA. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to have the instinct to protect members of the community (especially children) even if they are not directly related to you. In fact, evolution went a bit overboard with this; not only do we want to protect young human children, but also anything with child-like features such as a large head or short legs. Honestly, I think puppies and kittens and the like are a lot cuter than human babies, which suggests that the human baby detector mechanism in the brain isn't particularly well-adjusted and is set up to have an extremely low false negative rate at the expense of a very high false positive rate.
So you're right, "everything I do is to carry my genes forward view" is too simplistic; in fact, you also have to take into account the fact that there is (or at least was) some correlation between social closeness and genetic similarity, so you have a huge incentive to protect your children, a big incentive to protect your siblings and their children, a moderate incentive to protect friends and their children, etc. etc. I'm told this principle has a name in evolutionary biology, but I can't remember what it is.
> Because evolution is a local optimizer, not a global optimizer, and you can't account for all the factors an evolutionary process accounts for indirectly.
This is pretty much my point. People assume that there are some universal evolutionary principles that underlies everyones decisions across species. And that these simplistic principles can explain everyones behaviour.
> I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.
Because stuff costs money? Financial stress is the leading cause of friction in relationships: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/04/money-is-the-leading-cause-of.... Something as small as getting a parking ticket ($50 here in DC) can cause a lot of stress for a family for whom that's not something they can just wave off. Also, high status jobs are usually a lot more interesting. A lot of people would code for free--nobody would restock shelves for free.
And women strive for status and money too. Women outnumber men in college--and it's not because they're trying to improve their prospects on the marriage market.
Men strive for resources because women used to rely heavily on men for those resources. It's really kind of weird how this ends up being an epiphany for many people, though I find it painfully obvious. Men and women are not difficult to understand if you don't look through the "blank slate" prism.
Lovelessness; Because money and status is a proxy for love from friends and would-be lovers that we crave:
“The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of—and means to—love rather than ends in themselves.”
Snobbery; Because underneath small talk amongst casual social situations underlies a constant of "sizing up" and civilized snobbery:
“The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them”
Outsized expectations; Because meritocracy, "American Dream" doesn't empower people; rather statistically forces us to confront the mediocrity of our ordinariness of lives, while feeling anxious about alleged "wasted potential" :
"In aristocracies, servants often accepted their position with good grace; it was not impossible for them to harbour, in Tocqueville’s words, 'high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect.' In democracies, by contrast, the propaganda of the press and public opinion relentlessly promised servants that they, too, could reach the pinnacles of society and make their fortune as industrialists, judges, scientists or even presidents. Although this sense of unbounded opportunity could initially excite a surface cheerfulness in them—particularly in the younger ones—and though it did encourage the most talented or luckiest among them to fulfill their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville’s noted that their mood darkened, bitterness took hold of and choked their spirit, and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.”
Do most of us agree that people strive for excessive (excessive meaning to their detriment) status, power, and wealth? I rarely see that behavior from my peers. I believe most people are very content with their current status, for example Gallup measures that 80% of Americans are satisfied with their standard of living and 48.7% live with a lot of happiness and little stress (compared to 10.7% with a lot of stress and without happiness). When 55% of workers are "completely satisfied" with the recognition they receive and 41% completely satisfied with their salary, it seems like most people are happy and are not striving for excessive wealth and power.
I wonder if this operates at the mimetic level instead of the genetic level, making this a cultural phenomenon rather than a biological one. As the article points out, in humans this striving for status/money doesn't confer much of a biological advantage, at least beyond a point.
Hypothesis for mimetic reproduction: People with status and money (who tend to have desired it and worked towards it) weild more influence on a larger set of people than otherwise, and can broadcast their approach/perspective. A large number of people will then aspire to follow in their footsteps and similarly seek status and money, continuing this cycle.
I found an interesting talk called "Is there anything good about Men?" that includes potentially useful ways to frame questions about differences between men & women:
"Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women."
79 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadNow maybe its ultimately the same motivation but expressing different things. But I guess what makes the drug dealer seek status, the thief, the used car salesperson, the food truck operator, the barber...
I guess the only way to find out for sure would be to place lone stranded subjects on solitary planets with no chance to communicate or leave ever with anyone else at the end, come back and see what castaways did -knowing anything they did was for naught.
We channel our hunting instinct in FPS computer games, or professions such as soldier or policeman. We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love". And we don't want to admit that we enjoy dominating others, so we call the jobs where we are in charge, such as governor or mayor "public service".
What makes you think animals don't think high about themselves?
We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love".
Humans developed love? Seriously! Did we also develop gravity? Love is a universal (read: not limited to or developed by humans) attribute that we express to one extent or the other.
Inevitable name for an ancient concept of attachment.
Huh? I uh, huh?
> We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love".
Speak for yourself, I ain't ashamed of shit. Also, go buy a Labrador puppy. Or maybe google something like "monogamous animals" and/or "do animals feel love"
No, he gets the women because of his drive and social status. What the author fails to go into is that females have also evolved to seek men of high social status to father their children. The female genes are more likely to propagate if they mate with such a male, as their children will have similar traits. The other interesting omission is that women seek more masculine men when they are ovulating and less so when they are not - this has been repeatedly shown in studies. So women seek the alpha male for reproduction and the beta male providers the rest of the time.
Spent, Geoffrey Millers' book is a fantastically good reading on this subject. You would be surprised on how much that theory can explain and predict. https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior...
[ edit: Adding a statistic to validate the above assertion: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam... ]
I run a startup and during the inevitable valleys where my self-perceived status is low, my testosterone falls off a cliff.
I've suffered from low testosterone in the past and now that I understand the importance of sleep, diet (greens!), and exercise I can mitigate the drops quite a bit - but status is still a big ingredient.
It has become taboo to discuss the importance of status and sex for male health, but there is an epidemic of males who aren't thriving.
I do not take exogenous testosterone but will be open to it as I age if healthy lifestyle can't keep it up.
https://www.amazon.com/Testosterone-Level-Hormone-Balance-Te...
I hypothesize that sleep, diet and exercise can improve your mood through a whole bunch of factors, with testosterone playing an overstated role. Or even a reverse causation: improved confidence leading to higher T perhaps.
I've since stopped taking the injections as it simply wasn't doing me any good.
I don't think you understand why you were downvoted. You made no effort to tie your comment into the OP. You then state a contrarian opinion as fact "my self-perceived status is low, my testosterone falls off a cliff." And lastly you use hyperbole "an epidemic" to describe your(?) situation which also expresses a lack of empathy for segments of society that really have it bad.
A reason to strive for status and money is because there is glory in it. The harder the struggle the greater the glory. So turn your "not thriving" situation into a personal battle. Let nothing hold you back. Fight brother! :)
The worst cases tend to be desk-bound intellectuals like many of us here. As these guys transform the result is beautiful - less anxiety, more equanimity in the face of adversity, and a humble self confidence that looks nothing like Trump. :)
Shit diets, shit education, shit culture. It's nothing new, although it's been accelerating as society has become more dense and more concentrated on the top.
I say nothing new because I remember staying in the homeless shelter and just seeing entire lives wasted in abjection. Nobody held a decent hand to these men nor showed them another way. This utter abjection was intensified by the lack of positive models to emulate. When the zookeepers seem like a bunch of idiots, the caged animal thinks that, even for all of its trials, it is still more eminently wise and clever.
Khufu didn't build the Great Pyramid as a place for his kids to live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7HZATMKBY
More seriously, most male/female social differences can be explained by the fact that women can have perhaps ten children in a lifetime, whereas men can have ten children in a day. Therefore the base sexual strategy of males is "many", and the base sexual strategy of women is "best". Men, therefore, must strive very hard for "best", particularly in winner-take-all societies. Lifelong monogamy attenuated both of these tendencies and, in my opinion, is the bedrock of civilization.
One man and a thousand women is a potential civilization, whereas one woman and a thousand men is a horror movie.
Very well put.
"Men, therefore, must strive very hard for 'best'"
Aren't I getting a lesson in this. Spent most of my life in pure abjection until a doctor, with some actual competency, prescribed me some ritalin.
You would not believe how mad I am. Now I'm trying to play catch-up to be the best and it's absolutely infuriating to hear people tell me to "relax".
I went through unimaginable hell because the wrong men were promoted to higher positions and nobody told them to eat shit. I can't even recourse to a notion of ultimate karma and fairness because I've realized how ultimately such notions are a case of the sourest grapes over losing in the competition.
There are MANY terrible and incompetent men and I want to devour them all. But my wants are nothing compared to what I need to do (develop skills and behaviors that are marketable and which act like positive feedback on another). My apologies for the little detour but figured that someone here has an inkling of what I feel and it's nice to know that one's turbulence isn't a lone storm.
It's life changing to have (better) control of executive functioning. And it's sobering if you have a lifetime of being moralized at by lesser people for things that aren't too much under your control.
I don't mean to imply you have this disorder. However, in my limited experience, I have found viewing anyone as inherently "lesser" has only been destructive for everyone involved, especially oneself. People are different, they all have their crosses to bear, just as you do.
"People are different, they all have their crosses to bear, just as you do."
Some people just suck and should be imprisoned, killed, or disbarred from any position of authority. A lot of sucky people somehow get into positions, including being responsible for the care of homeless veterans.
"Lesser" people do exist. But I know precisely I'm not the shit. A major irony is that as the capacity for directed work and improvement improves, I'm more and more aware how "far" I am from having a certain comfortableness in my present situation.
It's the anxiety of status, because one knows what happens to those with low status. It's the anxiety of death and waste because one knows what happens to bodies over time. It's the anxiety of regret because one is stuck with memories of one chemical regime while being in a more able one. The socialite is haunted by memories of being a dullard and .
"In earlier societies where marriage did not exist..."
I could stop reading right there. There are essentially no known human societies, past or present, in which marriage does not exist. (Possible exceptions for a few very small societies in highly unusual situations.) Marriage is considered a human universal by anthropologists.
But a bit further on:
"This study looked at research being done on 33 nonindustrial populations (nonindustrial = pre-marriage, pre-contraception)"
You're seriously equating nonindustrial with a lack of marriage? You understand that the industrial revolution was less than 200 years ago, right? And that people have been getting married for all of recorded history?
- anthropologists don't study primates.
- primates don't strive for money.
Also weren't most very early societies without marriage matriarchal?
Addition: Isn't this also ignoring polygamist marriage?
The idea that early human society was matriarchal comes out of wild speculation by certain authors with a political bent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_matrilineal_or_matrilo...
The Akans of Ghana, West Africa, are matrlineals. Akans are the largest ethnic group in Ghana. They are made of the Akims, Asantes, Fantis, Akuapims, Kwahus, Denkyiras, Brongs, Akwamus, Krachis etc.
"Matrilineal" means property is passed down through the maternal line on the death of the mother, not that of the father.
There are a substantial number of matrilineal societies, probably due to the ease of knowing who your mother is compared to your father, before genetic testing was developed. They are quite often not matriarchal, though.
No offense, but I'd rather trust that guy's story than some random dude on the internet's.
Marriage stops the "natural" dynamic by tying every male to a maximum of one female
That guy must be kidding, right? Monogamy is one thing, but what about other forms of marriage that involves more than one man and one woman?
But the rest of the sentence that you quoted is even worse, but so that it makes more sentence, I'll quote the entire sentence:
In earlier societies where marriage did not exist, the most dominant males had children with many women, and the males at the bottom of the hierarchy did not get to procreate at all.
But in most societies around the world, the poor tend to have more kids. Who is the author of that article?
He's:
a 33 year old semi-retired entrepreneur (I co-founded the Swedish marketplace Fyndiq where I was CTO for the first six years). Nowadays I spend my days mostly reading, writing and photographing stuff.
And making up crazy ideas about society.
That might be true for women but not for men. And the author is talking about men.
Men who make good money generally have no trouble remarrying and having more kids with another woman if they want it. Stats I have seen suggest that women are more likely than men to have kids, men who do procreate are more likely to do so with more than one partner.
Iirc: about half of all men reproduce, about 80% of all women do. You can infer from that stat right there that men who do father kids have decent odds of fathering them on more than one woman.
Can you provide any sources?
I think the idea may have originated with anthropologist Donald Brown, who wrote a book Human Universals (which I haven't read) about traits that are pretty much ubiquitous across all cultures.
If you can tolerate a Wikipedia article, here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
"Take any behavior seen in all humans, ie. not something that is due to local culture, and place that behaviour in the kind of tribal group that we lived in during most of evolution. Then ask the question 'what would be the consequence of this behaviour?' "
But if the goal is to figure out why things actually are the way they are, rigorous agent based modeling would be a much better way to proceed.
Also, all notions of human happiness were also shaped by human evolution, so the whole essay is nonsense. If evolution shaped our understanding of happiness, then evolution does not, in any simplistic way, explain why me might do things that go against happiness.
- Why do pregnant women have sex
- Why do women have sex after menopause
- Why do men stay with women who are no longer fertile
- Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.
- Why do sperm banks have to advertise for doners
- Why do people adopt kids, its not their genes
And don't get me started on monogamy...
I was not aware of this statistic. I really have no thoughts on it either way except - wow!
http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2016/3/11/less-50-teens-iden...
There is probably a strong reproductive advantage for a population as a result of having reproductively disinterested members, and there are individual benefits to sex and sexual desire outside of it leading to pregnancy.
Pregnant women have sex because rewiring women to NOT want sex while pregnant would be evolutionarily pointless, not to mention sex is used to bond male partners.
Likewise, sex after menopause. Women still seek shelter from males post-menopause and also want males around for their children and grandchildren's sake.
Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of "infertile" if a woman appears otherwise sexually appealing.
I'm skeptical of the idea that 50% of young people identifying as bisexual, but if there is truth to this, I imagine that it is largely females who identify this way. And bonding between females is likely to strengthen the 'herd'.
Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of sperm banks. Even if they did, men are also selective in where they deposit their sperm, and in any case are largely motivated to reproduce through sexual desire. If sperm banks were the only way we reproduced, then we'd have evolved a desire for that.
The idea that there are any humans on Earth that aren't closely genetically related is absurd...
As for monogamy, it's a rational response on the part of males who want to be sure they are the father of their mate's children and who want a better mating opportunities than they might have if it was winner-take-all.
Obviously, I'm not sure of the veracity of any of these, but I think it's fairly simple to explain most of these from an evolutionary point of view. I think it is a mistake to assume that because the rational part of our brain can grasp more efficient ways to spread our genes (e.g. sperm banks), that we must therefore do that if we are wired to spread our genes. The parts of our brains wired that way aren't quite that literal and probably haven't had time to catch up with those concepts.
Some apes kill other apes offspring when they take over a group. Others don't.
Some animals such as gibbons and bald eagles mate for life, but most animals are not monogamous.
If evolution principles were so hardwired you would probably expect them to universally
All animals are the way they are because of a combination of random mutation and environmental pressure. If a trait is successful in one species, it doesn't mean it will occur in another species. If it does occur in another species, it won't necessarily be reproductively beneficial depending on environment and other factors specific to the speices, so may not ever become a generalized part of the species.
> Why do pregnant women have sex > Why do women have sex after menopause > Why do men stay with women who are no longer fertile
All of these are answered by the following:
A reason evolution would cause these "intentionally" is to help maintain social bonds outside of pregnancy.
A reason evolution would cause these "unintentionally" is because evolution created reward systems to encourage procreation, but never got around to disabling them when already pregnant/can no longer get pregnant.
> Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.
I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.
Anyway, there are plenty of evolutionary explanations for having a population with homosexual tendencies. It could be good for social cohesiveness, or for maintaining a more effective fighting force, etc. etc. Evolution is also imperfect, so it's entirely plausible that sexual desires just get accidentally subverted sometimes. I can't imagine that it's very hard to accidentally trigger the growth of the "wrong" sexual selection hardware during development.
> Why do sperm banks have to advertise for doners
Remember that humans only have a weak desire to reproduce in the abstract sense. It was much easier for evolution to make us want sex (regardless of its outcome) and to raise children.
> Why do people adopt kids, its not their genes
Any time people have an energy-intensive social relationship that doesn't involve their immediate relatives, you have to consider the fact that in the sort of environments anatomically modern humans evolved in, if someone was in your community, they probably had very similar DNA. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to have the instinct to protect members of the community (especially children) even if they are not directly related to you. In fact, evolution went a bit overboard with this; not only do we want to protect young human children, but also anything with child-like features such as a large head or short legs. Honestly, I think puppies and kittens and the like are a lot cuter than human babies, which suggests that the human baby detector mechanism in the brain isn't particularly well-adjusted and is set up to have an extremely low false negative rate at the expense of a very high false positive rate.
So you're right, "everything I do is to carry my genes forward view" is too simplistic; in fact, you also have to take into account the fact that there is (or at least was) some correlation between social closeness and genetic similarity, so you have a huge incentive to protect your children, a big incentive to protect your siblings and their children, a moderate incentive to protect friends and their children, etc. etc. I'm told this principle has a name in evolutionary biology, but I can't remember what it is.
This is pretty much my point. People assume that there are some universal evolutionary principles that underlies everyones decisions across species. And that these simplistic principles can explain everyones behaviour.
> I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.
Here is one from the UK https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/16/half-young-not-heterose...
Someone linked to another from the US somewhere in the thread.
I think it is striking how much this a generational thing. And IMHO a behaviour that is probably not hardwired in genetics.
And women strive for status and money too. Women outnumber men in college--and it's not because they're trying to improve their prospects on the marriage market.
Lovelessness; Because money and status is a proxy for love from friends and would-be lovers that we crave:
“The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of—and means to—love rather than ends in themselves.”
Snobbery; Because underneath small talk amongst casual social situations underlies a constant of "sizing up" and civilized snobbery:
“The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them”
Outsized expectations; Because meritocracy, "American Dream" doesn't empower people; rather statistically forces us to confront the mediocrity of our ordinariness of lives, while feeling anxious about alleged "wasted potential" :
"In aristocracies, servants often accepted their position with good grace; it was not impossible for them to harbour, in Tocqueville’s words, 'high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect.' In democracies, by contrast, the propaganda of the press and public opinion relentlessly promised servants that they, too, could reach the pinnacles of society and make their fortune as industrialists, judges, scientists or even presidents. Although this sense of unbounded opportunity could initially excite a surface cheerfulness in them—particularly in the younger ones—and though it did encourage the most talented or luckiest among them to fulfill their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville’s noted that their mood darkened, bitterness took hold of and choked their spirit, and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.”
- Alain de Botton. “Status Anxiety”
Hypothesis for mimetic reproduction: People with status and money (who tend to have desired it and worked towards it) weild more influence on a larger set of people than otherwise, and can broadcast their approach/perspective. A large number of people will then aspire to follow in their footsteps and similarly seek status and money, continuing this cycle.
http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
"Nature rolls the dice with men more than women."
and
"Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women."