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Violet comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
The Sex at Dawn story is nice but the whole debate seems backwards.
Everyone picks their favorite modern social models and then molds citations and stories to support that it must be natural and even the ancient hunter gatherers...
Popularized evo-psych seems to be a lot like appealing that a certain way of life is "natural" and thus "good".
btw Is there a name to the "natural -> good" bias/fallacy?
It's called the naturalistic fallacy.
You're right that the debate seems backwards. Evo psych should be used to make correct predictions and find optimal actions, not create or justify moral norms.
N.B. This is the less common use of the phrase "naturalistic fallacy", and where possible "appeal to nature" might be preferred (when describing an argument).
No, "appeal to nature" is the much more common use of "naturalistic fallacy," unless you only count use by philosophers.
Touché
Does anyone actually do this? Do I just hang out in the wrong circles? Are there people who do this and yet I never talk to any of them or read anything they write?
I have definitely seen it leveled as an argument against feminists (or, more generally, pro-altruist exhortations.) Men are evolved to cheat on women and be bad fathers, so don't ask them to do otherwise. Humans are evolved to make war, so don't ask them to do otherwise. You hear a lot of evo-psych from people who have a generally pessimistic view of human nature: everybody's mean, nobody is nice, all niceness is futile.
I find that attitude exhausting and the associated arguments usually overstated. But hey, that's just me.
The standard rejoinder is that women are evolved to ask men to stop cheating, so men shouldn't ask them to do otherwise.
I've evolved to stop talking to people who abuse evolutionary psychology.
Such pessimism is dangerously close to fatalism, and wrong for the same reasons. Just as we have reasons to contemplate our choices despite their inevitability, we have reason to fight our bad urges even under the (weaker!) influence of genetics.
And then there's the fact that societies with stronger norms against infidelity had less of it, suggesting that men "had the willpower all along!"
Yes people do it. Most of the time actually. You just hang in the right circles to avoid it.
Yes, unfortunately people do this.
Sex at Dawn doesn't talk about any modern social models. One of its central points is that the lives of hunter-gatherers were radically different from the lives of everyone born after the adoption of agriculture.
The authors aren't making any moral claims, so far as I'm aware. They're just trying to figure out how evolution shaped our sexual psychology; while this should probably tell us quite a bit about how to conduct our sexual affairs in the modern world, that's a topic they touch on only very briefly, and they draw no particular conclusions.
That's only true if one accepts the basic evolutionary psychology premise that we have a strong bias towards a particular pattern such that any other pattern will cause unhappiness and psychopathology. What if psychopathology comes from conflict between individual idiosyncratic sexual feelings (caused by early, incorrectly locked-in interpretations of group norms?) and group norms?
I don't accept that premise and I still think it's a point worth investigating. It's obvious that monogamy does make many people happy, but justifying it by an appeal to nature that isn't even true does few favors to the >50% of people who have been failed by the ideal of life-long monogamy.
It's as good an explanation as any other, I suppose. Ryan and Jetha do talk a bit about paraphilia in men, but that chapter disappointingly lacked the rigor displayed elsewhere, so I wasn't planning to discuss it.