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cousin_it comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong
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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.