No, body fat percentage doesn't necessarily say anything about genetic fitness, since bodyfat levels are highly dependent on diet. Show me a tribe that says asymmetrical faces, high waist:hip ratio, or pockmarked skin are attractive female traits. Those are real claims of "objective subjectivity" made by evolutionary psychologists. You seem to be unwilling to address their actual claims.
The main problem I have with this series, is that you sort of make vague criticisms about a "standard account" without being precise and specific about what you think is the correct account.
There's a deep problem in general with using modern hunter-gatherer or forager societies to get data about historic human societies. These societies live in the margins, often in isolation in land that was not taken by other humans. Thus, they are likely to live in areas with different resource availibility constraints and less trading than historical human groups. This problem impacts both what you call the standard narrative and your alternative.
Good point. I hadn't considered that there are strong effects determining which hunter-gatherer societies survived to get surveyed by anthropologists. I'll have to adjust my estimation of the significance of this evidence downwards; I wish I could see a way to do better.
I am starting to wonder if this "standard view" thing is a bit of a straw man. Most of the stuff WrongBot describes that is supposedly outside the standard view, I learned in college anthropology/bio/psych classes, so it can't be too nonstandard. I could agree that some positions in the supposed "standard view" used to be more common, but I think that they have been debunked enough that they aren't really standard anymore.
I am thoroughly confused by the amount of flack WrongBot has been getting, and I hope that he continues to post.
I found an excellent counterpoint to the Pinker Evo Psych claims is in Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They present a picture which is much more complicated than what Pinker presents in such books as How the Mind Works and they provide some specific critiques to his claims. The feature which struck me is how measured these books are in their claims. At no point do Jablonka and Lamb criticize the Pinker viewpoint as being absurd or ridiculous; they merely think it is exaggerated.
Evolution is extremely complicated and extensive...
This sounds like a better argument than I have seen from you earlier, indicating to me that you do have the ability to make such arguments when you are inclined, at least some of the time.
With respect to its content, yes, I think this is a reasonable conclusion regarding how one should respond to Pinker's conclusions. However, as I noted, my observation is that Pinker argues well. When you have a good argument in front of you its primarily the argument and not the evidential value of the opinion which you have to confront.
The fact that you can be so wrong about what I have said, when it's all there in writing, seems to me to be strong evidence that you just don't know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions, which is what I was initially saying in my critical comments to your first post.
Whatever WrongBot’s failings as a poster may or may not be, I haven’t seen anything in his posts to suggest that the problem is arguments engaging his emotions. You’ve expressed the opinion that WrongBot can’t reason, and perhaps this comment is evidence for that (although I think I understand the point he is trying to make), but I don’t perceive the connection to emotions. It is, of course, possible that I’ve missed something demonstrating that his emotions are at the root of any failures he has exhibited.
At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better. If anything, as a more or less independent observer, I feel like it is your focus on WrongBot that could be interpreted...
Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.
Indeed. I upvoted this post and the other on this topic because they contained interesting information that was new to me, and since I "like and want more of that", they deserve upvoting on that basis.
I do think that both posts contain a bit too much whaling on the strawman of "the standard narrative" and could do without it altogether, but at the same time I don't see why people are so focused on arguing with that. It's almost like a sacred cow is being threatened, or that WrongBot has previously been identified as an enemy outsider due to having supported polyamory.
(IOW, I see some of the reaction to WrongBot as greater evidence of emotional involvement by people other than WrongBot.)
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."
I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.
This is one of the most painfully ego-deflating things I've ever heard. That makes it the best kind of feedback, and I appreciate your honesty.
If your friend's opinion is at all widespread on LW, then the karma system is badly, badly broken. If people see something I've written and think that it's making the site worse, I would prefer that they downvote it and, if they are feeling particularly generous, explain why. If the purpose of this community is to make rationalists stronger, it needs to tell them where they are weak.
This bit:
The standard narrative of human sexual evolution ignores or manipulates the findings of forager anthropology to support its claims, and this is no doubt responsible for much of its confused support.
... kinda turned me off from reading the rest, because it made me expect partisan arguments rather than well-presented information. Your post would probably be better by just presenting whatever interesting information you found in that book without any reference to a "standard narrative".
And I don't even know whether I agree or not with ...
The standard narrative is supposed to explain every universal aspect of human sexual behavior, and a great deal more besides.
Says who?
They try to explain what they can, especially broad commonalities across cultures, but of course they can see that there are variations.
If an evolutionary psychologist says that we expect something to be a widespread property of societies, it isn't a valid rebuttal to say, "But the Aché of South America didn't have that property." That's like laughing at the warnings on cigarettes because your grandmother smoked until she was 96.
It sounds good to say that we can look at present day foraging societies as the nearest we have to early man and to point out that they do often have some agriculture etc. but really there is a big problem. These societies are likely to be atypical of pre-agricultural precisely because they did not move into more agricultural dependent societies.Suppose, hypothetically, that their sexual norms and beliefs did not fit with the inherited ownership of land, water wells etc.
I am also having a little trouble with the nomadic idea. It seems to me that humans, es...
Facts and books of facts are both nice, but nothing in this post seems very surprising to me. I think that you are attacking... not a straw man, but a trivially false set of popular claims that few people here would endorse.
I saw my initial complaint as identical to CousinIt's except for being admittedly lazy and vague (but later elaborated somewhat). I don't think that you understood my or cousin it's complaints. None of the complaints are about ratios of fact to claims. Both are about the relationship between facts and claims. It seems to me that, simply put, you don't know how facts are supposed to relate to claims.
Cousin it's original comment said
"This post doesn't make a convincing argument for any of its points."
That's the key point. It's not enough that fact suggest claims to you. It's necessary to actually make an argument that leads from the facts to the claims. You don't seem to be doing that but making mistakes, which is why I find it difficult to criticize your mistakes. Rather, you don't seem to be making arguments at all, just giving facts and saying what they suggest to you. This is a valid way of reasoning, communicating, or figuring things out. It's a useful way of arguing, and it's all humans did for thousands of years. Combined with swordsmanship it can even work for resolving arguments, but by itself it doesn't serve that purpose. I honestly think that you d...
Nice to see your bit on PInker; that is what I'd concluded as well, that his violent death stats were unreliable re our distant ancestors.
It's worth noting that the 'yams' several of these cultures cultivate are not the same as the 'sweet potatoes' that are commonly called 'yams' in the West. Wikipedia) has a wealth of information for the interested.
As a further tangent, I once worked at a grocery store where the sweet potatoes were split up into spaces on opposite sides of the produce department, one labeled 'yam' and one labeled 'sweet potato'. Folks from produce were sometimes called up to the register to verify whether a particular sweet potato should be rung up as a yam or a sweet potato (since they had different codes) and they'd just pick one.
Here is what I would have done for this sequence. Rather than trying to summarise everything from the book, figure out what my argument would have been like for the same and then put the pieces that fit the argument in place and then highlight the pieces of evidence missing. Critique and praise the book.
First I would have checked to see what the view of how fluid human sexuality was around here; to avoid calling something the standard view if it wasn't.
Then my argument would have been something like this.
1) Talk about standard sexuality in humans (polygamo...
and so can have multiple biological fathers
Or just the probability who the father is, is dispersed over many males. Not necessary the uniform distribution, of course.
2: This statement is true, but that does not imply that I prefer the state of affairs it describes.
Why did you choose to add this disclaimer?
EDIT: Ignore the rest of this... just see WrongBot's comment. (Hm, there's no way to do strikethrough in Markdown, is there?)
To recall something related that came up here recently and might be worth mentioning, I seem to recall someone (Alicorn, I think?) posting something here recently about a culture that actually hadn't figured out the sex/pregnancy connection, due to their diet containing many natural contraceptives (being largely based on yams, IIRC?)? And that still doesn't really acknowledge it culturally now that they've learned about it? Though those were not foragers, IIRC.
I can't seem to find it right now, though... can anyone remember what I'm thinking of?
(This is the second post in a short sequence discussing evidence and arguments presented by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn, inspired by the spirit of Kaj_Sotala's recent discussion of What Intelligence Tests Miss. It covers Part II: Lust in Paradise and Part III: The Way We Weren't.)
Forager anthropology is a discipline that is easy to abuse. It relies on unreliable first-hand observations of easily misunderstood cultures that are frequently influenced by the presence of modern observers. These cultures are often exterminated or assimilated within decades of their discovery, making it difficult to confirm controversial claims and discoveries. But modern-day foraging societies are the most direct source of evidence we have about our pre-agricultural ancestors; in many ways, they are agriculture's control group, living in conditions substantially similar to the ones under which our species evolved. The standard narrative of human sexual evolution ignores or manipulates the findings of forager anthropology to support its claims, and this is no doubt responsible for much of its confused support.
Steven Pinker is one of the most prominent and well-respected advocates of the standard narrative, both on Less Wrong and elsewhere. Eliezer has referenced him as an authority on evolutionary psychology. One commenter on the first post in this series claimed that Pinker is "the only mainstream academic I'm aware of who visibly demonstrates the full suite of traditional rationalist virtues in essentially all of his writing." Another cited Pinker's claim that 20-60% of hunter-gatherer males were victims of lethal human violence ("murdered") as justification for a Malthusian view of human nature.
That 20-60% number comes from a claim about war casualties in a 2007 TED talk Pinker gave on "the myth of violence", for which he drew upon several important findings in forager anthropology. (The talk is based on an argument presented in the third chapter of The Blank Slate; there is a text version of the talk available, but it omits the material on forager anthropology that Ryan and Jethá critique.)
At 2:45 in the video Pinker displays a slide which reads
Until 10,000 years ago, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements or government.
He also points out that modern hunter-gatherers are our best evidence for drawing conclusions about those prehistoric hunter-gatherers; in both these statements he is in accordance with nearly universal historical, anthropological, and archaeological opinion. Pinker's next slide is a chart from The Blank Slate, originally based on the research of Lawrence Keeley. Sort of. It is labeled as "the percentage of male deaths due to warfare," with bars for eight hunter-gatherer societies that range from approximately 15-60%. The problem is that of these eight cultures, zero are migratory hunter-gatherers.
In descending order of bloodiness, the societies mentioned are the Jivaro (who cultivate numerous crops, keep livestock, and live in "matrilocal households"), the Yanomamo (who live in villages and grow bananas), the Mae Enga (who have scattered homesteads and cultivate sweet potatoes), the Dugum Dani (who live in villages, cultivate sweet potatoes, and raise pigs), the Murngin (more commonly known as the Yolngu; the data cited was collected in 1975, after they had been living with "missionaries, guns, and aluminum powerboats" (Ryan and Jethá, 185) for more than three decades), a different tribe of the Yanomamo (who still live in villages and grow bananas), the Huli ("exceptional farmers"), and the Gebusi (who live in longhouses and keep gardens).
While Keeley's research is the basis for this claim, it should be noted that he distinguishes (if somewhat confusingly) between what he calls "sedentary hunter-gatherers" and true "nomadic hunter-gatherers" (War Before Civilization, 31, as cited by Ryan and Jethá). Keeley also points out that "Farmers and sedentary hunter-gatherers had little alternative but to meet force with force or, after injury, to discourage further depredations by taking revenge." The nomads, on the other hand, "had the option of fleeing conflict and raiding parties. At best, the only thing they would lose by such flight was their composure."
Pinker is not so easily excused. It is possible that he failed to recognize this critical research failure for the five years between The Blank Slate's publication and the TED talk in question, and that no one with a copy of his best-selling book and access to the internet noticed the error and pointed it out to him. It is also possible that he was being deliberately deceptive. In either case, while this doesn't warrant discarding every claim that Pinker has ever made about evolutionary psychology, he should probably not be considered a reliable source on the topic. (See Menand, Blackburn, and Malik, for example, for further criticism of Pinker's approach in The Blank Slate.)
What does forager anthropology have to say about human sexual evolution and the standard narrative, then? Ryan and Jethá offer a wealth of examples in support of their thesis--that in the human evolutionary environment, communal sexual behavior was the dominant paradigm.
Partible Paternity - While we (and the standard narrative's advocates) take it for granted that any given individual can have only a single father, this was not established scientifically until the 19th century. This belief is not universal, however, and Beckerman and Valentine (pdf) have compiled decades of anthropological research on dozens of South American tribes (both foragers and farmers) that believe in partible paternity: that "a fetus is made of accumulated semen" (Ryan and Jethá, 90), and so can have multiple biological fathers.This is not a regional oddity, either--the Lusi of Papua New Guinea had similar beliefs. One of the consequences of this belief is that a woman who wants to give her future child every possible advantage should "solicit 'contributions' from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking, the strongest, and so on--in hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each" (Ryan and Jethá, 91).
It is a key point in the standard narrative that men benefit when they enforce sexual monogamy on their mates and ensure their paternity. But Hill and Hurtado (review here) found that among the Aché, a South American tribe that believes in partible paternity, children with multiple fathers were more likely to survive than those with only one. It should not be hard to see why: keeping all else equal, men in a society in which all children have one father have the same rate of biological paternity as men in a society in which all children have three fathers. Should a particular man in the first society die before his child is grown, his child has no other man to rely upon for resources; should a particular man in the second society die, his child is one of three receiving the resources of the two surviving men. (The second society would then have a strong selection pressure for men who were more likely to provide the sperm originally responsible for fertilization; the next post in this sequence, on comparative anatomy, will cover sperm competition.)
Alloparenting - The standard narrative considers it a given that individuals should have no incentive to raise children which they know are not their own; this is why paternity is important in the first place. While it should be possible to fool a man into thinking a child carries his genetic legacy (and it is important for the standard narrative that this is so), fooling a woman in the same way is rather less plausible. Chimp and gorilla mothers never allow other females in their tribe to hold their young children, probably because females of both species are quite willing to kill infants not their own; this is precisely what the standard narrative tells us we should expect. And yet, in 87% of human forager societies, mothers are willing to allow other women to breastfeed their children. This is not just a lack of rampant infanticide: it's an active expenditure of resources. (See Hrdy's Mothers and Others; review here.)
This is the sort of highly-cooperative situation that might seem like it could only be explained by group selection, and if that were so it would probably be a good idea to discard evolutionary explanations of alloparenting entirely. But positing group selection is unnecessary when there's a much more plausible explanation available: kin selection. W.D. Hamilton identified two different mechanisms by which kin selection might operate, and humans are among the minority of species which fit the criteria of both. (The related Price Equation may offer a more definitive explanation of the process, but I admit that I haven't taken the time to grok the math involved.) Kin selection also explains why alloparenting is more frequently practiced by close relatives (like grandparents, aunts, and uncles) than by distant relatives or unrelated tribe members.
(If you're still uncomfortable with kin selection's similarity to group selection, take a look at the breeding patterns of naked mole rats and try to explain them any other way.)
The (Un-)Universality of Marriage - Well-respected anthropologists (George Murdock and Desmond Morris, for example) are in the habit of declaring that marriage is found every human society, a finding that provides strong support for the standard narrative; after all, explaining the evolutionary inevitably of human pair-bonding isn't much good if it isn't universal in the first place. Anthropologists are willing to consider all kinds of arrangements to be "marriage", though, creating confusion that is easily amplified by imprecisions of translation.1
For example:
These are not behaviors that the standard narrative should be able to explain; indeed, if it could explain them it wouldn't be paying its rent. When I first noticed this point, I very suddenly realized why I find Ryan and Jethá's thesis so convincing: it isn't trying to explain everything.
The standard narrative is supposed to explain every universal aspect of human sexual behavior, and a great deal more besides. And, its proponents hold, it should be able to explain the behavior of both modern and prehistoric humans with more-or-less equal accuracy. This more than anything else is its failure: it does not acknowledge the mutability of human preference. The current mainstream American standard of female beauty values low body fat2, which is a powerful signal of something about genetic fitness. Not long ago, the mainstream Mauritanian standard of female beauty valued obesity2 (as some subpopulations still do), which is a powerful signal of something contradictory about genetic fitness. No evo-psych theory should be able to explain both of these desirability criteria in a fashion more direct than "desirability criteria are easily influenced by social pressures."3
Faced with the godshatter of modern human preference, Sex at Dawn passes on trying to provide an explanation. The book's greatest virtue, to my mind, is that it just attempts to discover the patterns of prehistoric sexual behavior, acknowledging that many questions about how humans behave today are better left to other disciplines.
The next post in this sequence will look at what Ryan and Jethá have concluded from the study of comparative sexual anatomy.
(As before, I will be happy to provide whatever additional citations I can to address specific claims made in this post.)
1: To say nothing of polygamous arrangements, which should obviously prohibit any attempt to conflate marriage with monogamy.
2: This statement is true, but that does not imply that I prefer the state of affairs it describes.
3: Except, of course, when they aren't.
