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drethelin comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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No, but I am suggesting it's probably not been selected for as a genetic predisposition due to the fitness it supposedly brings. The cost/benefit ratio seems pretty damn bad. Let's assume a man of 25 (great fertility, past the peak risk-of-mortality age on a pure-forager's lifespan curve, presumably able to provide for himself to greater or lesser degree.) Assume he only targets women of peak reproductive age, 25 to 30 years (this is very generous for the rape-as-adaptation argument; in reality rapists are known to target women of any age, from single-digits to senescence), thereby maximizing expected payoff per act.
He loses fitness if:
-He is killed by the victim or her relatives. How likely this is depends entirely on his culture -- some forager band societies are quite pacifistic; others resort quickly to violence and have no real way to regulate its spread. It's a pretty strong risk, though.
-The mother refuses to raise the child. This is unlikely to happen, but in a society with high infant mortality rates and established protocols for socially-legitimate infanticide by abandonment or handing off to a relative for culling (standard practice in societies like these if the baby is more than 48 hours old; otherwise the mother usually does it), it's not socially-costly behavior either.
-Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. This is a virtual certainty -- cooperative food acquisition, compulsory sharing and an ethic of reciprocity are standard features of societies like these. Cutting someone off from this network of assistance is as good as a death sentence in most cases; it also means he's unlikely to ever get consensual sex, or medical assistance when he's hurt. I can't overstate how bad an outcome this is, and how likely it is to happen -- tribal societies don't keep many secrets!
Meanwhile, he gains fitness if and only if all of the following happen: -The victim is potentially able to concieve on that given day AND -She does (the cumulative on these first two items equals 3 - 5 percent odds of conception for consensual sex), AND -She doesn't then miscarry (true 90 percent of the time), AND -She won't voluntarily let the unwanted baby die (not sure, but estimates for the probability of routine infanticide in paleolithic cultures ranges from 15 percent on the lower end, up to 20 or even 50 percent in some cases). No idea offhand, but it seems a heck of a lot more likely than it would be today in the Western European culture area.
You'd have to get incredibly lucky to have a payoff even once; it's certainly not a viable reproductive strategy, not even a distant also-ran that some minority of the population favors. Human population densities in the EEA simply don't support it.
So the fact that rape is common suggests that it's happening for some other reason than it being an evolutionarily-fixed, advantageous trait.
[citation needed]
If nothing else, a reputations as a "rapist" is not at all the same thing in a society where women aren't considered to be people, but property. Hunter gatherers as well as civilization at least up to the biblical level have also engaged in Bride kidnapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping) Which we would definitely think of as rape but clearly wasn't viewed in the same way at those times. Genghis Khan didn't get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)
You seem to be doing a lot of theorizing about ancient behavior on very little data, because you don't want rape to have been adaptative.
It should be considered rude to post:
and then offer irrelevant information to back up your point.
I agree that the first part is rude, but how is information irrelevant? It's an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.
The article on bride kidnapping contained no hunter-gatherers, as far I could see.
I do not think it wise to attempt to extrapolate information about the EEA from contemporary (or even merely ancient) societies whose material conditions do not resemble the conditions of bands in the EEA. (Hell, I don't even know if we can extrapolate information from modern bands. All of this is an incredible epistemic mess.)
I do not dispute the truth of this fact. However, the ruler of the largest contiguous land empire in history is not the sort of fellow we wish to be looking at in order to determine whether or not rape was adaptive in the EEA. If you were interested in answering such a question, I guess you would want to look at some folks like the Hadza and observe how reproductively successful fellows like Scumbag Sengani, a hypothetical rapist, end up being.
It's irrelevant because Neolithic-era societies are not representative of plausible assumptions about the evolutionary ancestral environment or early human and protohuman lifestyles. It's not an example of the thing being talked about; it has no direct bearing on it; ergo, it's irrelevant.
We have evidence that chimps rape, and we have evidence that Neolithic societies rape. You need to provide strong information that somewhere between those two states of existence(taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived), it became evolutionarily unfavorable to rape, but not enough to keep civilized people from doing it
Bad assumption. We're genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos, who are pretty nearly opposite in their social and sexual behavior.
Did that common ancestor favor one strategy, or the other? Or neither one, or a mix of the two? Is the chimp model an adaptation subsequent to that divergence? Is the bonobo model one? Are both?
We do share a common ancestor with chimps, yes. From this common ancestor is descended both chimps and bonobos.
Given the existence of bonobos, I do not see why chimp-rape is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not rape is adaptive in humans. That is, given the existence of bonobos, it seems uncertain whether or not the common ancestor of chimps and humans (who is also the common ancestor of humans and bonobos) was, how to put this, a rape ape.
That does not describe forager societies at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Common_characteristics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami_women#Violence
Not strict "foragers"
The Yanomamo are horticulturalists. They grow bananas, manioc and other crops available in the wild by means of slash-and-burn and managed planting. They are not an example of a forager (aka hunter-gatherer) society.
They are were (using past tense because of the changes they have undergone) a hybrid culture. They did agriculture but the crops were low-quality and they also relied heavily on hunting and also on gathering. For a man to prove himself a worthy husband for a woman, he had to do "bride service" which basically amounted to providing meat from hunting to the bride's family for a year or two.