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J_Taylor comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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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.