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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I have realized I don't understand the first thing about evolutionary psychology. I used to think the selfish gene of a male will want to get planted into as many wombs as possible and this our most basic drive. But actually any gene that would result in having many children but not so many great-great-grandchildren due to the "quality" of our children being low would get crowded out by the genes that do. Having 17 sons of the Mr. Bean type may not be such a big reproductive success down the road.
Since most women managed to reproduce, we can assume a winner strategy is having a large number of daughters but perhaps for sons the selfish gene may want quality and status more than quantity. Anecdotally, in more traditional societies what typically men want is not a huge army of children but a high-status male heir, a "crown prince". Arab men traditionally rename themselves after their first son, Musa's father literally renames himself to Musa's father: Abu-Musa. This sort of suggests they are less interested in quantity...
At this point I must admit I have no longer an idea what the basic biological male drive is. It is not simply unrestricted polygamy and racking up as many notches as possible. It is some sort of a sweet spot between quantity and quality, and in quality not only the genetic quality of the mother matters but also the education of the sons i.e. investing into fathering, the amount of status that can be inherited and so on? Which suggests more of a monogamous drive.
Besides to make it really complicated, while the ancestral father's genes may "assume" his daughters will be able to reproduce to full capacity, there is still a value in parenting and generally quality because if the daughter manages to catch a high quality man, an attractive man, her sons may be higher quality, more attractive guys, and thus her sons can have a higher quantity of offspring and basically the man's "be a good father of my daughter" genes win at the great-grandchildren level!
This kind of modelling actually sounds like something doable with mathemathics, something like game theory, right? We could figure out how the utility function of the selfish gene looks like game-theoretically? Was it done already?
If you're really curious, I recommend picking up an evolutionary psychology textbook rather than speculating/seeking feedback on speculations from non-experts. Lots of people have strong opinions about Evo Psych without actually having much real knowledge about the discipline.
I don't really believe in this anecdote; large numbers of children are definitely a point of pride in traditional cultures.
Surely you don't think daughters are more reproductively successful than sons on average?
Surely I do - it is common knowledge today that about 40% of men and 80% of women managed to reproduce?
Every child has both a mother and a father, and there are about as many men as women, so the mean number of children is about the same for males as for females. But there are more childless men than childless women, because polygyny is more common than polyandry, ultimately because of Bateman's principle.
But if everyone adopts this strategy, in a few generations women will by far outnumber men, and suddenly having sons is a brilliant strategy instead. You have to think about what strategies are stable in the population of strategies - as you begin to point towards with the comments about game theory. Yes, game theory has of course been used to look at this type of stuff. (I'm certainly not an expert so I won't get into details on how.)
If you haven't read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, it's a fun read and great for getting into this subject matter. How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker is also a nice readable/popular intro to evolutionary psychology and covers some of the topics you're thinking about here.
As I understand it, humans are on the spectrum between have maximum number of offspring with low parental investment and have a smaller number with high parental investment. There are indicators (size difference between sexes, size of testes, probably more) which puts us about a third of the way towards the high investment end. So, there's infidelity and monogamy and parents putting a lot into their kids and parents abandoning their kids.
Humans are also strongly influenced by culture, so you also get customss like giving some of your children to a religion which requires celibacy, or putting your daughters at risk of dowry murder.
Biology is complicated. Applying simple principles like males having a higher risk of not having descendants won't get you very far.
I'm reminded of the idea that anti-oxidants are good for you. It just didn't have enough detail (which anti-oxidants? how much? how can you tell whether you're making things better).
Or cultural variation is mostly determined by genetic variation. It's hard to empirically distinguish the two.
You can do historic comparison. 500 hundred years ago people in Europe acted very differently than they do today. On the other hand their genes didn't change that much.
It is even theoretically possible? If there are causal influences in both directions between X and Y, is there a meaningful way to assign relative sizes to the two directions? Especially if, as here, X and Y are each complex things consisting of many parts, and the real causal diagram consists of two large clouds and many arrows going both ways between them.
There no "the selfish gene of the man". There especially no "the selfish gene of the woman" given how all the genes in woman are also in men. Humans have between 20000 to 25000 genes and all of them are "selfish".
Yet compared to women, men have not as many copies of genes. Perhaps there are 'selfish chromosome parts'?:)
A gene that on the X chromosome "wants" to be copied regardless of whether it's in the male or female body. Thinking in terms of the interest of genes means not only thinking on the level of an individual specimen.
Most of evolution happened in hunter gatherer arrangements not in traditional farmer cultures.
No background in evolutionary psychology, but I'm wondering to which degree 'good fatherhood' can be encoded in genes at all. Perhaps maximal reproduction is the most strongly genetically preprogrammed goal in males but it's cutltural mechanisms that limit this drive (via taboos, marriage etc.) due to advantages for the culture as a whole.
Why not? A male's genes do not succeed when he impregnates a woman -- they only succeed when the child grows to puberty and reproduces. If the presence of a father reduces e.g. infant mortality, that's a strong evolutionary factor.
But how significant did the the male father role used to be among hunter-gatherers for a good upbringing of a child? If that task was for example shared between the group members (which I think I’ve read before it was) then it’s questionable whether there would be significant differences in knowing one’s genetic father or not. One hint that this might have been the default mode among hunter-gatherers is that monogamy is a minority marriage type among human cultures today 1 (meaning if polygamy was prevalent, it would have been difficult to ensure that all partners of an alpha male would remain faithful). I also think I’ve read that in many ingenious people, women are readily shared among the alpha males. Besides that, it seems that most things that have to do with reproduction considerations seem to be either on the physical attraction level or on a very high cognitive level (Are there enough resources for the upbringing? Is the the mother’s environment healthy?). Predetermined high-level stuff is memetically encoded rather than genetically (or it is just common sense our cognitive abilities enable us to have).
Edited for clarity. Please consider removing the downvote if it makes sense now to you.
Our (nearly) cavemen-optimized brains fear our children will starve or be eaten if we don't help them. Sexual jealousy is probably genetically encoded meaning lots of men want their mates to be exclusive to them. The following is pure speculation with absolutely no evidence behind it: but I wonder if a problem with open relationships involving couples planning on having kids is that the man might (for genetic reasons) care less for a child even if he knows with certainty that the child is theirs. A gene that caused a man to care more for children whose mothers were thought to be sexually exclusive with the man might increase reproductive fitness.
Yes, until recently it was impossible to know with certainty that the child was his.
And even today feminist organizations are doing their best to keep it that way. For example, they managed to criminalize paternity testing in France.
By that standard, sex is also criminalized in many countries -- after all, it's only legal if the participants consent.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the French law, but your interpretation of facts seems a little... creative.
They criminalized it for the main purpose that one would need to use it for.
If the traditional male role involves making sure the pregnant or nursing woman does not starve, very.
Heh. How about among successful human cultures? :-D
See the link above; it's not clear that the food provider role of males was actually widely present in prehistoric people, and the upbringing of the children might have been predominantly a task carried out by the entire group, not by a father/mother family structure.
Not sure what causes your amusement. Isn't there still the possibility that this is memetics rather than genetics?
I don't see support of this statement in your linked text (which, by the way, dips into politically correct idiocy a bit too often for my liking).
I'm easily amused :-P
What exactly is "this"? Are you saying that there is no genetic basis for males to be attached to their offspring and any attachment one might observe is entirely cultural?
Here is the part I'm referring to: "Nor does the ethnographic record support the idea of sedentary women staying home with the kids and waiting for food to show up with the hubby. We know that women hunt in many cultures, and even if the division of labor means that they are the plant gatherers, they work hard and move around; note this picture (Zihlman 1981:92) of a !Kung woman on a gathering trip from camp, carrying the child and the bag of plants obtained and seven months pregnant! She is averaging many km per day in obtaining the needed resources."
Attachment to cute babies is clearly genetically predetermined, but I'm trying to argue that it's not clear at all that considerations whether or not to have sex are genetically determined by other things than physical attraction.
Yes, and how does it show that "it's not clear that the food provider role of males was actually widely present in prehistoric people"? The observation that women "work hard and move around" does not support the notion that they can feed themselves and their kids without any help from males.
I am not sure I understand. Are you saying that the only genetic imperative for males is to fuck anything that moves and that any constraints on that are solely cultural? That's not where you started. Your initial question was:
But not among individual humans, i.e., most men in polygynous cultures couldn't afford more than one wife.
I think it can be. If the basic program of the selfish gene is "try to implant me in 100 wombs" once he realizes it is not really likely, there can be a plan B "have a son who will be so high quality and status that he will implant me in 100 wombs".
But couldn't high quality and status be highly correlated with attractiveness so that this this trait prevents other traits from being selected for?