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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.