First off, I think you may be a few decades late to worry about feminism as a sufficiently disruptive power that we need to devote any energy to placating it. The feminists have won. Young women in the west have sex with whom they want when they want, dress the way they want, bare ankles be damned, compete for the jobs they want, and have kids if and when they want. Whatever residual disagreement with my above sweeping declaration of victory is weak enough that it need not be dealt with by interest groups in which it is not particularly central.
In any case, the “resolution” between feminist concerns, and evolutionary psychology is to understand that evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done. The fact that evolution biases many women towards child-rearing is enough, the laws don’t have to push on this as well. The evolutionary fact that men feel a conflict between attraction to women and needing to not act like assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females) doesn’t require laws to hide women away from men so that they can at least pretend to go about their business without sex on their minds all the time.
There is evolution in cultures as well, and natural selection. The west with its increasing abandonment of codifying differences between males and females is, production wise, kicking the butts of cultures that want to limit things. Western ideals leak at a flood rate into these cultures because of western domination of all production, including entertainment, information and education.
If even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural need to answer this evo psych question: why are 5% of males not heterosexual? Evolution tends towardss great efficiency. We don’t have a 5% blindness rate or deafness rate. If we have evolved to have a significant population which is homosexual, one would screw with evo psych’s result at one’s peril: there is probably an advantage to having homosexuals. Of course the same reasoning would apply to women who want to be engineers or CEOs or whatever, they got here by being descended from a LONG line of ancestors ruthlessly culled. To put legal and/or cultural barriers in the way of evolution’s decision is to entirely miss the point of how optimization works.
In summary, feminists yelling angrily at evo psych results are not enough of a current phenomenon to require any special plan to deal with any more. And evo psych only supports oppression if really poorly understood, if looked at through a remarkably blurry lens. Rather, evo psych is more reasonably understood to have produced distributions of characteristics in the highly social human population, distributions which should be consciously adjusted only for compellingly logical reasons, and not merely from a misunderstanding between the value of 90% and 100% participation in some endeavor.
If even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural need to answer this evo psych question: why are 5% of males not heterosexual? Evolution tends towardss great efficiency.
Yeah, you probably need to read more books on evolutionary biology. While technically correct the latter sentence is a misleading generalization when thinking about certain traits. I recommend you start by familiarizing yourself with genetic load to see an example of how evolution can end up relatively inefficient at doing some things. Also note the role of path dependence in the natural world.
We don’t have a 5% blindness rate or deafness rate.
A noisy figure, we have estimates going from 1% to about 6% for all non-heterosexual people depending on country and methodology. Statistics vary but about 2% of men are totally infertile. We also have infectious diseases and parasite infection rates for some organisms above 5% in human populations that get in the way of spreading genes as much as homosexuality. This is considered a plausible explanation too:
A related hypothesis is that the proximal cause of homosexuality must be an infection. Cochran does not suggest that an infectious agent that causes homosexuality is spread by homosexuals. The premise is that homosexuality reduces the number of offspring and would lead to the genes carried by a homosexual person to be progressively eliminated over generations. Cochran maintains that the observed level of prevalence of exclusive homosexuality (3 to 4 percent of men and 1 to 2 percent of women in the United States) means genes cannot be the cause of homosexuality. This argument is based on natural selection, the fitness cost of genes ‘for’ homosexuality being too great for its occurrence at a frequency above that of random mutation (~ 1 in 50,000). The argument assumes that evolution would have largely eliminated homosexuality related to non-infectious environmental causes, except novel ones
This argument is based on natural selection, the fitness cost of genes ‘for’ homosexuality being too great for its occurrence at a frequency above that of random mutation (~ 1 in 50,000).
What if the allele for homosexuality is recessive (you need two copies of it to be homosexual), and having one copy of it has some advantage (the way having one copy of the sickle-cell allele makes you resistant to malaria)?
Species may come and go, alleles may come and go, but since neurons first showed up they have gotten a lot better, a lot better organized, to the point where mammal brains are pretty happening. Eyes, wings, tooth and claw all seem to be “winners” from evolution. We may evolve things to extinction, but evolution on the whole appears to be a winner at constructing marvelous things that persist across alleles, species and individuals.
In any case, the “resolution” between feminist concerns, and evolutionary psychology is to understand that evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done
Evolution doesn’t have a job to do. It just is, Moreover, our ancestral environment doesn’t look much like modern cultures, but seems at this point pretty clear that culture can influence evolution.
assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females)
If you think this definition of asshole captures your intuition about the meaning of that word then something has gone drastically wrong.
f even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural
They have much more of an is v. ought problem before one gets to whether or not it is unnatural. But it also isn’t helpful in this regards in another way: whether something is or is not natural is distinct from whether it is evolutionary advantageous (either now or in our ancestral environment). Note also that there quite a few hypotheses giving potential explanations for why homosexuality would evolve.
one would screw with evo psych’s result at one’s peril
This is essentially an argument that we should reside in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence agriculture society and also shouldn’t try to address cognitive biases and shouldn’t do any math that wasn’t easy in our ancestral environment, etc. etc. I don’t think this argument does what you want it to do.
First off, I think you may be a few decades late to worry about feminism as a sufficiently disruptive power that we need to devote any energy to placating it. The feminists have won. Young women in the west have sex with whom they want when they want, dress the way they want, bare ankles be damned, compete for the jobs they want, and have kids if and when they want. Whatever residual disagreement with my above sweeping declaration of victory is weak enough that it need not be dealt with by interest groups in which it is not particularly central.
In any case, the “resolution” between feminist concerns, and evolutionary psychology is to understand that evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done. The fact that evolution biases many women towards child-rearing is enough, the laws don’t have to push on this as well. The evolutionary fact that men feel a conflict between attraction to women and needing to not act like assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females) doesn’t require laws to hide women away from men so that they can at least pretend to go about their business without sex on their minds all the time.
There is evolution in cultures as well, and natural selection. The west with its increasing abandonment of codifying differences between males and females is, production wise, kicking the butts of cultures that want to limit things. Western ideals leak at a flood rate into these cultures because of western domination of all production, including entertainment, information and education.
If even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural need to answer this evo psych question: why are 5% of males not heterosexual? Evolution tends towardss great efficiency. We don’t have a 5% blindness rate or deafness rate. If we have evolved to have a significant population which is homosexual, one would screw with evo psych’s result at one’s peril: there is probably an advantage to having homosexuals. Of course the same reasoning would apply to women who want to be engineers or CEOs or whatever, they got here by being descended from a LONG line of ancestors ruthlessly culled. To put legal and/or cultural barriers in the way of evolution’s decision is to entirely miss the point of how optimization works.
In summary, feminists yelling angrily at evo psych results are not enough of a current phenomenon to require any special plan to deal with any more. And evo psych only supports oppression if really poorly understood, if looked at through a remarkably blurry lens. Rather, evo psych is more reasonably understood to have produced distributions of characteristics in the highly social human population, distributions which should be consciously adjusted only for compellingly logical reasons, and not merely from a misunderstanding between the value of 90% and 100% participation in some endeavor.
Yeah, you probably need to read more books on evolutionary biology. While technically correct the latter sentence is a misleading generalization when thinking about certain traits. I recommend you start by familiarizing yourself with genetic load to see an example of how evolution can end up relatively inefficient at doing some things. Also note the role of path dependence in the natural world.
A noisy figure, we have estimates going from 1% to about 6% for all non-heterosexual people depending on country and methodology. Statistics vary but about 2% of men are totally infertile. We also have infectious diseases and parasite infection rates for some organisms above 5% in human populations that get in the way of spreading genes as much as homosexuality. This is considered a plausible explanation too:
What if the allele for homosexuality is recessive (you need two copies of it to be homosexual), and having one copy of it has some advantage (the way having one copy of the sickle-cell allele makes you resistant to malaria)?
The problem is that evolution is perfectly capable of evolving things to extinction.
Species may come and go, alleles may come and go, but since neurons first showed up they have gotten a lot better, a lot better organized, to the point where mammal brains are pretty happening. Eyes, wings, tooth and claw all seem to be “winners” from evolution. We may evolve things to extinction, but evolution on the whole appears to be a winner at constructing marvelous things that persist across alleles, species and individuals.
Yes, but it’s under no obligation to give those things to us.
This would be closer to true if negated.
Evolution doesn’t have a job to do. It just is, Moreover, our ancestral environment doesn’t look much like modern cultures, but seems at this point pretty clear that culture can influence evolution.
If you think this definition of asshole captures your intuition about the meaning of that word then something has gone drastically wrong.
They have much more of an is v. ought problem before one gets to whether or not it is unnatural. But it also isn’t helpful in this regards in another way: whether something is or is not natural is distinct from whether it is evolutionary advantageous (either now or in our ancestral environment). Note also that there quite a few hypotheses giving potential explanations for why homosexuality would evolve.
This is essentially an argument that we should reside in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence agriculture society and also shouldn’t try to address cognitive biases and shouldn’t do any math that wasn’t easy in our ancestral environment, etc. etc. I don’t think this argument does what you want it to do.