RE: Monogamy is an Evolutionary Strategy
It's funny how the guy who is known mostly for being a laughing stock of computer geeks, the author of sex for nerds HOWTO and above all for his worlds encompassing ego is now an expert in evolution.
Now, seriously: there's not a shred of evidence that human monogamy might be an evolutionary strategy, and whatever (admittedly meager) evidence we have points in the opposite direction. A recent book does quite a good job of debunking these misconceptions, and another gives also valuable insights, although it touches monogamy only incidentally.
But maybe we shouldn't expect too much. Psychologists are notorious for their treatment of evidence, and evolutionary psychologists (which in fact are neither) are the worst of this stock. So what to expect from guys like Raymond or Donald, who - perhaps brilliant in computer science - have yet to understand that not everything is an algorithm.
Ad hominem.
Well, while it is hard to keep oneself from a little joke, you would certainly do yourself a favor reading the entire comment. Or perhaps one of the books I refer to. Or two.
As for ad hominem... well, I would be most suspicious of a history book which is not written by a historian or a physics book not written by a physicist. They might have some insights, but most of the time it's just crap. It's only reasonable to be wary of computer scientists trying to explain evolution, and even more, culture.
Mary Midgley once surveyed and found out that Creationism is most popular among trained engineers, the least among historians and... theologians (biologists were somewhere in the middle AFAIR, thankfully closer to theologians than engineers). It's described in her book Evolution as a religion (the title is quite unfortunate, she is not a Creationist and does not deny the evolution). And she is not the only one to have noticed that engineers tend to have a somewhat simplified view of such complicated issues. After all, Salem Hypothesis did not emerge from nothing.
Ego much?
Appeal to authority is not convincing.
Say, 0.1 milliESR ;)
Authority? Really? Not being an expert in physics when I want to know something about, say, quantum mechanics, I should read a book by a trained physicist, or, say, a Medieval literature expert who never took a lecture in physics above high school level?
Granted, the physicist may be a kook and the literature expert a genius, but the probabilities of this are?
Obviously there are caveats: seeing in a work in a field I'm not familiar with badly botched statistics on which the work's argument depends I can be pretty sure I'm reading crap, no matter who wrote it. But unless you're competent in a field related to the work's argument you will do the best to rely on experts.
Lol, good one. I've butted heads with him, so I've experienced it first-hand, but you also came off initially to me as being too willing to accept some bullshit of academics as well. I'd prefer to keep my mind open and unfortunately I don't have enough time to read all those books so I can better respond on what I think is bullshit and also to learn what those authors have to say.
I agree except I find that academics often have an agenda, often based around who is funding their research and the culture that pervades these Ivy League cathedrals. See for example the AGW (man-made global warming) junk science.
The literature cited by @neilstrauss seems to support much of the thesis I grabbed from ESR and JAD as I expounded in my other comments on this page.
Also statistics are not proof of a causal relationship. Repeatable physics experiments are more in alignment with the scientific method, than what appears to me to more conjecture in the social sciences. But again I am not an expert, so perhaps I would change my mind if I had more time to read experts in those fields.
My mother who practically prays to doctors which I don't, shocked me recently when she said she doesn't listen to veterinarians about the best feeding practices for the dogs she rescues. She said she observed that her hands on experience was more relevant than their academic theories. It was validation for me that not accepting without careful study the experts in fields dominated by theory instead of practice, is a reasonable stance.
Well, a mind open might also be open to bullshit. Nobody can be expert in everything today, Renaissance is long gone. That's OK. What worries me, that too many people (and, sadly, it appears that you as well) are all too eager to think what is bullshit or not without actually reading all those books, as if admitting own ignorance was something of a shame. It is not. I'm pretty much completely ignorant of quantum mechanics and I do not feel ashamed, but neither do I feel a need to take a stance in Copenhagen vs. Everett (I know of such a dispute, yes, but I don't understand it at all). :-)
You missed the point, I never said they were. I said that if I read the work whose argument depends on statistics, and these statistics are clearly and badly fucked up, then I have a strong reason to think this work is worthless. Not so incidentally, this can be said of pretty much everything in evolutionary psychology.
But then again, it still does not do much more than argue that this is possible. Which it clearly is. But there's no real argument why it would be more probable than, say, a byproduct of other historical events.
We may, for one, argue, that Christianity was more friendly than Islam to philosophy and science from the beginning and therefore it's not very surprising that the Christian attitude to science was shaped by people like Augustine or Aquinas while the Islamic one by people like al-Ghazali and I could build an argument in defense of this, but I'm not really sure. What if in the world of Islam prevailed people like Alhacen or Averroes and in the Christian one people like Tertullian or Cosmas? Wouldn't we now discuss why polygyny was so successful an evolutionary strategy (or not)? :-)
Or, they argue that young males without a female partner tend to engage in crime. This is true, but there's a big warning bell: most of the evidence comes from normatively monogamic societies. So it's possible that non-monogamic societies find other ways to police young men than finding them wives, and they do not appear to discuss this (and some cue could be taken from some modern Islamic societies which, unless or maybe until the said society is destroyed by war, oops, liberated, tend to be less crime prone than Christian or post-Christian ones with a similar standard of living, think e.g. North Africa before 2011 vs. Latin America from Mexico to Brazil).
Frankly, I think there are way too many variables, most of them so far unknown, for us even think of being able to successfully determine whether monogamy was a successful evolutionary strategy (but if it was, then why in the most successful West it is being weaker and weaker?), or a byproduct of other, sometimes accidental changes.
In fact, even in biological evolution where there is a rich fossil record, and we are able more or less to trace the history of many developments, often we are unsure whether they were adaptations or byproducts. For example the os penis (the boner bone) which we humans do not have. Dawkins once famously speculated (I think in The selfish gene) which evolutionary forces could lead to humans losing the bone, but it's, well, speculation (and one that begs some obvious questions to boot). But we don't really know if it was adaptive or accidental. So why we would expect to know what was and was not evolutionary in mind and culture development where evidence is way less than that?
I don't want to discuss AGW as this is another field I am mostly ignorant of, but it seems to me more than accidental that the same people who had spent years on casting doubt on health effects of tobacco were later casting doubt on AGW. Clearly not only academics have an agenda. But then again, I don't know much about AGW so I don't feel competent to discuss it. So I only ask: how much are you competent in this field, how much works did you read, followed the footnotes, verified the statistics and so on?
Well there you go doing what you said I shouldn't do.
When we are in a mini-ice age from 2030 - 2050, then you maybe you'll realize how fucking junk that AGW science was. And that is a backtested prediction.
Yeah like the variety your academic cohorts are promulgating and then accusing everyone else of being ignorant because we refuse to waste our time reading their agenda indoctrination books.
Or you could consider the theory from my blog post which is that randomization is the strategy of nature. So it can all just be random diversity so as to be consistent with the Second law of thermo, that entropy is trending to maximum.
Joseph Dunphy's response here http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-explained/ kinda points out how the Salem Hypothesis does, kinda, emerge from nothing.
Quite the opposite. While the Salem Hypothesis is to be taken somewhat tongue in cheek, in the linked article it's explicitly written that, quote, _ Surveys of the phenomenon suggest that it is a very real phenomenon. _, end quote.
It could be correlated with precisely the theory I am presenting in this blog post, in that engineering is a profession focused on production and practice, not on theory. Monogamy (and other group compliance paradigms such as religion) appears to me (see also my comments on this page) to be a strategy to keep men productive. So those men which subscribe to being productive are more inclined to want to see the world as structured in a conducive way to production versus chaotic genetic diversity. OTOH, it can also be argued that the Humanities are elite political agenda indoctrination camps (with heapings of theoretical bullshit and massaging statistics to tell any story desired). Isn't life wonderfully complex. I love it.
It could. It might. It is possible. Well, it is. It is also possible that the engineering education and profession is promoting an oversimplified mechanistic worldview which in turn promotes a strong negative preference for more complex explanations and theories, especially where evidence is not 100% decisive (which means pretty much everywhere). It is possible, but possible does not mean probable and while I'm inclined to believe the above explanation (not that I tried to study the phenomenon in depth), I'm honest enough to admit that I am not aware of a shred of evidence to support this speculation.
In short, I don't know.
Did you really expect me to go do the scientific method in a blog post? You criticism is disingenuous. None of the 85% of cultures that preferred polygamy were competitive economically with the dominant Western monogamous cultures over the past couple of centuries.
Nature is adapting too fast to even apply the scientific method, i.e. there appear to not be repeatable instances, but rather a continual evolution. Although perhaps we might find a cycle if we could compile enough historical data.
So just accept that is for the most part won't be a concrete science.
Perhaps you prefer posit the theory (which you've alluded to) that engineers are just simpletons and want to enclose everything into a neat equation.
(I would guess it is both your theory and my theory combined. I know from my own personal experience and other engineers I've known that we do indeed prefer production over endless theoretical bullshit. I do like theory and philosophy, but I like it to end up somewhere within reasonable time frame; whereas, some academics make a career out of theoretical research that never produces any practical real world application/production.)
And perhaps I think your cohorts rather bloviate about various speculative causal interpretations from complex data sets (making arguments about evidence leaning towards), which from another perspective appear to be aliasing error and thus hogwash.
So we shouldn't blog because neither of us have any solid veracity. Blogging is often about expressing ideas and opinions.
Frankly, I almost didn't write this blog, because I did realize that the social sciences are far to complex and muddled to make absolute arguments. But I decided to proceed, because I sense there is a decadence associated with the new fondled idea of polygamy for Western culture. We are importing the barbarians again, repeating the fall of Rome.
None, that is, except Islam. Yes, Islam declined over the last few centuries, but how much of it might be attributed to its preference for polygamy, and how much to other factors like, say, Mongolian invasions which barely touched the Western world but destroyed most of the Islamic one twice. Or accidental discovery of Americas (which is doubly funny because it was enabled by Columbus' gross miscalculation: he thought that Japan was only about 5000km westward from Canary Islands).
I do. This still does not mean it should be allowed free speculation. History is in much worse situation as what it studies is by definition non-replicable, and even approximating contemporary statistics and cross cultural studies which are available to evopsych (or would be available if they knew how to do it) are out of the question. So it's in fact only explanations of any available evidence. Yet, historians show much more of scholarly discipline than evolutionary psychologists do.
Most of the evopsych research I read appears to do the thing backwards: assume the answer (it must be an evolutionary adaptation) and try hard to support it with whatever excuse at evidence they can come at and speculation. Outside of evopsych (and Continental philosophy, maybe something else) a respectable scholar should first look for evidence against his hypothesis, then for alternative hypotheses and only failing that tentatively treat his hypothesis as confirmed. And never be ashamed of admitting ignorance (yes, I know, easier said than done, publish or perish and all this stuff.)
There are perhaps more theories of what caused the fall of Rome than bad evopsych research papers out there ;) Let's not go there, at least now.
Sorry, I missed the "Joseph Dunphy's response" part. But it does little to refute this anyway, as the phenomenon has been noticed not just by Salem or Patterson but by others as well (e.g. Mary Midgley). He points (quite correctly) that most engineers are not extremists or creationists, but since most educated people in the world are not extremists or creationists this seems not very relevant.
From what I know about this to date, I take that among people with higher education engineers indeed are overrepresented in creationism. I will however happily stand corrected if pointed to new evidence.
We could posit that building large family networks and having many loyal sons, would be advantageous in those agrarian and somewhat feudal or tribal societies, but would not be beneficial in the modern economy. Perhaps this is why monogamy has been winning and production increasing as a result. Granted these are theories. We write blogs to share our thoughts and impact on others. I don't think your experts should have a monopoly on influence and sharing. Knowledge creation is an accretive, bottom-up process, not a top-down cathedral.
Indeed the Americas have been a huge economic driving force, and especially during the Industrial Age where the USA had a coast on both major oceans the Mississippi River to bisect the Eastern portion and transport cargo most efficiently. And it was arguably the Puritan, monogamous conservative culture (along with a temporary boost of slavery in the South) that drove the great production to harvest that resource.
Again it is all conjecture.
Ah your academic bullshit is why we computer programmers (not the scientist variety, but the actual doers) are changing the world, while you stroke your feminist agenda propaganda dick. As Einstein is quoted, "If the facts don't fit the [feminist, emasculating] theory, change [reinterpret] the facts."
Consider my reply to @jimmco. The logic presented isn't exclusive of other complex anthropological interplay. It seems someone got offended that their field of expertise wasn't being claimed by a "non-expert".
The time scales required to falsify evolution are too great to argue for any non-archaeological evidence. We must reason about our experiences and what seems to make sense.
Regarding the book you cited which apparently discusses cultures which reared children as chattel and even though I haven't read the book, this seems to be orthogonal to the logic I presented in this blog post. These cultures have developed around the economics of oversupply of labor in agrarian societies. Remember before the Black Death, Europe also had an oversupply of labor and people were treated as slaves.
I realize you were responding more on the claim of falsifiable evolutionary relevance, and you may be correct that there is none but you can't prove it. It may just be a short-term strategy which fizzles out without any evolutionary impact. Yet I will still argue it is an attempt at a strategy for maximizing hereditary impact. You will observe in those societies which treat children as chattel, the women are often also treated as possessions of their husband. Again this appears to be an evolutionary strategy of beta-males.
Yet we could also reason that is might just as well be a practical strategy of how cope with an agrarian lifestyle, where one needs a reliable female to maintain the household chores and watch over the children. So in that respect we could argue it might have nothing or much less to do with evolutionary impact, and more to do with practically how to produce the most. Yet even that is an evolutionary strategy to survive, thrive, and produce offspring.
Aliasing error is not pointing any where. There are plethora of strategies being applied in nature, and mapping these out with some repeatable scientific test is I think basically impossible. All we have is conjecture. The relevant strategies may be changing (due to the environmental conditions changing, e.g. the end of the agrarian and industrial ages) faster than any evidence could support them.
You are throwing aliasing error all over the map. And I don't see a benefit to wasting my time on it.
It is all aliasing error, because there do not exist total orders in our universe nor in nature. Everything is a partial order and perspective is always relative. This can be easily proved by noting that a total order would be equivalent to real-time omniscience, but this would require the speed-of-light to not be finite, which would collapse the past and future into each other.
So all you will ever have is relative agreement and disagreement.
That is why I won't waste my time reading your propaganda books.