Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2023

The instinct to protect

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rob Henderson on the way that women react to men who demonstrate protective instincts toward them:

Human psychology evolved in environments far more violent than even the most dangerous modern U.S. cities. Overall, in the U.S., the average death rates from interpersonal violence are less than 1 in 10,000.

In contrast, in hunter-gatherer societies, 15 percent of deaths were the result of physical violence.

Our violent evolutionary past has shaped our minds. Even peaceable people in developed countries who have never even been in a fight can still readily estimate men’s physical strength from their face, body, and voice. These estimations tightly correlate with men’s actual physical strength.

A 2022 paper (preprint link here) investigated whether people prefer romantic partners who are willing and able to protect them from violence.

Considering the frequency and intensity of violence in the human ancestral environment, affiliating with people who were able to protect you would have been advantageous. The authors of the paper suggest such preferences have shaped human mating psychology.

The authors (Barlev, Arai, Tooby, and Cosmides) explore the question of whether a potential partner’s ability to protect you from violence is valued. It seems obvious that the answer (especially for women) is almost certainly yes.

However, they also explore whether a potential partner’s willingness (independent of ability) is also considered attractive.

When a woman judges a man, does learning that he is willing to protect her from violence make him more attractive, even if he isn’t particularly effective at doing so?

What about when a woman learns that a man is able but unwilling to protect her? Imagine a muscular guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, just stands there and does nothing, or runs away.

Is he still more attractive than a guy who is unable but willing to protect her? Picture a scrawny guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, physically tries but is unsuccessful in his attempt to stop the mugger.

The paper explores these questions.

[…]

Here you see that women rate male dates (described in this particular version of the study as average in physical strength and average in physical attractiveness) who make no attempt to protect them as a 2 out of 10 in attractiveness. Women rate a man who attempts to protect them but fails as a 7.5 out of 10. And a man who attempts to protect them and succeeds is an 8 out of 10.

So the major bump in attractiveness comes from willingness, rather than ability.

November 7, 2022

“We are the descendants of good team players”

Filed under: Americas, Books, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rob Henderson considers the Male-Warrior hypothesis:

The male-warrior hypothesis has two components:

  • Within a same-sex human peer group, conflict between individuals is equally prevalent for both sexes, with overt physical conflict more common among males
  • Males are more likely to reduce conflict within their group if they find themselves competing against an outgroup

The idea is that, compared with all-female groups, all-male groups will (on average) display an equal or greater amount of aggression and hostility toward one another. But when they are up against another group in a competitive situation, cooperation increases within male groups and remains the same among female groups.

Rivalries with other human groups in the ancestral environment in competition for resources and reproductive partners shaped human psychology to make distinctions between us and them. Mathematical modeling of human evolution suggests that human cooperation is a consequence of competition.

Humans who did not make this distinction — those who were unwilling to support their group to prevail against other groups — did not survive. We are the descendants of good team players.

It used to be accepted as a given that males were more aggressive toward one another than females. This is because researchers often used measures of overt aggression. For instance, researchers would observe kids at a playground and record the number of physical altercations that occurred and compare how they differed by sex. Unsurprisingly, boys push each other around and get into fights more than girls.

But when researchers expanded their definition of aggression to include verbal aggression and indirect aggression (rumor spreading, gossiping, ostracism, and friendship termination) they found that girls score higher on indirect aggression and no sex differences in verbal aggression.

The most common reasons people give for their most recent act of aggression are threats to social status and reputational concerns.

Intergroup conflict has been a fixture throughout human history. Anthropological and archaeological accounts indicate conflict, competition, antagonism, and aggression both within and between groups. But violence is at its most intense between groups.

A cross-cultural study of 31 hunter-gatherer societies found that 64 percent engaged in warfare once every 2 years.

Men are the primary participants in such conflicts. Human males across societies are responsible for 90 percent of the murders and make up about 80 percent of the victims.

The evolution of coalitional aggression has produced different psychological mechanisms in men and women.

Just as with direct versus indirect aggression, though, homicide might be easier to observe and track with men. When a man beats another man to death, it is clear what has happened. Female murder might be less visible and less traceable.

Here’s an example.

There’s a superb book called Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero. It’s a biography of a Spanish girl abducted by the Kohorochiwetari, an indigenous Amazonian tribe. She recounts the frequent conflicts between different communities in the Amazon. After decades of living in various indigenous Amazonian communities, Valero manages to leave and describes her experiences to an Italian biologist, who published the book in 1965.

In the book, Helena Valero describes arriving in a new tribe. Some other girls were suspicious of her. One girl gives Valero a folded packet of leaves containing a foul-smelling substance. She tells Valero that it’s a snack, but that if she doesn’t like it she can give it to someone else. Valero finds the smell repulsive and sets it aside. Later, a small child picks up the leaf packet, takes a bite, and falls deathly ill. The child tells everyone that he got the leaf packet from Valero. The entire community accuses Valero of trying to poison the child, and banishes her from the tribe, with some firing arrows at her as she runs deep into the forest.

The girl who gave Valero the poisonous leaf packet formed a win-win strategy in her quest to eliminate her rival:

  • Valero eats the leaf packet and dies
  • Or she gives it to someone else who dies and she is blamed for it, followed by being ostracized or killed by the community

This is some high-level indirect aggression. Few men would ever think that far ahead (supervillains in movies notwithstanding). For most men, upon seeing a newcomer they view as a potential rival, they would just physically challenge him. Or kill him in his sleep or something, and that would be that.

Point is, this girl would have been responsible for Valero’s demise had she died. But no one would have known. If a man in the tribe, enraged at the death of the small child, had killed Valero, then he would be recorded as her killer. Or if Valero had been mauled by a jaguar while fleeing, then her death wouldn’t have been considered a murder.

Interestingly, the book implies that Valero was viewed as relatively attractive by the men, which likely means the girl who attempted to poison her was also relatively attractive (because she viewed her as a rival). Studies demonstrate that among adolescent girls, greater attractiveness is associated with greater use of aggressive tactics (both direct and indirect) against their rivals.

October 18, 2022

“On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl”

Filed under: Health, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson considers how early humans managed to overcome violent tendencies as human communities got larger, and specifically considers the social role of young men, then and now:

One challenge to overcome involves the behavioral tendencies of young males.

[Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin] Dunbar writes:

    When males (and younger males, in particular) are deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities, they are prone to behaving in ways that both stress other group members (especially reproductive females) and threaten the stability and cohesion of the group. This is as true of the more social primates as it is of humans, and is often associated with high mortality rates. Under these circumstances, males are also likely to indulge in raiding neighbouring groups, which can result in poor inter-community relations as well as retaliation. Managing male behaviour may, thus, be critical to maintaining an environment conducive to successful reproduction.

Young males are (unknowingly) experts at disrupting social cohesion. To be fair, they are also required to maintain and defend it. They’re a mixed bag.

Disputes that spill over into violence and homicide have been an ever-present risk in both contemporary and pre-modern small scale societies. Young men make up the overwhelming majority of such conflicts, both as perpetrators and as victims.

[…]

The vast majority of violence is carried out by young men.

Psychologically, a key reason for this is that women are more sensitive than men to penalties. Men are more inclined to take risks, oblivious to the punishments they may receive. Men also have lower levels of empathy and a higher tolerance for pain.

The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has posited the hypothesis of the “extreme male brain”, suggesting that males are at higher risk for a clinical diagnosis of autism because of the constellation of traits men tend to score higher on (e.g., systematizing over empathizing, favoring things over people, etc). It also implies that most males may be a little bit autistic. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are girls and women who are diagnosed with autism. Just at much lower rates than males.

I have wondered if, in addition to autism, the idea of the “extreme male brain”, could just as easily apply to psychopathy.

For both psychopathy and autism, the ratio of males to females is about three to 1.

Men (especially young men) are more pronounced than women on just about every trait that characterizes psychopathy.

Relatively low impulse control, low empathy, low fear, high sensation seeking, relatively shallow emotions, need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, violent fantasies, desire for revenge, and increased likelihood of criminality. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are women who are psychopaths. But far fewer than males.

The psychologist John Barry has pointed out that when he was a student, he learned he couldn’t use standard adult psychopathy tests to administer to teenage boys. The reason? Because adult tests might give teen males a false positive.

Just as (relative to women) most men might be a little bit autistic, most (young) men might be a little bit psychopathic.

On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl.

September 7, 2022

The “self-domestication” hypothesis in human evolution

Filed under: Books, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A review of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham in the latest edition of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter:

The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners.

Over time, our ancestors eliminated humans — typically males — who were exceedingly aggressive toward members of their own group.

If there was a troublemaker, then other less domineering males conspired to organize and commit collective murder against them.

Women too were involved in such decisions involving capital punishment, but men typically carried out the killing.

Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. This led us to become relatively peaceful apes.

But if humans are “self-domesticated”, then why are there so many violent people among us today?

The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.

Comparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.

We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. And tear overly dominant males to shreds.

Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees.

This is true.

Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.

Bonobos are “peaceful”, relative to chimps. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans.

The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.

This is a review and discussion of Wrangham’s book.

August 30, 2022

NYT op-ed – “Maternal instinct is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate”

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jerry Coyne responds to a New York Times op-ed by Chelsea Conaboy (author of a forthcoming book from which the op-ed was adapted):

The recent article […] from the New York Times (of course), is one of the worst of the lot. It bespeaks a lack of judgment on the part of the author — who ignores biology because of her ideology — as well as on the part of the newspaper, which failed to hold the author’s feet to the scientific fire. Let this post be my rebuttal.

Author Conaboy, who apparently hasn’t done enough scientific research, maintains that “maternal instinct” doesn’t exist, but is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate.

The immediate problem is that Conaboy never defines “maternal instinct”. It could mean any number of things, including a greater desire of women than men to have children, a greater desire of women than of men to care for those offspring, the fact that in animals mothers spend more time caring for offspring than do fathers, a greater emotional affinity of women than of men towards children (including offspring), or the demonstration of such a mental difference by observing a difference in caring behavior.

I will define “maternal instinct” as not only the greater average tendency of females than males to care for offspring, but also a greater behavioral affinity towards offspring in females than in males. The term involves behavioral response, not “feelings”, which are demonstrable only in humans. Thus one can look for difference in “parental instincts” across various species of animals.

But even in this sense, Conoboy is partly (but far from wholly) correct when she discusses humans. It’s undoubtedly true that women were socialized into the sex role as offspring breeders and caretakers, with men assuming the “breadwinning” role. It’s also true that women were often denied access to work or education because their vocation was seen as “reproducer”, or out of fear that they would spend less time working and more on children, or even that they’d get pregnant and would leave jobs. Further, it’s also true that this role difference was justified by being seen as “hard-wired” (i.e., largely the result of genes, which, I argue below, is true), and that “hard-wired” was conceived as “unable to be changed”. The latter construal, however, is wrong, and that is what really held back women. The socialization of sex roles, which still occurs, goes on from early ages, with girls given dolls and boys toy cars, though, as society has matured, we’re increasingly allowing girls to choose their own toys and their own path through life. I of course applaud such “equal opportunity”.

But to claim that women don’t have a greater desire than men to care for offspring, or have a greater emotional affinity towards offspring, is to deny biology, and evolution in particular. (I freely admit that many men love their kids deeply, and that some men care for them as much or more as do mothers, but I’m talking about averages here, not anecdotes.)

There are two reasons why Conaboy is wrong, and both involve evolution.

The first is theoretical, but derived from empirical observations. It thus explains the second, which is wholly empirical and predictive. How do we explain the fact that, across the animal kingdom, when members of only one sex do most of the childrearing, it’s almost invariably the females? (Yes, in many species males share the duties, and in a very few, like seahorses, males provide more parental care; and there are evolutionary reasons for that.)

The reasons for the statement in bold above involves the biology of reproduction. It is the female who must lay the eggs or give birth, and there is no way she can leave her genes behind unless she does that. It’s easier for males to take off after insemination and let the females care for offspring. Given that females are constrained to stick with the fertilized eggs, their best strategy is to take care of the gestation and resultant offspring, which of course allows males to seek other mates. Not only must females carry the fetuses, lay the eggs, and so on, but they are also constrained to see out the pregnancy until offspring are produced and then suckle or tend them in other ways. In some cases it’s the best evolutionary strategy for a male to stick around and share the child-rearing, but often it’s not.

This disparity in behavior holds not just in humans, of course, but in many animals: it’s a prediction — largely verified — of evolutionary psychology.

August 29, 2022

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

August 25, 2022

QotD: Scandinavian women

Filed under: Europe, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On my trips to this part of the world, I’ve noticed that women here are what we in America would call high maintenance. The men seem to put a lot of effort into doting on their women, while the women act like they deserve it plus more. In Copenhagen, I saw men pushing a cart in which their date would ride. Contrary to the Viking image, men in this part of the world seem almost henpecked. Given what we see with their politics, it’s clear that the culture veered into matriarchy at some point and politics followed.

Even if this is just a superficial affectation, it is interesting because of what we think caused the variety of eye colors, hair textures and hair colors in Northern European people. The most common explanation is that there was an imbalance between the sexes, as the males needed to engage in high risk activity like hunting large animals and fishing cold waters. The result was more girls than boys, which gave an edge to women with unusual eye and hair color, as far as the sexual marketplace.

A trait that offers an edge in terms of attracting a mate, especially for women in a world short of eligible men, is going to spread quickly. It would follow that women would be the pursuers, while the men could be indifferent. If things are the reverse today, then it suggests something important changed over the last many generations. Perhaps enough cads were killed off in wars to turn the tables, giving the doting males an edge. That would have changed the dynamic among women, making them high maintenance …

The Z Man, “Travelogue: Talinn”, The Z Blog, 2019-04-03.

August 5, 2022

QotD: The Peacock’s feathers

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Behold the peacock in all its glory: As an evolved organism, it doesn’t make sense. The peacock can barely fly, and its extravagant tail feathers signal “Hey, here’s lunch!” to predators for miles around. So why the fancy look? Simple: The girls love it. Peacocks with the biggest and most dazzling tail feathers mated with lots of adoring peahens and begat lots of offspring, a process that resulted in the utterly useless but amazing-looking birds that we decorate our parks with today.

The “peacock principle” provides the answer to one of the abiding mysteries of nature: Males will evolve into any sort of weirdness to attract females. Since psychology recapitulates phylogeny, I have personally experienced the peacock principle. In my callow youth, I grew my hair to enormous length and strutted around in ridiculously colored garments. My bewildered parents thought I had become gay, but the explanation was the exact opposite of that. Long hair and gaudy clothes were my peacock feathers.

Martin Gurri, “Get the Kids Out of the Room — We’re Going To Talk About Sex”, Discourse, 2022-04-25.

July 16, 2022

QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist

Filed under: Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look, it’s not even racial, but it is tribal. Because human beings are tribal. By evolution and inclination, humans associate most with people they’re used to, and they feel safe amid a small number of people they know well.

The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)

Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.

June 20, 2022

QotD: Swinish western civilization

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The foreground question, that has been disturbing me for some time, and obsessing me lately, is whether what we call for shorthand “Western Civ” is salvageable. That it would be worth salvaging (we live in the age of gerunds, don’t we?) I take for granted. We are alive; we have to live somehow; better that it be in the highest of civilizations, than in barbarous filth. Not everyone agrees with me on this. The great majority, even within my Church, would prefer to live in a moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual pigsty of consumerism, in which the swineherds are provided by Twisted Nanny State.

Now traditionally, pigs had extended sharp tusks, and were death on swineherds. They still have them, but diminished in size by breeding, and sometimes even the wee vestigial bumps are removed, at the risk of cracking our jaws. This does not mean the captive suid is perfectly contented; only that he has been disarmed.

(I have a theory that humans are descended from pigs, not monkeys. I don’t actually believe it, but the argument can be developed in a way that will drive the village Darwinist crazy. Note: the average pig is smarter than a monkey; and can’t be bothered climbing trees.)

But I seem to be distracting myself into zoology, and my purpose was hardly to advance naturalism. Indeed, my self-assigned brief is for supernaturalism. My affection for pigs is just an aside. In the end it must be said there has never been a pig civilization, and the prospect that one may emerge by the ministrations of animal rights activists is, to my mind, dim.

David Warren, “A rant for Saint David’s Day”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-01.

January 8, 2022

“We are a sexually dimorphic species, and men and women are different”

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A statement like that on Twitter or other social media platforms might run you the risk of denunciation, cancellation, and a plethora of accusations of transphobia, but it isn’t the intent of Robert King to troll the hypersensitive online:

No, this carving isn’t directly related to the article … but it is eyecatching.

We are a sexually dimorphic species, and men and women are different. Evolution has designed us to be different. Realising that we evolved through slow steps, rather than just popping into being in an act of creation, has implications. For one thing, it means that men and women have their own separate evolutionary histories, as a result of differing (although not wholly different, of course) selection pressures. Resisting this truth — pretending that men and women are a sort of silly putty, totally moulded by social forces — has already had serious consequences in medical science, and it also has implications for my field of study.

I study the nature and function of the female orgasm. It might surprise people that there is even a set of questions about this phenomenon, but it is one of the most vexed fields in evolutionary biology. I do not claim that we have solved the puzzle of it. However, I do claim that we know a lot more about female orgasm than we used to. For example, female orgasm is multi-faceted in nature (unlike male orgasm) and is associated with a host of complex, fertility-related, functions. Male orgasm has but one (and a pretty-well understood one at that) fertility related function: reinforcing sexual behaviour. How is it that these stark differences between the sexes have been missed?

A major reason is that sex researchers, in some cases even self-described feminists, have often persisted in treating female orgasm as a mere adjunct to male orgasm. On this view — the by-product view — only male orgasms have a function. Female ones exist as a sort of afterthought of nature. Thus, clitorises have been routinely compared to (functionless) male nipples by, among others, the influential palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould. However, this comparison does not stand up to scrutiny. Clitorises are not substandard penises. For starters, they are large, four inches in length, on average. They are highly complex, but their structure — including muscular, erectile, and sensitive tissue — is mostly internal.

The external part — the glans — is highly sensitive, but so is the rest of it, when appropriately aroused. Clitorises connect to their own dedicated area of brain (the somatosensory cortex) utterly distinct from the male version. To see some of this for yourself you could read any number of excellent works by, for example, the brilliant anatomist Helen O’Connell.

If the structure that generates female orgasm is at least as, if not more, complex than the male counterpart, then it makes little sense to assume that the female version depends on the male one. This is doubly true of the event of orgasm itself, prompting the eminent biologist Robert Trivers to quip of female orgasms that “One has to wonder how often Steve [Gould] has been near to that blessed event to regard it as a by-product.” That may be a tad unkind — but it raises a rather important point. If we restrict ourselves to studying female orgasm, or human sexual behaviour generally, in the laboratory alone, then we run a very real risk of missing out on crucial aspects.

Let me make this point more concrete. Over the last couple of years, zoos and wildlife parks across the planet have seen a huge upswing in births, among species previously thought to be sexually frigid — like Pandas. Why? Simple. No humans were about. The animals had some privacy from prying eyes. Does it really stretch imagination to appreciate that the full range of human sexual responses might be also muted when under laboratory conditions? Inefficiency is a hallmark of good sex, and humans use the privacy of the boudoir to do more than make each orgasm as rapidly as possible. We use this space to find out about one another.

December 17, 2021

Scott Alexander on the risk of ancient plagues returning

Filed under: Environment, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The other day, Scott Alexander responded to a hair-on-fire New York Magazine piece of hysteria-mongering about climate change warming up arctic zones that may still harbour ancient plagues that can return:

I’m a little nervous talking about this, because I am not a microbiologist. But I haven’t seen the proper experts address this properly, so I’ll try, and if I’m wrong you guys can shout me down.

(Also, the real microbiologists are apparently “self-injecting [3.5 million year old bacteria] just out of curiosity” and we should probably stay away from them for now)

I think we probably don’t have to worry very much about ancient diseases from millions of years ago.

Animal diseases can’t trivially become contagious among humans. Sometimes an animal disease jumps from beast to man, like COVID or HIV, but these are rare and epochal events. Usually they happen when the disease is very common in some population of animals that lives very close to humans for a long time. It’s not “one guy digs up a reindeer and then boom”.

If a plague is so ancient that it’s from before humans evolved, it’s probably not that dangerous. In theory, it could be dangerous for whatever animal it originally evolved for — a rabbit plague infecting rabbits, or an elephant plague infecting elephants. And then maybe after many rabbits are infected, some human might eat an infected rabbit and get unlucky, and the plague might mutate to affect humans. But I don’t think this is any more likely than any of the zillion plagues that already infect rabbits jumping to humans, and nobody is worrying about those.

The story about anthrax is a distraction. The fact that someone got anthrax from a corpse frozen in permafrost is irrelevant; there is anthrax now, and you could get it from a perfectly fresh corpse or living animal if you wanted. It’s adapted to animals and it can’t spread from person to person. Just because you got an irrelevant-to-humans modern animal disease when you dug up a modern animal, doesn’t mean you’re going to get a dangerous-to-humans disease from an ancient animals.

But I’m more concerned about recent human plagues coming back.

Not bubonic plague; that one is another distraction. The reason we don’t get more Black Deaths isn’t because yersinia pestis died off or mellowed out. It’s because we have good sanitation and pest control.

And doctors whose knowledge of medicine doesn’t begin and end with “look like a creepy bird”

But the 1918 Spanish flu has, as far as I know, legitimately died out. Lots of people like saying that in a sense it’s still with us. This NEJM paper (with a celebrity author!) points out that it’s the ancestor of all existing flu strains. But most of these flu strains are less infectious than it was. This didn’t make sense to me the first, second, or third time I asked about it: why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu? Sure, it might evolve into a less deadly flu because it’s perfectly happy being more infectious but less deadly. But I think the Spanish flu was also especially infectious; so why would it evolve away from that?

July 14, 2021

QotD: The unlikely hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m strange only in that I was very young and that the book that caused this reaction was a classic of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book. Loved it even. Mostly because it was different and it made me think. (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies” for words. Now this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time. No one else is forced to agree with me.)

But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.

They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals. No, we’re really animals.” And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time. Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile. We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)

But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time. “We’re just animals. If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”

The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world. Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs. The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day. So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears. And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape. Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)

What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.

In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy. “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”

In point of fact, from evolutionary POV, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die. World’s shortest species/race/breed.

Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and … oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is. There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.

Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only. There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around. (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives. Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix. Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Remaking People”, According to Hoyt, 2018-11-19.

June 1, 2021

QotD: The evolutionary origin of male aggressiveness

Filed under: Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The central and recurring argument Stewart-Williams deploys, to explain why the contents of the human mind are just as much a product of evolution as the attributes of the human body, is the fact that all the other animals clearly have mental habits that must have evolved, so why should we humans, who are also animals, be any different?

Were we humans the entirely separate creations, quite unlike mere animals, that old-school Christians used to say we were, then for our minds to be entirely different from those of animals might make more sense. As it is, given that we are products of the same evolutionary process that made all the others animals, the “blank slate” notion of the human mind makes no sense at all.

One thing I did — not “learn” exactly — but hear for the first time from a scientist of human evolution, concerned the aggressiveness of the human male. Many human masculine characteristics have evolved not so much because human females like them, but more because other human males are intimidated by them. Males who defeat other males in competition achieve high status, and high status and the resources that accompany it are what human females especially like, rather than necessarily liking the particular characteristics that achieve that high status. Male aggressive characteristics are, metaphorically speaking, deer antlers more than they are peacock tails. They are at least as much for making human males into top dogs, so to speak, as they are for directly impressing the ladies. I can’t help noticing that some human females are impressed, directly, by male aggression. They like to watch men fighting, for instance. But others are very put off by such behaviour, and especially, of course, if it is ever directed against them.

Brian Micklethwait, “What Steve Stewart-Williams said”, Brian Micklethwait’s New Blog, 2021-02-26.

May 27, 2021

Charles Darwin “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Wright argues that Charles Darwin is not guilty of the most recent set of sins alleged in an editorial in the journal Science:

Charles Darwin, circa 1874.
Photo by Leonard Darwin via Wikipedia Commons.

The author of the Science piece (which ran under the heading “editorial”) was Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton. He contended that Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man “offers a racist and sexist view of humanity” and is “often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious”. So students who are taught that Darwin was a great scientist “should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience”.

There are things about this essay I like. For example: I understood it, which distinguishes it from many things written by contemporary anthropologists. Also, it’s hard to argue with its claim that Darwin said things about race and gender that would get a guy canceled today. (As one person put it on Twitter, Darwin, “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”.)

Still, Fuentes does seem to have gotten one important thing about Darwin wrong. And in the process he demonstrated a kind of confusion I consider so pernicious that I’ve decided to add it to my list of “existential psychological threats”, along with such cognitive biases as attribution error and confirmation bias (“existential” in the sense of grave threats to Planet Earth, a subject pondered often in this newsletter).

Here’s the confusion: In reading Darwin, Fuentes fails to distinguish between an explanation of something and a justification of something.

I want to emphasize that, though Fuentes seems to be on the left, this conflation of explanation and justification is common on both sides of the political spectrum. If you suggest that some terrorist act committed in America was a response to America’s bombing of majority-Muslim countries, someone on the right may respond to this attempt to explain why the terrorism happened by saying, “Oh, so you’re justifying the slaughter of Americans? You’re excusing the terrorists?”

The fact that I’m often on the receiving end of this kind of question may be one reason I’ve come to see this conflation — let’s call it the “explain/excuse conflation” — as something whose extinction would be a wonderful thing. But there’s another reason: I believe this conflation is a genuine impediment to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. If people get shouted down every time they start a sentence with, “I think the reason bad thing X happened is …” then we’ll have trouble understanding enough about bad things to reduce their frequency.

Here’s the assertion by Fuentes that, so far as I can tell, is flat-out wrong. After (accurately) writing that Darwin “asserted evolutionary differences between races,” he adds: “He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through ‘survival of the fittest.'”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

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