Evolutionary psychology is essential to understand human behavior and the human mind. Evolution gives ultimate , not proximate explanations.
In ethology, the study of animal behavior, causation can be considered in terms of these two mechanisms.
Proximate causation: Explanation of an animal’s behavior based on trigger stimuli and internal mechanisms.
Ultimate causation: Explanation of an animal’s behavior based on the principles of evolution. The ultimate causation requires that the behavioral and physical traits are genetically heritable, and explains behavior by correlating behavioral traits to mechanisms that favor evolutionary development, such as natural selection.
Why are men more unfaithful and promiscuous then women?
ultimate explanation: A woman can only have one offspring every few years. No matter with how many men she has sex. So she can only influence the genetic quality of her offspring, and try to find a good father, a good caretaker. A promiscuous man can have an unlimited number of offspring, the world record being many hundreds. So more partners gets more offspring for men. And thus the genes for promiscuity in men spread faster then the genes for faithfulness.
Males are overrepresented in jail, death row, war death, work accidents, accidental death & involuntary middle age virginity, reproductive failures, mental retardation. Feminist and men’s right’s activist fail to request female quotas in jail. Isn’t it funny? We need quotas in politics, management, Universities. But no quotas among homeless and war dead? No gender equality on Titanic life boat seats!
some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.
The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
Equal rights, equal duty. Did feminists fight for conscription for women?
One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don’t see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds. Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister
Men outnumber women both among the losers and among the biggest winners
Men take high risks. They reap high rewards, and pay with death, injury, abysmal failures. Feminists are envious of the winners, and oblivious of the losers. They want to get the gold coins without risking their lives in the fight.
Evolution built this higher risk, higher variance even into genetics of male physical features: There are more men that are extremely tall, extremely intelligent, etc and there are more men then women at the bottom, with the lowest IQ, shortest height, etc.
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.
Over half the males but very few females were reproductive failures
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. [ . . ] Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago [2005].
I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
In evolutionary times, in the “EEA” 100 000 years ago, only very few women failed to reproduce, but about 60% of the men were total evolutionary failures. They are the end of their genetic line. Every man or women know that some guys are girl magnets, while others barely stand a chance: Nerds, socially inept, shy, ugly, handicapped. And even nowadays, with legally enforced monogamy, there still is serial monogamy after divorce, and affairs, both practiced mainly by successful men.
In terms of the biological competition to produce offspring, then, men outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners. [ . . . ] Experts estimate Genghis Khan had several hundred and perhaps more than a thousand children. […] For him, the big risks led to huge payoffs in offspring. My point is that no woman, even if she conquered twice as much territory as Genghis Khan, could have had a thousand children.
And thousand’s of wanna-be Genghis Khan’s died before they had a chance to reproduce. And others were snubbed by women.
Feminists look for equal rights without equal risk & equal losses.
Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards
Men outnumber women both among the losers and among the biggest winners
The power of feminists is awe inspiring.
Feminists conquered and brainwashed the minds of lawmakers, police, press, the United Nations.
And people are not even aware of the sweeping changes feminists did, to encroach upon men’s rights, men’s well being, freedom. How much terror feminists managed to sow with teenage sex and child porn witch hunts. This sounds exaggerated? Please read on.
The feminist social manipulation skill superiority hypothesis
Females are superior in social manipulation & language distortion to foster their reproductive interest (An evolutionary hypothesis).
More provocatively it could be called “feminist cunningness hypothesis”, female evolutionary cunningness hypthesis, …… Any more naming suggestions?
Hypothesis: Females are vastly superior in social manipulation skills
In evolution, everything is result of an evolutionary arms race. (cheetah and gazelle’s running skills, bacteria vs. our bodily defense system, …) Skills and capacities get honed over time, to solve evolutionary tasks. Women, in evolutionary time, had the hard task to convince a much stronger man to assume his paternal role and take care of her offspring (which might be his, or even just his cuckold offspring). In any argument, men had clear superiority with 2 powerful weapons
economical superiority: men were the hunters, they had the meat, they also could defend and own territory
physical superiority: men could always win an argument by brute force, by simple violence.
So to achieve some kind of evolutionary long term equilibrium, women must have developed some weapeons to counter men’s economical & physical power. What weapons could they have?
Social manipulation: gossiping among women, ganging up together against the common enemy, making intrigues, badmouthing a man, destroying his reputation, manipulating the opinion of other men (and women).
Women would actually need the skills to win over other men to defend the female agenda. In order to counter men’s physical superiority, women needed to be better then men at these social manipulation skills. They could not confront men clearly straight on, or else men could resort to the big stick argument. They would have to “con” men into doing what is in women’s interest, without men noticing.
Women would have to manipulate epecially skillfully, when it has to do with reproductive success, with getting men to provide for them and their kids, with men staying away from other women.
So the historical stone age balance of power is:
men have economical and physical superiority,
women have verbal manipulation, cunningness, intrigue, social manipulation.
Nowadays, men surrendered their physical and economical power. Women maintained and expanded their verbal manipulative social power
Men surrendered both their advantages. Winning an argument with physical violence became criminalized. Women got to earn their own money, plus they get the government to collect pension money and child support from fathers that must pay up but have no say over how their money is being used. So most of the male power advantage waned.
Mass media and the internet even increased the verbal manipulative power of women beyond what they had in the evolutionary EEA, 50 000 years ago.
This would explain womens total win on all fronts. They started winning when they outlawed bigamy, made it a crime for consensual adults to engange in marriage with several partners, and now are curtailing the rights to have consensual sex for pay, with adolescents, take one’s own photograph and doing DNA tests on one’s own children.
Anecdotal and other Evidence
It is self evident that women must have developed some skills to counter the obvious male physical superiority.
I will explain the
reasoning behind my female-social-manipulation-superiority hypothesis.
Feminism as middle aged womens trade union to promote their selfish reproductive interest, even their plain interest in an easy life, trying to curb men’s access to more attractive or cheaper competitors.
I was wondering:
Why and with which methods do the feminist trade unions score such resounding victories
how do feminists convince everyone else to promote their goals?
And why are they winning the war on all fronts with absolute resounding victory?
there must be a special evolutionary skill how feminists manage to convince male law makers to support their warped feminist “women studies” logic and distract from the egalitarian goal of creating “men’s studies” and “men’s rights” (Feminist arguments against prostitution debunked)
One of the most prestigious peer reviewed research journals of the American Psychological Association published a meta-research (an overview of lots of other research papers) with disturbing findings. Result: the US Senate and US congress condemned the Research. After all, the preconceived notions behind our criminalization of Teenage Sexuality must not be disturbed.
Disclaimer: The issue here is repression of research and denial of the truth. One still may defend the laws as they are, but should not repress free research that could challenge one’s personal political opinions.
Another clash between highly charged political rhetoric and scholarly discourse concerned Associate Professor of Psychology Scott Lilienfeld. It began with a 1998 paper in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). Temple University’s Bruce Rind and two colleagues had conducted a review of quantitative literature, finding a weak link between childhood sexual abuse and later psychopathology. Radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger blasted the article as an effort to normalize pedophilia. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions condemning it, and finally, the chief executive of the APA wrote that the findings “should have caused us to evaluate the article based on its potential for misinforming the public policy process. This is something we failed to do, but will do in the future.” Wait, there is more! This article continues! More about Repression of Scientific Findings » Bruce Rind Study: Scientific Publications Condemned and Repressed … » continues here »
Life is complicated. There actually are paradoxes that are very hard to solve.
Example: I am convinced religion is wrong. There is no God. But, on the other hand there is lots of research proving “miracles” of religion like
Imagine a poor, uneducated, violent neighborhood. If any church can gain foothold there, crime decreases, the entire community starts improving and working better. It is good, it is an improvement. So even if the church teaches wrong things, even if the church is run by a fraudster who just wants to siphon away part 10% of the faithful’s income (Tenth, Tithe), the church can have a positive effect. It is false, but it does good.
James Randi (“Flim Flam”) is a great guy who relentlessly preaches against false beliefs, astrology, wonder healers, dowsing rods etc.
Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions by James Randi $22.98 0879751983 James Randi has a US$ 1 Million bet that anyone can win who can show any paranormal effect to him. He never had to pay. For example, James Randi debunked a US$ 1000 dowsing rod that was sold to US police departments. These dowsing rods could identify criminals! But James Randi himself admits that the dowsing rods worked. They helped police identify criminals they otherwise would not have identified.
People who are very religious, people who have supersticious beliefs about their breast cancer recover better then average from breast cancer (research by Professor Shelley Taylor). So if you take their beliefs away, you are reducing their chances of recovery. Positive Illusions by Shelley E Taylor $16.95 0465060528
Placebo effect in Medicine: if you believe in healing power, you have a good chance of getting healed. And the more invasive the method is the better it works. A huge european study on acupuncture found that sticking needles into someone has a stronger placebo effect then pills. So let us assume that acupuncture and homeopathy are quackery ( I don’t want to discuss the merit of this here and now). But it has effects when done by a professional doctor who is strongly enough self deceived that he honestly believes in it.
So maybe the truth does harm. Very disturbing idea! Maybe I should start praising the virtues of human stupidity, self deception and unconsciousness.
First a story about a toddler that had to die because a man was afraid to help, due to the pedophilia hysteria.
An extreme defense of pedophilia
Then Professor Harris Mirkin’s thesis that criminalization of “pedophilia” is like gay criminalization and psychiatrization of homosexuality 50 years ago and that childrens’ right to sexuality should eventually win.
Judith Levine’s book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
Alfred Kinsey a pedophile? He observed orgasms of children and adolescents during his University Research.
More unbiased academic discussions about pedophilia
She was not walking straight, she was tottering, said Mr Peachey. “I kept thinking should I go back? One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her.”
The hysteria over paedophilia hangs like some dark cloud over almost every interaction nowadays between a man and a child that isn’t his.
Professor Mirkin got himself into deep trouble defending that consensual sex with an adolescent is not the same as raping the same adolescent. Similar to a Dutch law, Professor Mirkin contends that the age of consent should be 12 years, as long as the adolescent’s consent can be proven.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election. Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama. […]
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”
“Intelligent design” or “scientific” creationism are buzzwords created by religious fundamentalists, with the agenda to put content of 2000 year old religious books into our children’s school science curriculum.
Dawkins just takes apart all the religous arguments, shreds them into pieces. Watch the video “the purpose of purpose”.
Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions by James Randi $22.98 0879751983
Health Psychology by Shelley E. Taylor $64.50 0071283609