the psychological case for Evolution

I have never seen any indication that wild animals, sharp objects or high places are unattractive to children. Particularly the animals bit - I loved animals as a kid. I don't have flash on this computer, so I can't be certain, but I think that this is the video I'm thinking of. Do you see any sign here that the baby is at all perturbed by the venomous snake (it's been defanged, but I doubt this factors into the child's reasoning)?

Probably, but is that behaviour just learned early? I've never seen a very young baby fed to lions, so I don't really have any idea how it would react, but I have seen babies evince no fear at all when they're in danger. And if a baby cries whilst being fed to lions, is it because of an instinctive fear of the lion; or because it's been abandoned by its mother; or simply because of the pain once the lion starts chewing?I think that evolutionary psychology is a subject you have to be careful with to avoid just making up a posteriori justifications for behaviour that might have nothing to do with it. It's like hearing speculations about the reasons girls like pink and boys blue - knowing this fact to be true people can come up with all sorts of convincing stories to do with girls picking berries.Thing is, there's no real evidence that pink and blue are ingrained in our minds as girls' and boys' colours respectively, except by our cultural upbringing. An issue of Time magazine informed us, in 1927, that the cradle of the Crown Prince of Belgium "had been optimistically oufitted in pink, the color for boys, that for a girl being blue." (from here)I'm all a little bit dubious about touting evolutionary psychology as great confirming evidence for evolution when it's a subject still too much in its infancy*. If we're creating convincing evolutionary rationales for behaviour and habits that don't actually turn out to be an inherent part of our psychology at all, then we need more evidence than just a convincing sounding story to explain any behaviours that are ingrained.*Caveat: There's a possibility my understanding of the state of the field is shaped more by bad articles in the popular press than the actual research being done

I've nothing at all against exploring hypotheses, but there's no point in just putting a hypothesis out there then just moving on. I was looking at those you'd presented and pointing out some problems I see - specifically that it doesn't really seem to be the case that small children are naturally scared of dangerous things, including dangerous things they would have encountered way back in our evolutionary history.I'm not quite sure I understand your point now though, but I think some of this is just a bit of mistakes with negatives. You ask: I'm guessing this should read 'if children are afraid of automobiles'. The fact that they aren't particularly is why they need to be taught not to run into the street. If I understood your point well before, it was that this is because cars and trucks have not been a significant part of our evolutionary history, so there's never been any pressure to evolve instinctive fear.But, babies don't seem to have a great deal of instinctive fear full stop. Saying that they aren't afraid of modern inventions is all well and good, but unless we have a good sign that they're afraid of primaeval dangers then it doesn't really tell us anything about the origin of the fear response in children. With reference to the bolded part, I have to ask 'how do you know?' In historical times, the only ones in which we have direct evidence of mating practices between humans, monogamy is far from universal, and probably in the minority. In the extreme case, when men have had the wealth to support massive harems and the political power to keep them to themselves, such as the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, they have done so. Polygyny was (and sometimes is) common practice in all sorts of societies about which we know these things - Biblical Israel (from the Old right through to the New); early Mormons in the US (and a few Mormon groups stil today); Imperial China right up to the 20th century; many Muslim countries, past and present. Even in societies where men have only one wife, it has often been common for them to have mistresses on the side, either in a formalised way or informally with varying degrees of approval.This doesn't give us much reason to assume prehstoric humanity was particularly monogamous. A few clues point the other way - one is the sexual dimorphism in humans when it comes to size. Studies of other mammals (such as this one of seals and walruses) have found that the degree of dimorphism correlates well with the size of male harems - the more polygynous a species the bigger its males grow. Male humans aren't massively bigger than females, but the size dimorphism that exists is a hint in the favour of some poylgyny in our past. Animals that are strictly monogamous (or ones who invest equally in the care of offspring, at least), such as albatrosses, tend to be much less dimporphic.There's also the evidence from the attempt to find our most recent common patrilineal and matrilineal ancestors from Y-chromosone and mitochondrial DNA, respectively. The common ancestor of the Y-chromosone of all men in the world is estimated to have been around about 60,000 years ago, while the common ancestor of all our mitochondrial DNA (only passed down the female line) is placed much earlier at about 180,000 years ago.This implies that there has been much greater variation in reproductive success amongst males than females - more men fail to reproduce, while those who do reproduce are more likely to leave many offspring. The male common ancestor is much closer because so many mroe Y-chromosonal lines died out as their carriers faield to reproduce, possibly because a few successful harem owners were hogging all the women. The only monogamous scenario that would make sense here is one of serial monogamy in which men were much more likely to remarry.Edited by caffeine, : to include the bit i forgot to write. This is what happens when I sit in forums at work.Edited by caffeine, : somehow deleted part of a paragraphEdited by caffeine, : More oddness with tags - don't know what's wrong with my typing ability today

God in heaven! How do you people all manage to post so regularly — don’t you have to work? Straggler’s already said some of what I’ve written here, but I spent so long writing this the other day that I feel obliged to post it anyway. As Perdition points out, not all of them do. I remember watching a programme about basic personality types in children once, which claimed (a bit optimistically, in my opinion) that you could divide infants into two basic personality types from a very early age by jumping at them in a scary mask and saying boo. The babies were then classed as intorverts or extroverts based on whether they cried or giggled.The structure of the test (or at least the way it was presented) may be a bit dubious, but the point is that there was variation in the way the children responded — they didn’t have one standard, instinctive fear response.To be clear, I don’t disagree with your general point — that our evolutionary history leaves us with tendencies to act and think in certain ways, some of which may be counterproductive to a healthy and happy life in the 21st century. I just think you have to be very careful about oversimplifying it. Humans are very adaptable behaviourally, which I think is one of the main reasons we’ve come to dominate the planet like we have, and they aren’t just constrained by the requirements of life on the African Savannah. Most of our brain’s wiring is done after we’re born in response to the stimuli we encounter in our lives, so I don’t think we have an exact selection of scary shapes (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!) stored in our minds from birth.The nature of the fear response might be a product of our evolutionary history that’s not always appropriate for modern life. An adrenalin rush, the urge to flee and increased oxygen supply to your muscles may be all well and good when someone’s coming at you with a knife, but it’s hardly appropriate for a job interview. I agree that monogamy has arisen many times without the need for religious instruction to get us there, I’m just not so sure we can say monogamy is the primitive condition for humanity. Chimpanzees and bonobos are both about as far as you can get from monogamous! I don’t know if it’s so helpful to look to them to discover our ancestral state, though. 6 million years separates us from the chimpanzees, and just by looking at the variety of ways things are done in human societies it clearly takes a lot less time than that for mating patterns to change. I think the mating patterns of humans and our ancestors would have varied wildly depending on the ecological and cultural constraints of the time. Nevertheless, If monogamy gets a majority vote it’s a very slim minority, and there’s good evidence that polygyny has been common throughout human history as well.The ethnographic atlas compiled by Patrick Gray is an attempt to compile data on social organisation in 1231 different societies, past and present. Here are the counts for monogamy and polygamy:Monogamous: 186Monogamous with occasional polygyny: 453Polygynous: 588Polyandrous: 4I had started to write an account of why I think monogamy is more widespread nowadays, but I’m having difficulty expressing it well. I thought I’d post what I’ve written so far before the thread moves any further.