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Author | Topic: Rape and evolution | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Heh. You like walking on the edge, don't you, nem?
A few points. First, we don't know that there is an innate drive in human males toward rape. Personally, I suspect that there isn't, although these things are hard to determine. Second, if there is an innate biological drive in human males toward rape, there is no reason to accept that it was directly selected because it provided some sort of reproductive benefit to those who had the trait. It may be the result of other aspects of human neurology that were directly selected for. Third, even if a biological tendency toward rape were selected for because it provided a reproductive benefit in our ancestors, it may, like the modern human appendix, serve little or no purpose in modern humans. Since, like all human drives, it is rather weak and flexible, it is possible that it has been selected against in recent human evolutionary history. Finally, even if modern human males have an inherited tendency toward rape because it has given our recent ancestors a reproductive benefit, there is no moral conclusion we can draw from it. Just like the law of gravity requires things to fall down, there is nothing morally superior to keeping to the valleys and nothing immoral about flying in airplanes or living on hilltops. Likewise, if modern human males have an inherited tendency toward rape because it has given our recent ancestors a survival benefit, then this is merely a description about human behavior and the reason a certain behavior persists, not a moral imperative. Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Hi, iceage.
quote: Actually, it's not; it's a very different argument. Remember how it used to be a sit-com staple, that the philandering husband would try to justify his philandering on the evolutionary drive to "spread his genes"? Well, in real life, actual evolutionists have tried to justify things like imperialism, racism, and the like with arguments based on evolutionary theory. Social Darwinism was, after all, advocated by people who accepted evolution. This is all based on a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution, of course, but it isn't just creationists who have used these types of arguments in their attempts to discredit evolution. Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Why? Is there statistical evidence that these people are producing more children or that more of their children are surviving to adulthood than other people? That is, after all, the very meaning of "natural selection".
Edited by Chiroptera, : sounded too much like a personal challenge Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: Oh, sure, there are a host of biological and physical facts that can be used to justify any cultural tradition. In anthropology, the cultural materialists do it without resort to biology at all. It's a fun game to play. Take any tradition from any culture you want. Come up with a biological explanation for it -- hey, you're a psychobiologist! Now come up with a non-biological economic reason for it. Hey, now you're a cultural materialist! Find a passage in the Bible that justifies it. Hey, now you're a religious scholar! Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: Well, people will, do, and have claimed that all sorts of human behaviors were acquired through natural selection. However, it is still a matter a great controversy which, if any, behaviors are innate. -
quote: Sure it does. Even if some behaviors are determined to be innate doesn't mean that all have to be. Driving automobiles, for example. That is definitely not an innate behavior. So there are definitely some behaviors that are not innate. -
quote: Actually, how people would react if it were scientifically deteremined that human males do have a natural, innate instinct to rape is itself an interesting question to ponder, even without the questions about evolution. That might be off-topic, though. Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Hi, nemesis.
From the looks of your reply, you seem to have no objection to my first and third point. I don't see how your response to my third point is relevant. Forgive me if I am misreading your post. But I am going to ignore all that, because it appears that your main point is
quote: so I am going to just focus on this. - First, a point that I consider minor. If the important thing is procreation, then rape can be counterproductive. Remember, the key to evolutionary success is not having sex or even producing children. The key to evolutionary success is producing children who will grow up and successfully reproduce themselves. It does no one any good (in an evolutionary sense) to have sex if no children are produced. It does no one any good to have children if the children die before adulthood, or fail to reproduce themselves. And, in the long range success strategy of evolution, the same holds if one does produce surviving, procreating children but the numbers of procreating children are fewer than someone who does not rape. It is pretty easy to see that as a reproductive strategy, rape may not be all that successful. It takes work to capture someone and force sex on her. Especially when it becomes known among the circle of acquaintences that the person is a rapist; then people start avoiding the person, and the person has to put more effort into hunting new victims. It may very well be far more efficient to maintain a nice reputation and attract mates who voluntarily make themselves available on a regular basis. Also, in our society women have the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and even to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Sex with an unwilling partner is not guaranteed to produce progeny. In fact, in most traditional societies, there is often a stigma attached to the offspring of rapists. They experience more neglect, the experience more abuse, and so it is far more likely that they will not survive childhood, and it is often the case that if they do grow up, they occupy a lower caste limiting their reproductive success. The rapist, if he is caught, may experience some sort of punishment, even death. So, he may have very limited opportunities to practice this particular reproductive strategy. Finally, this makes people unhappy. Unhappy people make other people unhappy. The overall cohesion of society is undermined, making the society less stable and less able to provide the necessities of life to its people. All in all, it isn't obvious that rape is a particularly successful reproductive strategy. The only way that this can be answered is to actually find out whether rapists have more children who have their own children. - But the main point, as I have stated, is that the theory of evolution is a description of how the world works and why we see the things that we see around us. It is not a prescription about how we should live. Like the analogy that I used earlier, it is exacly like the theory of gravity. It simply explains a phenomenon that exists. But it in no way implies any morality of any actions whatsoever. The theory of evolution does not say that people should reproduce. It simply says that if some people successfully reproduce and other people do not, and if the difference in success is due to inherited characterisitics, then you will see a change in the human population over time - humans will evolve. That is all there is to the theory of evolution. -
quote: What difference does it make? This sense of violation and the sense of outrage exist. Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: Other reactions are possible, too. It has been interesting to read your reaction to scrafinator's attempts to understand rape. Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
That is an extremely good response. I am going to have to put that one in my tool box for future use.
Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
I think the question is (or at least it should be), what is the evidence that Pinker uses to support this contention?
Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: Actually, it's not. The impulse would be to have sex, not to reproduce. In the past, the impulse to have sex would have automatically led to reproduction, so there would have been no need for an impulse to actually produce children. The main obstacle for the hypothesis of a genetic basis for rape is the lack of any good evidence for it, besides Pinker's hasty conclusions to his made up facts. Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
These examples are very well and good, but there is a problem with simply "logically discussing" the problem as if we were Plato and Socrates and believed that reason alone is enough to come to definite conclusions in the real world.
There are two questions. One is whether there is a genetic basis for rape as a behavior. The actual way to investigate this is, I think, obvious. The other question is whether a male (since we seem to be discussing males) who engages in rape has a reproductive advantage over someone who does not. That is not quite as straightforward as the previous question, but it is still amenable to scientific tests. I can give a reason why in Homo sapiens societies rape would be disadvantageous in a reproductive sense. Finally, it is possible that the behavior of rape may (if it is biological in origin) may be the unfortunate synergetic result of other mental phenomena that have been evolutionary advantageous. It is also possible that rape (if it is biological in origin) is like the appendex: a vestigial behavior that may once have conferred a reproductive advantage to the individual but long since ceased to be evolutionarily "useful". Like discussions about the Trinity, discussing potential evolutionary causes of human behavior is sterile without actual physical evidence. Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: I always get a feeling in these types of discussions that some people don't want to admit that the social values they grew up with, have internalized, and accept without question are partly responsible for problems that they either don't want to acknowledge or want to minimize. I first read about The Blank Slate in a review in The Skeptical Inquirer. The review was mainly a political screed about how all leftists are secret Stalinists who want to use the idea of the tabula rasa to justify their genocidal policies. No shit, it was really that bad -- I was surprised that the editor of a serious magazine like The Skeptical Inqirer allowed it to pass! Well, looking at the Wikipedia article I find:
...that belief in a blank slate human nature encourages destructive social trends such as persecution of the successful and totalitarian social engineering. So it seems what we really have here is political ideology, not science. Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine
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