Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Halfway to Ambidexterity
I managed to just about cut off the tip of my left thumb a couple of days ago while chopping onions, and living with a big bandage over the painful end of my thumb for the past two days has been interesting. It's hard to realize how much I use both my hands for until one of them isn't quite working. Removing a credit card from my wallet, putting on a belt, even pulling something out of a pants pocket is damn hard, when I can't use my thumb. About the only benefit has been easier kitchen clean up, since I have to change the bandage every time it gets soaked, so I'm just dishes clumsily, one-handed, and then sticking them into the dishwasher I never use.
Cutting food has been a pain too, since, as my injury demonstrates, I usually hold with the left and slice with the knife in the right. I'm particular about my vegetable slice sizes, and I've got a system for fast, efficient cutting. (Somewhat too fast, sometimes.) When I can't keep to that I get annoyed, and yesterday's nachos, and today's lunch salad left much to be desired.
This concludes today's utterly self-absorbed, petty, pointless blog post. Check back tomorrow when I might have a hangnail, or something.
Labels: misc
The Evolution of Desire: Chapters 8-10
Continuing on my merry way, here are the 5th, 4th, 3rd to last chapters in this book. Yes, finally.
Chapter Eight: Breaking UpChapter Eight starts off with an old proverb.
Women marry believing that their husbands will change;
Men marry believing that their wives will not change
They're both wrong.
Pretty well sums it up, eh? Moving right along, chapter nine covers... Well, not quite yet.
Buss follows the quote by citing the 50% divorce rate in the US, then delves into some historical info. Divorce is not a recent phenomena, nor is it confined to any particular cultures. Societies governed by religions or belief systems that discourage (or criminalize) marriage can control it, but humans are in no way naturally monogamous. Most primitive tribes that have been studied show high rates of divorce, and mate hopping is S.O.P. in some. "Among the Ache of Paraguay, the average man and woman are married and divorced more than eleven times each by the time they reach the ate of forty."
Humans have always had straying eyes and a desire to upgrade their mate. Even aside from that, life was perilous and short throughout much of human history, and death from disease, accident, and murder has long claimed one half of a couple. Death comes for men and women, but men have always been more prone to living a shorter life. Hunting accidents, warfare, fights for dominance within a tribe, and many other causes were taking out young men long before drunk driving was available, and as Buss points out, it must have made genetic sense for women to keep their eyes open for replacement options. After all, their husbands certainly were.
Changes in life or in one's partner don't necessarily trigger conscious, logical thoughts. People just start to realize that maybe they could do better. "Just as our taste preferences for sugar, fat, and protein operate without our conscious awareness of the adaptive functions they serve, so marital dissolution mechanisms operate without our awareness of the adaptive problems they solve." Large scale studies have been conducted across hundreds of societies, and while it's impossible to directly compare due to cultural differences, common themes can be agreed upon. As you will expect by this point in the book, the top causes of divorce are events tied to reproduction: infidelity and infertility.
Infidelity. This one is huge for both sexes. "The most powerful signal of a man's failure to retain access to a woman's reproductive capacity is her infidelity. The most powerful signal of a woman's failure to retain access to a man's resources is his infidelity." Of 43 categories that can cause divorce, adultery is #1 in more than half the societies studied, and in many of those men can opt for an immediate divorce if they find their wives are cheating. Women have that right far less commonly. Why the male bias on cheating? Especially considering that men are far more likely to cheat? Buss gives several reasons: 1) Men have greater power to impose their will, in most societies. 2) Women may be more forgiving of sexual infidelity so long as men do not withdraw their resources. 3) The costs of divorce might be so high that the woman can't risk it with children to support. Infidelity can also be used as a tool to dissolve an unwanted relationship; either by cheating and driving away a spouse, or spreading rumors of their infidelity to give yourself an excuse to move on.
Infertility. Just like animals, human couples often break up if there's an inability to reproduce. Infertility is exceeded only by infidelity as a leading cause of divorce all around the world. Even societies that do not permit divorce usually have mechanisms to allow a separation in the event of infertility. Having kids is worth the trouble, in some ways. Children strengthen a relationship, or at least greatly lower the odds of divorce. Couples with no children divorce much more often than those with two or more children, to a striking degree. According to a worldwide UN study, 39% of divorces happen to childless couples, 26% to couples with one child, 19% to couples with two children, and less than 3% to couples with four or more kids.
Age isn't often a factor cited in divorce studies, but when it is it's usually related to fertility. In no society do women commonly divorce older men. Yet in a number of societies men divorce older women, and it's a universal truism that men tend to marry younger when when/if they remarry. Cruel and unfortunate though this maybe, it's quite genetically logical, since female reproductive fitness declines so rapidly past age 40.
Sexual Withdrawal. Another highly-ranked reason for divorce, this one is unsurprisingly gender skewed too. In numerous societies men will divorce their wives if sexual access is denied for a period of time. There isn't any data to show that the opposite is true, at least not other than in isolated cases. Like infidelity, intentional sexual withdrawal can be a very effective tactic to dissolve an unwanted relationship.
Lack of Economic Support. This is the converse of sexual withdrawal. Something that causes divorce in many cultures, and is much more upsetting to women than to men. Humans have an inherent bias towards men earning more than their wives, and when this ratio is upset, so are couples. American marriages in which the woman earns more money than her husband are 50% more likely to divorce than those in which the husband is the primary breadwinner. This seems to upset both partners; men often feel inadequate, and women often feel their husband is lazy, that they deserve better, or they simply feel safer looking to upgrade when they do not rely on their husband's resources.
Conflict Among Multiple Wivess. Not something many of us will ever have to worry about, but it is a common difficulty in cultures that permit polygamy. Quite a few still do; 83 out of 853, in a worldwide study Buss cites, and plenty of men still try to pull it off in cultures that do not officially sanction the practice. Rules seem to help: the book details the strict rules found in some polygamous societies. For instance, among the Kipsigis in Kenya, each wife gets an equal plot of land and shares it with the husband. The Kipsigis men maintain a separate residence apart from the wives, and alternate days of the week with each woman, carefully allocating time equally. The best tactic for cooperative polygamy seems to be "sororal polygamy," in which a man marries two (or more) sisters. Yes, just like a Playboy photo fantasy come to life! Except for the "marriage" part...
Implications for a Lasting Marriage. On the whole, Buss recommends that married couples treat each other well, refrain from cheating, and have children if they want to stay together. A minute to learn; a lifetime to master!
Chapter Nine: Changes Over TimeThis chapter opens with a charming story about chimpanzees fighting for dominance in the zoo in the Netherlands. One male has long dominated the colony and gotten most of the sex. He ages, another male rises up and kicks his ass, and starts claiming all the women. The ousted male doesn't give up though, and forms an alliance with another male, teaming up to overthrow the new alpha male and regaining some access to the girls. The lesson, for animals as well as humans, is time passes, and there will always be physical and psychological changes that affect sexual access. Don't get too complacent, but don't give up hope if you get kicked out of bed, since there are ways to get back in!
Changes in a Woman's Worth. Not a tough one to figure out, in light of the information in the rest of this book. Women's reproductive value peaks in their early 20s and declines thereafter, dropping sharply past 40. Men who can trade up will often do so, if they give in to their genetic urges. This obviously doesn't happen in every case, and most 50 year old men don't have the looks or resources (or nerve) to claim a highly-desirable 20 year old. But the genetic urge will always be there.
Buss cites the case of a business man who had six children with a woman who died young. He remarried, to a woman 3 years older than him, and that second wife devoted her life to raising his children. Then when his kids were in college...
he divorced the woman who had raised them, married a 23 year old Japanese woman, and started a second family. His behavior was ruthless and not very admirable, perhaps, but his circumstances had changed. From his individual perspective, the value of his second wife lowered precipitously when his children were grown, and the attractiveness of the younger woman increased to accompany his new circumstances.
Buss conveys this reality with more than anecdotes. There are several pages of stats and surveys backing up the point. Tribal peoples pay much lower bridal prices for older women. Numerous worldwide surveys show that men and women rate female attractiveness with a strong correlation to age. On the whole, it seems that older women would do well to remain married. They can maintain considerable value -- emotional, economic, parenting, social -- to a husband, but much less on the dating market. For prospective suitors, older women have little to no reproductive value, their beauty is lessened, and their time and resources may already be devoted to their children and grandchildren.
Loss of Desire. An almost universal problem of marriage, this one illustrates clearly why sultans used to kick the 30 year olds out of their harems. Almost immediately after marriage, men begin to complain that their wives are less receptive to sex. 14% of newlywed men voice this complaint, and the figure rises to 43% by the fourth year of marriage. It's not just the time married either; the age of the woman factors in as well. Married 19 year olds engage in intercourse an average of 11.5 times per month. By age 30 that's dropped to 9 times a month. By 42 it's down to 6 times a month. Past 50 the frequency drops to less than once a week. "These results may reflect a lessened interest by women, by men, or most likely by both." Unsurprisingly, sexual satisfaction ratings decline with frequency of sex. More unsurprisingly, the arrival of a baby kills the sex life. Married couples with baby, after less than three years, have sex less than a third as often as they did during the first year of marriage.
Lowered Commitment. Men and women complain that their partners show less interest in them, and less frequently express their love as time goes by. Women complain that their husbands don't express their love, don't listen to them when the talk, and ignore their feelings, even during just the first four years of marriage. Men complain about these things much less often, though it's unclear if that's due to men being less giving, or less sensitive to not receiving. Or both. The thing that men do complain about over time is their wife demanding more of their time. 22% of newlywed men say this, compared to 36% of fourth year husbands. Women do not share this complaint; only 8% voice it by the fourth year of marriage.
It's also clear that men spend less time, effort, and expense to please their wives, and are less vigilant and potentially violent in guarding them, as the women age. Men less often make threats and commit acts of violence on older wives, but they bring them flowers and tell them they love them less often, too. This also differs between the sexes; women remain just as protective of their husbands through the 30s and 40s, since the man's value as a resource provider is just as high as it was earlier, if not higher. Obvious changes in male guarding can also be seen when their wives are pregnant; men become less concerned with their wives' whereabouts, and behaviors that would cause acute jealousy at other times are not remarked upon.
Changes in Frequency of Extramarital Affairs. Discussion of this topic is made difficult by the unwillingness of subjects to provide honest answers. Questions on this subject were the ones most often not answered during Kinsey's initial surveys in the 1950s, and there remains a high reticence to discuss it to this day. Most researchers contend that extramarital affairs are systematically undercounted. Kinsey estimated that his figures were at least 10% too low. A large study (750 spouses) in 1974 resulted in 30% of the subjects admitting to cheating when initially questioned, and another 30% admitted it during subsequent "intensive scrutiny." Yes, that's a 60% cheat rate.
Whatever the actual percentage, the incidence of cheating is clearly tied to age. Women cheat rates by age:
16-20: 6%.
22-25: 9%
26-30: 14%
31-40: 17%
41-50: No number. Rapid decline with age.
51-55: 6%
56-60: 4%
These figures are somewhat odd; since men find women most attractive in their early 20s, the likelihood of a woman cheating is clearly not tied that directly to the amount of attention she receives from men other than her husband. Buss offers several explanations, including a lower intensity of male guarding of spouses past their mid-20s, lower penalties (from the husband) for older women caught philandering, and female desire to test their value in the dating market (and possibly trade up) as their reproductive value begins to decline.
Motivations for affairs vary as well. Men are much more likely than women to say they cheated simply for sex, and women are much more likely to cheat due to love or emotional connection (72% to 51%). Men are more likely to cheat even when they say their marriage is happy (56% to 33% of women). Men are also much more interested in cheating. In one 1985 study, 48% of American men expressed a desire for extramarital sex, compared to just 5% of women. (That 5% seems suspicious, since more than 5% of women cheat at every age lower than 56.) A 1970 survey of nearly 1500 men and women found that 72% of men, but only 27% of women, admitted to sometimes desiring extramarital sex. A 1971 study in Germany found similar figures: 46% of married men but only 6% of married women said they would take advantage of a casual sexual opportunity if one were available. These figures are borne out in practice, as nearly as can be determined. For 16-20 year olds, Kinsey found that 37% of men but only 6% of women had cheated. The incidence of affairs by men remains roughly steady throughout life, until declining at the elderly years.
These are not just one time things, either. Most of the men who cheat do it regularly, with prostitutes, mistresses, or side girlfriends. Extramarital sex comprises 20% of the average man's sexual outlets between 16-35. It rises to 26% from 36-40, 30% from 41-45, and 35% from 46-50. (I assume these figures are for men who are cheating, not an average for all married men, but the book doesn't make this clear.)
It's not known how these figures compare to polygamous societies. Logic would suggest that married men would have fewer affairs if they had several wives to alternate between, and that married women would have more with their husband's attention so often elsewhere, and so many single men around. However, such societies are usually quite repressive and controlling of women, so female opportunities should be lower, and penalties for being caught cheating (execution by hurled stones) higher, which would have to act as a disincentive. Apparently no one has dared try to conduct such a survey yet; at least none is mentioned in the text. Move to Saudi Arabia and go for it; publication of your research results is nearly guaranteed, assuming you survive long enough to write them up.
Menopause. This isn't mentioned in the book, but isn't this an odd word? I mean logically, pregnancy or getting into Olympic gymnast condition leads to menses "pause." What we call "menopause" should really be called, "menoend" or "menostop." At any rate, Buss points out an oddity of human menopause; how early in life it occurs. Most female animals die while still fecund, or live just 5% or 10% of their lives after they lose the ability to bear young. This is the case even in long-lived animals; only about 5% of elephants live until about age 55, but even then fertility is still about 50% of what it was at their peak, decades earlier. In contrast, most women go through menopause by age 50, and frequently live another 30 years. This is a genetic oddity, since human males can sire children while elderly, and since most animals live only to reproduce, and (might as well) die once they're not longer able to do so.
At one point in history, women were blamed for menopause, and it was thought they brought it on themselves with excessive luxury and sex. We now know that's not true, but it's still not clear why humans have evolved in this fashion. One theory is that better nutrition and medicine has artificially lengthened post-reproductive life. By this theory, our ancestors would seldom have lived past the reproductive age. There's little support for this though, since the dramatic increases in human longevity we've seen in modern days are largely due to decreased infant mortality. Humans have always lived into their 60s and 70s; it's just that far more people now survive childhood and make it past age 20 than used to, so the overall averages have increased. Also, consider the fact that a woman's reproductive capacity nosedives, while her other vital signs decline only slowly.
One theory is the "grandmother hypothesis," which states that menopause is an adaptation that prompts a shift from reproduction to parenting, grandparenting, and other forms of investing in kin. Older women build up useful stores of knowledge about children and childbirth, accumulate material resources, and can devote time to caring for others.
Another theory is that menopause is a trade off; rapid reproductive potential in early life for zero in later life. "Producing many high-quality children early may in effect wear out a woman's reproductive machinery; so that menopause is not in itself an adaptation but is rather an incidental byproduct of early and rapid breeding." The logic behind this is that a woman could only count on strong health and a resource-sharing mate for a decade or two, at best. Therefore, it was wise to pump out several children quickly, while a mate was around to assist in raising them. Chimps and other higher primates do not have their young in rapid succession, since there is no pair bonding and females must raise the children on their own. Such animals space out the births every few years for their entire adult lives, and do not experience menopause.
Nothing has been proven at this point, and it's likely there will never be any absolute answer; just competing theories with varying levels of support.
Changes in a Man's Worth. "While women's desirability as mates declines steeply with age, the same does not apply to men's." Buss boils it down to two key differences: 1) a man's resources and social status peak much later in life than a woman's reproductive value, and 2) a man's value as a mate varies much more than does a woman's. Men can have very high value and lose it all, go from low value to highly-eligible based on their financial or social status, and the difference in status between a billionaire and a beggar is enormous.
This is clearly illustrated in various tribal societies, where men in their teens or twenties seldom have the resources or political capital to marry one woman, much less take a second or third wife. Things are not much different in modern, cash-based societies. A large study in 1987 showed that men had negligible earning ability in their teens and early 20s. From 25-34 men were earning about 2/3 of their eventual peak, which was reached between 35-54.
As with most examples in this book, culture, modern society, and individual preferences allow for much more variety than we would see if humans simply followed their genetic logic, a fact every man below the age of 30 and not born to rich parents should be intensely grateful for. If women only married for resources and want of a stable mate, the average age difference would be at least a decade, and every well-off, balding, pot-bellied 50 year old divorced man would be living the sex life of a rock star. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your age/sex/wealth), women often vote with their hearts and not their heads -- there are plenty of penniless young couples, lots of women put off having children until well past their peak reproductive years, and other genetically suboptimal matings occur with great frequency.
Earlier Death of Men. Men die faster and earlier than do women in all societies and cultures. American men live 6 to 8 years less, on average, than do women, are more susceptible to disease, have a 30% higher mortality rate from accidents during their first four years of life, and a 400% higher mortality rate from accidents before adulthood. Men are 3x more likely to be murdered, more likely to commit suicide, and from 16-28 men have a mortality rate 200% higher than that of women. These facts are not accidents or coincidences, and they in fact stem directly from male sexual psychology. Men take more risks and compete much more vigorously, and this is true across much of the animal kingdom. Everyone is familiar with scenes of male deer, sheep, goats, lions, etc, bashing heads, wrestling, chasing, attacking, and otherwise struggling with each other, while the females of the species sit around, grazing contentedly and waiting to see who comes out on top. As a rule, throughout the animal kingdom, the more polygynous the mating system, the great the differences between the sexes in terms of mortality. Polygynous mating selects for males who take risks -- risks in competing with other males, risks in securing the resources desired by females, and risks in exposing themselves while pursing and courting females.
Most humans do not live in a polygynous culture, but even in Western Civilization, the reproductive stakes are higher for men than for women. Buss makes this clear with some amazing stats. In America, in 1988:
29 year olds who had never been married: 43% of men and 29% of women.
34 year olds who had never been married: 25% of men and 16% of women.
True, reproduction is less and less limited by the bonds of matrimony, but I doubt the relative figures would change a great deal if we were talking about what % of women had given birth, vs. what % of men had fathered a child. And the stats skew like this despite the fact that women outnumber men at those ages. Clearly some men are outcompeting their fellow males, and taking more than their share of women. It's even worse in polygamous tribes, where there are literally zero unmarried women, and many men consigned to bachelorhood.
Furthermore, the competition and death rate amongst men is not evenly-distributed. Men with fewer resources and commensurately lower odds of mating are much more likely to engage in risky activities. Figures for homicides in Detroit in 1972 bear this out: 41% of adult male murderers were unemployed, compared to an 11% unemployment rate citywide. Also, 69% of the male victims and 73% of the male killers were unmarried, compared to a 43% unmarried rate in the city. This figures seem a bit cherrypicked, and I don't think guys getting shot robbing liquor stores or selling drugs can really be directly compared to male red-horned deer dying while jousting for female access, but it's not an entirely different situation.
The Marriage Squeeze. Despite the fact that more women than men get married, (the same men marry multiple times), there are always more unmarried women than men, in every age group. Men die earlier, die more often, emigrate more frequently, die in wars, are incarcerated more often, and so on. The situation is even worse for black women in the United States. Because there are more boy babies than girl babies, the women are in the minority for a time, but due to higher male incarceration and death rates, that doesn't last. Among black Americans, there are 108 adolescent males for every 100 adolescent females. A wise woman would pick then, and stick with her choice, because by the time she's 26-28 there will be 80 men for every 100 women, and by 38-42 there are only 62 available men for every 100 women. By 60 there are around 40 men for every 100 women.
The numbers do not tail off so rapidly for women of other ethnic groups, but across the board, women who wait to marry find it difficult, and women who get divorced are in even more dire straits. The numerical handicaps are supplemented by gender differences, since eligible 50 year old men will marry 25 year old women, if they can pull it off. The same is very seldom true of 50 year old women. A 1979 study in Canada found a great dissimilarity in remarriage rates.
Divorced men, ages 20-24: 83% will remarry.
Divorced men, ages 25-29: 89% will remarry.
Divorced women, ages 20-24: 61% will remarry.
Divorced women, ages 25-29: 40% will remarry.
These figures are representative worldwide, and they skew even further at older ages. Past the age of 50, men are exponentially more likely to remarry. Four times as likely in Egypt. Nine times more likely in Ecuador. Nineteen times more likely in Tunisia.
In closing, Buss points out that while most humans want to mate for a lifetime, few are so lucky. This isn't surprising; humans aren't very well suited for lifetime compatibility, with what men want and what women want diverging so often and so widely. Our physical processes are in no way complimentary either; women hit puberty earlier than boys, then lose the ability to reproduce decades sooner. And they know it.The urgency that some childless women feel as their remaining years of potential reproduction wane--the increasingly loud ticking of the biological clock--is not caused by an arbitrary custom dictated by a particular culture, but rather reflects a psychological mechanism attuned to reproductive reality.
Married couples start out great, with lots of sex, but the amount declines steadily, due largely to a man's genetics causing him to grow tired of the same partner, and to find her less attractive as she ages. With less attention paid to her, and less affection given, wives get bored and begin to cheat more as they age; though they never practice infidelity at anywhere near the rates their husbands do. "Long attributed by traditional scientists to the fragile male ego, to psychosexual immaturity, to 'male menopause,' or to a culture of youth, men's effort to mate with younger women as they age instead reflects a universal desire that has a long evolutionary history."
With all these issues, it's remarkable that somewhere near 50% of marriages do last "'til death do them part." This fact demonstrates how completely humans can triumph over their biological urges, if they put their minds to it. (And overlook their spouse's occasional strayings.)
Chapter Ten: Harmony Between the Sexes
Much of this chapter serves as a summary of what's come before. It starts off with a few paragraphs that essentially serve as a disclaimer for the entire book. Genetics are not fate. Humans can choose their own destinies. Men almost always desire it, but can resist seizing younger poontang. Women can love men who aren't great providers. And so forth. This isn't just a sop to the critics, but an introduction to Buss' version of harmonious living; each spouse learning to do things their partner will appreciate, or at least managing to resist their genetic urges to upgrade or order out when things (inevitably) don't go quite so well.
Differences Between the Sexes. Men and women have very different wants and desires. "To assume that men and women are psychologically the same, as was generally done in traditional social science, goes against what is now known about our evolved sexual psychology." Men and women differ in the qualities they desire in a mate, in their expectations for behavior in marriage, in their economic priorities, and so on. Some people rail against these differences, denying that they exist or wishing that they would cease to exist. But wishes and denial will not make psychologically sex differences disappear, any more than they will make beard growth or breast development disappear. Harmony between men and women will be approached only when these denials are swept away and we squarely confront the different desires of each sex.
A Feminist Viewpoint. Buss clearly enjoys a conundrum in this section. He points out that most feminists object to patriarchy; the male oppression of women through their control of resources. And yet, one of the major reasons men strive so vigorously to control resources is... because women select men with money. "Ancestral men who failed to acquire such resources failed to attract women as mates." He says, no doubt itching to add, "Pwned, you bra burners!"
Women have always, and will almost certainly continue to, prefer men with more resources. This is found cross culturally, in every society. "In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of he same age whom women do not marry." Buss isn't arguing with or disagreeing with feminists; he's fully in agreement that men try to control resources and dominate women; he just stresses that this is due to genetics, and that women continue to reinforce that sort of behavior by their mate selection habits.
Diversity in Mating Strategies. Scientists long thought that men and women were largely identical in their mating strategies and interests. Women were thought to be almost entirely passive and interested only in a long term, monogamous relationship. We now know that this is not true, and there seem to be some clear evolutionary trends acting on women's mate selection criteria.The fact that women who are engaged in casual sex as opposed to committed mating change their mating desires to favor a man's extravagant life style and physical attractiveness tells us that women have specific psychological mechanisms designed for temporary mating. The fact that women who have extramarital affairs choose men who are higher in status than their husbands tells us that women have specific psychological mechanisms designed for temporary mating. And the fact that women shift to brief liaisons under predictable circumstances, such as a dearth of men capable of investing in them or an unfavorable ratio of women to men, tells us that women have specific psychological mechanisms designed for temporary mating.
Competition and Conflict in the Mating Arena. This section begins with a quote, "An unpleasant act of human mating is that desirable partners are always outnumbered by those who desire them." That's true, but it's only unpleasant if you're not one of the "desirable partners," I'd think. Men with high resources are desired by many women, but only the most attractive succeed. Beautiful women are desired by many men, but the women can pick only the best from their many suitors. "The combined qualities of kindness, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, looks, and economic prospects occur in the same person only rarely. Most of us must settle for someone who has less than the full complement of desirable characteristics." Thus is competition and conflict born.
Cooperation Between the Sexes. For all the conflict we deal with, men and women have always had to depend on each other to pass their genes onto the next generation. Each gender gains some benefits from infidelity, but each takes great risks in the process. Committed partners can give each other more and more valuable benefits than any series of casual sexual encounters. We just need to find a partner who will fulfill our needs, and allow us to fulfill theirs.Labels: psychology, the evolution of desire
Monday, January 28, 2008
Julia Sweeney
I did my usual thing tonight; fired up some interesting Google videos to listen to while I cooked and ate dinner. I've been working my way through various Daniel Dennett lectures of late, but before dinner I was reading some of Dawkins'
The God Delusion, and since he mentioned Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" performance, and I'd heard previously heard that it was good, I figured I'd give it a listen, if I could find a copy online.
Unfortunately, the whole performance isn't around in a convenient form, but there are plenty of excerpts and highlights. The longest form is
a 40 minute speech from James Randi's the Amaz!ng Meeting #2, but it's not a great performance by Sweeney, and the recording is in four parts on You Tube. I watched that one, and I recommend it, but more convenient and funny is this 17 minute highlight, from the 2006 TED convention.
The funniest part starts at about 7:40, when she describes a visit she received from two Mormon missionaries. Enjoy.
I'd heard of Julia Sweeney before, but not in years. She did those briefly-entertaining, "It's Pat" sketches on SNL years ago, but when that one trick pony got sent to the glue factory, she was cut adrift. I thought this piece was very funny, but honestly, I'd like it a lot more if another comedian performed it. I find Sweeney's mannerisms very annoying; that giddy, giggly, half-hysterical laughter she throws in every 30 seconds makes me want to strangle someone, and she exudes (intentionally, I think) such a "dumb blond" persona that it makes it hard to believe in the accuracy of any of the historical or literary scholarship she works into the performance. YMMV, of course.
As for the religious nature of the piece... yeah. The fact most of the people on this planet devoutly believe in one or more religions, despite the fact that all of their foundational myths are as or more absurd than Mormanism's, is kind of amazing to me. Sweeney actually does a very good job helping me understand that though, in the rest of this performance. She talks about her desperate need for faith, her "belief in belief," as Daniel Dennett calls it, and how she went from Catholicism to Buddhism to (so help me) Deepok Choprah's "fairies in the garden" version of quantum physics, all trying to find something to believe in, before she was finally strong enough to put all that superstition behind her. Her comments about how becoming an atheist changed her whole world view are quite interesting too.
This segues into a nice bit of insight from Dawkins' book, when he touches on the same theme. On page 178 of the US hardcover edition, he summarizes the beliefs of the Fang people of Cameroon:
...that witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away at night nd ruins other people's crops or poisons their blood. It is also said that these witches sometimes assemble for huge banquets, there they devour their victims and plan future attacks. Many will tell you that a friend of a friend actually saw witches flying over the village at night, sitting on a banana leaf and throwing magical darts a various unsuspecting victims.
Absurd beliefs, of course. Ridiculously primitive. Utterly unlike, say the beliefs of mainstream Christians:
In the time of ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.
If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his 'father' (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and my act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.
If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even fif nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but 'ascended' bodily into heaven.
Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), 'become' the body and blood of this fatherless man.
What would an objective anthropologist, coming fresh to this set of believes while on fieldwork in Cambridge, make of them?
Or, to put it more succinctly, just quote a t-shirt.
Of course the LDS church believes this,
and then adds on the high camp of Egyptian hieroglyphics on golden tablets, magic translating rock hidden in a hat, etc. The most amazing thing is that new converts get told that part up front... and they still sign up! As Sweeney says,
even the Scientologists know enough to hold back the "evil Galactic Emperor Xenu dumped frozen aliens into the Hawaiian volcanoes where their souls became thetans" origin myth, at least until you've spent years and tens of thousands of dollars buying into the scam, and are too deeply invested to back out painlessly.
One of Richard Dawkins' big ideas is that we should avoid identifying children with their parent's religion. That there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children" since after all, kids aren't intelligent or informed enough to belong to any religion; they just believe what their parents tell them. One of Daniel Dennett's big ideas is that comparative religion should be a mandatory subject for school children, just as reading and math and history are. He thinks that knowledgeable, informed citizens would make wiser choices in their religious beliefs.
I like both of those ideas a lot, but then I think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people sign on to the transparent scam that is Scientology, and that tens of millions of Mormons believe (or choose to overlook) the ridiculous golden tablets story upon which their faith is founded... and I wonder if any amount of education in childhood would really ever help? If people want to believe in something, they're going to believe in it, no matter how transparently ridiculous it might be. That's the magic of religion; almost all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Westernized, college educated, and middle class, but pathetic fantasies about immediate entrance to heaven and flocks of brown-eyed virgins were enough to turn them lethally suicidal.
Labels: atheism, daniel dennett, religion
Some X, Y, axis adjustment necessary...
Because aiming a cell phone camera straight down at your own lap is hard, while lying back in bed in a kitteh-assisted doze.
Labels: jinx, photos
Women are smarter than they think they are?
Article from Newsweek that meshes nicely with my ongoing M/F psych coverage.
Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs.
Do women tend to think that men are smarter than they are?
Surprisingly, [both] men and women perceive men being smarter across generations. Both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers.
What about the kids?
If there are children, [both] men and women think their sons are brighter than their daughters.
There are a lot more questions, so check out the whole thing. The doc (wisely) leaves it to others to interpret the results, or comment on their importance in society. He just accumulates and collates the information. He does suggest that this may be changing, since girls are now substantially outperforming boys in elementary and middle school, and with that performance may come increased self esteem, and with it an end to this sort of inferiority complex. Whether that will also lead to men and boys more accurately evaluating their intelligence is another matter.
The one that surprised me was that parents thought their sons were smarter than their daughters. I can see that impression coming in their teens or adult life, but children? My impression has always been that young boys are quite stupid, as they fall out of trees and play videogames and crash their bikes into parked cars (guilty on all counts), while girls are more bookish and verbal and mature more quickly. In my relatively limited experience with kids of about ten, the girls always seem smarter and more composed, while the boys are just running around like mad. Perhaps it's the fact that girls are more often shy and reserved, and people associate that with not having anything to say? Readers with more experience, or kids of their own, are free to comment.
Labels: psychology
Sunday, January 27, 2008
This and That
Despite
my protestations about the high prices and lack of selection, I did manage to use up my Gap gift certificate this week. The Gap at the mall near my apt is tiny and useless, as described in that previous post. There's a far larger one about 8 miles down 101 in the super-bougie
Corte Madera mall, and I met the IG there Tuesday, on a joint Xmas gift cert mission. She had virtual money to blow at Banana Republic, and after she found nothing to her liking in that deceptively non-tropical clothier, we adjourned to the Gap, and were pleasantly surprised to find the store occupied two stories, with substantially more merchandise on both the lower and upper levels than we found in the entire store in the thoroughly inadequate Northgate mall.
Downstairs was all women's stuff, plus there was a Gap Body adjoined to the main store, with sub-Victoria's Secret quality undergarments galore. I didn't know Gap sold such things, and when I failed in my efforts to persuade the IG to model some for me, I turned to their website to satisfy my curiosity. It's women's underwear; look if you enjoy that sort of thing. I will give them props for the technology; you click on an item and
a new page opens up where you can see the panties or bra on a fetching model, plus there's a nifty little perv-o-cam square viewing box, which you can drag around to magnify the view as you hunt for stray hairs and/or labial indentations. Basement dwellers are jerking off to this
right now.
As for the Gap store, the entire downstairs was women's stuff, including a whole wall of clearance/sale stuff of all types. The IG nearly got swallowed up in it, but came to her senses and remembered that we were there to use my gift cert. So up the stairs we went, to find that the upper level was about half the size of the downstairs, and that half of that was devoted to very overpriced kids clothing. The men's stuff was off in the back corner, and as is usually the case in non-discount clothing stores, the women's section was busy with female customers, and the men's section was less busy... with women customers. Most men would wear the same jeans and t-shirt they got last Xmas, every day, until it rotted away. And yes, I've got some nerve making that claim after my last Gap-related bitch-fest. And yes, I was there... looking for jeans and a t-shirt for an Xmas present.
At any rate, we moved past the "I bet this would look good on my son/husband" females, and dove in. The IG made suggestions, I demurred with the illogic that distinguishes my "fashion" sense, and we made our way through the selection merrily enough. Though the quarter or fifth of the store that housed menswear wasn't huge, it still had far more variety than other Gap stores I've been in, and while it was all still basically jeans, khakis, belts, and polos, I eyed some black slacks, before picking out a chocolate brown, semi-shiny button up shirt that I didn't hate. It cost $40, and I would never have paid more than $16 for it at my usual Ross/Marshalls shopping destinations, but I didn't want to carry around that gift cert forever. So I hypnotized myself into believing that the item was actually $10, ignoring the fact that the $30 on the card was real money, and left with a new shirt in a plastic bag, for $12 after tax. What a deal!
More enjoyable was our next stop at the mall, when the IG pulled me into a J Crew store, and picked out a miniskirt and hoodie, which she eventually modeled for me, accessorized with knee-high stripper boots, courtesy of a cell phone cam shot. And no, you can't see it. Hell, I can hardly see it; when will flashes become standard equipment on cell phone cams?
In other news, I did something new on Friday. I guest lectured in a friend's college course. She's teaching a class on online communities via computer games, and I spoke to her class of game freaks and geeks about fansites, internet communities, the history of MMORPGs, and (my senior project topic) storytelling in videogames. I was scheduled to speak for at lest an hour, and wasn't sure I could go that long, but ended up doing 90 minutes, including some questions and discussion. It was fun. I'd never "lectured" on anything in an even semi-formal setting, and while I had (to take) a Speech/Rhetoric class as part of my General Education requirements to earn my degree, and we gave five speeches in that class, they were all limited to 5 minutes. A ridiculously short time that I regularly crashed past in my effort to relay some actual content, but even my last speech, on the historical context of religion as a man-made meme, only went 8 minutes. From there to 60 is quite a leap, much less to 90, and I'm surprised how easy it was to make.
Of course my lecture was pretty crap; I knew the material very well, from living it these last 10 years and having written several research papers on it in the last 2 years, but I had never presented it all at once before, and my organization was all over the place. I kept forgetting points and going back to them 10 minutes later, I talked way too fast as I usually do (thank god the class was young and still sharp-eared; I might as well be a dog whistle to old people when I get going on a topic), and I should have prepared more with specific names and dates and quotes, since I kept alluding to things that I couldn't remember well enough to cite specifically. I have no idea how Hitchens does that in all of his speeches and interviews; how he keeps exact quotes in memory, along with who wrote/said them, in which book, etc. I'm more like, "I read this in a book somewhere. By someone. Let me clumsily paraphrase it for you."
When I told the IG about the guest lecturing gig, she was excited and said the expected, "Do you think you might want to be a teacher? I think you'd like it and be good at it!" I shuddered then, as I always have when someone suggests that. I would not make a good teacher, and even if I would, I don't want to be one. I don't like kids, and I don't like putting up with their chattering bullshit. I hated attending school; I certainly don't want to return there now.
That being said, I could probably refrain from slitting my wrists if I were a college professor. Yeah, it would suck talking at the disinterested 13th graders in all the intro classes, but there's no presumption that I'm supposed to care about them, or be a role model, and when they don't pay attention and bomb their tests I can flunk them and teach them the lesson their coddling parents never did. (Well, once I have tenure, anyway). Plus, the 10% of students who are bright and engaged and taking some interest in their $40k a year education are worth interacting with, and as for the rest, well we're still some decades away from fully automated gas stations and fast food restaurants, so the ones who can't get a job from in daddy's business will have something to fall back on. The ones not wise enough to work as bloggers/fansite webmasters/perpetually aspiring novelists, I mean.
Lastly, I joined a gym. A big 24 Hour Fitness in Larkspur (even the town's name is bougie), about 5 miles down the freeway from me. It's in a very rich area and the gym isn't cheap; $52 a month on top of the membership fee and one of those "fuck you" one time fees. Those amount to something like $160 to put your name into their computer, and then you get to pay $624 a year for membership. Or, you can take the 12 months for just that club for $300, with no signup fee at all. Better yet, they had a New Year's special with the 12 months for $199. So, $16.58 a month it is, then.
I've enjoyed all the mountain biking I've been doing in the nearby semi-mountains, and my legs and cardio are great, but it rains about 20 days a month from now until May, and it's cold, and I miss lifting weights. I've got the 30 pound, "
sometimes, things are heavy" dumbbells here, and if I were self motivated and spent 20 minutes a day doing various lifts with those, I wouldn't need the gym. I'm not, 5 minutes every other day isn't getting it done, and using a variety of weight lifting machines is much more fun. Plus, gyms are sometimes known to contain attractive, physical fit, tight pants-wearing females, and I would not at all object to the regular presence of one, or more, such creatures in my life.
I do have to wonder about the necessity of the 24 hour nature of this gym, though. It was one of the main reasons I signed up; along with the price. I'm a night owl and have long longed for the option of heading off to the gym at 2am. Especially since I prefer to avoid the crowd and not have to wait for machines. However, my first late night visit to the gym was not only solitary, it was downright creepy. I went late night Friday, and I was literally the only person there. Well, me and muscles at the front desk, but he hardly appeared alert/alive enough to register on an EKG, so it was just me in the vast fitness warehouse for about 45 minutes. I can't complain; I was the one who wanted no waiting, after all, but it was a bit like some place Will Smith might have worked out with a German Shepherd and an assault rifle.
Eventually a creepy old guy came in; but he just talked to the guy at the front desk. The old guy was wearing a puffy vest over a shiny running jacket, a ski cap, running shoes, and short jogging shorts. All the better to show off his veiny, hairy, knobby-kneed old man legs. Because what else would you wear to the gym on a rainy night, in 50 degree weather, in January, at 3am?
Update: I made another less-late night visit to the gym this evening, and found about 6 people there at midnight. Only 2 were left by the time I departed at 1:30, and I've got a photo to (not really) prove it.
You can tell it's a manly gym by the mega-heavy dumbbells they've got stacked up. These boys run the entire end of the gym, and they're not very wisely arranged. On the top row they start at 50lbs (23kg) and go all the way up to about 120 lbs (55kg). I haven't been to this new gym that many times, but I've never seen any of the dumbbells missing from the racks on the top row. The lower row has dumbbells from 20-45lbs, (lighter ones are in racks to the side and in another back room) and all of the 20 and 25s are usually scattered all around the weight room, with fewer of the 30s and heavier missing.
The question then, is why are there a million weights heavier than any sub-bodybuilder needs, and why are they displayed on the top row where they're always visible, while the weights people actually use are down below and harder to reach? Even if some football team someday comes to the gym and uses the big ones, they'll probably leave them lying all over the place, and then someone on the staff will throw out their back having to lift all of those weights up to more than waist height to put them back in their appropriate slots.
My old gym near Malaya's condo was not a manly gym. There were a lot fewer dumbbells, and most of them were from 5-20 pounds. Of the heavier ones, there were only like one pair each of 25, 30, and 35, with the masters of them all, a pair of 42.5 pound juggernauts. Logically, all the lighter weights went on the top row of the storage rack, and the heavy ones that none of the mostly-female clientèle could lift squatted on the bottom row, where dirty, sweaty, smelly men like myself had to hunker down and drag them out, like really heavy sex toys from that box you think no one knows you've got under one side of your bed.
Inconvenient storage aside, I like that there are big dumbbells sitting there, staring. Taunting. They give me motivation to bulk up enough to need them. I use 30 pounders now, but I do a fair number of reps in different positions. I could probably do some curls with 50 or 55lbs now, to save my life, but I'd make like one rep and need a break and possibly a nap, and what's the point in that? There is no point; at least not at night, when there aren't any spandex-pantsed bunnies to hurt myself trying to impress.
Labels: college, fashion, fitness
Seeing it in Person?
Amusing article about the ongoing
Superbowl ticket scalping frenzy.
Asking prices for the Feb. 3 game range from $2,450 to $19,446 at StubHub, a unit of eBay Inc. and the biggest of the online resellers. Officials there say the average price so far is $4,300 for tickets that the National Football League originally priced at either $700 or $900.
...
Marcel Nadeau of Rehobeth, Mass., said he paid $29,385 to reseller RazorGator for a package that includes three hotel nights and breakfasts, transportation to and from the game, a gift package, and tickets for him and his two sons.
Yes, that's 30k (more than that, by the time you consider meals, souvenirs, and incidentals) for a weekend vacation in the desert, plus tickets to a sporting event that will be broadcast on free TV worldwide. Having worked at the stadium in San Diego for more than a decade, including 2 Superbowls, a world series, a baseball All-Star game, and a World Cup game (up in LA, for that), I feel safe in saying... you're really not missing that much watching on your couch. And when you factor in not having to deal with travel, traffic, and other hassles, I'm not that sure why anyone pays to attend sporting events in person.
Then again, I've never been a rabid sports fan for any team, nor do I especially understand the magic of viewing an event in person; as evidenced by my disinterest in attending live musical events. So YMMV. Thirty thousand dollars of difference...
Labels: football
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Book Review: The Evolution of Desire, Chapter Seven
Remember how last time I said these chapter summaries would start getting briefer? Um... yeah. This one might be the longest yet. It's full of really good stuff though, especially the info about why men tend to keep pursuing women who have rejected them, and why men are so confused when those women get upset by their continued affections. Male and female psychology and genetic urges could not be more poorly designed for peaceful coexistence in that arena.
For next time, the next three chapters in the book are much less interesting (to me) than the first seven, so I'll go over those much more quickly, before taking more time on chapter 11, Women's Hidden Sexual Strategies, since it's got some very juicy stuff. And, since there are only 12 chapters in the book, this write up will actually come to an end. Eventually...
Previous chapters
covered here.
Chapter Seven: Sexual ConflictThis chapter covers conflict between the sexes, or conflict caused by sexual desires, such as men competing to date the same woman. It's not outright "sexual conflict," like say, begging your wife for non-
surprise buttsecks. As Buss explains, "Conflict between the sexes is best understood in the broader context of social conflict. Social conflict occurs whenever one person interferes with the achievement of the goal o the other person."
Men compete over desirable women, women compete over eligible men, men want sex without putting in the requisite investment of resources, and so forth. The key aspect of these situations is that conflict is a negative. It serves no beneficial genetic purpose to get into fights over potential mates, or with a desired member of the opposite sex. Rather, conflict is an often unavoidable result of conflicting sexual goals. That humans get into such difficult conflicts is evidence that the goals are well worth fighting over, and humans have evolved numerous strategies to solve or avoid time and energy-wasting conflicts.
The most basic male vs. female conflict is over sexual access. Men want sex without spending a great deal of time or resources to obtain it, and they grow angry when their desires are denied. Women want a man to invest time and resources in exchange for reproductive access, and they grow angry when men are disinclined to cooperate. As always, this basic scenario is very caveman in its implications and origins, and here, as throughout the book, Buss glosses over or ignores the conscious actions and thoughts of actual human beings.
This tendency is easy to object to, but the book's argument are not intended to be bulletproof. Modern humans can think and choose to act counter to their instincts, and no one does what their genetics tells them to do all the time. However, free will aside, it's useful to consider the base evolutionary urges that remain within us, if only to understand why we often have to work so hard to resist doing things we know are stupid or pointless. So while it's easy to think of real people going against most of the arguments made in this book, they're best taken as general species-wide guidelines, rather than inescapable commandments chiseled into the stone of your genetic code.
Sexual Accessibility. Perceived desirability is an interesting component of sexual interaction, and one that frequently leads to conflict. Putting it simply, people who are hotter can command a higher quality partner; a fact that's seldom greeted enthusiastically by the lower quality partners they reject.
A woman who frequents singles bars reports that she is sometimes approached by a beer-drinking, T-shirted, baseball-capped, stubble-faced truck drivers or construction workers who ask her to dance. When she declines, the men sometimes get verbally abusive, saying, for example, "What's the matter bitch, I'm not good enough for you?" Although she simply turns her back, that is precisely what she thinks; they are not good enough for her. Her unspoken message is that she can obtain someone better, given her own desirability, and this message infuriates the rebuffed men. Differences between people's perceptions of their value as mates cause conflict.
Adding to this problem is the fact that men sometimes (usually) infer sexual interest when it does not exist. A lab experiment demonstrated this by showing volunteers a short movie of a female student asking a male professor for extra time to finish a paper. Neither actor acts flirtatious or provocative in the movie, though they behave in a friendly manner. Both men and women perceived friendliness in the female student's behavior, but most men thought she was behaving somewhat seductively, while almost none of the female viewers came to that conclusion.
Men apparently interpret simple friendliness and mere smiling by women as indicating some level of sexual interest, even when women report no such interest... When in doubt, men seem to infer sexual interest... If over evolutionary history even a tiny fraction of these "misperceptions" led to sex, then men would have evolved lower thresholds for inferring women's sexual interest.
Naturally, evolution conditioned women to respond to this tendency, and not just with disgust and lesbianism. No, women know instinctively that they can obtain special treatment by acting friendly or flirting, and while not every woman does this, quite a few do, at least some of the time. This obviously leads to sexual conflict, as men resent what they see as women leading them on, while women resent men being pushy in their sexual demands. They really resent it: in one study, researchers asked women to evaluate 147 potentially upsetting actions on a 1-7 scale. Women rated sexual aggression at 6.50; no other kinds of acts, including verbal abuse and nonsexual physical abuse, were rated as highly.
The real kicker comes when considering the male reaction to the same act. Men rated unexpected sexual aggression on the part of women at just 3.02, or "lightly upsetting," and many men spontaneously wrote on the margin of the survey that they would in fact welcome such behavior from a woman. It's not that men enjoy being abused; they find verbal abuse and physical abuse just as upsetting as women do. It's that heterosexual men don't seem to even acknowledge that there is such a thing as unwanted sexual aggression, at least from a woman. Furthermore, men greatly
underestimate how upsetting women find their sexual aggression, while women greatly
overestimate how upsetting men find such acts when perpetrated by women.
It's a perfect storm of overlapping and conflicting beliefs about sexual persuasion. Men think women are asking for sex when they're not, and men don't think women really mind being pressed for sex, since most men would welcome that behavior from a woman. In fact, women are extremely upset by sexual aggression, and have no idea why men don't understand, since they think that men must be upset by it as well. It would be hard to create a system more perfectly designed to create conflict and communication difficulties. (Though I think Microsoft has managed it once or twice.)
I found this section of the book fascinating and enlightening, and but I think it would be even more useful for women. I couldn't count how many conversations I've had with female friends, including several recent ones with the IG, in which they asked me why guys were always pushing them for sex, why guys couldn't take a hint that they weren't interested, why guys expected them to put up with unwanted touching and other signs of affection, etc. And here's the answer: men really want it, but moreover men think women want it, or at least that they won't mind it, since from a man's frame of reference, he knows he'd love it if a woman did that to him. Furthermore, the more desperate to impress a man grows, the more likely he is to use a behavior that will cause the maximum offense to the woman he uses it on. It's logical in his brain; he's just doing to her what he'd most like her to do to him. Doesn't usually work out too well in reality, much to the annoyance of the woman and confusion of the man.
Humans can, of course, learn from experience, and grow to understand that the other gender wants different things. Also, some guys are insensitive, or outright assholes/pigs, and some women are teases/flirts, intentionally or otherwise, but both genders can be somewhat excused their incomprehension by the fact that our instinctual comprehension of the these delicate issues actually leads us in exactly the wrong direction. Understanding what the other gender wants and means in this area is a learned skill, and a tricky one to learn, since it goes so counter to our own wants and desires.
Worse yet, in this one the man is always going to be the metaphorical (and literal) bad guy. He will offend without meaning to, not understand why he's offending, and feel resentful and confused when offense is taken over something he wouldn't be offended by. Not only do women not inflict this type of unknowing offense, they might not even be capable of doing so. After all, women are offended by sexual aggression, so they expect that a man will be as well. Therefore, they are 1) would be much less likely to act in that fashion, and even if they do, they 2) wouldn't be surprised if/when it caused offense, which 3) it's highly unlikely to, since men welcome that sort of behavior and find it flattering, even if they choose not to take advantage of the opportunity.
Another source of conflict is sexual withholding. Men frequently complain that women say no to sex, tease and flirt without following through, and so on. These behaviors bother men quite a bit, rating a 5.03 on the 1-7 scale, substantially higher than women judge the upset (4.29). There's an evolutionary logic to sexual withholding, of course. There's an evolutionary logic to everything, according to this book. In this case, Buss points out that scarcity increases the value of anything. Including sex. By withholding sex from some men and awarding it to others, women create incentives for men to compete for sexual access. An individual woman can also boost her own perceived desirability by withholding sex, since more desirable women tend to be more selective about their sexual favors. Finally, withholding sex can make a man view a woman as a potential mate, rather than just a casual sex partner, due to the associations between female promiscuity and long term male attraction (discussed in earlier chapters).
Emotional Commitment. The level of commitment in a relationship is another source of conflict. Put simply, a woman wants a man to expend his total effort and resources on her. A man wants to expend as few as he can to keep her happy, while reserving the rest to devote to obtaining other mating opportunities or enhancing his social status. Resources, in this example, are not merely monetary, but emotional, temporal, and more.
One of the most common complaints by women is that their partners do not express their emotions freely. (Women assume those free emotions would be to their liking, obviously. If a man is hiding the fact that he's sick of her and wants her to die, freely expressing that would probably be less welcomed.) This is largely a female complaint; 24% of newlywed men complain about it, compared to 45% of newlywed women. The numbers increase rapidly during a relationship; by the 4th year of marriage, 59% of women complain that men ignore their feelings, compared to just 32% of men. (The possibility/likelihood that these figures reflect reality; that 32% of women and 59% of men really do ignore their spouse's feelings by the 4th year of marriage, isn't addressed by the author. It doesn't especially matter though, since what counts in this case is whether the spouse perceived that they're being ignored, right or wrong.)
Cutting to the genetic aspect of things, Buss speculates on why this is. What are the benefits and liabilities of expressing one's emotions, from the male and female POV? One analogy provided is of a poker player. Men, in this view, are withholding their true feelings since they may be considering other sexual/reproductive options. After all, men are physically capable of fathering numerous children in short order, while women are much more limited in that capability. A woman who grants the wrong man reproductive access may have to live with that mistake for years, so it's strongly in a woman's interest to accurately assess her man's intentions. This requirement has caused further adaptations, turning women into much more intuitive psychologists. Women report spending far more time than men sifting through memories, evaluating what their partners said and trying to figure what he really meant by it, and prodding him to express himself clearly and honestly. The flip side of this is that while women complain about men being emotionally constricted, men feel that women are moody and unpredictable. (Reciprocal behaviors that are caused by the women trying too hard to figure out the uncommunicative men.)
Moodiness doesn't exist in a vacuum, of course. Men interested in preserving a relationship must invest time and emotional effort in trying to cheer up or reassure a vexed wife. Women may also use moodiness and other minor emotional upsets to test a man's continuing interest and emotional attachment to her.
Investment of Resources. Resources include money, but also things like time, emotional investments, and energy. "Among their common complaints are that men do not spend enough time with them, fail to call when they say they will, show up late, and cancel dates or other arrangements at the last minute." Objections such as these are far more common in men than women; 38% of dating women but just 12% of dating men complain that their partners sometimes fail to call when they say they will. (Again, it's not made clear if these facts reflect reality, or if women are just much more sensitive to being stood up on a date. And again, it doesn't really matter, since the key issue is how people tend to feel about perceived behaviors. I'm sure everyone has found out first hand just how well it works when you tell your partner to stop being so sensitive.)
I read this and expected Buss to speculate as to the evolutionary origins of the behavior. If in fact men do fail to call more often than women, why? Is there some adaptive purpose? Are men doing it semi-consciously as a way to spar with the tendency of women to flirt and tease, or to turn moody and shut men out? Perhaps, but it's not an issue Buss addresses. Instead, he goes right to the negative; men are distant because they're not that into the woman, and are conserving their resources, or spending them elsewhere.
Another possibility is that men and women just have very different needs in this area. Women want men to be with them more often than men want. That would follow reproductive logic; the man doesn't need to be there all the time, just often enough to have sex and be sure the woman is not straying on him, whereas the woman wants the man around much more often, to ensure that he's not straying or spending his resources on other women. Whatever the reason, 41% of newlywed women say their partner doesn't spend enough time with them, compared to just 4% of newlywed men. Naturally, there's a flip side to this coin. Men are far more likely to say their partners are clingy and dependent on them. Among married men, 36% complain that their wives demand too much of their time, compared to only 7% of married women.
Money is a factor as well, of course. More than 72% of couples fight about money at least once a year, though perhaps surprisingly, the issue of allocation is far more contentious than the total amount. Men frequently complain that women spend too much money on clothing; 26% of men voice this concern by the 4th year of marriage, compared to only 7% of women. The sexes are identical in one aspect though; by the 4th year of marriage, around 1/3 of men and women say their spouse spends too much money in general.
Deception. The most common form of deception by men is exaggeration of affection. As
Chef once sung:
When a man loves a woman, and a woman loves a man,
Actually, sometimes a man doesn't love a woman, but…he acts like he does, in order to get some action...
In a survey of 112 college men, 71% admitted to having exaggerated the depth of their feelings for a woman in order to have sex with her, while the other 29% said she was so drunk they didn't even have to lie. (I made up that 29% part, but you know it's true.) When women were asked if men had done this to them, 97% of them said yes. (Buss doesn't include any data on what percent of the time it worked.)
Lying about this isn't such a problem amongst married couples, but women still need to be vigilant since preserving their relationship is such a high stakes game, especially if they've already had children with the man. Men have high stakes as well, but amongst our ancestors, the man who had had children with a woman had essentially already won. Women needed to keep the man around, and they could raise their odds of this by picking the right man in the first place. To that end, women are far more active in trying to look into the man's character. Women report spending far more time analyzing their man's behaviors and motivations, and often discuss these with their female friends. Men report this behavior far less often.
While women are more concerned with a man's deception in emotional matters, men place the utmost importance on knowing about a woman's age and sexual history. Since sexual infidelity is the biggest worry for men, and reproductive fitness is the most important attribute in a mate, men tend to be highly observant of signs of age or loss of health, as well as inquisitive and investigative into a woman's past sexual history, since a promiscuous past can be a sign of a straying future.
Abuse. Unsurprisingly, physical and verbal abuse of women by their men is usually connected to infidelity, or at least the man's fears about it. Buss cites various studies from Canada and the US and finds a very high correlation between male accusations of infidelity, and abuse. Most of the men in these studies were determined to be "controlling," and "jealous." The women leaving the house, maintaining friendships with other men or women, or behaving in ways their husbands couldn't control set off morbid jealousy and incidents of violence.
It's pretty clear, from what's come before in the book, where Buss will go with this. What genetic purpose can wife-beating serve? Where does the urge come from? That second one is pretty easy to figure, actually. The studies show that upwards of 90% of abusive husbands cite fears that their wives are being unfaithful, and this book has provided plenty of evidence that infidelity is the trait men most dislike and fear in their wives. So is wife-beating just an overreaction to fears of infidelity? Fears that come about from the genetic male need to be certain that his mate's offspring are his? Perhaps, but why are some men comfortable letting their wives live their own lives, while other men are terrified into becoming control freaks? And why does their fear turn into violence? Isn't that likely to be a maladaptive solution to the problem; more likely to drive the woman away than to force her to curtail her infidelities? (Especially if the infidelities are entirely in the head of the jealous husband.)
Buss offers no solutions or explanations. He does point out that most abusers flash from anger to profuse apologies, "crying, pleading, and promising that never again will they inflict such costs. These actions may be attempts to void the risks of defection inherent in using abuse as a tactic of control."
Sexual Harassment. Men are far more likely to be the harassers, and they're far more likely to harass young, attractive women. Not exactly a shocking revelation there, but someone had to tally up the statistics to prove it, I guess. In a study of 10,644 federal employees, 42% of women and 15% of men had experienced sexual harassment at some point in their careers. As for actual case filings, in two years in Illinois 76 women and 5 men filed complaints. In Canada, 93 women and 2 men filed sexual harassment cases. Hugely disproportionate numbers, but Buss points out an interesting fact; given that women are far more likely than men to be seriously offended by unwanted sexual attention, it's quite possible that something a man would laugh off or even be flattered by would infuriate a woman. As always, he means not to excuse or apologize for bad behavior, but to analyze it in genetic, behavioral terms.
Reactions to persistent attention vary by the identity of the pursuer too, of course. In one study women ranked how upset they'd be with a man's repeated attempts to date them on the usual 1-7 scale. Construction workers (4.4), garbage collectors (4.32), and gas station attendants (4.13) better learn to take no for an answer. Meanwhile, rock stars (2.71), pre-med students (2.65), and graduate students (2.80) can ask every day. (Man, my grad school aspirations are looking better every day!) The type of attention affects things greatly, too. Sexual overtures, such as inappropriate touching, were judged very harshly. In contrast, romantic or friendly approaches, such as "a co-worker telling a woman that he sincerely likes her and would like to have a coffee with her after work was judged to be only a 1.5, where a 1.0 signified no harassment at all."
(That's cute and all, but um... who has coffee after work? It's late, you're hungry, and you need to get the dry cleaning on the way home. Still, apparently it's inoffensive to make the invitation, so keep that one in mind, guys, if you want a date idea that will almost surely be declined, but at least won't piss her off.)
Rape. Buss defines rape as "the use of force, or threat to use force, to obtain sexual intercourse." The stereotype of rape, a stereotype that seems to mostly exist in the mind's of anti-feminists of both genders, is the "she was asking for it" fallacy. Some drunken bimbos in a miniskirt stumbling down a dark alleys to her inevitable doom. In reality, the vast majority of rapes are committed by men the women know; most often their husbands or boyfriends.
One study found that almost 15% of college women had experienced unwanted sexual intercourse in the context of dating situations. Another study of 347 women found that 63% of all instances of sexual victimization were perpetrated by dates, lovers, husbands, or de facto partners. The most extensive study of rape in marriage found that of nearly a thousand married women, 14% had been raped by their husbands.
When it comes to heterosexual rape, men are almost always the perpetrators, and women almost always the victims. The question then, is "whether rape represents an evolved sexual strategy of men, or is better understood as a horrifying side effect of men's general sexual strategy of seeking low-cost casual sex." After all, rape is quite common in the animal world, where it is almost always found in the context of attempted impregnation. It's also clear that men are aroused by sexual activity of all types. Lab tests have exposed men to audio and visual displays of consensual and non-consensual sexual activity, and the men have usually become aroused by both. "Men apparently are sexually aroused when exposed to sexual scenes, whether or not consent is involved, although other conditions, such as the presence of violence and a disgust reaction from the woman, appear to inhibit the sexual arousal of the men."
These studies don't prove the question about rape being an evolved sexual strategy or a side effect, though. They merely show that men become aroused when presented with sexual stimuli. Something that might shed light on that are statistics on which women are raped. The same ones that men are genetically predisposed to want to breed with. 85% of female rape victims are under the age of 36. Women between 40-49 are just as likely to suffer an aggravated assault as women 20-29, but the younger women are far more likely to be raped. This doesn't prove the point either; just provides more evidence (not that any was needed) that men prefer sex with younger women.
Buss concludes that there's not enough evidence yet to make a judgment about genetic reasons for rape. The only conclusion that can be drawn at this point is that men are willing to use force and violence to obtain things they want, including sexual access to attractive young women. Men use violence often; on other men more often than on women. Men kill other men four times as often as they kill women. "Men are clearly the more coercive and violent sex and are responsible for most of the socially unacceptable, illegal, and repugnant behavior in the world."
The book next discusses female reactions to rape. Old stereotypes about women who "want to be forced" have been pretty conclusively demolished by now, but Buss cites some studies to that effect. Interestingly, in surveys of female reactions to being raped, women of prime reproductive age experience much more lingering trauma than younger or older women. This seems to stem from genetic fears of unwanted impregnation. Buss takes this as a data point that women have evolved behaviors to deal with rape, which seems to indicate it's long been a tactic used by men.
In another survey, men were asked if they would force sex on a woman if they were sure they would get away with it, had no risk of disease, no damage to their reputation, etc. Two surveys of this nature got 35% and 27% of men admitting that they'd do it. "Although these percentages are alarmingly high, they also indicate that most men are apparently not potential rapists." So that's the good news, ladies. You've only got a 1/3 chance of being raped by a man if he thinks he can get away with it. Yikes! To help in your 2/3 profiling, Buss lists some common attributes of rapists.
They tend to be hostile towards women, endorse the myth that women secretly want to be raped, and show a personality profile marked by impulsiveness, hostility, and hypermasculinity, combined with a high degree of sexual promiscuity. Studies of rapists show that they also have low self-esteem.
Interesting that rapists are usually promiscuous men; basically they seem to be guys who want sex all the time, and who frequently get it, but who aren't above using force if it's denied them. Seems the stereotypes about loners and losers whose only interaction with women is attempted rape are inaccurate. Also, watch out for poor guys. Male rapists tend to come from lower socioeconomic classes. "Men scorned by women because they lack the qualities for attracting desirable mates may develop hostility toward women, an attitude that short circuits the normal empathic response and so promotes coercive sexual behavior."
Also, try to stay off the losing side in wars; rape is almost always epidemic in those situations, and as Buss puts it, "rape occurs when the costs incurred by the rapist are generally minimal or absent." Doesn't that go for every type of crime, though? In short, there are no answers for why men rape, other than that some men will do whatever they can, if they can get way with it. Encouraging news, eh?
Next time. Chapter Eight: Breaking Up.
Labels: the evolution of desire
Thursday, January 24, 2008
A Genetic Predisposition to LOLcats?
I wouldn't have made this connection myself, except as an excuse to post amusing images, but
this scientific article on the way the human eye is genetically predisposed to track animals in motion, more than other objects in motion,
leads nicely to a digression into LOLcats. As the tech blogger says:
What's great about this research is that it inadvertently targeted exactly what's happening in lolcat images: the animal has been changed from being just a regular cute kitty, to being a cute kitty with special attributes created by the caption. So a lolcat is an animal image with "a single change."
Perhaps, but it doesn't address the "why cats?" question. The
leading lolcats site has been branching out into non-felines, with their semi-daily, "Daily Bonuf Lol," with shots that usually feature small rodents, instead of/in addition to cats, but the site is still predominantly cats. Dogs and guinea pigs and other creatures make semi-regular appearances, but they're usually
just costars, unable to command the screen for long on their own. Dogs, for all their popularity, are much less often featured, especially on their own.
IMHO, it's pretty simple. Cats are more interesting, to LOL. There was an old
The Far Side cartoon (that I can't find online) which summed this up perfectly. It was called something like, "The Moods of a Golden Retriever" and featured the exact same image of a dog's head in 6 or 8 panels with captions like "happy," "angry," "confused," "pensive," and so forth. That's the problem with loldogs. They don't have expressions, so they can't so easily be anthropomorphized. Like young blonde actresses, they have the ability to look happy and confused, and might manage a mildly-annoyed, if wet and/or cold. Cats, on the other hand,have much more expressive faces that clever lolcaptioners can project countless emotions onto. It also helps that cats are smaller and more curious, so they're constantly getting into things and posing in amusing locations. Plus when they open their mouths they look cute, not like they're about to turn your years of touch typing into
an unpleasant memory.
Of course the cats aren't actually experiencing that much wider an array of emotions, they just look like they are, which is all that really matters for the photo captions. Probably half of the cats in the pictures are just yawning, but with the right timing and a suggestive caption, a mere expression of fatigue, which every cat makes about 500 times a day, can appear to be
superspeed, or
snarkasm, or
taunting laughter, or
yodeling, or even...
fighter pilots?
It also doesn't hurt that cats are so gifted at looking distressed, peeved, or vexed, since a desperate or resigned sense of annoyance is generally comic gold.
moar funny picturesLabels: lolcats
Gas Prices Around the World
So,
how much are you paying? There's no attribution for the prices, but I can at least say that the San Francisco ones are accurate.
The prices will be useless to many people, with them standardized for the US gallon, when the vast majority of the world buys petrol in liters, but it's easy enough to use the info to compare relative differences, even hobbled as they are by an archaic, pre-metric liquid measure.
I've long heard that California, and especially SF, has the highest gas prices in the US, and this chart seems to back up that claim. Gas was about 30 cents a gallon cheaper in San Diego when I visited over Xmas, and even with gas around here 50 cents or more above the national average, this chart underprices it a bit. I paid $3.59 for mid-grade this week, and that was at one of the cheaper stations in the area. I see high grade for $3.79+ on a regular basis, at Chevrons and Shells and other of the more expensive stations. It's down from the high last year, at least. I still remember seeing a station in downtown SF with prices at $4.09/$4.19/$4.34 when I drove into the city to attend the Flagship Studios community day event last spring.
For bonus shits and giggles, check out this pic I tripped over in my archives. It's from March 2003, when gas prices shot up in the early days of the cake walk, we'll be welcomed with rose petals, low cost, quick and easy mission to overthrow Saddam and secure his WMDs began. I haven't been reading the news much lately; how'd that turn out anyway?
Americans complain a lot about high gas prices, but you'll note that we're paying about half what they do in most of Europe. Of course the Europeans have efficient mass transportation, largely funded by their high gas taxes, unlike the utterly car-dependent US. Where we're pretty much fucked, if all the
peak oil doomcriers are even partially correct in their unflagging pessimism.
Labels: oil
Heathcliff Ledger
As everyone already knows, he died a couple of days ago in his apt in NYC.
Seems to be an accidental overdose of sleeping pills brought on by a young star busily burning the candle at both ends. I guess this is big news, since he was still quite young (28) and a rising movie star. Personally, I didn't have any reaction other than, "Bummer." but I don't mean that in a callous way; I just didn't have any connection to the man, and at this point, who is all that surprised when another celebrity drops dead?
I saw the headline on my home page (Yahoo news), but didn't read the article since the name didn't really ring a bell. I knew he was an actor, but nothing he's been in stuck in my mind. It wasn't until a few minutes later that I thought, "Wait, wasn't he one of the guys in
Brokeback Mountain? Oh, the heartless cultural conservatives are going to be all over this one with tasteless, unfunny, 'He must have caught movie AIDS!' jokes." (Who knew how
right I was?)
A few minutes after that I had another belated realization. "Wait... wasn't he playing the Joker in the new Batman movie?" I was correct again, belatedly, and at that point I felt some regret. I'm looking forward to that film, and expecting him to be good in the role. It's still a one-off, though. I mean I'm assuming Batman will triumph in the end and kill the Joker in the process, so it's not like this will screw up the sequel. Good thing they didn't cast Heath as Robin, though. Not that there is a Robin, or any other unnecessary and annoying sidekick, I sincerely hope.
I finally got around
to checking his resume tonight, and nope, I've never seen Heath in anything. I saw a few bits of that postmodern knight in shining armor movie he did years ago, when he was a teen heartthrob. And I was of course aware of Brokeback Mountain, but I never saw it and can't imagine that I ever will. I wasn't opposed to it, but Malaya saw it with her mom, and I haven't cared enough about a film to go see it solo in years.
That I had no interest in that movie, other than making easy and obvious "
will they be eating pudding?" jokes pre-release, and I think it's because I'm whatever the opposite of homophobic is. Lots of gay people saw Brokeback because it spoke to their experience, and lots of curious straight people saw it because they were titillated by the gender twist, and lots of other people saw it because they enjoy love stories with strong acting performances. I fit into none of those groups.
I've been around gay people for decades, my mom always had gay friends, and while I think the subject of human sexuality and mate preferences is a fascinating one (as evidenced by my endless, ongoing discourse on
The Evolution of Desire, I'm so over caring if someone is gay or not that I didn't have any interest in that film. Besides, my movie tastes aren't real high brow; if there'd been some kung fu and car chases, I might have been drawn in, but I don't have much interest in weepy, sentimental love stories, no matter what gender the weepy lovers are.
Thankfully,
the Batman movie is already finished, so come this July I'll get to see my first, and last, Heath Ledger film.
Labels: batman, celebs, death
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Religion in Canada, and Mental Viruses
I had mixed feelings about this article on the
collapse of organized religion in Canada. Attendance is dropping rapidly, and budgets are drying up and churches are actually being closed and sold off. Protestants are hurting the worst, since residents aren't going to church anymore, and they can't attract immigrants. Catholic churches are doing a bit better, since more immigrants are Catholic, but even they're not sticking, since by the second generation the kids are attending church just as avidly, or not, as the general population.
There's no clear reason why this is happening. There haven't been terrible church scandals in Canada (unlike in the US, and there are still plenty of Catholics here anyway, despite absolute proof that the Church concealed and protected a vast, organized ring of pedophiles), no new religious laws were passed, no famous celebrities or academics came out against religion, etc. The article engages in some speculation, but it's all off the cuff and not backed up by survey data. The leading theory? Women just got fed up:
Women -- the traditional mainstays of institutional religion -- in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings. As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics. Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility, to delay and limit the size of families. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On The Regulation of Birth), shocked even loyal Canadian Catholics by upholding the church's ban on contraception.
Callum Brown, a Scottish church sociologist, describes what took place in the churches in the 1960s and 70s -- especially in Western Europe and Canada -- as a "hemorrhaging of young women."
It's an established fact that church goers today and throughout US history have been predominantly female, so this Canadian explanation is probable on that front; if women stopped going to church in the US, they'd collapse here too. That fact makes one sideshow of US religiosity all the more ironic; the issue of the "Promise Keepers," evangelical, culturally conservative men who frequently spend their time
blaming women for the fact that men don't go to church.
Relish the ignorance, sexism, and selfishness of that logic. It's women who are keeping the US churches from folding up like cheap lawn furniture, mostly due to their demonstrably misguided belief that dragging the kids to church will inculcate them with good morals. The amusing part is that while women are suffering through another unpleasant chore their role as primary caregiver forces them into, their husbands are off watching football or playing golf, and occasionally writing
sanctimonious, whiny books that blame wives and mothers for the fact that their husbands refuse to yawn through a droning lecture about something they don't even believe in anymore. (And why should they, when their wives will do it for them?)
To digress, as I am wont, I expect to see a parallel scenario unfold around US higher education in the next few years (it's probably doing so already, though I've not read specifically about it). Women now greatly outnumber men in US colleges. So far, the discourse I've seen about this has been pretty rational; young men aren't interested in all that studying and learning and hard work, there are still a fair number of jobs with decent wages open to men without college degrees, etc. Plus, women, like minority males, have historically needed to greatly outperform white men to be taken seriously on their job application. Hence education is more important and more valuable to them.
The female advantage in higher education is changing society, and once the female demographic advantage really starts to kick in over the next decade or two, the traditional male/female wage disparity begins to draw narrower, and colleges (naturally) refocus their courses to appeal to the majority of the customers, I guarantee we'll see eruptions of books (written by white males, of course) complaining about how colleges are no longer male-friendly, and how they should change their curriculum to better engage men. (Perhaps arm wrestling and belching contests could be incorporated into final exams?) Oddly, none of the men involved thought there was any problem with the structure of colleges during the first several centuries when they were exclusively male, or during the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50, 60s, or 70s, when they were still almost entirely male. Yet now that women substantially outnumber men, male reformers will pop up like the proverbial mushrooms. What a coincidence?
Incidentally, my just completed three semesters at a local university backs up this trend. My professors were about equally divided between men and women, with slightly more men, especially among the older profs, but the students were overwhelmingly female. The day students, 18-22 y/o undergrads, were about 75% female. The ratio was a bit more even amongst the adult (30-70 y/o) students who mostly took night classes, but I was in the gender minority in every class but one (ironically, it was in that one that I met the IG), and was in a very small minority most of the time. One class, admittedly a Women's Studies course, featured me, one other guy who missed at least half the classes, and about twenty-five females. (Tragically, as was almost always the case, the age range was profoundly un-Goldilocks-esque, and all the women were either 20 or 50.)
What confuses me, is why people think this is a problem? I guess if I were worried about cultural trends, especially if I were a sexist and thought it was important that men continued to hold most of the positions of power in US society, I'd be concerned. But on a personal level; what heterosexual college-going male is going to object to being surrounded by young women? I was in school to finish my degree and learn things, and maybe date a bit, once Malaya and me split before the January 2007 semester. The fact that a typical class was about 14 women to 3 men was not a bad thing, in my view. I'd have had to ride out an apocalypse trapped in a Victoria's Secret during a bra and pantie sale to improve much on those odds.
Returning, at last, to the increasingly irreligious nature of Canadians... I'm not sure. Despite the fact that I think less religion is generally a good thing on a personal and societal level, the article left me feeling somewhat melancholy, though far short of infinite sadness. I'd exult in the shuttering of most American churches, especially any with televangelist connections, since those people should be
wearing cardboard signs and selling pencils from a cup. But I don't know if the Canadian ones are guilty of such gross crimes against decency and justice, not to mention the bottoms of altar boys.
Neither do I know much about Canadian culture and the practice of religion north of the border, so I can't comment with any authority. I can comment on religious belief in general, and religion in the United States, and I will... but not today.
To tease, I've recently read best sellers by three of the four prominent male atheist writers (Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett) and I'll be opinioning on them when I post reviews in the days or weeks to come. All three books were excellent (I'm only halfway through Dawkins') and refreshingly, they all approached the subject from different perspectives. They were not redundant or repetitious, even reading them back to back to back, and even after I'd viewed numerous speeches by all three authors.
Hitchens' is the most witty and the easiest/quickest read, and definitely the most sarcastic and imbued with the most directly combative attitude. Hitchens approaches the issue as a social commentator and a historian, and takes great pleasure in puncturing sacred cows and assaulting the sensibilities of the faithful. He's a good enough writer, establishing a sense of narrative and theme throughout his book, that it's quite readable anyway. Even, I suspect, if you disagree with him on various of his propositions.
Harris book is like a very good research paper, with hundreds of (optional) endnotes and references. His tone is calm, scholarly, and dispassionate, and that makes his central argument, that the persistence of religious belief is likely to create a nuclear holocaust, all the more striking. As he points out, cultures and countries possessed of (or by) opposing religious beliefs have clashed all through history, and when one, or both, sides in a conflict believes that dying in the battle will only hasten their ultimate heavenly reward, their possession of nuclear weapons is an incalculably dangerous proposition. The book is much more than that, of course. A great deal of it concerns philosophy and the function of the human brain, fields Harris is learned in. (He has a philosophy degree and is working on his PhD in neuroscience.) He's also a practitioner of various forms of meditation and the transcendental, and it's fascinating to read his views on those sorts of experiences, since he approaches them from a scientific, brain-function perspective.
Dawkins is a brilliant biologist and evolutionary scientist, and his book is incredibly broad-based. He brings a great deal of learning and authority in history, culture, science, philosophy, morality, and more, and aims them all at the practice of religion and the mind set and beliefs of the faithful. It's a devastating critique, and I'm only halfway through the book, so far.
I've not read anything by Dennett yet, but I've been watching some of his speeches lately, and he's an interesting case. He's the least compelling speaker of the four; he's an old university professor, and at times he lectures like... an old university professor. He's given to droning and occasionally mutters, and in some of the presentations his mike is situated so that he sounds like a gargling Darth Vader when he inhales. He's also got a habit of far too often asserting that something is "interesting" and/or "important." And he's right, but this tick makes the listener feel like they're being ordered to pay attention, and that the thinking has already been done for them. (I'm trying to learn from his example. I edited the first sentence of this post since I am aware that I far too often make the same claim about articles I blog about. It's repetitious, and pointless, since I clearly wouldn't be linking to and writing about if I didn't think they were worth reading.)
Dennett might not be the greatest presenter, but he's got some brilliant and fascinating (interesting?) ideas. He's a philosopher and a scientist, and I like his speculations on the persistence and spread of religion, and his comparisons of it to a
meme. Or a virus.
This is a good example, and the stuff I found most clever comes in the last fifteen minutes. It's all very philosophically analytical. What elements of religion and other memes are beneficial, or neutral, or bad, for their hosts (us)? Flipping the equation entirely, how are the carriers of mental viruses, like religions and other foundational belief systems (such as communism, democracy, libertarianism, etc) affected, sustained, controlled, and modified by those beliefs?
I've blogged in the past about human evolution, and pointed out that it's been stopped, or entirely subverted by culture. The weak no longer die without reproducing; the strong no longer have the most children. However, thanks to the highly prevalent custom of pair bonding, humans have seldom functioned like most other harem-based mammals, where the strongest males can sire a substantial percentage of the next generation. Furthermore, human strength and fitness is not exclusively based on physical size and strength, as it is in most animals. When we look at how natural selection works in the wild, it's usually fairly obvious what factors and traits are being favored. It may be very counter-intuitive; peacock tails, for instance, have no survival benefit, and in fact they are quite a survival detriment, but they are what peahens like and are thus a strong factor in sexual selection.
Humans and our courtship and breeding rituals are far more complicated than those of animals, and as Dennett discusses in this speech, the complications and higher levels of human culture can be entirely deleterious to our genetic fitness. Religious and nationalistic fervor are prime examples; how many prime, healthy young men have sacrificed their reproductive chances by willingly marching off to likely death in war, or certain death in suicide attacks, for their beliefs? Animals don't do that. An animal's highest priority is to reproduce, as frequently as possible. That's how natural selection works on them; the ones that are best at reproducing leave offspring with their genetics. How does that reality reflect, at all, on humans? Aside from occasional lusty conquerors like Attila the Hun, reputed to the father of thousands, it doesn't show up at all.
However, if you compare natural selection in the animal world to a meme like say, Catholicism, you get some contradictory evidence. Those who are most strongly infected by that particular meme not only don't reproduce much, they tend to aspire to positions in the church that will preclude their ever reproducing. The various branches of Christianity are almost universally condemning of polygamy (one prominent Utah-based sect aside) as well, which at first seems like a detriment to reproductive natural selection. A man with 5 wives can clearly pass on his genes more often than a man with one wife. On the other hand, there seem to be some pretty obvious reproductive benefits to individuals who belong to a religion, such as Catholicism, that enforces monogamy, provides ample options for pair-matching, strongly encourages couples to be fruitful and multiply, and makes it very difficult for them to divorce. This says nothing about abstract notions like truth, or reality, or happiness; it's just about surviving and reproducing, and by that measure, being a good Catholic is a pretty useful tool to achieve that end.
On a higher level, and this is where Dennett mostly focuses, let's lift our eyes up from our usual myopic, anthrocentric POV. After all, I, and most of you, are probably concentrating on the human element of this natural selection and reproductive fitness. But what about the religion, the mental virus, the meme? It's evolving and existing through time, it lives far longer than any human, and it survives by being transmitted from host to host, just like any other virus. Instead of considering how humans reproduce and live when under the influence of a given religion, perhaps the question should be how does the religion, the meme, replicate and evolve and persist through the ant-like lives of its billions of believers? After all, when it comes to the relative popularity of a world religion, the death or life of individual adherents is pretty much irrelevant.
What are the essential traits of a religion or belief system that make it last? Why do some flare brightly and fade away, or stabilize with only a few million followers, while others claim tens or hundreds of millions of adherents? It's pretty clear that vast ideas like religions, memes, exist and compete in a sort of world wide cultural natural selection. And the truth or "goodness" of those religions is almost irrelevant. What matters, for the survival of those memes, is what they drive their believers to do. All religions and belief systems evolve over time, adapting to new human needs, waxing and waning in popularity, mutating or schizming into new branches. They were all created at some point, codified to some degree, and from there they took on lives of their own. So to speak. Religions, and all other foundational memes, change with the times, or even cause the times to change.
It's a vast subject of research and investigation, and one that is still in its relative infancy. I think it's fascinating, and want to read some more about it, from people who have given it more thought and much more research than I have. I'm sure Dennett isn't the only one working on the topic, but I'll start with him and branch out from there.
Labels: atheism, christopher hitchens, daniel dennett, philosophy, psychology, religion, richard dawkins, sam harris
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