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The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 180
"I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right: Murder is "natural " in the sense that our ape relatives commit it regularly, as apparently did our human ancestors: Prejudice, hate, violence, cruelty—all are more or less part of our nature, and all can be effectively countered by the right kind of nurture: Nature is not inflexible but malleable: Moreover, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others: Evolution does not lead to Utopia: It leads to a land in which what is best for one man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man. One or the other will be condemned to an "unnatural" fate: That is the essence of message: In the pages that follow I will again and again be trying to guess what is " natural" for humanity: Perhaps my own moral prejudices will occasionally intrude as wishful thinking, but they will do so unconsciously. And even where I am wrong about human nature, I am not wrong that there is such a nature to be sought..."
There is another book of Matt Ridley that describe his views about the classic debate of nature vs. nurture which is also a suggested lecture. I read it a couple of years ago on a printed version and was an enjoyable book.When dealing with human morals is always safe to take some warnings, and here we are dealing with two polemical issues, moral and nature vs nurture debates.
Any way the lecture is witty and clear, somehow shallow when explaining some examples. Anyway it helps like an introduction to the debate, and think how to understand us. Read the whole book, enjoy the quotes here.
Reference:
Ridley, M. (1994). The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) (p. 416). Penguin. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Red-Queen-Evolution-Penguin/dp/0140167722
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 3
Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 5
thanks to the red squirrel that sometimes scratched at my window while I wrote: I still don ' t know which sex it was.
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Human nature is a product of culture, but culture is also a product of human nature, and both are the products of evolution.
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Laws against racism do have an effect because one of the more appealing aspects of human nature is that people calculate the consequences of their actions: But I am saying that even after a thousand years of strictly enforced laws against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure in the knowledge that racial prejudice is a thing of the past.
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You are born free of sin.
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Every idiot can be father or mother to a genius—and vice versa.
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Most of science is the dry business of discovering how the universe works, how the sun shines, or how plants grow. Most scientists live their lives steeped in how questions, not why questions. But consider for a moment the difference between the question "Why do men fall in love? " and the question "How do men fall in love? " The answer to the second will surely turn out to be merely a matter of plumbing.
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In physics, there is no great difference between a why question and a how question. How does the earth go around the sun? By gravitational attraction. Why does the earth go around the sun? Because of gravity. Evolution, however, causes biology to be a very different game because it includes contingent history.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 21
Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier:"
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Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.
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Marriage teeters on the line between a cooperative venture and a form of mutual exploitation—ask any divorce lawyer.
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Successful marriages so submerge the costs under mutual benefits that the cooperation can predominate; unsuccessful ones do not: This is one of the great recurring themes of human history, the balance between cooperation and conflict.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 43
In the pages that follow you will meet three kinds of scientists. The first is a molecular biologist, muttering about enzymes and exonucleolytic degradation. He wants to know what happens to the DNA of which genes are made. His conviction is that sex is all about repairing DNA or some such molecular engineering. He does not understand equations, but he loves long words, usually ones he and his colleagues have invented: The second is a geneticist, all mutations and Mendelism. He will be obsessed with describing what happens to genes during sex. He will demand experiments, such as depriving organisms of sex for many generations to see what happens: Unless you stop him, he will start writing equations and talking of "linkage disequilibria: " The third is an ecologist, all parasites and polyploidy: He loves comparative evidence: which species has sex and which does not: He knows a plethora of extraneous facts about the arctic and the tropics. His thinking is a little less rigorous than others, his language a little more colorful: His natural habitat is the graph, his occupation the computer simulation.
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moleclar biologists, genetecists, and ecologist explained!
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The geneticists, too, are obsessed with damaged DNA. But whereas the molecular biologists concentrate on the damage that is repaired, the geneticists talk about the damage that cannot be repaired. They call this "mutation. "
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For many years geneticists concentrated on good mutations and viewed sex as a way of distributing them among the population,
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The most obvious reason to borrow genes is to benefit from the ingenuity of others as well as yourself.
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Sex disobeys that great injunction: "If it ain't broke, don 't fix it." Sex increases randomness."
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Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average:'
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The struggle for existence never gets easier.
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However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches.,
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Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.
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" Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, " you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing: " " A slow sort of country! " said the Queen. " Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place: If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! "20 "A new evolutionary law, " wrote Van Valen, who sent a man-uscript to each of the most prestigious scientific journals, only to see it rejected. Yet his claim was justified. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature has become a great personage in the biological court. And nowhere has she won a greater reputation than in theories of sex.
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Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes.
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The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.
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Just as every plant is perpetually under attack from insects, so every animal is a seething mass of hungry bacteria waiting for an opening. There may be more bacterial than human cells in the object you proudly call " your " body. There may be more bacteria in and on you as you read this than there are human beings in the whole world.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 67
Parasites are touted as the prime movers in the evolution of sex, promising a final solution to that problem of problems."
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Parasites have a deadlier effect than predators for two reasons. One is that there are more of them. Human beings have no predators except great white sharks and one another, but they have lots of parasites:
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advantage will always be swinging from one to the other: The more dire the emergency for one, the better it will fight: This is truly the world of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, where you never win, you only gain a temporary respite.
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" There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence:'°
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But these are all hints from natural history, not careful scientific experiments.
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(that is, a fish that stores its genes in triplicate, like a bureaucrat).
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Men are not redundant after all; they are woman 's insurance policy against her children being wiped out by influenza and smallpox (if that is a consolation).
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Genes, like people, have other things to do than kill each other.
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crossing over is like an elephant repellent. You know it 's working because you don ' t see any elephants."
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Gender is a bureaucratic solution to an antisocial habit.
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Treat the wasps with an antibiotic and, to and behold, two genders reappear among the offspring. Penicillin cures virgin birth:"
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 129
Sons inherit the status necessary for successful breeding; daughters have to buy it.
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Unlike the female, though, the male has a residual uncertainty. How does he know that he is the father of the eggs in the mound? The answer, discovered recently by Australian scientists, is that he does not know and, in fact, is often not the father. So why does he build vast mounds to raise other males ' offspring when the whole point of sexual reproduction is for his genes to find a way into the next generation? It turns out that the female is not allowed to lay an egg in the mound until she has agreed to mate with the male; that is his price for the use of the mound. Her price is that he must then accept an egg. It is a fair bargain.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 132
IS LOVE RATIONAL? It is sometimes hard even for biologists to remember that sex is merely a genetic joint venture: The process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective: We do not regard any and all members of the opposite sex as adequate partners for genetic joint venture. We consciously decide whether to consider people, we fall in love despite ourselves, we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 133
Indeed, according to sexual selection theory, it is the female 's fault that the male has such a ridiculous tail at all: Males evolved long tails to charm females: Females evolved the ability to be charmed to be sure of picking the best males.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 138
Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males. That much is now uncontroversial: Thus far Darwin was right.
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The question Darwin failed to answer was why: Why on earth should females prefer gaudiness in males?
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A hen pheasant, for example, who will get no help from a cock in rearing her young, happily chooses to ignore a nearby cock who is unmated to join the harem of a cock who already has several wives:
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The characteristic of the lek is that one or a few males, usually those that display near its center, achieve most of the matings: But the central position of a successful male is not the cause of his success so much as the consequence: Other males gather around him:
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 145
earlier—the fact that if the best genetic cream of the cream is taken off each generation, there will soon be no separability left in the cream. Mutational bias keeps turning some,of the cream back into milk."
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If the goal is to have the sexiest son in the next generation, then one way of doing that is to mate with the sexiest male; a second way is to prevent other females from mating with the sexiest male.
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It is hardly surprising to find that the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well; it does not prove that females are seeking good genes for their offspring. They might be avoiding feeble males lest they catch a virus from them: Nor do such observations damage the idea that the most important thing a sexy male can pass on to his sons is his sexiness—the Fisher idea.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 160
It is better to be fooled into buying the second-best ice cream than go to the bother of educating yourself to resist the salesmanship.
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Truth in advertising concludes that females will discover a cheating seducer; dishonest manipulation concludes that males will seduce females against their better judgment.
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It is better to let herself be seduced by a good one than to have the best become the enemy of the good. After all, if she cannot easily distinguish the truthful from the dishonest badge of quality, then other females will not, either, and so her sons will not be punished for any dishonesty they inherit from their father."
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 164
Monkeys and apes are the only mammals with good color vision: Therefore, it is not surprising that they are the only mammals decorated with bright colors such as blue and pink. Likewise, it is hardly remarkable that snakes, which are deaf, do not sing to each other. (They hiss to scare hearing creatures:) Indeed, one could list a whole panoply of "peacocks ' tails" for each of the five senses and more: the peacock 's tail for vision, the nightingale's song for hearing, the scent of the musk deer for smell;" the pheromones of the moth for taste; the "morphological exuberance "
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 165
Each species chooses to exploit the senses that its females are best at detecting. This is, in a sense, to return to Darwin 's original idea: that females have aesthetic senses, for whatever reason, and that those senses shape male ornaments."
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courtship of guppies and is especially interested in the colors adopted by male guppies: Fish have magnificent color vision; whereas we use three different types of color-detecting cells in the eye (red, blue, and green), fish have four, and birds have up to seven. Compared to the way birds see the world, our lives are mono-chrome.
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Men succeed with women for much more varied and subtle reasons: They are kind or clever or witty or rich or good-looking or just available. Humans are simply not a lekking species. Men do not gather in groups to display for passing women: Most men do not abandon women immediately after copulation: Men are not equipped with gorgeous ornaments or stereotyped courtship rituals, however it may look in the average discotheque.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 174
We learn to direct hunger at hamburgers, anger at delayed trains, and lust at the object of our affection—when appropriate: So we have "changed " our " nature. " Inherited tendencies permeate everything we do, and they are flexible. There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature: To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience: The study
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For a man, women are vehicles that can carry his genes into the next generation. For a woman, men are sources of a vital substance (sperm) that can turn their eggs into embryos. For each gender the other is a sought-after resource to be exploited:
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the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery: It is at least possible to rule out some options.
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Most people live in monogamous societies, but this may only tell us what democracy usually prescribes, not what human nature seeks: Relax the antipolygamy laws and it flourishes.
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Throughout history powerful men have usually had more than one mate each, even if they have had only one legitimate wife: However, that is for the powerful: For the rest, even in openly polygamous societies, most men have only one wife and virtually all women have only one husband: That leaves us precisely nowhere. Mankind is a polygamist and a monogamist, depending on the circumstances.
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Although research has modified this supposition, it is nonetheless true that males are generally seducers and females the seduced: Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about 99 percent of all animal species, including our closest relatives, the apes.
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In more human terms, men can father another child just about every time they copulate with a different woman, whereas women can bear the child of only one man at a time: It is a fair bet that Casanova left more descendants than the Whore of Babylon.
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I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right: Murder is "natural " in the sense that our ape relatives commit it regularly, as apparently did our human ancestors: Prejudice, hate, violence, cruelty—all are more or less part of our nature, and all can be effectively countered by the right kind of nurture: Nature is not inflexible but malleable: Moreover, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others: Evolution does not lead to Utopia: It leads to a land in which what is best for one man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man. One or the other will be condemned to an "unnatural" fate: That is the essence of message: In the pages that follow I will again and again be trying to guess what is " natural" for humanity: Perhaps my own moral prejudices will occasionally intrude as wishful thinking, but they will do so unconsciously. And even where I am wrong about human nature, I am not wrong that there is such a nature to be sought
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 185
"Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy 's third wife than Bozo the Clown's first?"
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The surprising conclusion of game theory is therefore that males, despite their active role in seduction, may be largely passive spectators at their marital fate.
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People cannot be adapted to the present or the future; they can only be adapted to the past.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 191
features that are universal among modern humans of all-cultures: a pair bond as an institution in which to rear children, romantic love, jealousy and sexually induced male-male violence, a female preference for men of high status, a male preference for young females, warfare between bands, and so on.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 192
Our brains grew so big not to make tools but to psychologize one another. The lesson of socioecology is that our mating system is determined not by ecology but by other people—by members of the same gender and by members of the other gender. It is the need to outwit and dupe and help and teach one another that drove us to be ever more intelligent.
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Power is, roughly speaking, the ability to call upon allies to do your bidding, and that depended strictly on wealth (with a little help from violence):
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Wealth, cunning, political skill, and experience lead to power among men. From Hannibal to Bill Clinton, men gain power by putting together coalitions of allies.
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Therefore, the more polygamous a society, the more likely it will show male-biased inheritance:
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that proves nothing: It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen. There is a cautionary tale that scientists tell one another about a man who cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that fleas ' ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right; fleas ' ears are in their legs:
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If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and reward of violence. This is presumably the reason that the early Church became so obsessed with matters of sex.
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One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence.
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There is a tradition in anthropology that you should not believe what people tell you, so Chagnon was ridiculed for believing them. Or as he puts it, "You are allowed to admit the stomach as a source of war but not the gonads.
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" Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above: "
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SHEPHERD: Echo, I ween, will in the wood reply, And quaintly answer questions: shall I try? ECHO: Try: What must we do our passion to express? Press: How shall I please her who never loved before? Be Fore: What most moves women when we them address? A dress: Say, what can keep her chaste whom I adore? A door. If music softens rocks, love tunes my lyre: Liar. Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her? Buy her. —Jonathan Swift, À Gentle Echo on Woman
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It is our usual monogamy, not our occasional polygamy, that sets us apart from other mammals, including apes: Of
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If men are opportunists-polygamists at heart, as I argued in the last chapter, then where does marriage come from? Although men are fickle ("You 're afraid of commitment, aren 't you? " says the stereotypical victim of a seducer), they are also interested in finding wives with whom to rear families and might well be very set on stick-ing by them despite their own infidelity ( "You 're never going to leave your wife for me, are you? " says the stereotypical mistress). The two goals are contradictory only because women are not prepared to divide themselves neatly into wives and whores.
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Broadly speaking, the social pattern of female monkeys and apes is determined by the distribution of their food, while the social pattern of males is determined by the distribution of females.
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The best strategy for a male bonobo intent on genetic eternity is to eat his greens, get a good night 's sleep, and prepare for a long day of fornication."
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A female human being does not have to share her sexual favors with many males to prevent infanticide, but she may have a good reason to share them with one well-chosen male apart from her husband.
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The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography: Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous: None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear, offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.
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Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good territory and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbor. This theory is supported by the facts: Females always choose more dominant, older, or more "attractive" (that is, ornamented) lovers than their husbands; they do not have affairs with bachelors (presumably rejects) but with other females ' husbands; and they sometimes incite competition between potential lovers and choose the winners. Male swallows
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When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door.' In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings: It is called having your cake and eating it, too:
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 229
Ache women are constantly preparing for the possibility that they will be deserted by their husbands. They are building up alternative relationships and are more likely to be unfaithful if the marriage is going badly. That is, of course, a double-edged sword: The marriage could break up because the affair is discovered:''
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Only our absurdly parochial anthropocentrism has allowed us to think that silent ovulation is special.
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Women will often be competing with women: SPARROW FIGHTS It is this competition between females that provides the final clue to the reason adultery, rather than polygamy, has probably been the most common way for men to have many mates.
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In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, not their mistresses.
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Most males are monogamous. Polygamy is prevented by wives who resent sharing their husbands lest they also share his contributions to child rearing. Even though they could bring up the children unaided, the husband 's paycheck is invaluable. But the ban on polygamous marriage does not prevent the males from seeking polygamous matings. Adultery is common. It is most common between high-ranking males and females of all ranks. To prevent it males try to guard their wives, are extremely violent toward their wives ' lovers, and copulate with their wives frequently, not just when they are fertile.
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In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives ' vaginas:"
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As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity. If he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives: Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones: As Othello learned, even the suspicion of infidelity is enough to drive a man to such rage that he may kill his wife.
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self-esteem, they say, and emotional dependency. Indeed it does, and that is exactly what the evolutionary theory would predict. A man held in low esteem by his wife is exactly the kind of person in danger of being cuckolded, for she has the motive to seek a better father for her children. This may even explain the extraordinary and hitherto baffling fact that husbands of rape victims are more likely to be traumatized and, despite themselves, to resent their raped wives if the wife was not physically hurt during the rape: Physical hurt is evidence of her resistance: Husbands may have been programmed by evolution to be paranoidly suspicious that their wives were not raped at all, or "asked for it.'
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" in terms of the marital status of the woman. Whether the adulterous man was himself married is irrelevant. "" And they do so because "it is not adultery per se that the law punishes but only the possible introduction of alien children into the family and even the uncertainty that adultery creates in this regard: Adultery by the husband has no such consequences.
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His wife could not give her baby daughter to a wet nurse and be ready to bear another in the hope of its being a son, and he could not make love to his wife "for three weeks at Easter, four weeks at Christmas, and one to seven weeks at Pentecost; plus Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—days for penance or sermons; plus miscellaneous feast days:"
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There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men 's wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbor 's wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, plows and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity:
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Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man: It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon 's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard: Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes. Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history:
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Just like meadow voles, men are better at spatial tasks than women: When asked to compare the shapes of two objects seen from different angles and judge whether they are the same shape or to judge whether two glasses of different shape are equally full or any such task that involves spatial judgments, men generally do better than women: Polygamy and spatial skills seem to go together in several species.
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How can we strive to build an equal society when men are given " scientific " support for their sexism? Give men an inch of inequality and they will claim a mile of bias.
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Of the many mental features that are claimed to be different between the sexes, four stand out as repeatable, real, and persistent in all psychological tests. First, girls are better at verbal tasks: Second, boys are better at mathematical tasks. Third, boys are more aggressive. Fourth, boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood—on average.' (And, interestingly, gay men are more like women than heterosexual men in some of these respects.)
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It is impossible in the end to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be without some basis in biology—or vice versa: Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it: (An exception may be aggressiveness, which develops more in boys despite frequent parental discouragement:)
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It would be easy to engineer a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women: Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones, and the result would be men and women with normal bodies but identical feminine brains: War, rape, box-ing, car racing, pornography, and hamburgers and beer would soon be distant memories: A feminist paradise would have arrived: SUGAR AND SPICE
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Women clean house in a kibbutz because, like women everywhere, they complain that men would not do it properly. Men do not clean house in a kibbutz because, like men everywhere, they complain that if they did, their wives would say it had not been done properly.
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So feminism itself is anything but egalitarian: Feminists argue explicitly that if more women were in charge, more caring values would prevail: They begin from the presumption that women are by nature different beings: If women ran the world, there would be no war: When women run companies, cooperation, not competition, is the watchword: These are all explicit and firm assertions of sexism: that the personalities and natures of women are different from men. If women ' s personalities are different, is it not likely that they will prove better or worse at certain jobs than men? Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not:
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If social pressure is as powerful as social scientists would have us believe, then a person 's nature is irrelevant; only his or her background counts: A man from a broken home who has led a life of crime is the product of that experience, and there is no spark of decent "nature" in his soul to redeem: Of course we scoff at such nonsense: We recognize him to be a product of both his background and his nature: It is the same with sex differences: To say that Western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man 's career is to patronize women: Politics is all about status-seeking ambition, which many women have a healthy cynicism about: Women have their own minds: They are capable of deciding to enter politics if they want to, whatever society says (and Western society, if anything, now affirms that they should). One of the things that make a political career uninviting may well be the sexism of those around them, but it is absurd to assume it is the only thing.
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If in the Pleistocene period men went off from the home base on long hunts while women went a shorter distance to gather plants, then maybe men are mentally better suited to long commutes. But neither is evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day and talk into a telephone or sit at a factory bench all day tightening screws: The fact that " work" became a male thing and "home " a female one is an accident of history: The domestication of cattle and the invention of the plow made food gathering a task that benefited from male muscle power: In societies: where the land is tilled by hand, women do most of the work: The industrial revolution reinforced the trend, but the post industrial revolution—the recent growth of service industries—is reversing it again: Women are going " out to work" again as they did when they sought tubers and berries in the Pleistocene period."
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But there is no general support in biology for sexism about careers: Indeed, in a curious way, an evolutionary perspective justifies affirmative action more than a more egalitarian philosophy would, for it implies that women have different ambitions and even more than different abilities.
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The evidence suggests that women are on average slightly better than men at running countries.
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(the people who are good at getting to the top are not necessarily the people who are best at doing the job)
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Camille Paglia, literary critic and gadfly, is one of the few who sees that feminism is trying an impossible trick: to change the nature of men while insisting that the nature of women is unchangeable. She argues that men are not closet women and women are not 2 closet men: "Wake up," she cries. "Men and women are different."
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Fed on different diets, two identical twins will grow to different heights. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both: The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing.
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Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism: Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous.
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Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as they are of women; often more so: If men are sexual predators, it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be: In the words of one psychologist, "Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them:""
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We would expect, therefore, that while women pay attention to cues of wealth and power, men pay attention to cues of health and youth.
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People lower their expectations according to their age, looks, and wealth:
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romance novel and pornography represent the respective utopian fantasies of the two sexes.
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the consumer-driven selective forces of a free market (which have shaped the historically stable contrasts between male-oriented pornography and female-oriented romance novels), the ethnographic record on human sexuality, and the ineluctable implications of an evolutionary perspective on our species, taken together, imply the existence of a profound sex difference in sexual psychology:" This is a far more enlightened view than the peculiarly uncharitable assumption among the politically correct that the reason women are not more turned on by nudity and pornography is that they are repressed:
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Men are promiscuous opportunists at heart and in their fantasies:
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A sports car and an expense account can turn a frog into a prince for women, but even a rich woman cannot afford to be ugly (although in these times of cosmetic surgery, she can sometimes afford the means not to be ugly):
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So man's choosiness reflects once more the fact that man does indeed form a pair bond and invest in his young, unlike some of his undiscriminating ape cousins: It is a legacy of his past monogamy: Choose well, for it may be the only chance you will get.
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The fact that men do prefer twenty-year-olds adds one piece of evidence to the theory that a Pleistocene man, like a rpodern man, married for life.
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Sexism is the sister of racism. I confess to being baffled by this. I think it is easy and, given the evidence, rational to believe that the differences between the natures of men of different races are trivial, while the differences between the natures of men and women of the same race are considerable. Not that racial and cultural differences cannot exist. Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind: But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely:
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It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."
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People seem to forget easily that the word is is different from the word should: If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder. But we should be clear that we are redressing a difference, not discovering an identity. Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex:
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They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one 's closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it: (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with
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They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one 's closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it: (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with
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They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one 's closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it: (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with strangers.)
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strangers.)
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strangers.)
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strangers.)
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Lifelong friendships are formed, but marriages between fellow kibbutz children are very rare.
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it has been well known that animals do not learn anything and everything; they learn what their brains " want" to learn: Men are instinctively attracted to women thanks to the interaction of their genes and hormones, but that tendency is much influenced in a critical period by role models, peer pressure, and free will: There is learning, but there are predispositions.
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men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa, and for good reason: Youth and health are better clues to women's value as a mate and potential mother than to a man's: Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.
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Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family: But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive:"
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Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa:
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Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure, and face.
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,Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty—face, youth, and figure: But in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men. 28 The single exception is height: Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men: In the world of dating agencies, the principle that a man must be taller than his date is so universal that it has been called "the cardinal principle of date selection: "
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In a monogamous society a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a "chief, " and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions.
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(Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the "Coolidge effect ": a new female refreshes his libido: The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being shown around a farm. Learning that a cockerel could have sex dozens of times a day, Mrs: Coolidge said: " Please tell that to the president. " On being told, Mr. Coolidge asked, "Same hen every time? " "Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time. " The president continued: " Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.")
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Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do:''
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As Charles Darwin put it, "If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.
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The depressing part of Darwin 's insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness: Sexual selection, Red Queen—style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving,
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It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already.
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"How did she manage to catch him? " we ask of a high-flying man married to an ugly woman.
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intriguing thing is what made the big-brained people likely to have more children than the small-brained ones. After all, as a diverse array of observers from Charles Darwin to Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, have noted with regret, clever people are not noticeably more prolific breeders than stupid people.
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There was a time when it was easy to define what made humans different from other animals: Humans had learning; animals had instincts: Humans used tools; animals did not: Humans had language; animals did not. Humans had consciousness; animals did not: Humans had culture; animals did not: Humans had self-awareness; animals did not. Gradually these differences have been blurred or shown to be differences in degree rather than in kind: Snails learn: Finches use tools. Dolphins use language: Dogs are conscious: Orangutans recognize themselves in mirrors: Japanese macaques pass on cultural tricks: Elephants mourn their dead: This is not to say that all animals are as good as humans at each of these tasks, but remember that humans were once no better than them and yet they came under sudden pressure to get better and better, while animals did not. A well-trained humanist is already scoffing at such sophistry: Only people can make tools as well as use them. Only people can use grammar as well as vocabulary: Only people can empathize as well as feel emotion: But this sounds uncannily like special pleading. I find the instinctive arrogance of the human sciences thoroughly unconvincing because so many of its bastions have already fallen to the champions of animals: Beaten back from position after position, the humanists simply pretend they never intended to hold them in the first place and THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME ::: 3I3 ::: redefine the retreat as tactical: Almost all discussions of consciousness assume a priori that it is a uniquely human feature when it is patently obvious to anybody who has ever kept a dog that the average dog can dream, feel sad or glad, and recognize individual people; to call it an unconscious automaton is perverse. THE MYTH OF LEARNING At this point the humanist usually retreats to his strongest bastion: learning: The human, he says, is uniquely flexible in his behavior, adapting to skyscrapers, deserts, coal mines, and tundra with equal ease: That is because he learns far more than animals and relies on instincts far less. Learning how the world is rather than simply arriv-ing in it with a fully formed program for survival is a superior strategy, but it demands a bigger brain: Therefore, the bigger brain of the human reflects a shift away from instinct and toward learning. Like just about everybody else who has ever thought about these things, I found such logic impeccable until I read a chapter in a book called The Adapted Mind by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara.' They set out to challenge the conventional wisdom, which has dominated psychology and most other social sciences for many decades, that instinct and learning are opposite ends of a spectrum, that an animal that relies on instincts does not rely on learning and vice versa. This simply is not so. Learning implies plasticity, whereas instinct implies preparedness. So, for example, in learning the vocabulary of her native language, a child is almost infinitely plastic. She can learn that the word for a cow is vache or cow or any other word. And likewise in knowing that she must blink or duck when a ball approaches her face at speed, a child would not need to have plasticity at all. To have to learn such a reflex would be painful. So the blink reflex is prepared, and the vocabulary store in her brain is plastic: But she did not learn that she needed a vocabulary store. She was born with it and with an acute curiosity to learn the names
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In other words, it is hard to conceive how people can learn (be plastic) without sharing assumptions (being prepared). The old idea that plasticity and preparedness were opposites is plainly wrong: The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts: He was ridiculed for this, but he was right.
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If I am right and people are just animals with more than usually trainable instincts, then it might seem that I am excusing instinctive :behavior. When a man kills another man or tries to seduce a woman, he is just being true to his nature: What a bleak, amoral message. Surely there is a more natural basis for morality in the human psyche than that? The centuries-old debate between the followers of Rousseau and Hobbes—whether we are corrupted noble savages or civilized brutes—has missed the point: We are instinctive brutes, and some of our instincts are unsavory: Of course some instincts are very much more moral, and the vast human capacity for altruism and generosity—the glue that has always held society together—is just as natural as any selfishness.
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None of our instincts is inevitable; none is insuperable. Morality is never based upon nature. It never assumes that people are angels or that the things it asks human beings to do come naturally. "Thou shalt not kill " is not a gentle reminder but a fierce injunction to men to overcome any instincts they may have or face punishment.
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Just because language is acquired after birth does not means that it is cultural. Teeth are also acquired after birth.
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No wonder social science is irredeemably wedded to the notion that nothing in human behavior is "innate, " for things do vary greatly between cultures, do develop after birth, and are plainly flexible. Therefore, the mechanisms of the human mind cannot be innate. Everything must be cultural. The reason men find young women more sexually attractive than old women must be that their culture teaches them subtly to favor youth, not because their ancestors left more descendants if they had an innate preference for youth:' Anthropology 's turn was next. With the publication of Margaret Mead 's Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the discipline was transformed. Mead asserted that sexual and cultural variety was effectively infinite and was therefore the product of nurture: She did little to prove nurture's predominance—indeed, what empirical evidence Mead did adduce was largely, it now seems, wishful thinking'—but she shifted the burden of proof: Mainstream anthropology remains to this day committed to the view that there is only a blank human nature.' Psychology 's conversion was more gradual. Freud believed in universal human mental attributes—such as the Oedipal complex: But his followers became obsessed with trying to explain everything according to individual early childhood influences, and Freudianism came to mean blaming one ' s early nurture for one 's nature: Soon psychologists came to believe that even the mind of an adult was a general-purpose learning device.
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B. F. Skinner. He argued that brains are simply devices for associating any cause with any effect. By the 1950s, looking back at what Nazism had done in the name of nature, few biologists felt inclined to challenge what their human-science colleagues asserted: Yet uncomfortable facts were already appearing. Anthropologists had failed to find the diversity Mead had promised. Freudians had explained very little and altered even less by their appeals to early influences. Behaviorism could not account for the innate preferences of different species of animal to learn different things: Rats are better at running mazes than pigeons. Sociology 's inability to explain or rectify the causes of delinquency was an embarrassment. In the 1970s a few brave " sociobiologists " began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching: Yet the question they had asked has not gone away.'° The principal reason for the hostility, to sociobiology was that it seemed to justify prejudice. Yet this was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars.
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Stephen Jay Gould once caricatured the views of genetic determinists in this way: " If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable: We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change them:'
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Some years later Gould wrote: "Cultural determinism can be just as cruel in attributing severe congenital diseases— autism, for example—to psychobabble about too much parental love, or too little:'
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Almost every scientist who studies language or perception now admits that the brain is equipped with mechanisms, which it did not "learn" from the culture but developed with exposure to the world; these mechanisms specialize in interpreting the signals
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In human beings, 18 percent of the energy that we consume every day is spent in running the brain. That is a mighty costly ornament to stick on top of the body just in case it helps you invent agriculture, just as sex was a mighty costly habit to indulge in merely in case it led to innovation
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Humans became ecologically dominant by virtue of their technical skills, and that made humans the only enemy of humans (apart from parasites). "Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution, "
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It eats the leaves that grow abundantly all around it. But the gorilla 's life is dominated by social problems: The vast majority of its intellectual effort is expended on dominating, submitting to, reading the mood of, and affecting the lives of other gorillas: Likewise, Robinson Crusoe 's life on the desert island was technically fairly straightforward, says Humphrey. " It was the arrival of Man Friday on the scene that really made things difficult for Crusoe.
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" Humphrey suggested that mankind uses his intellect mainly in social situations. "The game of social plot and counter-plot cannot be played merely on the basis of accumulated knowledge, any more than a game of chess can. " A person must calculate the consequences of his own behavior and calculate the likely behavior of others: For that he needs at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that are going through others ' minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.'
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Gossip is one of the most universal of human habits. No conversation between
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people who know each other well—fellow employees, fellow family members, old friends—ever lingers for long on any topic other than the behavior, ambitions, motives, frailties, and affairs of other absent—or present—members of the group: That is the reason the soap opera is the quintessentially effective way to entertain people:"
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Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives, read Proust or Trollope or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with one another 's minds: "Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy, "
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Horace Barlow points out that great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds: Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim: We are clever because we are—and to the extent that we are—natural psychologists:`°
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Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed out that animals use communication principally to manipulate one another rather than to transfer information: A bird sings long and eloquently to persuade a female to mate with him or a rival to keep clear of his territory: If he were merely passing on information, he need not make the song so elaborate: Animal communication, said Dawkins and Krebs, is more like human advertising than like airline timetables: Even the most mutually beneficial communication, like that between a mother and a baby, is pure manipulation, as every mother who has been woken in the night by a desperate-sounding infant who merely wants company knows: Once scientists had begun thinking in this way, they looked at animal social life in an entirely new light."
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Deceiving and detecting deception would then be the primary reason for intelligence. They suggest that the great apes acquired a unique ability to imagine alternative possible worlds as a means to deception.°
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suggestion that alliance building among unrelated individuals is a key to success in human beings and that this complication vastly increases the rewards of intellect:
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"Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothing less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions."
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most people are not witty and creative but are dull and predictable.
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An individual is unique because of the genetic variety that sexual reproduction generates in its perpetual chess tournament with disease. An individual is a member of a homogeneous species because of the incessant mixing of that variety in the pool of fellow human beings ' genes. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on.
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the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on.
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It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 348
Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions: But still an ape: Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley | Page: 349
human science is not encouraging. Galton 's eugenics, Freud 's unconscious, Durkheim 's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner 's behaviorism, Piaget 's early learning, and Wilson 's sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my: Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press, " said David Hume: But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before: We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.
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