Evolutionary psychology: an affront to feminism?

[RainDog]

6. We evolved in communities

Last edited Thu Apr 17, 2014, 04:33 PM - Edit history (2)

So we are social animals - not singular reproductive units of harem or nuclear family, etc. Tho, as an essential feature, we have genes with their own self-preserving ends - but those genes don't have to belong to the person who carries them - they can also belong to someone related to them. Beyond that, whoever, within that genetic soup, who has those genes has to survive long enough to reproduce them.

In order to succeed in a community, cooperative behaviors would be selected - since we know that ostracism is the most important way communities deal with those who try to take advantage for their own selfish ends - and ostracism would mean near-certain death. On the other hand, selfishness has its purposes, too - because it also exists and allows some to benefit at the expense of others. We see both behaviors. Both behaviors can exist in the same person - and they will be demonstrated depending upon a circumstance. So, yes, examining our own cultures to see how we behave is a better approach than saying "my genes, or x or y chromosome made me do it." We have symbolic thought - so some people will sacrifice themselves for the good of the community (large-scale war) - but they generally have relatives within that community - so this "selflessness" derives from that initial reproductive impulse.

Homosexuality is understood as an adaptation in this way - it's often good for a group to have some who are not interested in reproduction because they are aunts or uncles who contribute to the well being of nieces or nephews.

Difficult environments do not benefit from males producing large amts of offspring - it's wasted female energy to conceive and not survive - the female or the offspring. If homosexuality was not a positive adaptation, it would not have survived. This is within the realm of extremes - either completely one or the other sexual attraction - while, as Kinsey noted - we all exist on a continuum of sexuality - and have the capacity to express behaviors based upon our circumstances/environment. But there is a genetic component to homosexuality according to our understanding of "the selfish gene" as the unit of reproduction - not the organism.

Men with more older male siblings make up 15% of the homosexual population - whether the siblings were raised together or independently. Males, rather than females, put a greater ecological burden on a community, because they can create more offspring within shorter time frames. A significant proportion of women with more than one homosexual son have one x chromosome that is active while the other is not...so, again, this could be viewed as a sort of cooperation at the genetic level - totally not conscious - that contributes to community/family survival - and demonstrates homosexuality is not choice (as religious believers state). Instead, it is a positive communal adaptation - with genetic origins. Of course, other cultures have recognized this in two spirits and India's "third sex" gender. Women who conceive in stressful circumstances are more likely to miscarry if they have a male fetus. Again, an overabundance of males in an environment where basic survival is questioned would put further stress on an entire community because of carrying capacity for a particular environment.

I was thinking, too, about the way people (mostly men) had speculated about human societies of the past - and it's apparent that so many of those speculations simply reproduced the conditions in which the scientists lived, not necessarily any ancestor. I'm thinking about Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Later, Owen Lovejoy had a "provisioning theory" that claimed men went out and brought home the bacon for women - both are reproductions in their speculations of 1950s and 60s (mostly white) U.S. culture. So anytime you read about this subject, you have to take into account the blinders of culture.

We understand, now, that divisions of labor based upon gender/sex are not set in stone in our closest primate relatives, nor in the remaining hunter/gather societies in existence that are looked at as shadows of the past - hunter/gathers have entire groups, including lactating females, going on hunts together, some have more division of labor - and their physical environments/prey are different.

Chimpanzee troops have females that hunt with males - tho males do do the majority of hunting (that occurs in groups).

People think canine teeth are about meat eating - but, in humans and the two chimpanzee species all hunt - and, interestingly hunts now are for smaller prey, like those that occurred in proto-human environments, in both chimps and human communities. Small prey, not the big game that has often been the historical stereotype - is the focus of the hunts (and they take out juveniles, overwhelmingly... which means they don't destroy their source of meat b/c the adult females of the prey will become fertile immediately after - but the current argument is that after homo sapiens came into open areas with more advanced tools - they did create extinctions... changes.)

Canine teeth in common chimps are used to control females for reproduction. In human and proto-human - (millions of y/a, shortly after the split from pan), and in bonobos - who evolved separately from common chimps after the three split, teeth do not demonstrate this controlling behavior. So, in two of the three most closest genetically related, two have female "choice." So, you have to wonder if common chimps evolved this trait independently of their more peaceful (within their communities), egalitarian bonobo and human cousins. We share some traits with bonobos, genetically, that they do not share with common chimps, and we share some traits with common chimps, genetically, that we don't share with bonbos - but in terms of sexual selection - we're more like bonobos than common chimps.

Our canine teeth are most like bonobo canine teeth - not common chimpanzees. Bonobos, as we know, use cooperative and soothing behaviors, rather than aggression, to maintain cohesion - and have females with power within the community - and sex is not controlled by males - it's used for community soothing. But they're far more promiscuous than humans, based upon the size of male testes. Our canine teeth, tho, would lend strength to the idea of matrilineal structures, not just patrilineal ones, as important markers of our past, and our long history of cooperation within a community, rather than the simplistic "all competition, all the time" view.

...which gets to that thought I had about social structures via forms of marriage in present day societies, and older ones. It's about social power, not gender, b/c both genders have power in social set ups that are predicated upon control of wealth. Polygamous societies, whether it's males or females with multiple spouses, are about protection of wealth - and the group that marries is most likely a set of brothers or sisters - so that, too, is about protection of wealth - iow - two families cooperate to provide for their children's well being by having all offspring related to the other spouses in varying degrees - this is the most common version of polygamy.

Wealth, not gender, is the issue for such arrangements.

I mention this, too, because the sometimes popular fantasy of human males as gorillas with harems, or males as humans with harems, isn't about unrelated females, for the most part. It's not about male choice or variety, but family cooperation. That's not the common conception of the idea of harems. This family cooperation is played out later with concubines - who did not have the status of the marriage based upon power maintenance and the children of such arrangements were not accorded the benefits their half-siblings received. But the reality, too, is that the majority of males in such communities don't get any benefit from such arrangements - most males would have to sneak to try to impregnate a female - most would not have their own harems - they would be the worker bees for males, rather than a "queen bee."

Genetically - you could argue that wealth-sharing, instead of hoarding by a few, leads to more robust communities - and maybe that's one reason revolutions occur - if those with power/wealth horde the same - it's to the benefit of most males and females to overthrow that power and share the wealth among themselves. And the studies that indicate democracies with more economic equality are more stable - because they offer more upward mobility seems to reinforce this - while societies with educated people who are denied autonomy and kept in second-class status are the ones most likely to have revolutions - currently and in the past.

Which gets back to your remark about looking at ourselves within our cultures. It was pretty amazing, imo, in its time, for Engels to think outside of the dominant paradigm of Victorian culture to imagine societies in which females exhibited power-holding apart from a male - or to theorize about the rise of capitalism as a form of hoarding that was centered around control of females to the exclusion of other males. Of course the west had had hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures - but they were, for the most part, deemed "inferior" rather than simply expressions of a continuum of possible human social structures.

What gained currency at the time was a misapplied, misunderstood "natural selection" turned into social darwinism - which was, not coincidentally, put forth by those who already had power within western societies and distorted and abused science for its own selfish purpose - to justify its horrid treatment of the mass immigration of poor people from rural to urban areas to work in factories, etc.

Just like we see now in statements from wealthy (Republican) members of this society who justify their treatment of others without the social clout to demand a more economically equitable society. This is why I see social upheaval/conflict as inevitable if our nation continues on its current economic course - people will not stand for this indefinitely - the issue is if they understand who and what is causing them harm - and it's not those below them or at their level of economic status in society.