Is it a myth, though? It seems pretty potent as an argument. By all means dissect it and you may ressurect in me the perfect egalitarian I always wanted to be.
This doesn't have much to do with egalitarianism. The concept we're discussing here is called an ESS, an evolutionary stable strategy. Fortunately, these strategies can be calculated through field observation and used to derive equations. We can model mating behavior with game theory to determine how animals (including humans) will behave sexually.)
Ridiculous. What you would get would be genes of males who would be very good at fertilizing eggs, regardless of the "fitness" of said individuals in their own lives. It seems pretty obvious to me that women do heavy selecting, preying for men that can be competent at providing them with the best support they must have when they do give birth. And it seems obvious to me that men insist on the monogamy of their wifes to assure their offspring is really theirs.
Okay, let's start with a definition of fitness off Wikipedia because I can't be arsed to dig out my textbooks.
Fitness (often denoted w in population genetics models) is a central idea in evolutionary theory. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype. In either case, it describes the ability to both survive and reproduce, and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by an average individual of the specified genotype or phenotype. If differences between alleles at a given gene affect fitness, then the frequencies of the alleles will change over generations; the alleles with higher fitness become more common. This process is called natural selection.
An individual's fitness is manifested through its phenotype. As phenotype is affected by both genes and environment, the fitnesses of different individuals with the same genotype are not necessarily equal, but depend on the environment in which the individuals live. However, since the fitness of the genotype is an averaged quantity, it will reflect the reproductive outcomes of all individuals with that genotype.
Inclusive fitness differs from individual fitness by including the ability of an allele in one individual to promote the survival and/or reproduction of other individuals that share that allele, in preference to individuals with a different allele. One mechanism of inclusive fitness is kin selection.
Got that? Fitness is a mathematical outcome measure. It doesn't mean you're big and muscular or that you maintain a harem of loving wives. It just measures your ability to pass on your genes, whether through your own children or your siblings'.
So, step one:
What you would get would be genes of males who would be very good at fertilizing eggs, regardless of the "fitness" of said individuals in their own lives
Exactly! Exactly! This is
a key component of fitness. You can be a scrawny weakling with poor eyesight and bad complexion, but if your sperm are kickass, you may come ahead in the fitness race.
And in fact if you examine human sperm this is just what you find. Our sperm are designed to outrace other sperm, even, in some postulated cases, to fight and block them.
For a quick mathematical proof of this you can look at other species, like the ground squirrel. The size of testicles in these species scales
with the average number of mates the FEMALES have. This is because the males need a load of sperm to compete. So powerful is this mechanism that in some ground squirrels the testicles physically drag on the earth.
Evolution is an arms race. Females want to mate sleep around. Males generally want to stop them. Thus you find traits such as:
Sperm competition has led to other adaptations such as larger ejaculates, prolonged copulation, deposition of a copulatory plug to prevent the female re-mating, or the application of pheromones that reduce the female's attractiveness
read more heah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_fitness It seems pretty obvious to me that women do heavy selecting, preying for men that can be competent at providing them with the best support they must have when they do give birth.
Female choice is indeed a powerful part of evolution, but it's not
solo female choice. Take the case of birds, who are statistically far more loyal to their mates than humans or pretty much any mammal. The female will go for the most evolutionarily fit male it can get. And then,
even in this paragon of monogamy, the female will then attempt to sneak out of the nest and mate with other males too - because that strategy results in higher fitness for the female.
The male will, as you said, attempt to control this behavior. This is why men get so controlling about female sexuality, and why we end up with people who think it's somehow a problem for women to enjoy sex.
But there are also documented human societies where the belief arose that every child had more than one father. Each mother would maintain a stable of husband, each of whom would support all the mother's children. These societies have been best documented in the Amazon and may represent a relic of early human social structures.
The fact that females carry the large ova provides the biological incentive for them to be what we so derisively term sluts.
I really don't see how. As fact, it seems to me, rather the opposite, women get to be extremely selective of any sperm that gets inside her.
Exactly - but the very fact that they can be selective
within themselves (and they can) provides the incentive for them to get a lot of sperm inside! The womb demands a buffet so it can select the fittest fertilizer. Thus the biological drive for women to sleep around every bit as much as men.
Yes, that also happens. But the alpha males are very successful too, and mythical. Thus the result is you have lots of effeminate males pretending to be alpha males for social recognition, i.e., being "slutty" is good for their reputation.
Again you're talking out of folk logic. When you actually do the math you can calculate how well the alpha strategy pays off. And it rapidly tails off when the group becomes cognitively eusocial.
I never said that. I said there is clearly a bias in these movies. All these activities are "kinky", but they are men fantasies, and they are pervasive, ubiquituous.
Then how do you respond to the women who enjoy porn and to the link I posted arguing that porn can be valuable and beneficial to women?
**** I said myself that most porn is boring, mechanical, and problematic because it's clearly shot from a male gaze, but that doesn't render the acts of group sex, facials or anal somehow inherently wrong, which is the whole point I'm contending here. Are you conceding that or what?
Like I said, once you're in a loving comfortable relationship that allows you to explore these things, you'll learn to shed the fears involved and to treat sex behaviors like flavors of ice cream. It doesn't mean you need to start getting pegged in the ass, but it also means you can stop going into moral panic mode every time you think about a woman enjoying anal.
Really Battuta, grow the **** up before teaching the mass to the priest, mkay?
Bro I think you're missing a key point here, I'll let you read around until you spot it
Um, I wonder if you're having English language difficulties. Statistical arguments and logical arguments are completely different. A statistical argument is based on data gathered empirically. A logical argument is based on derivation from first principles using established rules.
If you believe that, then you are a frequentist. I'm deeply sorry for you.
Describe to me the empirical utility of an ANOVA test and explain in less than 500 words when it should be used instead of a linear regression model.
The foundation of science, especially social science, is the use of unbiased, unskewed samples to draw conclusions about a population. You can't reject the value of empirical data without rejecting science.
