All Comments on 'A Million Years of Evolution'

Sorry, but this has many flaws in the analysis.

The whole issue is based on female fertility and impregnation. But it ignores small tribal cultures which encourage extra-marital sex when a husband offers his mate to a stranger, due to instinctually needing the genetic diversity in the small tribe. Native Americans, even into the mid-1800s were known to kidnap white settler children and raise them as their own, because they needed to expand their tribal workforce and genetic diversity.

And when a woman is no longer fertile, all of the reasoning to punish her future infidelity goes out the window!

So, no, it's not a million years of evolution, but rather a few thousand years of specific cultures conditioning the males to hate female infidelity. When you remove all risks of pregnancy, the violent jealousy is a cultural thing.

Greetings Lifestyle66 and thanks for the comment. I am sure that there are many flaws in my analysis and even more in the expression of my ideas. I substantially agree with you. I also agree that cultural influences can be strong. Given the efficacy of modern birth control, why do some men nevertheless go berserk anyway? And why do some women? Why do people feel shame and humiliation when their mate cheats? What is the survival benefit of being able to feel humiliation?

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I see the issue as having two axes. Mate guarding is deeply ingrained and instinctive. Even non-verbal animals have it. It rarely drives them to murder. The other is cultural. But why should culture matter?

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This is where I see a second ingrained and instinctive behavior: standing in the tribe. It is culture that defines the expectations of the tribe, but the need to meet those expectations is biological.

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There are tribes where the cultural expectations suppress the mate guarding behavior.

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This is where I am taking other authors to task. They get mate guarding correctly. They sort of get culture. They miss that culture plays into the need for standing. Instead, they treat it as a mishmash of confusing emotions. Those emotions aren’t confusing. They are your gut telling you that you are losing standing. If you lose your tribe, you and your offspring perish. You can get another mate, but where can you get another tribe? That feeling of humiliation is driving you to repair your standing.

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Of course, in modern times, you can get another tribe. However, evolution hasn’t caught up. We are still desperately clinging to standing.

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LW readers like to see themselves as rugged individualists. They aren’t. We are tribesmen, every one of us.

First of all, thank you for the effort and the bravery to post it.

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Second of all, I'm expecting to see the pro-cheating camp (or the smaller pro-swapping one) to either scoff at this - because ignoring evolutionary psychology is a sport for some types of people - or use it to justify opposition to moralistic monogamy "because everyone wants to cheat anyway". Even though that's not a logical conclusion from the posited points even on a simple level, never mind once you look at complexities and second order effects and long tetm.

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Third of all, I'm expecting to see anti-cheating camp to see it as vindication of their position, even though the author actually didn't make moral judgements. Morality is simply a social memetic system a specific tribe/society adopts (and individual members of it, adopt-or-modify) to help govern itself. The value function of how to evaluate any moral system - or a strategy of behavior within that system - isn't so simple, since really the ONLY absolute 100% unimpeachable value of such a system is either "the system survives and grows - meaning more humans adapt it" (memetic success) OR; "people who adopt the system survive and grow genetically" (genetic success). To muddy the waters further, "genetic" side is not so easy either - you can have a system where more female descendent genes prosper at the expense of more male descendent genes, or vice versa. How do you choose "better" between the two?

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I'm tempted to set an alarm for a month from now, make popcorn and read the comment thread.

Agree, there's no good women gone bad. There's just women with opportunity.

Men as well.

Ha!!! Loved this

There may be some fallacies in your analysis. However, delightful read. It will enrage certain readers of every kink

I am tempted to do as @inka2222 says, and come back in a month or so and read the comment threads

lc69hunter, thanks for the feedback. I am sure there are fallacies and look forward to hearing about them. I am pretty sure about mate guarding and the need to belong to a tribe. My ideas of primitive culture are just my speculation.

Zzzzzzzzzz. Straight out of a 1930’s college anthropology textbook, with a dash of early Boomer interpretation thrown in for good measure. Don’t waste your time there’s nothing new here.

Another writer who mistakenly thinks the stories and comments on this website are actually representative of humankind in general. It’s similar to the infidelity statistics thrown loosely around and oft quoted on this website compiled by Ashley Madison. It’s a website people go to who are looking to cheat! Get real people!

You wanted me to read it?

Well, mission accomplished.

What did I think?

You suggested I miss the point. Sorry to say. I think it is you who missed the point. In fact your thinking is so steeped in the dark ages, you may be stuck there.

Your perception of love is disturbing. I'm not sure you understand what the word means.

If you cannot accept that sex is not simply a reproductive act. You are lost to humanity. The human race, is not the only species on the planet that initiates sex for pleasure.

Sex, is something to be enjoyed and treasured. It isn't always about conception. Sometimes, a fuck is just a fuck.

Good lord, when I read what you wrote I could do nothing but laugh...

Sorry, I do not mean that to sound condescending, it's simply you are so far from reality...

Cagivagurl

Cagivagurl, thank you very much for your reply. You usually drive me crazy, but I enjoy the ride. I admit to many flaws and biases and being raised on a crapload of cultural gender (and race) expectations. I try to rise above it.

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I agree that rationality, with effective contraception available, sex should be a fun, low stress, social activity. It should help us build connections. The problem is most of the time most people are not rational. They simply cannot be talked out of their gut instinct. Maybe in a future utopian sociality with a consistent message delivered from birth, it would work. But the world today is filled with people driven mostly by primitive instincts and emotions. My meager essay is an attempt to understand those emotions. Why, does a man feel humiliation when his mate has relations with another man? Culture you may say. But why can he feel humiliation in the first place?

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Cagivagurl, your ability to capture and express the typical male’s initial thinking about non-monogamy is unsurpassed. But when he has that change in thinking, I feel two points are missed. 1.) Peer pressure, which I equate to a need to maintain standing in the tribe. It drives him nuts. It may drive him to mayhem. 2.) The essential mating transaction: the man provides his labor, and the woman provides her pussy. When the man finally accepts that the wife can have multiple partners, she still seems to go one receiving the value of his labor. If there were a next chapter, some opportunistic woman would come along and make a proposal to the man: my pussy exclusively for your labor exclusively. Then the whole house of cards would come down. There is no solidarity among women (or men) when it comes to mating.

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Consensual polyamory is a great idea, but it takes an exceptional group of altruistic humans to pull it off.

It's an interesting analysis. I'd like to debate it. My personal experiences have led me to some conclusions, that are... well,... personal.

As far as writing in Loving Wives goes... it's a bear-pit. Watch yourself. Every time I think someone does a good story, there's a legion of people who come along and see it as their 'job' to downvote it.

Your essay is clinical, and I see points I absolutely agree with. I see things I don't. Not that I'm trained in this, but, it's valuable to me to see it broken down like this, and think about it. Thank you for that.

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Be well!

Wandering_Mongol, thanks for the comment. Feel free to ccntact me if you wish to have a conversation.

I share many of your thoughts, and those I don't share I'm simply not thought through fully enough to agree or constructively disagree.

Cagivagurl is on the right track with "steeped in the dark ages" so I'll view that as a positive comment. Except what you're talking about is much older than that and more of a root cause FOR the dark ages. Religious and social/legal traditions worldwide embraced and enforced your bottom line with few (and ultimately unsuccessful) exceptions until the 20th century, because it worked. Now, it's not so clear what the new rules should be when our technical abilities have dramatically changed the survival game. Cagivagurl is correct that these innovations (and it's MUCH more than just contraception) mean our evolved emotional responses no longer fit our world. But we don't just wake up and say "I'm going to act in opposition to my emotions because they don't fit the situation". At least not very often in our personal lives. Instead we are FAR more likely to construct a seemingly logical argument that supports what the lizard brain emotions want. It's going to take many generations before those emotions are much different. And they very well might not go in the direction a lot of people expect---evolution is mindlessly focused on the production of grandchildren. So whatever behaviors maximize that will become our future.

I'm sure there's fodder for some very interesting SciFi to explore how human emotions might evolve in this new world where the "information workers" (who presumably represent the high end of the intellect bell curve) are not reproducing very fast. I suspect we have already passed peak intellectual capacity as a species.

Thanks for your in-depth analysis, which I agree with in principle. With one caveat: your conclusions only apply to the period after about 15 000 BC. The end of hunter/gatherer societies not only resulted in new cultural developments, but also evolutionary ones, although of course the original DNA toolbox remained. In paleo-anthropology, it is now considered certain that women were on a par with men in terms of strength, endurance and stature. The idea that the woman sits in the cave and waits for the man to provide the meat is romantic and wrong. There was certainly a division of labor, but apparently not that the women gathered herbs and the men hunted the saber-toothed tiger or mamooth. In fact, the family seems to have gone hunting together in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene: Woman, man, child and dog. And our ancient mothers were as good in hunting as men.

(https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101).

And we should’nt forget the major issue: the last 15,000 years are only a fraction of human history. Or in other words: patriarchy is not God-given, but a fairly recent aberration of the species.

Another interesting study shows that the female orgasm was probably essential for the evolution of the specie, as it seems to have triggered ovulation. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jez.b.22690). In cats and rabbits this is exactly the case: no fertility without a double orgasm.

Which shows that the evolutionary background of sex is more complex than in your analysis. Which does’nt mean wrong or inaccurate. Because it might be highly accurate for the Holocene. Reproduction strategies before that time might be even more elaborate or accurate.

My 2cents