Sex and Housework

From a biological perspective, the primary reason for anyone to have sex is to procreate. Sex does have some additional value in social bonding but if procreation wasn't driving the show there would be zero sex. Your own or anyone else's interest in sex is a structural expression of biological requirement for procreation. Of course, this isn't the feeling or narrative interpretation we put on sex but why would it be? We are built by evolution not to understand ourselves and the world but to have capabilities and impulses that work - or, more accurately worked on the plains of Africa 100.000 years ago.

The biological value proposition of sex for males is quite different for males and females. At the minimum inputs, a male contributes a teaspoon of semen to "produce" a child while a female (human) contributes contributes 10+ years of physiological expenditure: gestation, birth, lactation, care, food sharing, protection, etc.  This is actually more or less the way things work in chimpanzee society. The males spend a lot of time fighting over the females in order to have sex and the females look after the kids. A female chimp won't let her child out of her sight for it's first six years or so; apart from external predators, other chimp mothers may treat it as a protein supply for their kids. She is the quintessential obsessive mother.

How far have we evolved from this chimp model? Obviously, co-parenting is adaptive or we wouldn't have taken it up. On the other hand, the (new) cost of co-parenting falls mainly on the males so the females had to make it attractive to males.  How? The obvious candidate here is the male obsession with sex. Human females have evolved continuous sexual receptivity and hidden fecundity - features which are AFAIK otherwise unknown in megafauna.  It's a pretty good guess that this evolved to facilitate a deal: coparenting for sex. To augment the deal, we can expect layers of domestication. As the dog that protects the family but doesn't bite the kids was selected, so women selected men who demonstrated personalities compatible with reliable parenting, and in the other direction, men may have selected fidelity and enhanced sexuality. The permutations of these qualities, and the ensuing cultural constructions provide serious entertainment for us, both as observers and participants.

Like all deals, the prospects for cheating and backsliding are ever present: men will skip the housework or the home and women will skip the sex. I'm not proposing any particular solution to this but I do recommend that we acknowledge the basic biological deal, and it's problematical nature. From an evolutionary perspective men are newcomers to childrearing as women are newcomers to recreational sex. It's a deal that kinda works but it's going to require our ongoing efforts to make it work well. If Evolution has Intent, it surely isn't to ensure that every man gets his desired frequency of sex or that women get their toilets cleaned at their preferred frequency. This may require some conscious effort and even a little guile.

(Originally posted as a comment on this article http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/d6d50e247f8b/)

Danger and Creativity

Mueller et al demonstrate in a couple of experiments that

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal.

This makes sense.  According to Read Montague, brain scans of our reactions to familiar things have the same signal as when we react to actually good things. In a risky environment this seems powerfully adaptive to me. On the other hand, a capacity take unnecessary risks indicates a biological surplus so should be a plus in the sexual selection stakes provided it doesn't happen to kill you.

For example, this lad is demonstrating a biological surplus.  Of course, he may not describe it like that.  

Promiscuity goes with Inbreeding

"Researchers from the U.K. set out to test this idea, and the results were pretty conclusive. Red flour beetles were mated sibling-to-sibling for fifteen generations, effectively creating a “genetic bottleneck,” before being compared to their non-inbred (i.e., outbred) counterparts. Inbred and outbred females were offered 10 virgin males to mate with (insert joke I don’t have the guts to make), and the inbred females were more promiscuous by all measures:"

Read the whole blog here: http://trynerdy.com/?p=1177

The evolution of overconfidence (abstract)

The evolution of overconfidence

Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler

Nature 477,317–320(15 September 2011)

Abstract

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

Essentialism and Evolution

Bloom’s idea is that we are all essentialists. That is, we pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, what it has touched, and who has touched it. As Bloom explains, we subscribe to “the notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters.” And, moreover, “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences.”

Why are we essentialists?

McNerney: Is there an evolutionary advantage of being an essentialist?
Bloom: I think the case is most obviously made about other people. If I want to safely interact with you, I must be cautious of your history. For example, it is advantageous for me to know how you’ve treated me in the past, who your friends are, who you know and what you know. There is a long list of things that are invisible but are part of you, and they could be important for, say, my survival.

McNerney: So you could say that when we assess others we look at them physically, but we also examine their “resumes,” if you will.
Bloom: Exactly, that’s right. And the same is true with animals. You want to know more than just the physical – the history is important too. For example, is it dangerous? Does it tend to move quickly? Likewise for food, you want to know its history and what it has touched before you eat it.

McNerney: So evolution did not favor people who weren’t able to think as essentialists?
Bloom: Yes, think about what a disadvantage it would be if you only assess things as they are. Here’s the interesting part, you could argue that humans have taken it too far. We are so caught up in history that we collect irrelevant things. We care about the difference between an original and a forgery.

[from http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-psychology-of-pleasure-interview-with-paul-bloom/]

Dutton's cross-cultural cluster criteria for art

1. Direct pleasure - valued as a source of immediate experience
2. Skill and Virtuosity - demonstrates specialized skills
3. Style - made according to rules of form, composition and expression (while usually allowing or  celebrating departures)
   
4. Novelty or Creativity - Valued and praised for originality.  Kitsch and craft use the style in an uncreative way.
   
5. Criticism - artistic forms exist with parallel discourses of appreciation and judgement.
   
6. Representation - In wildly varying degrees of naturalism, art objects represent real or imaginary experiences of the world.
   
7. Special focus - art is bracketed off from ordinary life, "made special" by location, time,appurtenance, rituals, e.g. art gallery, opening, picture frame.
   
8. Expressive individuality - potential to express individual personality through the work.
   
9. Emotional saturation - not only the emotion of the content but the emotional tone of the work or performance.
   
10. Intellectual challenge - utilize the combined variety of perceptual and intellectual capacities at a high level.
    
11. Art traditions and institutions - works of art gain value from positions in the history of their traditions.
12. Imaginative experience - (most importantly) artworks provide an imaginative experience for their makers and their audience.

Not all artwork will have all characteristics but they will generally show most.

from Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct

Dutton/Carrol on Darwinian literary theory

Interesting review from Denis Dutton of Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.

Taster:

Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that “is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and post-menopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artefacts.” Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure. 

http://denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm

Supernatural Policing

Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray examine the idea that belief in supernatural agents is adaptive because these agents are punishers: supernatural policeman if you will. This policing can have two effects. First, belief in supernatural punishment can enhance within group cooperation. Second, it can reduce cheating or free-riding.

However :

Aguair and Cronk observe that judgmental gods or policing spirits are historically recent: “Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, smallscale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies.”

We cannot simply assume that because supernatural watchers-punishers exist and have utility in post-Neolithic or complex societies, the same was true during the Paleolithic. Although the ethnographic and ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record is an imperfect guide, it strongly suggests that supernatural watching-punishing is a recent invention.

Evolution and Argument

[From www.edge.org]

One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. "The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

 I've probably wasted a lot of breath while suffering from the illusion that arguments were a search for the truth...