Posted: Mar 21, 2011 4:38 pm
Mr.Samsa wrote:Well one thing we can say with almost complete certainty is that the female straying behavior is probably not an "instinct". As for why the females specifically do this, I'm not sure, as I said we'd need more information on what processes could have led up to it.
Well incest avoidance is the basic one. In all social species one or both sexes disperses. Females especially resist incestuous matings.
Usually it is males who disperse as mother and offspring formed the first social unit, then daughters staying around while sons seek novel females.
Some change in apes led to sons staying with fathers and daughters then leaving to seek novel males and avoid incest.
We have it to some degree in gorillas which have one male or a male and son with unrelated females who move between silverbacks.
When the female bonobo reaches puberty she stops her sexual interactions and moves to the periphery of the group and then disperses. Maybe moving between groups before settling in one. This is where these otherwise promiscuous females exercise 'female choice' - they choose which community of related males they will mate with.
Incest avoidance with the attraction to some degree of novelty goes right back to the first sex cells.
Mr.Samsa wrote:So you accept that cultural variation and learning can significantly change the sexual behaviors in the sexes? If so, then how do you know that the differences that you are talking about are biological and not learnt? For example, how do you know that your speculation above is true?
Because they all boil down to the same species-wide principles of sexual selection, control over reproduction, and sexual conflict.
That's insane. When women are stoned for being raped in some cultures the people there clearly think she should die.
Or in the past when it was the father or husband who was compensated the experience of the raped woman does not seem to have been one of particular concern about her.
Or for many cultures and in our own history that the rape of married women was viewed as impossible to exist.
Are you saying that these variations are not connected to the self-interest of the men involved?
And while these vary according to the environment I am saying they vary a lot more than do the feelings of the women who are raped across these cultures and situations.
And yes, you can create an environment where women will learn to accept rape more or less.
In some cultures girls are gang raped immediately before marriage (Australia), or gang-raped when they refuse to be free with their bodies (Amazonia).
Though it is part of the culture the girls still hate it.
Mr.Samsa wrote:
Wait, what.. Did you just say that men can't be raped by women? And you're trying to justify such ignorance by appealing to what other species do? What the fuck.
Ok Time for evidence of men being raped by women.
Or are we yet again using the 'it doesn't matter if it happens relatively rarely in men' geez.
Do you know about the Pitcairn islanders?
In 1790 nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. !5 men and 13 women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later ten of the women had survived but only one of the men. Of the other 14 men, one had committed suicide, one had died, and twelve had been murdered.
Mr.Samsa wrote: First you need to present data showing that men are rejected more than women, and then if you can show this, you have to explain how you've separated out the biological differences from the significant cultural differences that play a major role in this difference (i.e. the strong social punishers in place for women approaching men and asking them out).
Yes, of course there are environmental influences.
Going back to the 70s, women were quite free to approach men. There were all those sex communes then etc etc. 'Free sex' was welcomed by a lot of people of both sexes. I read somewhere (and many years back so don't remember where) that when the men decided to settle down they reverted to wanting women who had not slept around.
I saw something from Iran recently about male and female students having sexual relationships. They talked to the girls who were quite starry-eyed about their boyfriends and marriage. Then they, separately, talked to the boys. "Will you marry your girlfriend". One boy thinks and looks a little horrified by the prospect. What about the women they will marry - if she has had other boyfriends will that matter? No hesitation from the boys. Of course it will matter. The boys would not marry any woman who, as they put it, was secondhand goods. I just wished the girls could have seen this.
Of course this strict want for a virgin wife is cultural.
Boys and men asked similar questions here say things like it being preferable she has had fewer partners than he. I think nine was that accepted number for one group of males. And they would not want to be told it was anymore. They advised women to lie.
I guess the number who would marry a sex worker is likely to be pretty low then.
Of course men, in certain circumstances, want women to be promiscuous. They often want to be promiscuous themselves so of course they can't do that without promiscuous women around. The story often changes when it comes to marriage and parenting.
I think that women should be at least a little suspicious of men's encouragement of their promiscuity. It still has far more negative consequences for female reproductive success than it does for the man.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Those studies show that it goes both ways. Men are much happier and have much more stable relationships when they wait longer before having sex with their partner.
Are there studies that show men would have preferred to have waited longer ie till they were older, before they started having any sex as studies of women show. I.e. stayed virgins longer?
Mr.Samsa wrote:Firstly, even though the beliefs of society are changing, there are still significant punishers in place for promiscuous women so there aren't a lot of promiscuous women around.
Oh yes there are - you said above that they were hanging around in bars but unwanted because they're unclean.
Mr.Samsa wrote:And secondly, what man actually buys books on how to get women into bed?
Are you basing your understanding of male behavior on the spam emails you receive?
No, the number of books in this genre, Amazon book sales and discussions.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Total misunderstanding of my position. I have no said it is all learnt. I have said that learning obviously takes place, to some degree. My question is how have you separated out learning effects that produce sex differences, and biological differences that produce sex differences. In reply to that you've simply said "But sexual selection...!".
Mr.Samsa wrote:That's not the problem with the legal system. Part of the problem with prosecuting rapists is that there is rarely ever any evidence that the victim did not consent. We can do swabs, check for vaginal tearing, and so on, but this only proves that sex (and sometimes rough sex) has taken place - it tells us nothing about whether the victim consented. Thus, a lot of rapists get let off.
If a woman says no to sex, and there is evidence of this, then the rapist will get prosecuted. The judge will not throw out, say, a video recording of her removing consent and say, "Sure, she said no, but I know that deep down women want sex just as much as men so this obviously can't be rape".
So it boils down to his word against hers. And we get a 6% conviction rate.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Again you're still fantastically missing the point of my argument. You've accepted that learning processes play a significant role in the development of sexual behaviors. So when we find that there is a difference between the sexes, how do we know what behaviors are learnt and which are biological?
This is the main point that you keep dodging by appealing to sexual selection without explaining how sexual selection differentiates the two processes.
I'm now thinking the problem is that your definition of learnt seems to be anything that is a result of the interaction between the individual's biology and the input from the environment, while 'biological' seems to have to require no input from the environment which is impossible.
As earlier in discussing the hermaphrodites, with this definition everything is 'learnt' and nothing is 'biological'.
But then we also have this other term 'evolved' which I have had to assume means evolved adaptations. So this is the 'biological'. Evolved adaptations are also expressed in interaction with the environment. So does this then mean they are learned? That's what you seem to be ultimately arguing because they are not independent of the environment.
You think an adaptation must express itself regardless of the environment otherwise it is learned.
You also think physical traits are distinct from behavioural ones connected to them.
I'll run this with a species you brought up yourself a little while ago - the 'learning' damselflies.
Two very similar species where the females of one species learned which male was the one of their own species.
How does she learn this? She mates with them. So what does this mating tell her? Most likely, and suggested in the paper, the difference between the males is in their genitalia.
Insects have the most diverse and rapidly evolving genitalia of all species. They are the main subjects and evidence for Eberhard's work on female cryptic choice. Many species can ony be distnguished by the male genitalia. Females have their preferences for particular genitalia with particular stimulation. Sexual selection. Post-copulatory male-male competition plus post-copulatory female choice.
So the female damselflies do not have a mating adaptation regarding what the male looks like in terms of the dark colour of the wings in these two species. There is also female preference for darker wings but the darkest wings belong to the other species.
So what do we actually have going on here with this 'learning'? We have a damselfly female with a mating preference for darker wings. If she is just with her own males, no problem. But when in an area with another species that is externally much the same as her own she mates with them too. Then his genitals do not match her evolved preference in her species. She can now distinguish between her own and the other species.
Yes, she has learned which is the correct mate but only because her evolved preference applies to the genitals and only through mating can this be known. Genitals that have evolved through sexual selection. Genitals that evolve rapidly through sexual selection and that lead to speciation too.
She has evolved to accept males with the correct genitalia and genital stimulation.
You might think that because 'learning' is involved that mate choice is not an evolved, adaptive behaviour in this species. But of course it is. It's just that the evolved adaptation concerns the genitals with copulation needing to be in progress for female choice to act.
Here we have something which on the surface looks like 'learning' but these species have always and still are making mate choices through evolved preferences for particular male genitalia.
Yes it does because it is the production of eggs and sperm that in most instances determines how selection will act differently on individuals of the same species. If we were hermaphrodites then sex differences would not exist.
With two sexes comes two (often very) different environments for male and female, ie one has the environment where they must reproduce only with males, the other only with females. Bodies and behaviours diverge. That's just a fact of life. Males and females of the same species exist in different reproductive environments.