1. Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Comment #54928 by Ben Kington on July 9, 2007 at 10:50 am

Gordon - right, if you had no competition. However, if every time your sperm entered a female, they were outnumbered 100 to 1 by those of someone with "spanners" more along the lines of your Billie goat (forgive me if I'm butchering the slang - I've never heard it, but I'd love to learn!) you wouldn't be populating much of anything at all. Thus, chimpanzees (very much a free love species) have giant "sweetbreads," where as gorillas, who monopolize their females via their huge muscle mass, would get laughed out of a human locker room (supposing the humans had the... well, you know... to say anything.) Note that in the gorilla's case the competition is simply shifted to before sex occurs - it's done with the muscles rather than the balls - where as chimps prefer to let their boys slog it out post coitus. Humans have a testicle size relative to their bodies that suggest more sperm competition (more promiscuity) than gorillas, but less than chimpanzees.

2. Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Comment #54916 by Ben Kington on July 9, 2007 at 10:06 am

Mango and Konquerez,
Thanks for your replies - A few points:
I suppose I can let the article's assessment of why Barbie-type women are favored go - my main issue with it is that it omits the role of culture in sustaining a feedback loop for what's "attractive," not that the role of evolution that it plays up it totally absent. Clear skin is an indicator of health, blond hair of youth, and so on. Weight, I still believe, is almost entirely a cultural construct (as long as the weight is within a healthy range,) and my beef here is that the article suggests, if it doesn't explicitly say, that the entire "Barbie" image, including weight, is biologically preprogrammed.
My bigger issue is the description of women as benefiting from polygamy. I /am/ taking a gene's eye view of the question: Having a father who will provide food and protection (yes, Grandma can help, but I doubt you seriously dispute that men are better at these tasks than women,) and generally see that the child survives its initial helpless stage (exceptionally longer than in other animals, and a good bet for causing our other odd habit of pair bonding, as I'm arguing here) is good for the reproductive chances of the genes carried by everyone involved. Of course, it still benefits the woman to try and secure the biological input of a small number of highly desirable men (or a large number, but this would be harder to do and usually doesn't happen in practice.) It would be to the benefit of the man to donate his genetic material to as many women, of whatever quality, as possible. But in both cases, especially in the case of the woman's who has a much larger investment in the child, this must only be done to the extent that it doesn't jeopardize the pair-bond. This is consistent with what actually happens, and human testicle size - a strong indicator of degree of promiscuity - is consistent with a pattern of serial monogamy with a little action on the side for both partners. So, it's true that humans do not naturally "mate for life," but to say that they are "naturally polygamous" is a farce. The history of culture generally refutes it, not just Western. Aside from one or two outlying cultures, and the absolute top of the pecking order in many cultures (Kings, pharohs, NBA stars, a small group whose deviance from the practices of the group at large is evidenced by consistently being viewed as sensational) "polygamy" is not practiced by humans. Human testicle size strongly suggests this has been the case for a long in our evolutionary history. Promiscuity? yes, a bit. But not polygamy in the sense that the article means.

3. Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Comment #54884 by Ben Kington on July 9, 2007 at 8:25 am

I thought this article was garbage the first time I saw it - does anyone know how it ended up here? If Dawkins himself saw fit to post it, maybe I'll have to reconsider. A few points I saw:
Polygamy is not common in Muslim cultures. Postulating that this explains suicide bombers from those cultures is a stretch at best - the amount of polygamy practiced in such cultures is not nearly enough to have a significant impact on the population as a whole. Compare to China, where there are many more frustrated, mateless males (due to female infanticide skewing the gender proportions) and no suicide bombers.
Also, most of the reasons given why men like the sort of women that appear on modern magazine covers are not backed up by any evolutionary psychology I've read. As far as I know, the only physical constant in female attractiveness is the hip to waist ratio (in men, height). At different times in history, overweight women have been in vogue (This mostly has to do with appearing rich - it used to be only the rich could eat a lot. Now, only the rich can join a health club.) Though the saggy breast theory is interesting, I think it's more likely that something else is going on: Large breasts are currently fashionable, and a man with a big busted woman on his arm looks richer, just as if he were driving a fancy sports car. If some other sort of breasts were currently in style, than they would be favored (and so be in style - a feedback loop). I'm fairly certain that some cultures - perhaps in Asia? - currently or in the past have preferred small (though still big enough to evince puberty) breasted women but I could be wrong on this point.
One more complaint (though I found other things wrong with the article, too): polygamy is not good for women. More important than having the best genes from a male partner (unless you're relegated to the absolute bottom of the barrel, gene wise,) is having assistance raising the child. For this reason, women favor monogamy. Of course, the ideal arrangement, evolutionarily speaking, is for a woman to dupe a man into a monogamous relationship and then cheat on him with a man who has better genes, cuckolding the first man into raising the child. Indeed, even now there is evidence that women are more likely to cheat while ovulating.
The article seems to me the sort of hack evolutionary reasoning that gives us all a bad name.
My ideas on gender and evolutionary psychology are mostly informed by "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley, which is my favorite book. It's an old book (1994, I think), but I have not heard that any of the ideas I mentioned here have been refuted, and the logic of the women / polygamy example particularly seems hard to refute. So - is this article rubbish, as I am thinking? And if so, how did it end up here, polluting the memeosphere on the website of the man who coined the term?

4. Science of the Soul? 'I Think, Therefore I Am' Is Losing Force

Comment #52671 by Ben Kington on June 27, 2007 at 5:20 pm

I see that several people have already addressed it, but as a former philosophy enthusiast / current amateur philosopher I can't let the headline's denigration of the cogito stand. I once heard a professor call it "the only knock down, drag out argument in all of philosophy." If anyone here doesn't know, the basic gist is that you can doubt just about everything: are you /sure/ that right now you are really looking at a computer screen and not in "The Matrix?" Or that every time you try to figure out 1+1, the matrix manipulates your brain waves and makes you arrive at the wrong answer (2)? The point being that an evil God (or matrix) could fool you about anything you think you know, but only if there was something doing some thinking that could be fooled - you. So, whatever else I am (I can't speak for the rest of you Matrix-generated hallucinations,) I am a thinking thing.