Exactly my thought: Parents look out for themselves as well as their kids. The conflicting interest here beyond "What parent wants for child" and "What child wants for self", is "What parents wants for self by wanting for child". Also, a child can be, or at some point in life become again, dependent on the parents, so a more economically viable suitor means that the parents are less likely to have to provide more for their child.
We have a desire to have kids because we have a desire to have sex. We have a desire to have sex because people with desire have their sex desire genes passed onto the next generation.
You're almost taking certain dispositions for granted, as if they weren't subject to evolution in the first place.
>There's no need to jump to evolutionary explanations (although I agree those affect things).
What on earth do you mean "jump to"? They underpin our preferences, so they should always serve as a foundation of explanation.
If humans were absolutist gene replication maximisers in a way perfectly aligned with our current environment, they wouldn't care about being looked after in old age. We aren't this way, and the question is why we aren't this way.
But romantic love is fickle and transitory, it burns out, and then what? You're yoked to someone you no longer have any interest in and want to get free of them. On the other hand, with an arranged marriage, both of you (ideally) agree to make it work and lasting love grows over time. So your parents do want you to be happy, but long-lasting happiness.
As an aside, this is why I dislike the character of Neil Gibson in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge"; he's basically "Okay, I married this hot South American lady and had kids with her, but now I'm tired of her since she got older and isn't as hot anymore, and I want the hot young governess instead. Unfortunately my wife still loves me and won't just get out of my way, what a bitch!"
"And you are his manager?"
"I have given him notice. In a couple of weeks I shall have shaken off his accursed slavery. A hard man, Mr. Holmes, hard to all about him. Those public charities are a screen to cover his private iniquities. But his wife was his chief victim. He was brutal to her—yes, sir, brutal! How she came by her death I do not know, but I am sure that he had made her life a misery to her. She was a creature of the tropics, a Brazilian by birth, as no doubt you know."
"No; it had escaped me."
"Tropical by birth and tropical by nature. A child of the sun and of passion. She had loved him as such women can love, but when her own physical charms had faded—I am told that they once were great—there was nothing to hold him. We all liked her and felt for her and hated him for the way that he treated her. But he is plausible and cunning. That is all I have to say to you. Don't take him at his face value. There is more behind. Now I'll go. No, no, don't detain me! He is almost due."
The problem gets solved by the wife killing herself (and attempting to frame the governess for her murder) and Gibson is free to marry the governess, who isn't adverse to marrying her older but very, very wealthy (did I mention he is stinking rich?) employer so she can 'reform' him and turn his mind to giving his wealth to charities.
Yeah, I have my doubts about the 'happy' ending. It's much more likely that Gibson will tolerate her do-gooding as long as she holds his attention with sex, and if/when he tires of her in turn, all that 'reformation' will end too. So much for marrying for love!
The problem in the story is as much that Neil's love had burned out as that Maria's hadn't. If Maria's love had waned in equal measure, then Neil could have been rid of her neatly and tidily, by way of nothing more than a lavish financial settlement. But, as you acknowledge, she kept on loving him, however much he tried to turn her off with boorish behaviour.
So much for transitory. And, by the way, Gibson's own alibi is flimsy by Holmesian standards. "There is no evidence that he left the house" - hasn't Scott taught us to be wary of "there's no evidence" claims?
Anyway, there's no law that says romantic love cannot transition to a love based on habit, mutual comfort, and trust once the hormones subside. And what do your parents know about long-lasting love, anyway? Or about happiness? (Larkin's 'This Be The Verse' being of course the definitive word on the matter.)
But what Gibson did is what Scott is exampling in the clash between parents and children: his choice was "I wanna bang the hot young woman" and so he married her. Then she wasn't so hot, so his feelings cooled and he moved on to the next "I wanna bang the hot young woman". His marriage - on his side - was based on that shallow sexual attraction, instead of growing into steady settled love based on mutual commitment to their family and each other.
It doesn't augur well for his second marriage, given that once again he has little in common with his new spouse (she is interested in using his money to do good, he is only interested in saying and doing whatever will keep her around for him) and once she ages out of looking hot or he finds yet another hot young woman he prefers, there is nothing to stop him trying to dump her for Number Three.
Gibson, in the story, offered the governess "I'd marry you if I could, but since I can't, I'll make you my mistress and provide sufficiently for you" but the governess didn't want that (or didn't value herself that cheaply, so she perhaps was hoping he would move to divorce his wife and marry her). This is not a guy who is making spousal choices on grounds other than hormones, even though by now he's old enough to know better, and I don't think his choices are turning out well.
>Anyway, there's no law that says romantic love cannot transition to a love based on habit, mutual comfort, and trust once the hormones subside.
Heck, there is no law that says they can't both exist at the same time. Imagining people in their 20s as *purely* hormone/lust driven strikes me as likely to be a mistake even if simplifying it that way makes the discussion/thought experiment easier.
By similar logic, no one really wants love or sex. People are just narcissistic and they assume that the world would be better if it contained more people similar to *them*.
The conflict between generations is that the kids wants partners similar to themselves (young, attractive), and the parents want their kids to have partners somewhat similar to the parents (rich). Everyone believes that "a copy of me is objectively the best possible partner, ever".
Exactly! We don't even know that most parents object to their offspring's mate choice. I get the impression that most of them are pretty happy with their in-laws.
It doesn't need to be "most parents" for the arguments to be valid, just "more parents". It's going to be a statistical argument anyway, but I don't see how you could assign error bars.
Arranged marriages have been the norm for vast swathes of the world's population for much of history. The fact that cultural changes have lead to its diminishment doesn't actually mean that genes don't affect these preferences, though I think you're not realizing the extent to which parents work to direct their kids social circles (which is broadly a way of influencing their mate choice).
Agree; Evo psych isn't quite as far down my badlist as psychoanalysis, but it's mostly contrived examples trying to 'explain' contemporary mores via labyrinthine evolutionary explanations.
Yesterday I read a mind bogglingly involved theory of why people are having fewer children nowadays by Robin Hanson which involved complex anticipation of child success maladapting to modern wealth.
At no point did I get the impression he had ever asked women (and women are posited as the scheming child minimisers here, which is another common Evo psych trope) why they're having fewer kids.
Whilst I'm not claiming that you can fully rely on self reported reasoning, it's a good place to start, and 'raising children is really hard nowadays' is a pretty common explanation, and requires no castles in the sky.
That, and the culture that insists on spending on experiences, maximizing independence and minimizing constraints so you can have more experiences.
Then there's the hard economics (surely something Robin Hanson is aware of) - having children interferes with career, which puts both woman's independence *and* her family's fate at risk, in a world where most couples can't really sustain a household on a single income.
Then there's the perceived *obligation* for women to work for money - over recent decade or two, the hard-won freedom to focus on career changed into social pressure, where some women feel they'll be judged negatively by society if they're not making money. I write "perceived", because from where I'm sitting, half of society will praise a stay-at-home mom for her choice, so it balances out. But it's not how the women close to me see it.
(I wouldn't give too much weight to how expensive and hard is to have children these days, as a factor in deciding to not have children. In my experience, this is something you truly learn only *after* you become a parent. You can't even imagine many of the hardships and money sinks until you experience them.)
So I agree - self-reports give some good clues here; there's no need for complex evolutionary-level explanation for what seems to be purely a socioeconomical dynamic. The evolutionary adaptations that are involved here are just the ones that make you care about physical safety and social status.
The simple explanation of "why are people having fewer kids" is that people prioritize status over child-rearing since in the ancestral environment if your status dropped too much you died and didn't have kids.
So since in a modern society having a parent devote more time to childrearing will result in lower family income without a compensating gain in status from a large family (since our society doesn't assign status to that and often assigns negative status to "trashy" large families), people have fewer children.
This also neatly explains why so many people have exactly 1-2 children instead of zero, because having zero children as a woman is still lower status than having at least one child.
There's a simpler explanation: having children is an emotional drive and there's now easy available stimuli wherever you look and whatever your preferences are to satisfy those. Being childless no longer means being lonely and possibly bored. And then, there's the question of maybe having too little time to engage in everything one might want to engage in within our default lifespans. TBQH all these are reasons to look into longevity extension tech.
A large fraction of American children these days are born to single-mothers, who do maintain a household on a single income. Arguably, the rise in that fraction is the result of our society being wealthy enough for that to be viable.
Where is your proof? Where is your data? Your post is at the very least no better than what the evo-psychs are being accused of - giving a just so story without scientific data to support it. "The culture insists..." is not science. It's not even close to being operationalized enough for a hypothesis to test.
>So I agree - self-reports give some good clues here; there's no need for complex evolutionary-level explanation for what seems to be purely a socioeconomical dynamic. The evolutionary adaptations that are involved here are just the ones that make you care about physical safety and social status.
I hope everyone appreciates this explanation is intellectually on the same level as proclaiming that 'all this stuff about greenhouse gas emissions is unnecessary, we know that the climate goes through natural cycles' .
FWIW, there are lots of historical examples where economic stresses causes a reduction in the number of children. And many people would seem to prefer a new car to a new child. So I don't think there's much to explain until you try to do more exact modeling.
Do you imagine that poor people don't have kids? Do you imagine single moms are mostly high income earners? Do you imagine that people 100 years ago had less kids than people today?
Today there are a lot more things to spend your money on. Rich people tend to have more children than poor people. In Ireland about a century ago people tended to put off marrying until in their 30's because of economic pressures.
It's also true that when there's a huge infant mortality, people tend to have lots of kids. They've go no idea how many will survive to adulthood. And when you say "single moms" you're ignoring various factors that cause those who own real property to be more likely to register their marriage.
"Whilst I'm not claiming that you can fully rely on self reported reasoning, it's a good place to start"
No, it's really, really not, the dubiousness of Hanson's theory notwithstanding.
The average women does not even contemplate things from an evolutionary perspective at all, and cannot give an explanation for the almost unviersal female preference for taller men other than 'tall guys are more attractive'. They almost certainly do find tall men more attractive, but it tells us nothing of the why. They prefer confident men, and self-report will almost never tell us why confidence is more attractive. Most people, but especially women (in my experience), are deeply skeptical of and/or hostile to the idea that all aspects of human behavior are heritable at all.
> 'raising children is really hard nowadays' is a pretty common explanation
Do you imagine it was easier to raise kids 100 years ago?
"Do you imagine it was easier to raise kids 100 years ago? "
That's a sort of yes/no kind of question. If you lived on a farm, children were much less of an economic drain 150 years ago. If you lived in a city, this was much less true. This is, of course, only one dimension of "easier", but it's also true that birth control was a lot harder. And almost all the population lived on small farms. (IIRC it was in the neighborhood of 70%, and in their parents [grandparents?] generation it was well over 80%.) Cities have traditionally not been able to replace their population. Partially this was due to diseases, but it was also because of economic pressures. And there's a time lag in social adaptation.
FWIW, there's still evidence that people living in dense groups don't meet replacement numbers. The reason is a bit questionable, but I *think* that a part of the reason is economic pressures.
I'm working on a post (stay tuned!) about why "just so" arguments shouldn't be dismissed so quickly. Evolution works in a way that Keith Stewart Thompson calls "correlated progression," where every individual is an experiment, probing for varying solutions to the problem of existence. When iterated millions of individuals over a million years, evolution has the appearance of, in retrospect, divinity. Instead of reacting to changing conditions, evolution seemingly anticipates adversity, with latent traits springing into action at the right place at the right time.
Our whole existence has so much of the appearance of intelligence design, that things "just so" happening the way they happen is the norm, not the exception.
You've piqued my interest, but your post will need to address a couple of key issues:
1) How do we acquire evidence for these views that aren't just post hoc pattern matching? I'm willing to entertain either empirical or agent based modelling approaches, but pure reason doesn't cut it for me.
2) Why should we believe that this fine-grained evolutionary dynamic is usefully applicable to modern society and culture? I say fine grained because evo psych is either trivial (people want to have sex because sex makes babies) or assumes evolution can develop very specific behaviours which persists through cultural change.
FWIW, it's fine grained because there's a sample size of millions, and a filter that removes those samples that don't fit. So you get a shifting gradient as the nature of the filter shifts.
That said, there's a lot of places where it definitly *isn't* fine grained. Look into the path of the vagus nerve.
Thanks. I will incorporate these comments into my post. Regarding the evidence broadly in evolution regarding correlated progression, my initial touchpoint is At The Water's Edge by Carl Zimmer, which describes the fossil evidence for how fish gained feet (over 10m years) and how early mammals gained flippers (also over 10m years). As for whether these speedy evolutionary gears apply to recent human evolution, the evidence is scant. However, the 10,000 Year Explosion by Greg Cochran (who is on SSC's blogroll) hazards some theories.
Why don't you actually look into evolutionary psychology before being so dismissive? We don't tolerate this ignorant skepticism when it comes to things like climate change or covid, so why is okay here?
Good luck with that. Modern evolutionary biologists talk about something called the landscape. That's a way of thinking about developmental constraints and evolutionary tradeoffs. When the environment changes, the landscape changes. There's no divinity. There's no evidence that evolution anticipates anything.
As for the appearance of intelligent design, it's like finding a face in a piece of toast or a rock on Mars. Human minds look for it and find it. Hint: odds are it is not an actual face.
To me, it feels like you misread that post. It didn't read to me like thr author was claiming any of
- divinity
- evolution anticipating anything
- intelligent design
The actual quotes go:
"When iterated millions of individuals over a million years, evolution has *the appearance* of, *in retrospect*, divinity."
ie, if you look only at the result of a super complex process working over a super long time, that result may appear miraculous
"evolution *seemingly* anticipates adversity", set against evolution making new adaptations *after* changes in circumstances.
To my knowledge, that's how it works most of the time: evolution injects a bunch of random variation in traits, the environment changes, some of the previously neutral-ish changes (otherwise probably would have been selected out) are now advantageous. In retrospect, if you don't look closely, it "seems like evolution anticipating adversity", even if it's a "blind idiot god".
Basically the same thing for "our existence having so much of the appearance of intelligent design"
Again, "appearance of".
To me it seems like you're arguing against a position nobody stated (although I understand how certain phrasings in the post could lead to such an interpretation)
Evo-psych has a lot of bad examples and a smaller portion of good examples, you should learn to distinguish between them so you don't throw out the baby. :) E.g. the first thing I can remember is that old and long lived evo-psych hypothesis that girls growing up without fathers start mating behavior earlier and are generally more reckless because they... I don't remember the reasoning, maybe that they have to compensate for not having a protective male in their vicinity and need to find a new male to protect them. This was a good hypothesis, because it's falsifiable, and indeed, it got thoroughly falsified several times. Turns out that girls who lost their fathers in war didn't turn out reckless at all, though the girls left by reckless fathers still grow up more reckless than average, meaning it's mostly genetic probably. I think it was a nicely empirical and not just-so-story-esque thing to do to test this hypothesis.
Now and then there is a nugget, but there's an awful lot of bathwater. Worse, it's the kind of bath water that tends to be politically useful, often towards evil ends. I've seen some good research in the area myself, but, as others have noted, there are so many just-so and so-my-politics-are-right stories that I tend to be skeptical. To be fair, I'm like that with reports of new battery components and Alzheimer's drugs since so much money is involved.
>Honestly...this is why I dislike evo-psych. It's full of "just-so" stories about that try to explain human drives in evolutionary terms. But none of those stories actually have any strong empirical evidence behind them; it's idle speculation, not science
This betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of evo-psych science. All kinds of empirical work can help validates evo-psych theories. Honest question, have you read any books or listened to any lectures on the subject? Maybe you have, but your criticisms are absolutely indistinguishable from those who have not.
And I find an overwhelming majority of people who say stuff like this also believe in fantastical, logically incoherent notions of free will, as if its a better answer to say "oh, well everyone just *chose* to behave that way" (...)
Which is to say, not an explanation of anything at all.
>Unless we come up with a neurological mechanism for the difference in preference between suitors and parents
Nearly everything related to human behavior lacks a fundmanetal neurological explanation, so it's strange to be incredulous towards evo-psych in particular.
>or we can show empirically that such an instinct exists universally and increases reproductive fitness
One of the things evo-psychologists do is look at the extent to which certain behaviors are common across populations, and seeking high status mates is as common as any other high-level aspect of human behavior. Though, it absolutely does not need to be universal. It's like saying height can't improve reproductive fitness because not everyone is tall. It's a matter of probabilities.
>I mean, can Dynomight seriously think that somewhere in the human genome, there is a gene that encodes the "cause people to identify high-status mates for their adult children" protein? I mean, maybe it's possible that this is some complex polygenic trait, but we don't have any evidence of that
This is again naive skepticism. All aspects of human behavior are (to varying extents) heritable. It doesn't mean there's a gene that directly encodes for each highly specific behavior.
What happens in your view of things when a parent chooses a certain course of behavior like advising their offspring on mate preference? What causes this the desire for a parent to have these preferences? Unless you believe in supernatural souls that direct behavior, at some level all forms of behavior has to involve something at the biochemical and neurobiological level, be it in the generation of desire or the behavioral expression of it. You deriding the heritability of behavior as 'gene-for-particular-behavior-protein' hides the fact that any materialist explanation for the behavior must also involve fundamental biological factors.
When you have a conscious thought that is met with a corresponding behavior, how does this non-material experience even interact with your body to execute the action? You can say that there's some neural activity that gave rise to the thought, and this neural activity is doing the causation in the body....if so, then congratulations, you don't believe in free will.
And before you or someone else accuses me of needlessly talking about another subject (free will), the point is that you either have a strictly materialist (proteins and neurons and so on) view of behavior, or you have a dualistic view of the body to explain behavior. If you reject dualism, then dismissing the heritability of behavior on the basis that it would (supposedly) require certain proteins to carry out particular behaviors is special pleading.
Yep, was going to say this. There must be some evolved instincts in play there and they must be, broadly, nurturing instincts rather than reproductive ones. Would be surprising if those didn't exist in humans and didn't play some role in motivating prospective grandparents.
My impression is that for most mammals (with females living in herds of relatives and males roaming around alone) females have kind of low interest in male attractiveness: they mainly choose the territory and accept any male that comes with it, or wait until the males fight it out and then stay with the winner. This of course works as mate choice, preferring the strongest male (including the one who's keeping the best territory). Human females seem to have above average mate choice instincts, concentrating on the physical and mental traits of the males. Could be because we are long lived and the status of the male can change a lot during lifetime, so it's better to go with the one that seems to have high chances in a rapidly changing environment?
Elephants still seem to have some kind of trait based mate choice, preferring the oldest and biggest. 'Biggest' would be perhaps comparable to human preferences (though for us size alone is not quite as important) but 'oldest' is totally different in humans. Young women prefer young men, on average.
In stories about parent-child conflicts, dramatic necessity is sufficient to explain why the parents always prefer the rich suitor to the beautiful suitor.
The young people, not the parents, are always the protagonists (not in the original Greek sense of initiating the action, but in the common-speech sense of being the character the camera stays closet to and the audience sympathizes most with). It would be interesting to know why Western culture prefers youthful protagonists; but it is so, and has been so for centuries. Another reason the protagonists must be the children is that the protagonist must fight up a power gradient, and parents have more power than children.
The protagonists must be more-sympathetic than those opposing them, and it's more acceptable in Western post-Roman literary culture to love someone for their beauty than to love them for their riches or status. (Probably due not to over-valuing beauty, but to the Christian view of riches and status as corrupting, and of beauty as highly correlated with the Good.) It's also more-acceptable in post-Roman Western culture for a young person to be attracted to a young person than to an old person. Therefore, *in a story*, the parents will favor the rich old suitor; the child, the young and beautiful one. QED.
In reality, old rich men don't need the help of parents to get beautiful young women. And I don't blame those young women. Being rich is correlated with being smart and hard-working; neither being young nor being beautiful says anything positive about one's character.
It seems like in years past the protagonist in movie sense was significantly older than today, at least for men. Humphrey bogart, Cary grant, and Clark Gable were leading men in romantic roles until well into middle age. Even among women Katherine Hepburn wasn't that young for some of her roles either, and in Breakfast at Tiffany's both of the "young" stars sleeping with older people were over 30. Action stars seem to have a longer lifespan, from John Wayne to Bruce Willis. But was he his own producer? And Stallone also. I rarely watch movies but seems like all romance characters are trending younger.
For romance this is quite intuitive, as most romantic involvement happens at a young age. It's the same reason we don't see a lot of young protagonists in films about problems usually affecting old people, like dementia. Also, romance for older people is quite different and will not sell as much tickets.
There were a lot more women writing for Hollywood back then, so female stars had longer lives as romantic leads. Male writers have more trouble with this. If you look at television and now streaming, neither of which pay as well as Hollywood, you'll find older women in romantic leads.
I'm not at all sure that has changed that much. Richard Gere was playing romantic leads well into his fifties, Leonardo di Caprio is nearly 50 and is still in films with women twenty years younger.
What is true is that most actors get better at acting as they get older - and also their later films are necessarily more recent and so perhaps easier to bring to mind?
Plenty of actors spend most of their twenties playing highschoolers and so don't get to start on adult roles until they reach thirty anyway
Being rich is correlated with having money and other societal resources. It has nothing whatever to do with being smart or hard working. If someone wants a piece of that, it can pay to woo. This goes for men and women. I've known both and on both sides. From what I've seen, marrying for money is one of the hardest jobs out there, not that it always works out badly.
I think it depends what you mean by rich. I'd have thought there _might_ be a dip around the 20 million mark where you're not so smart/hard-working, but I think the general trend (definitely true for 5 million and 100+ million) is to be smart and hard-working.
I thought that there might be a peak around $10M-$20M, based on the rich people I know. (Of course, anecdotes are not data, but here goes.) That's the kind of money that you can earn with hard work, some smarts and a lot of luck. (One guy invented a sushi making machine. Another sold a travel software company to Google. Yet another worked for a bank in China.) Most of the big money is inherited, so if it's a lot over that range, odds are smarts had nothing to do with it. It was about the magic of compounding. It is a lot harder to get from $100K to $1M than from $10M to $100M. People with less were either not as smart or not as hard working, but most likely not as lucky. Chance favors the prepared mind, but there are a lot more prepared minds than lucky tickets. Remember, two inventors tried to register telephone patents that day.
How do you think people get money and other societal resources if not by being smart or hard working? Even if it's just by their ancestors being smart and hard working, that means they probably have genes for being smart and hardworking too.
Most of it was luck. You had to be in the right place at the right time otherwise all your smarts and hard work were unlikely to pay off. European serfs worked just as hard as 18th century American farmers, but serfs could work for a thousand years and never own their own land in Europe. They could in America thanks to our extensive resources and government policies.
Another common way was by violence and the threat of violence. A lot of fortunes in the US were made by businessmen backed by violent union busters, cavalry to clear out the land's original owners and kidnappers to procure an unpaid labor force. I'm not even counting the likes of Rockefeller who was known to blow up rivals oil rigs.
Since most wealth is inherited in our society, it doesn't matter if someone a hundred or five hundred years ago happened to be smart, hard working and lucky. You don't have to be smart or hard working to inherit.
The claim that "most" wealth is inherited in our society is just completely wrong, especially in the context of 500 years. The vast majority of wealth on earth has been created by smart and hard working people in the last 50-100 years.
There was a selective force. Smart serfs who let their masters know they were smart got killed.
Most wealth is inherited. It's highly concentrated, so we're talking about relatively few people. Sure, some of those at the very top may have had smarts and worked hard, but as you move down the list inherited comes up again and again. Also, most of the big success stories involve great wealth coming on top of not quite as great wealth. Building a real estate empire starting with $1M is not as impressive as building a real estate empire starting with $10 in terms of showing smarts and hard work. It's not impossible, but it takes less smarts and hard work.
Oh yeah, rich vs high earning is an important distinction. Marrying rich is difficult, too many existing hanger-ons, too few of them. Marrying high earning is significantly easier (there are so many more of them who are single), and a lot of the time reaps immediate benefits such as reliability with bills and invites to family functions where family is generally also high earning (but at the top of the earning curve, whereas your partner is usually just starting out). You get a surprising number of excellent free meals if you date or marry a 2nd or 3rd gen high earner and very often access to a network of other late-career high earners, some of which may be in your industry, most of which have highly prized professional skills.
I'm noting this because I would call myself a 2nd gen high earner, though the perks I can offer are necessarily limited by all of them being in my parents' industry and also overseas in the Motherland. And I would call my partner a 3rd gen high earner even though his wage might not numerically qualify, but he's built up a comfortable reserve by living at home (which had sufficient room to house him as an adult, a perk of being 3rd gen) in his early career days and having basically no bills and also no education debt.
A 1st gen high earner (I know a few of those through uni) is rarer than a 2nd/3rd gen, and will come with more money neuroses (and potentially some maladaptive money habits, like aversion to investment), but they're also more likely to be exceptionally hard working and smart (I feel like I'm very slightly above average for both, which was just enough as a 2nd-gener to get a high earning career, but the 1st gens I know are definitely both of those things and much more so than me!)
"Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical.[1] It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity ...It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe — especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu).
...Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution. ...It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas."
Taking on the established order is a young man's game, and so the cultural heroes became the young challengers, the rebels, the Question Authority type still valorised to this day.
I wonder too how much is a selection effect put in place by mass media, specifically that while only part of your audience has experience as a full adult, nearly everyone was young once. So even middle aged people can relate to a Romeo and Juliet ("I once had a tempestuous relationship like that. *sigh*") but teenagers and 20 somethings can't always grasp why parents should be so concerned about who their kids marry. As a result the topics of mass media stories trend towards experiences of younger and younger protagonist characters.
I would hold out Breaking Bad the exception, with perhaps Game of Thrones showing the transition all in one show; all the old serious people get killed off very fast and it is mostly their kids navigating the story and becoming serious adults that matter.
> On the other hand, our built-in nutrition instincts are also what tells us to take a fifth donut after we’ve already eaten four, which even a moron can use their reason to figure out is a good idea.
Typo: "good idea" => "/great/ idea" (or maybe just a missing negation)
Also worth noting that status is no longer achieved in the same way as a million year ago, when instinctual physical attraction evolved.
Intelligence did play a role at the time, but it made more sense for evolution to focus attractiveness metrics on physical size and strength.
Now that conscientiousness is a much better predictor of status than physical size and strength, parental reasoning is rationally focusing on this metric, while instinctual attractiveness has become a less suited assessment mechanism. Young love is maladapted and focusing on a suboptimal proxy.
Height and attractiveness and intelligence are somewhat correlated, so child/parent judgement might not always diverge, but assessing conscientiousness is safer with a longer track record, hence parental preference for older suitor.
Note that this divergence is mostly relevant for daughter / male suitor. In the symmetrical son / female suitor situation, parental disagreement would be less likely because the best proxy for female fertility remains beauty. And I think there is usually less parental conflict in this situation empirically.
Physical attraction has been overrated. You want a mate with a sense of humor. Humans evolved a sense of humor to keep them from murdering their children.
I'd bet that for a female's parents considering male suitors a bit of age helps too. Historically males tended to die rather more frequently, usually younger and with foreign objects lodged in awkward places. Any older member of a group that typically dies young must have a lot going for them, and probably are likely to keep living for a while longer. Rather like how once children made it to about 10 they were likely to live quite a bit longer, a male in a relatively violent society that makes it to 30 or 40 with some wealth and status is probably going to live into his 60's. It's the 16-20 year olds that are likely to get themselves killed, regardless of how pretty they are, and their future productive capabilities are not entirely obvious most likely.
I think the variables you are considering are not independent. Younger male are more likely to get themselves killed *in the process of* gaining status. A very-high-status youngster (wealthy-heir type) should not be more likely to get himself killed than a wealthy middle-age professional. So your argument would obviously be valid if the young male suitor is low-status + seeking to gain higher status, but then you assume that the female status "compass" is broken in the first place: evolution should nudge her towards the older, higher-status male. If you reject that hypothesis, then you are not really solving for the problem of parent-offspring best-suitor-selection-algo misalignment. Unless I am missing something in your argument.
Sorry, I should have specified that I was thinking in terms of the hunter/gatherer tribal group, where wealthy-heir wasn't really a type, outside of maybe "current chieftain's sons." Otherwise, most young males should almost by definition be low status, as they have not had time to climb whatever hierarchy exists and are just out of the "child that does what adults tell them" phase.
Now, a younger male who was already one of the best hunters in the tribe, the fastest or strongest etc. might get to be higher status very quickly and thus be the optimal mate, but there are only going to be a few of those around at any given time relative to the number of young females looking for a mate. It doesn't require a broken compass for genetics to push females towards "First, get young, strong and high status. Then young and strong and maybe will get high status. Then older and high status, even though he probably has other offspring or even other wives that might be a higher priority." Note that part of that decision process is an estimate of what someone's future status is likely to be, which is a function of mental acuity and social experience, i.e. maturity. Parents who have lived through the process and seen what sort of young men are more or less likely to become high status and what sort are more or less likely to become dead are likely to come to different conclusions on that point than youngsters, even if their underlying decision process is the same. If the chieftain's son is an option, parents are going to be thrilled. If the young Adonis who is rapidly becoming the most respected hunter in the tribe is an option, great. If it comes down to a choice between a pretty decent kid who is maybe a little too rebellious and likely to get himself offed and an older widower who has a solid foundation in the tribe, the parents are going to go for the latter while the daughter has less frame of reference for judging the situation and might want the young guy. If she had all the experience her parents had she would probably come to the same decision, but genes don't necessarily help you predict who is going to be high status better than experience does.
I understand your point much better, thanks for the clarification!
It makes sense. But maybe the underlying algorithm might even be more of a risk-management aspect than ordered preference then.
Going for the young promising suitor is higher risk (risk of violent death, more female competition, risk of failing to reach potential) and higher reward (longer compounding, resource exclusivity (at least for a time)(. Going for the older established suitor is lower risk (proven track record), but lower reward as well (shorter resource-providing timeframe, potential resource-sharing with older offsprings).
That would imply that parents behave more risk-averse than their daughters, which seems counter-intuitive. Evolutionary speaking, they should push their sons to be more risk-seeking than they would because of the extreme skewness of male evolutionary fitness and risk-averaging as parents having/expecting other offsprings. But for daughters, I cannot see a clear reason for parents and daughter to have diverging risk appetite. Do you?
Oh, very much yes on the diverging risk appetite. Part is based on appetite, part is based on incorrect estimates of risk, but we should expect a divergence.
You mention the risk of violent death when it comes to the young suitor, but that is a bigger issue than you might be considering. What is the status of a women with a kid or two whose husband just died? Does she go back to her parents and put the burden of upkeep back on that household, or is she on her own? If one of her parents has died, especially the father, is going back for support even an option, or does your remaining parent need your support? What is the status of her kids if their father dies? Can they advance without a father's clout?
The risk of having your spouse die before your kids are of age weighed against a somewhat longer life and no complications of other kids is probably a very "winning is a bit better, losing is super bad" kind of situation. Successful gamblers generally don't bet it all on one hand, and this is possibly a big gamble. Notably it is possibly a bigger gamble for the parents if they have to take the daughter back into the family with her kids, support them and then find another suitor, while possibly having other kids to support and marry off. So more downside risk for the woman, lots more for the parents, and importantly not that much more benefit for the parents of a longer compounding time; they aren't going to be around to see the last 10-15 years of their kid's life, and besides, you have children to support you in your old age, not the other way around.
Parents are also absolutely more risk adverse than their teenage kids. That's sort of universal. Part of that is just understanding the risks better. Young people generally have a firm belief that they will never die, and neither will their true love. Thus they will far underweight the risk of early death.
At just a genetic level, a male spreading lots of wild oats is a slight benefit, and if his success requires some risk of getting killed parents are going to be less worried. With females, well they are the limiting factor in how many babies a group can have, and require lots of resources and protection during that process. Parents are always going to be much more cautious with that, if only to prevent their daughters getting knocked up without a male to help raise the children. So long as the daughter has someone to help support her and raise the kids, it is sort of a wash, but from the parent's perspective the difference between the father supporting the kids and their supporting the kids is a big one.
There is also the question of the value to the parents (and their other offspring) of having their daughter marry someone who is already higher status, just in terms of social alliances etc. Someone who might become higher status 5-10 years from now is a big gamble compared to high status that helps out now. One in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say.
I *think* your ideas of life a million years ago are oversimplified, or just wrong. Evolution sometimes drives body sizes smaller. Specialists were making fancy tools a million years ago. Etc.
Also, whether conscientiousness is a better predictor of status depends on how the money is earned. Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter. Think of many salesmen and corporate spokesmen.
"I *think* your ideas of life a million years ago are oversimplified, or just wrong." - could you expand?
"Evolution sometimes drives body sizes smaller." - of course, in other species, or for humans in case of resource scarcity. But generally speaking bigger/stronger men (at roughly equal intelligence) had a higher evolutionary fitness.
"Specialists were making fancy tools a million years ago." - Ok, can you explicit your argument?
"Also, whether conscientiousness is a better predictor of status depends on how the money is earned." - Sure, but high conscientiousness is a strong predictor of success *across* the board. Even artistic geniuses have to put the hours in.
"Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter." - I don't understand that sentence.
"Think of many salesmen and corporate spokesmen." - B2B sales people need *a lot* more than looks for success. I have been a decision-maker on quite a few large B2B contracts, and I can assure you that pretty but incompetent sales people have a 0% closure rate. Again, at equal competence, looks always help, but unless you go into very very shallow jobs, a strong competence foundation is required at the top. Even actors for whom physical appearance is a must have typically gone through a lot of hard work and rejection before succeeding.
Yes, evolution is driven by many different forces, often in contradictory directions and simultaneously. Big was often an advantage, but not always. The robustus lines tended to die out more frequently than the gracile lines. (Of course, there were more instances of the gracile lines, as smaller animals tend to be more numerous than the larger ones. This is as true among the hominids as among the other groups.)
I'm not sure of the exact time period but there was a woman potter back then who had a paralyzed side of her face, and did a self portrait (in clay). I can't turn up a link right now, but it was in Science News or New Scientist a decade or so ago. She was rather elderly. There many places where "tool factories" were in place. Sometimes the tools were exported (i.e. they were traded until they ended up a long distance from the place they were made.) There was an amber route that may have stretched from Denmark to Southeast Asia (or it may have been a more complex kind of trading, but the merchandise moved). I've heard several different dates for that amber route. In the Americas obsidian from Yellowstone was traded all over the continent, but I haven't heard any real dating on that.
What's difficult about "Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter."? Never bought a used car from a smooth talking salesman?
When you restrict the conception to B2B sales people, I must admit I don't know that territory. You could be right. But that's only one small area, and there are other areas where physical appearance isn't the primary requirement. (And I never asserted it was the primary requirement, though in some lines it's quite important. Even in academic settings.)
"The robustus lines tended to die out more frequently than the gracile lines." -> I imagine you are at least partially talking about Neandertal vs. Sapiens, but there was much more to it than sheer size. And Homo Sapiens average height went up over the past few 100k years.
"Never bought a used car from a smooth talking salesman?" -> Never, but more importanly the question reflects my concern with your line of thinking: you are cherry-picking examples rather than addressing the main point. To illustrate, of course you can cherry pick women that are much taller than individual men, but it does not change the fact that men are in average taller than women.
sorry, i'm confused here. What's the difference between the 'stupid' explanation:
> parents are older and wiser than suitors, and so less hormonally obsessed with attractiveness.
and the new one:
> the suitors are working off one level of drive, and the parents another, in a way suggesting they’re genuinely separate.
You even end with an example here:
> the same reason why I might be tempted to overeat at the ice cream shop, but my parents can easily tell me “you should watch your weight” (while facing their own temptations themselves)
would a 10 year old in an ice cream shop with her friends have the same kind of wisdom? It looks to me like this post is actually redefining ancient virtues like wisdom and prudence, using modern understandings of optimization algorithms.
The difference is that rather than parents being genetically predisposed towards selecting higher status mates (A), parents are clueless at a genetic level and instead have to wing it based on their heuristics (B)
The difference is that it's not about age. It's that it's easier to tell somebody else to resist their instincts than it is to resist your own instincts.
> it's easier to tell somebody else to resist their instincts than it is to resist your own instincts.
it's true, but this suggests that tinkering with your notion of identity - say, by meditative exercises that help you identify desires as things that arise and fall - a pretty effective trick for acting more as a fitness maximizer rather than an adaption executor
if you ~only~ identify with your genes, it gets ugly, sure - but if you identify with some memes of your culture, and your own personal name, then it changes in interesting ways
That actually does seem like the sort of thing Trivers could more easily explain, and his theory of "genetic conflict" is tailored for a situation like this.
For those curious, I reviewed one of his books here:
Succinct and accurate. Can "parental preference" really be distinguished from the preference of any observer whose goal is the wellbeing of the protagonist?
As a secondary point, the protagonist's potential mate has their own interests and may (consciously or unconsciously) be counterfeiting fitness signals. I'd expect an observer to be less susceptible to this than the protagonist.
Probably the important test is whether friends and siblings both give the same advice as parents (the hypothesis suggested by this post) or whether siblings give the same advice as parents while friends give the same as the individual (the gene selection suggestion) or whether friends and siblings give the same advice as the individual while parents are the odd ones out (the age explanation).
It's not at all hard to imagine young peers encouraging each other to do stupid things that older adults say 'hey maybe don't drink until you vomit multiple nights a month'
It could be that the fashion of it being religion that intelligence, grit, etc. etc. are all just environmental and not genetic is causing a lot of parents to say some very silly things about who are and are not good potential mates. It would be very taboo for a parent to say 'You shouldn't marry X because they're dumb and ugly and I don't want to have dumb and ugly grandkids'.
I. When people want to have sex, they might pick a partner who is sexually attractive at the expense of other good life choices or personality. When parents are selecting partners, they are thinking in terms of marriage. Parents don't want their children sleeping with sexier people. This might be not relevant for the studies linked in Dynomight's post though.
II. We would expect the child to find someone they find attractive already. Attraction is somewhat idiosyncratic. It would be odd for a parent to step in and say "this person is insufficiently hot for you." It wouldn't be odd for them to criticize the person on a more straightforward criteria like "has a bad job, is mean, etc" that isn't so subjective. Only you know how attracted you feel to your partner. The parents are left guessing, and it would be odd to assume the child isn't attracted and the parents had to step in. Same would go for sexual performance.
> When people want to have sex, they might pick a partner who is sexually attractive at the expense of other good life choices or personality. When parents are selecting partners, they are thinking in terms of marriage. Parents don't want their children sleeping with sexier people. This might be not relevant for the studies linked in Dynomight's post though.
The whole *point* of this post is asking *why* people are sexually attracted to people who their parents don't consider the optimal mate. People are attracted to people due to reasons that in significant part are ultimately a product of evolution, and presumably this is true for parents' judgements of potential mates for their offspring - they've both evolved to have a preference for fitness maximising mates. Why don't the judgements of potential mates between parents and children converge?
*Why* do people want to have sex with certain people? *Why* fundamentally are those people considered "attractive"? You're treating it like it's a meaningless, brute fact of people, but everything about our behavior and preferences has been significantly shaped by evolution. We find certain things attractive, fundamentally, because of evolution. Men having sex to young women with wide hips increases fitness, therefore men find these types of women attractive. Let's say that parents are good are picking partners for their children that maximise fitness. If these partners do in fact maximise fitness, the question is why aren't these types of people necessarily the most sexually attractive?
>It would be odd for a parent to step in and say "this person is insufficiently hot for you."
Says who? We're talking about evolution here - if doing this lead to better fitness, then we should expect it to have been selected for. Absolutely everything we do could be considered 'odd', but we evolved to do it so its not considered 'odd'.
> the drive to protect children once you have them
I think there's lot lurking in this phrase. "Take care of the kids you have" is a powerful evolutionary-driven imperative. The main thing is, the 20-year-old doesn't _have any kids yet_. They are not yet subject to this imperative, while the parents are.
You're right, I think there is a lot here. IMO, parents want their child to have a suitor with prospects, because they want their child's (and grandchild's) life to be easier. To me, this seems like "taking care of the kids you have" rather than evolutionary fitness for the grandchildren.
It's also worth contrasting the behavior of a 20-year-old, childless individual, and a 20-year-old single parent. My guess is that, while the former might choose a mate predominantly on the basis of attractiveness/beauty, the latter's preferences probably would lean towards providing for their existing children.
That's an excellent point. While there are certainly single parents who continually chase the same sort of people that made them single parents in the first place, it does seem to hold that many are looking for a much more stable relationship partner than their previous choice(s), and are willing to trade a lot of physical attraction and romantic aspects for that. I have heard some variant of "I just want a good dad for my son" quite a few times. (Not directed at me to fill the role, of course.)
But the whole point is precisely that this factor should be encoded in sexual preferences (and to a certain extent, it unambiguously is - women almost universally prefer wealthier/higher status men).
If half the females in a prehistoric human population were sexually attracted to men who were highly unlikely to protect and provide for their offspring, while the other half were attracted to men who were highly likely to be able to protect and provide, the genes of the former group should be expected to constitute a diminishing proportion of the toal gene pool with each successive generation.
Evolved factors do not primarily drive our behaviors by making us perform rational cost-benefit analysis on a given trade-off, they're more fundamentally going to be encoded in what we inexplicably find attractive in the first place.
I think humans have a generalized version of imprinting, like ducklings that imprint on the first animal they see after hatching, humans have a longish life stage of gaining data about the world and "learning" reactions to it that they thenceforth innately follow. This is not the same thing as reasoning about things from principles and data, but it's also not the same as having a specific built-in instinct.
I’m not seeing why one needs any deep or difficult theoretical reasons for this phenomenon. It strikes me as the same reason why a third party has an easier time giving me good dietary advice than I might settle on myself. My biological hunger urge might lead me to over-value flavor and cause me to eat too much, whereas my parents (or whoever), who do not experience the visceral pleasure of my eating, can give me a more rational assessment of what my diet should look like. Similarly, if the desirability of a prospective marriage partner can be assessed through two (let’s pretend, to simplify) considerations, one of which is strongly driven by a biological urge, then one’s parents, who are not going to be tempted to over-value the component grounded in a strong biological impulse, will be positioned to offer more objective advice. I guess one could ask why there is a biological urge to overeat or to over-value the sex drive relative to more dispassionate criteria of value in a mate, but if we accept the common observation that most people do so, then the differing opinions of parents can be fully explained, it seems to me, by the fact that they are looking at the situation as third parties who are not experiencing the biological drive.
Yeah I'm sure there's some nuance here, but I can't believe I'm three sections into the blog post and it hasn't mentioned the obvious reason:
The parents don't get to fuck the hot babe/studly stud. In a weird-ass world where they equally received that benefit, for some reason, then analyzing drift in preferences between the two would make more sense.
Even the kid will know it's a bad idea pretty often. People stay in shitty relationships with great sex all the time, man!
The whole point is: why is that hot babe/stud "hot" at all in the first place?
We evolved to find certain things attractive. Those things are generally those that maximise fitness (in a particular enviornment). *If* parents are good at identifying which partners will maximise fitness, then why isn't there a total convergence in what people have evolved to find sexy and the partners which parents have identified as being fitness maxmising?
You're talking about sexual attraction as if it's some brute fact of nature, divorced from many thousands of years of selection pressure. Men aren't attracted to wide hips because "wide hips are just what is attractive, period". We evolved to have this preference because of its impact on reproductive fitness. If wide hips were worse for giving birth, then we should expect that we would have evolved to find them unattractive.
The older I get, the more I dislike evolutionary psychology explanations for anything. We can all come up with convincing stories, but there is no reason to treat them as anything other than fiction.
That's because, once you are out of the reproduction age, your genes are no longer selected to prefer this clearly superior argument ;-)
But on a more serious note, I agree that it's easy to make an evolutionary psychology argument, but very hard to prove ir refute. We can compare with other species, but it's really not clear at all how transferable those attributes are and which species is a good reference point.
On the other hand, we know that evolution is the process that instilled us this specific behavior, so if you can't come up with an evolutionary psychology argument, it's at least an indicator that something is off.
Because you are the end product of a line of organisms stretching back a billion years, who were successful at reproduction some billions of times in a row, roughly speaking. That is, from start to finish, the genes that make up *you* were the genes that successful reproduced themselves, one billion times in a row. What are the odds that a game of chance is run a billion times in a row, and we find an individual (in this case individual set of genes) that wins each and every game -- that throws a natural 7 a billion times in a row -- that this individual has *any* component of his behavior *not* exquisitely tuned to win the game? Pretty much zero to as many decimal places as you care to inspect. You are the poker player that won a billion hands in a row, there's no chance any aspect of your strategy at the table has not been tested, some time or other, and not been found to be optimal.
The problem with most arguments against the exquisite tuning of natural selection is that it fails to comprehend, at some basic level, how very long the selection has been going on, how extraordinarily many times the harrow has weeded out the faulty. As a species, we have existed for less than a million years, but we share most of our genome with species that have existed for much, much, longer. Our core genes have existed for most of the past billion years. They have been tested and refined so many times that *nothing* that does not produce an optimal result survived, it has all been pruned out long ago.
"Because you are the end product of a line of organisms stretching back a billion years, who were successful at reproduction some billions of times in a row, roughly speaking."
So is everyone else (including ferrets) and yet we are scattered across a considerable range of behaviours. Whole distinct cultures and everything. People throwing themselves on hand-grenades to shield their unrelated comrades. Young Werther. The courtly love tradition. Hikikomori. Streaking across football pitches.
It seems that in my case evolution has tuned me in the direction of neuroplasticity and, yeah, adaptation-executing. My genes seem to predict my behaviour only in very broad terms, almost useless in the particular.
I suggest you are overly impressed with the range of human behavior. As well one horse talking to another in a field may marvel at the diversity in horsey behavior. "Why, Carl over there loves munching on clover, while I myself can't stand anything but the tall fescue. And notice how Marian uses only the molars on the left? Thank God the great Left Molar Right Molar conflict is now over, and we can live in peace with each other."
It's understandable, we are embedded in our own species, and every little variation is important to us, but I rather suspect an alien biologist might well summarize the entire gamut of what we do in a paragraph or two[1] if we shared the textbook with the full range of conceivable life forms.
A damn sight better than just "harmless", at least.
Enjoyable rejoinder, but you've moved the goalposts. The question is not whether the variety of human behaviour is important in some species-independent sense but whether said variety exists and by dint of its existence demonstrates the limits of evolutionary fine-tuning. The Molar Schism would serve to show this just as well.
If anything, intelligence represents a terrific evolutionary hack allowing us to adapt to new or rapidly-changing fitness landscapes without having to laboriously sift allele ratios to do so. (This is weakly comparable to the evolution of the major histocompatibility complex, where there's selection in favour of maintaining a great variety of alleles as opposed to any specific individual ones.) To go back to Kaleberg's original assertion, it seems clear to me that plenty of human behaviours are not specifically instilled by evolution but instead enabled by an evolved, complex, somewhat fuzzy, behaviour generator.
Re: all the poor genes having been pruned out—no, that’s obviously untrue upon reflection. There are still genes around that kill kids before they get out of infancy. Reproductive matters are no different; poor genes get through the sieve by chance all the time.
There are genetic defects (like trisomy) that can severely impact children, and there are genes (like for sickle cell) that persist because they have other effects that are salutary, but if you can think of a single *normal* unmutated gene that has persisted for the past 100,000 years and which has nothing but evil effects, I'd be very interested to hear of it.
I think also you are confusing defects in DNA reproductionl, which produce brand-new mutant genes, with the pre-existing presence of evil genes. The former is what causes birth defects, not the latter.
There is no exquisite tuning in evolution. That's a common fallacy.
The genes that reproduced only had to be about as good as the previous generation's for a large value of about. There's nothing that keeps fitness rising consistently and nothing to prevent it from falling as long as it works just well enough to stay in the game. My genes sure as hell haven't won a billion hands in a row. My genes just won a pot often enough not to lose all their chips. Also, that winning wasn't just about genes. They were also lucky that the chair never collapsed and the game never got raided which is a way of bringing up environmental factors and dumb luck.
Exquisite tuning is a common misperception about evolutionary theory. One of the big beefs people had with Darwin was that his theory wasn't about exquisite tuning. Things just had to be good enough, so it didn't matter if they were just as good or somewhat worse. One writer compared evolution to a telenovela and creationism to the Aeneid. In telenovelas stuff just keeps on happening. In the Aeneid everything is towards the eventual found of Rome. Arguments citing exquisite tuning often turn out to be about politics, not genetics.
Sure there is. Competition. It's certainly true the earliest cat predators only had to be a smidge faster than the earliest ungulates, and maybe they both lumbered across the veldt at walking speed, but the prey adapted and willy-nilly the predator had to, and so now we have cheetahs and gazelles, which are both about as swift as their biomechanics allow. What you say is arguably reasonable when new niches are abruptly created or vanish -- let us say post-glaciation or Chixculub -- but these are narrow little bands of history and irrelevant to the point anyway.
The rest of this is a farrago of metaphor and assertion, neither of which leave me with more to say than that I disagree entirely, sorry.
My reply was to Carl Pham above you, who was asserting that there's "zero to as many decimal places as you care to inspect" percent chance that any individual (as a set of genes) has been tuned non-optimally by evolution. These are examples of genetic problems that evolution has thus far failed to weed out.
“We know that evolution is the process that instilled us this specific behavior”
We don’t know this unless you ascribe to evolution basically all possible human behavior, in which case your definition of evolution is so broad it might as well just be called nature or the universe or God. This is the problem with evo-psych. It’s the lock opened by any key.
But... there is nothing except Evolution which can create new behaviors. I don't understand what you're saying. If these behaviors did not come from Evolution, where did they come from?
Is there a reason you’re capitalizing evolution, as if it was an entity and not just a chain of accidents?
Anyhow, no, like I said, that’s far too broad. That’s like saying that we should understand everything through the lens of chemistry. We can call it chemistry psychology because everything is basically just fancy chemistry. (I recognize that some people actually do this, but it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.)
The fact is that most behavior is better and more simply explained by treating people as if they think and reason, and assuming that behaviors arise from their thoughts and feelings rather than the dead hand of ‘Evolution.’ If you assume that every behavior humans have today—boarding the F train, writing Der Holle Rache, farming strikes for a god roll sniper rifle in Destiny 2, planning the perfect bento box, putting atmospheric satellites in orbit, etc., is basically just noise caused by sexual selection in early primates, then you’re going to have an extremely reductive and trivial understanding of the meaning and nature of most human endeavors.
Which is fine. You are allowed to believe that, just like the chemistry people are allowed to believe their comfortable simplicities. “Why does the Mona Lisa smile? Dopamine. Why do I feel this terrible longing when I think of all the world and the things in it that I will never know or see? Dopamine. Why did my wife leave me? Dopamine.”
I capitalized Evolution because Google speech to text capitalizes it, and while I'm willing to go back and correct certain typos, that's not one of them because Jesus Christ is it annoying
Also, that's not the mistake I'm talking about. All human behavior comes about from chemicals in the brain, but that doesn't mean that understanding human behavior through chemistry makes sense. Not because it's false but because it's too complex, you could spend your entire life trying to understand a single coherent thought at the level of the synapse spikes and you'd never figure it out in time. Just like trying to figure out the crazy connection between the selection pressure in the ancestral environment and girls starting to do 'wings' on their eyes with eye liner. (I might be a few years behind fashion.)
But I am seeing a lot of people who wouldn't object "the connection is so tortuously complicated that it's impossible to tease out information", but rather "there is no connection". People who are claiming that genes do not influence behavior, rather than claiming that the influence of genes upon behavior is computationally intractible and therefore not comprehensible or a particularly useful framework for understanding behavior.
It feels like exactly those misconceptions that EY wanted to clear up with the evolution sequence. And I remember having conversations on older SSC where that context was understood! I am disheartened to see we need to go back to linking the sequences at people to get back to the level we used to be at. It wasn't very fun lol. Linking people the sequences is probably almost as tedious as being linked the sequences and told to read them.
The argument is a bit too close to 'god of the gaps'. It's computationally intractable only as far as considering every possible behavior goes. But you don't have to: evolution has levers to tweak specific signal strengths, cell type mixes, et cetera, that is: it tweaks ~propensities~ of our mental models. The issue is that propensities on a statistical scale turn into a set of common strategies/behaviors. Over time, these become common and institute selection factors for underlying propensities and vice versa. You can't just focus on the outlier behaviors and tell us we can't see the evolutionary process within those. There's an aggregate trend, just like going from a micro to macro scale in econ.
As for explaining human behavior through chemicals: see all psychoactive drugs and substances - if an effect on behavior can be achieved through some of those, it can be reached evolutionarily also but with a far greater degree of precision. Whether or not it's a valid construct, you can tweak pretty much every component of the OCEAN scale, so selection has to be doing just that.
Well yeah. Evolution is broad. As an explanation it's superrior to "God did it" not just because it's less broad as evolution can only explain the behaviour of self replicators with specific parameters instead of any possible physical phenomena, but because we have a pretty good gear-level understanding of how exactly evolution works, while the will of God is a black box.
Funny, it seems to me that despite your protest that an evolutionary explanation is more predictable and understood, that the objection of many people to evo psych is that it provides an elementary justification for literally any mechanism whereby we can arrive at what we see. “Uh… we must do that because… it was a fitness advantage. Or, maybe, it’s a leftover bit that used to be a fitness advantage but isn’t. Or, it’s a conspicuously anti-fitness waste of resources that demonstrates that you’re so fit you don’t need to be efficient!” At least with “God did it” you’re being honest with yourself that you’re not introducing any new information into your science.
The kind of honesty you get from "God did it" explanations is overvalued in my opinion. It's like doing a stupid mistake while being fully aware that you are doing a stupid mistake, yet continuing to do it, nevertheless. The whole point of noticing your mistakes isn't getting virtue points for awareness, it's correcting them and doing less stupid mistakes instead, even at a risk of not knowing anymore what kind of mistakes your are doing now.
I agree that a layman with a glimpse of evolution methodology can use it to create explanations for nearly anything. Here should be a link to an xkcd comics of evolutional explanation of gravity, but I can't find it for some reason. That's why you should be carefull with such things. Experts of the field who can do the math right, generate postdictions and falsify them are less at risk here, because they understand the actual constraints which are not clear for you and me.
I agree with you except that I don’t see any more substance in the explanations of evo-psych experts than the explanations of laymen. I mean, how can one even become an expert in evo-psych when one cannot reproduce, experiment with, or falsify one’s beliefs? There quite literally is no math to do. So much for rigorous empiricism, and without that, science is just a fancy word for sophistry.
The mate seeker uses system I heuristics, because that's what gets us excited. The parents use system II, because they don’t actually have to have sex with their new in-law. System I has not yet had time to catch up to the cultural factors that affect potential parenthood.
This is the old tension/dialectic between instinctive urges adapted gradually to hunter gatherer contexts and bourgeois values that make sense in cities.
"Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once."
Could there be a certain instinct to avoid incest here? I mean, maybe there's theoretically a way for parents to be drawn to exactly the same traits that correlate to sexual attractiveness without it feeling like sexual attraction but I'm having trouble imagining it. If a daughter brings home a suitor and the mother says, "Ooh, super hot!" you can see how this could create problems down the road that are even bigger than those created by the usual disagreements.
There's also the issue of who experiences the benefits and the downsides of the different types more. The parents don't get to enjoy having sex with the hot person, but they do have to deal with the aftermath of the hot person wandering around because everyone else thinks they're hot too. On the other hand, older folks are often in a more vulnerable position if crops fail/the house forecloses/somebody gets cancer or whatever, so they might end up benefiting more from having in-laws with means.
Maybe incest isn't the right word so much "parents and children competing for the same partner. " It has been known to cause lots of intrafamily conflict, which is bad for the family's survival.
While the "problems down the road" are a given in such cases, it's arguable whether /instinct/ is how they get avoided. The prohibition had to be explicitly coded, as far back as the books of the Torah. Leviticus prohibits father-in-law/daughter-in-law mating in 20:12 and mother-in-law/son-in-law mating in 20:14, both under penalty of death.
Over time such prohibitions turn into social norms, more than needing the actual draconian enforcement. And the prohibitions are justified in terms of the "problems down the road" that otherwise arise. But the fact that they needed to be codified as norms, runs counter to the concept of it being a "widespread instinct". There may be e.g. a prohibition against eating pork *because* most people's instinct would be to eat it - even if it wouldn't be a good idea in those times in that climate - whereas there is no prohibition against eating feces, which no-one who abides by their instincts would do anyway.
Those ancient cultural prohibitions therefore function as "amendments" to the things that the "built-in" human instincts do or do not (reliably) cover. They were assembled from wisdom and experience, to avoid the bad consequences that may arise from "merely following instincts". Meaning that if Leviticus 20:12 and 20:14 were written down, as they were, then human instinct was not something that could be relied upon to avoid such cases.
More directly, a daughter thinking "sex between me and Jack would be really hot, yay hot sex!", may result in the sort of sex that evolution would like to encourage. A *father* thinking "sex between my daughter and Jack would be really hot, yay hot sex!" requires that the father be inclined to think "sex involving my daughter and some heterosexual male could be really hot, yay hot sex!". Since the father is by definition a heterosexual male, and is in a position of influence and authority over the daughter, that could lead to some evolutionarily very suboptimal sex when the daughter enters her years of peak hotness.
So evolution is likely to discourage that whole line of thinking, whether father/daughter or mother/son and probably father/son and mother/daughter just to be safe. See Westermarck Effect. And with "yay hot sex!" off the table, parents wind up with only the boringly rational-economic criteria for mate selection.
Throughout much of human history, and across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, marriages were commonly arranged by parents or other kin. See Apostolou, M. (2007) 'Sexual selection under parental choice: The role of parents in the evolution of human mating' and Walker et al. (2011) 'Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices'. If you want to examine and theorize about the evolutionary history of human mate choice, and the role parental choice may have played, the dynamics across these societies are probably good places to start.
See also Chagnon et al. (2017) 'Cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamö shows evidence of parent–offspring conflict and mate competition between brothers'.
Maybe this is just what all the mesa-optimizer stuff means, but it seems like the simple explanation is that while we have a hormonal desire to reproduce, that's actually not our main behavioral goal.
When parents (or friends) advise use on relationships, they're thinking largely all the non-reproductive things we care about: a stable relationship with someone who you enjoy spending time with, who you can have a good standard of living with, etc, etc. Stuff we value, but are sometimes too "blinded by hormones" to see.
Suggesting that parents are doing 4D chess maneuvers to calculate/approximate the maximal yield for all their descendants just seems too to put too high of a premium on the raw evolutionary drive to me.
Okay, taking your logic to be correct - why are parents doing that? Why didn't they evolve to be more fitness maxmising?
But in reality, how do you not see that a "stable relationship" is *precisely* the kind of thing that IS fitness maxmising? Stable relationships is how you be confident that your children/grandchildren will be protected for/provided for.
There might be a very simple theory to explain suitors and parents' differences of preferences: Parents are old and their sex drive are dry. So their main consideration process is rational. Suitors are young and full of hormone and naturally get more influence from apparent characteristics.
The test case for this is to compare young parents/ or parents with substantial sex drive versus old and dry parents. Who would give more preference toward your in-law being hot? My experience point to quite a correlation. Sex-craze parent and uncle want me to marry the hot one and vice versa.
As a (relatively) young man with flowing hormones, I behave much more like a parent when I'm giving friends advice/judging their partners for suitability. Meanwhile, I can't follow my own advice in my dating life because irrational, hormone fueled urges are actually calling the shots.
Cart before the horse. The level of hormones is *the result of* natural selection optimizing behavior. Hormones don't peak in adolescence randomly, the *design* is for them to peak at that time, because the behavior that causes is optimal for some reason or other. Similarly, hormones do not decrease with age randomly, but by design, because for some reason or other it is better for the influence of hormones to wane as one gets older.
But why isn't there a convergence between these two things? Why aren't fitness maximizing traits precisely those that are the most sexually attractive? Sexual attraction is a matter of evolved preferences. There's nothing inherently "good looking" or "bad looking" about somebody, its all a product of preferences.
A fast life strategy is one that is dangerous and results in high quantity, low quality offspring. Think of men having unprotected sex with random partners, and then abandoning their children to have the mother take care of them. Maybe some of the children won't turn out so well, but you make up for it in quantity. Slow life is the opposite: get married and invest heavily in a small # of children.
We know that people who grow up with single parents, parental neglect, or in a stressful environment, tend to adopt fast life strategies. Children in these environments actually go through puberty earlier, and are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors (i.e. fast life strategy). This may make sense evolutionarily - if there is social instability, have children ASAP with someone good looking, rather than investing for the long term. [https://www.biomedcentral.com/about/press-centre/science-press-releases/28-10-20]
So probably if you have parents around who you have a good relationship with, who can actually influence your mate choice, you're more likely to be in a world conducive to slow life strategy. Your parents already primed you for that strategy during your childhood by staying together and investing heavily in you and creating a safe environment for you, which literally will cause puberty to trigger later, and likely result in you focusing more on long term vs short term mating. Whatever social maneuvering they engage in when you are in adulthood is just a continuation of that phenomenon
Simple alternative rat framed explanation: both parents and children are status maximizers. How does the child maximize their status through mate choice? A partner who's highest status in their milieu, i.e. the sexy romantic one, who their friends will be like "good catch". Otoh, have you heard how parents talk about their children to other parents? Never "their spouse is so sexy" but "my kid married a lawyer/doctor/etc." The bride as business owner's daughter makes this even more straightforward.
I think the really interesting or challenging question is why people ascribe status in these differential ways, among different milieus. Like, there's no reason someone's dad couldn't be like "your wife is hot! Good choice son" and equally why a husband couldn't be like "I think it's so sexy that you're a doctor". Seems like a combination of some deep cultural ideas relating to stages of life and taboos on interaction with in-laws (apparently different cultures have different bans on the sort of in-law relationships that people can have, like maybe mothers are prohibited from speaking with their son-in-laws... I think Freud discusses this in Totem and Taboo). And also, for a cynical TLP take, marketing works.
"Like, there's no reason someone's dad couldn't be like "your wife is hot! Good choice son" and equally why a husband couldn't be like "I think it's so sexy that you're a doctor".
I think people might find it a little unsettling if the father was ogling the daughter-in-law, that's introducing an element of sexual competitiveness that is positively Freudian (and I can attest to one case from previous job where guy and gal are living together and have a kid -out of wedlock of course, boyfriend goes to jail - because of course this is the level we're at, girlfriend then shacks up with his father and has baby by *him*, fun and frolics ensue when boyfriend gets out of jail and finds out what happened).
All in all, generally better if Dad is not going "You sure scored a hot piece of ass, kid!" 😁
Oh, I completely agree it's not a good thing, and that there's Reasons it tends not to happen, but "why" remains an interesting question! Also what a wild anecdote...
I tell you, working in social housing was An Education 😀 I'm really glad to be working now as admin support in childcare and special/additional needs centres, much less drama! There's really not a whole heap of trouble that two to five year olds can get up to, by comparison! Johnny bites Stevie? We have A Policy to deal with that. Janie has a meltdown? We can cope with that. Billy does not play nicely? We have an entire protocol to deal with it. Way easier to cope with the minor problems of small kids!
Is there a sex-drive-adaption and another wanna-have-(more)-kids-drive? - I wonder, but I'd say: "No. probably not. But then ...": a) I (male) like the sex-thing and I like the kids-thing (going for the fifth now - envying Dshingis and Ziona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziona ) - and it is not "social-pressure", nope. If anything, more than 2 kids is a minus in my country, in my circles - and even grandma said: Enough, now, isn't it! - So, why I had no vasectomy, yet?!? - b) I know one relative that was not much into sex, but into kids and had 4. Maybe there are more? - Maybe it is more an adaption as in "A fertile landscape with prey/water/shelter is good to be in" thus: we feel good when wwe look at one, so we buy a "beautiful landscape painting with deers"? And mammals evolved to feel good about having kids around them? But then: why "Hotels for Singles"/"burnt-out teachers"/and: Please, get the kids out of here! - Anyway, great SA as SAS always does and an appreciated shout-out for a fine text by dynomight. And agreed: dyno's question is solved by the ice-cream/donut analogy. - Can I have a fifth? As a moron, I qualify!
Yes. Well, it’s still evopsych, but human psychology is subject to two separate evolutionary tracks: innate behavior that is influenced by biological evolution, and learned behavior that is influenced by cultural evolution.
Biological evolution is still struggling to catch up with the advent of civilization, but cultural evolution has got its back. And cultures where parents meddle in their children’s marriage decisions are (presumably/apparently) more successful than cultures where parents let their kids make bad life decisions because they are horny.
True, but… why wouldn’t it be adaptive? Especially in modern times, where sickly kids can get antibiotics and women with bad ovaries / narrow hips / small breasts can get fertility treatments / C-sections / infant formula. Picking a successful mate seems like a better strategy for having reproductively-successful descendants than picking a “healthy” mate does. Biological evolution can’t move fast enough to adjust our preferences for that but cultural evolution can.
People reject 'evo psych' out of hand, but then just take it as a given that people have certain preferences and drives. Where do you think any of this comes from in the first place?
I don't reject evopsych at all. But just-so stories are the best-known failure mode around.
In this case, both parents and children want respectability as a type of status, which is a drive everyone accepts. The thing we're explaining is the difference in emphasis between the two, assuming it's real. But having a beatiful daughter-in-law gets little status. That should be enough of an explanation, shouldn't it?
Also, young people have an antagonistic drive towards disrespectability - maybe because iconoclasm is a part of future leadership, or something, but if this is itself a just-so story then substitute your preferred explanation for this part - and so again, it explains the difference in emphasis between parents and children on beauty versus status.
"An average Indian mother isn’t going to know about which physical features predict healthy pregnancies or which very minor skin imperfections signal poor immune function, but she is going to know that potential son-in-law X makes $20,000 a year more than potential son-in-law Y."
My question is how age fits into it (imagining a man trying to marry a woman). In the standard instincts vs reason story, I would think that the woman being young fits on both sides. Instincts to the extent people find younger people to be hotter; reason because a younger woman has more time to have more kids, and less chance of special needs kids. And yet my sense is that wanting to marry someone significantly younger is seen as typical instinct-over-reason behavior. And unlike really subtle looks-related indicators of fitness, like hips-to-waist ratio or facial symmetry, age is just a single number and anyone can understand the implications.
Another question is preference for in-group spouses. I.e. the group-X parents who want their children to marry people within group X. I'm not sure how that fits in with all this.
Sperm banks normally have a limit on how many children a single donor is allowed to have, it's usually a rather low limit, I think five or so? So if you play by the rules, that strategy won't get you a lot more kids than if you were to start a family in the old-fashioned way. (Although of course you can do both, so you can think of your extra offspring conceived via the sperm bank as a "free bonus".)
There have been multiple cases though where fertility doctors secretly used their own sperm instead of the donor sperm (or instead of the sperm of the male half of the couple trying to conceive) and sired hundreds of kids that way.
"Being in a position where you can secretly impregnate hundreds of women while they think they're getting someone else's sperm" is not an opportunity which many people will ever find themselves in; it certainly isn't something which evolution would have specifically programmed us for. But apparently, among the few people who do find themselves in that position, the temptation is there.
The sperm bank is not a good strategy because there is more to passing on one's nature than just the DNA. Or more precisely, the genes encode in the parent certain rearing behaviors that improve the fitness of the offspring more than mere possession of the DNA does. Consider it a variant of the green beard effect.
That's why all animals do not simply compete for maximum possible fertility, some kind of fish or housefly strategy of laying as many fertile eggs as is metabolically possible in a lifetime (which is what the sperm bank strategy is).
It's said that a chicken is just an eggs way of making another egg, but it has to be remembered that eggs (or rather the DNA) has ways of designing the chicken that are considerably more sophisticated (especially in a higher species) than encoding the instinct to "make as many eggs as possible as quickly as possible." That's *one* strategy, but it's pretty rarely chosen, I think only insects and fish do it. Most other "eggs" design "chickens" with considerably more sophisticated strategies. One assumes they do so because they are more successful ultimately.
I think it is that parents in societies with socioeconomic stratification like our own are more aware of the costs of raising children such that they can maintain or gain status. We did not evolve have an innate understanding of high real estate costs, for example. Thus parents are more likely to encourage their children to find high status mates and more likely to value status in prospective mates for their children than other desirable characteristics such as attractiveness.
Evolution says nothing about optimizing. If something is going to get carried to the next generation it only has to work just well enough. It does not have to be optimal. Piss poor may be 100% adequate. If you are following a putative evolutionary argument and notice the word "optimize" or a synonym, odds are you are not following an evolutionary argument. Odds are you are following a philosophical or political argument. Philosophers and politicians love the idea of optimal. It gives them an excuse for torturing and murdering people.
As long as a characteristic doesn't preclude reproduction, it may be carried to future generations. This is despite the Biology 101 joke that sterility is inherited: if your parents didn't have any children, you won't have any children. Evolution may favor certain characteristics if they lead to better reproduction, but if you've ever played with asymmetric dice where A>B>C>A, then you'd know that what comes out ahead in one case might not come out ahead in another. There's an awful lot of contingency which is science talk for dumb luck.
Biologists used to correct people who said organism X evolved characteristic Y. That was a teleological statement, a statement about purpose, and it had no place in an evolutionary discussion. They'd remind people that organisms don't evolve, populations do. If characteristic Y has become more common in organism X, that might be because characteristic Y offers some reproductive advantage. Alternately, characteristic X might be something that just happened to appear when some other characteristic, e.g. characteristic Z appeared, and that characteristic led to increased reproductive success. (See spandrels.) Or, it might just be dumb luck.
P.S. There's a hilarious 1983 paper "Why Are Juveniles Smaller Than Their Parents?" offering evolutionary arguments for why younger organisms are smaller than older ones of their species. To Ellstrand's credit, he was trying to be funny. The punchline: "In particular, another juvenile character is even more widespread than JSS (juvenile's small size) and deserves some thoughtful attention, the fact that juveniles ALWAYS seem to be younger than their parents."
P.P.S. As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!
"As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!"
Casting love and romance as methods of getting to breed (with recreational sex as a maladaptive variant of procreative sex, of course) is a way of taming love and romance, and shifting the discussion of those things under the streetlight of science. Such a move makes it theoretically possible to be objectively correct about love and romance, and that's a very seductive prospect.
What's "good enough" in one generation won't be "good enough" later when a more advantageous allele is sweeping to fixation and the population is at the Malthusian limits.
This is why we can think of evolution like an optimizing process. A better allele pops up, and it gets selected. Eventually you wind up with the best possible alleles for a trait.
Optimization refers to genomes that become progressively better at replicating themselves. The genes that were "good enough" the previous generation tend towards extinction over a long enough time range because they get outcompeted.
Of course evolution doesn't have a goal, but it's perfectly valid to talk about optimization in these terms.
That's a retrospective analysis. Basically, you are arguing from the point of view that the current world as it exists is optimal. In that case, your argument is correct for some value of optimal. If the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteor, they'd be arguing today that mammals were a failure because they carried their young internally rather than sensibly dumping them out in eggs.
If you are talking about an evolutionary goal: there are no evolutionary goals. That's like saying water wants to run downhill. Water doesn't want anything. It still runs downhill.
I assume you mean the plural "your". Individuals don't evolve. Populations evolve.
This discussion is about stated criteria for mate choice and the difference between those criteria among between making mate choices and those offering advice on mate choice. I have no idea of how evolutionary "goals" are related to this.
>"Evolution says nothing about optimizing. If something is going to get carried to the next generation it only has to work just well enough. "
You're ignoring the fact taht different genes can get carried to the next generation to different extents, its a competitive process. And it's not just the next generation. Having kids who all die before giving birth means your line is snuffed out.
>"As long as a characteristic doesn't preclude reproduction, it may be carried to future generations. "
And yet, we are vastly different to our prehuman ancestors, and vastly more similar to each other than we are to our nearest evolutionary relatives. The idea that almost everything is getting carried forward to the next generation is plainly false, otherwise we wouldn't be humans, and humans wouldn't be so distinct from every other species.
>"Biologists used to correct people who said organism X evolved characteristic Y. That was a teleological statement, a statement about purpose, and it had no place in an evolutionary discussion. They'd remind people that organisms don't evolve, populations do. If characteristic Y has become more common in organism X, that might be because characteristic Y offers some reproductive advantage. Alternately, characteristic X might be something that just happened to appear when some other characteristic, e.g. characteristic Z appeared, and that characteristic led to increased reproductive success. (See spandrels.) Or, it might just be dumb luck."
Okay, SO WHAT?
Literally nobody here is saying what you're implying they're saying. We're exclusively talking about evolution on a population level. Literally nobody is saying an individual organism is evolivng whatever trait. We're talking about human beings as an entire species.
And yes, spandrels exist, again, so what? You can't just say "spandrels!" as the explanantion for any particular trait based purely on the fact that it would suit you to be a spandrel. Either millions of species become well adapted to their environment by sheet chance through untold billions of lucky dice rolls.....or the overwhelming majority of evolution of traits has not been spandrels.
You're literally just spamming entirely generic arguments because you have some ideological opposition to the heritability of behavior.
>"P.P.S. As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!"
Are you a creationist?
If not, then you are completely wrong to think that they're all separate. They're all evolved traits meant to maximally produce and raise children. There's absolutely ZERO basis for treating them as distinct from evolutionary considerations.
Unless you wish to imagine that love is something that not only evolved by random chance and ALSO that it helps enormously with pair bonding and child rearing, then there's no reason to think its not subject to the same slection pressures as everything else.
Sure, the next generation gets its genes from the previous generation, but what does that have to do with optimizing? It just has to do with being able to reproduce. Just because some genes will make it, only half from each parent thanks to the meosis lottery, and others won't doesn't mean there is some kind of competition between chromosomal pairs, and it definitely doesn't mean that the resulting gamete has better genes. It's a crap shoot. That's why genetic drift is the usual state of affairs.
How does the fact that we are "vastly different to our prehuman ancestors" refute that the likelihood that we may have all sorts of genes from our ancestors as long as those genes didn't preclude reproduction? Sorry, but as far as genes go, almost everything does get carried forward, especially since we are talking about populations. There isn't some massive winnowing every generation. All humans share huge chunks of genome with minor variations here and there. If they didn't they'd have a lot more trouble finding mates.
I just keep finding mystical statements. For example, if you think that sex, love and romance are separate things, then you are a creationist. That's really hard to figure out. Try: If you think courage, valor and bravery are the separate things, then you are a flat earther. Separate things can be related and intertwined, but if you want to understand things, it helps to separate them. Please, don't get started on a evolutionary optimization argument about courage, valor and bravery. It's too early in the morning.
I think it is older / wiser and less hormones that explains the difference. I think the same individual would assess choices differently if they could go back in time and choose a spouse again. They would understand that lust is a passing phase and long term suitability is much more likely to lead to happiness.
Okay, then why haven't we evolved to have hormones that lead us to the "wiser" choices in the first place? That's the whole point of this post. Why haven't we evolved to lust after that which is (supposedly) best for us?
I'm going to argue that the difference between "parents want different things than children, but can't distinguish between only have a single child vs. multiple" is not that unusual a distinction, nor should it b unexpected in evolutionary terms.
There are _lots_ of ways that humans change as they age behaviorally and otherwise. It is very easy to hijack/piggyback on those changes, but none of those changes have a way of telling if there is only a single offspring.
For example, the hormonal changes you mention a paragraph beforehand. Hormones change, and switch parents from valuing good genes to valuing good social standing. However, these hormonal changes mostly happen regardless of if you have one child or multiple children (or no children at all) so in order to get to that next level of fine grain thinking, you need to now invent a completely novel process, instead of just hitching onto an existing one. This is a _very_ non trivial distinction in evolutionary terms. Changing what an existing process does/borrowing it for a new use happens _all the time_. Inventing entirely novel processes almost never does.
-edit- I don't think this should really change your conclusion, I would agree that your final thought of "it's easier to make choices for someone else than yourself" is probably more likely, it just doesn't seem crazy to think that evolution could make exactly the level of distinction that you are skeptical of.
All three papers referenced over at Dynomight are based on stated preference surveys. WTF! There's nothing about actual conflicts over individual mate choice. People do not choose a set of criteria as a mate. They choose an individual. Try having sex with a bunch of criteria. So, how common is parent-child conflict over mate choice? I have no idea. Neither does Dynomight. In my circle such conflicts are quite rare. Most parents are relieved that their child has decided to "settle down" and maybe behave like an adult for bit. Now and then there is some drama, but while it makes for a good story, it is uncommon.
Also, no one is addressing the more relevant issue of family structure. The nuclear family is an anomaly. In many societies, one is expected to marry a cousin. Saudi Arabia is a great place for research on genetic defects thanks to this custom. There's an argument that western Christianity restructured the family with the council of Agde banning first cousin marriages. There's probably a pile of BS in there, but banning first cousin marriage does cut down on certain genetic problems.
Other important questions are: How tightly are children controlled by their parents? Where are they expected to live before and after marriage? How is property inherited? Can one obtain resources without parental approval? Those are cultural, not genetic. There are all sorts of structures, but no one is obviously superior. Maybe primogeniture made the British Empire what it was, but there are still an awful lot of people in France and China.
People in just about every society value romantic love, but in traditional societies long term relationships are supposed to be about sex, property and social status. That's why it is so often customary to have a spouse approved by the family and a lover on the side or, for men only, a wife and a concubine, that is, a wife whose children will not inherit. It's almost always about resources. In one society, women take two husbands. They say more sperm is better, though it's more likely about the other stuff that sperm providers can offer.
To me as beautiful the various routes taken trying to analyze what is actually going on be it reptilian or complex thought genetics, I would like to remind people that in the mid 1960s an MIT professor gave students a summer assignment to model vison (Summer Vision Program 1966). I think we are still waiting on that one.
Well, it seems to me the thing you're missing here is that social and pseudo-social systems, both those humans invent and those nature invents, seem often to be designed to have conflicting drives and that this can be highly adaptive. Consider heirarchy among primates: what are the drives of the chimps not alpha? (1) Be obedient to the alpha, so he doesn't kill you, and (2) kill the alpha and take his place. *Both* drives operate, all the time, even though they point in radically different directions, because it is adaptive (for the primate tribe) to have that tension continually in play. When the alpha becomes old or fat and lazy, (2) gets stronger, and when the alpha is young and strong, (1) gets stronger, and both are highly adaptive for the tribe's survival, maximizing quality of leadership while minimizing unnecessary conflict.
So I would think it a priori not unlikely humans might evovle a system in which one component (the offspring) have a greater drive for markers for physical fitness, while the other component (the parents) have a greater drive for markers of social fitness. As you point out, *both* are adaptive -- but in what mixture? The correct answer to that would readily vary with individual circumstances, the situation of the tribe, et cetera.
One way for the system to arrive at an optimal answer is to have "agent advocates" who press for one priority or another, like competing lawyers fighting a case in court, who each argue their best case, with an end result that may end up better than if the competition is sorted out within one agent.
A good reason why dividing the agency like that might improve the outcome is that the parents, through their greater experience, are likely to have a better judgment as to the social fitness a potential mate represents. So having the parents represent *that* point of view makes good sense. But having them make the decision *entirely* probably *doesn't* make sense, for at least some of the reasons you outline (e.g. the parents' interests are not identical to the childs' even at a crude physical level). So it makes equal sense (from the point of view of evolutionary adaptivity) to give considerable agency to the child, and give the child his own strong contrasting point of view (and physical fitness is readily judged acccurately by even very inexperienced individuals, one assumes), so that the end result is some complex situationally-dependent compromise between the drives of the child and the drives of the parent.
Another way to look at this is that optimizing outcomes in a rugged fitness landscape (and it hardly seems doubtful that evolutionary fitness is *very* rugged) requires the occasional jump uphill to escape local minima. So adaptation strategies that translate to "just go downhill" are routinely beaten by strategies that incorporate some degree of saltation. What better way to ensure saltation than to set up conflicting agents with conflicting drives, such that from time to time they reach different conclusions and something unusual happens? It's the social equivalent of mutation in physical evolution: perhaps most of the time children defying their parents produces a lower quality marriage, but in x% of the cases it produces a much *higher* quality of marriage in unexpected ways and the gene line gets a big honking infusion of fitness[1].
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[1] It's interesting that stories of children defying their parents vis-a-vis mate selection tend to end up with just this fairy-tale ending: the prince/princess defies the wishes of the king and marries a commoner -- *but* the latter turns out to be unexpectedly extraordinary, and brings much-needed hybrid vigor to the royal line.
Alternative theory: the parents might be driven by some drive other than maximizing the number of successful grandchildren. People seem to like money for reasons that do not directly tie into maximizing genetic fitness. I guess the drives that lead to this probably came from something related to that at some point, but it's not like people who are never going to have children or nephews don't care about money. Having a rich in-law benefits the parents financially (especially if it shores up a relationship with an important business partner). Having an attractive in-law doesn't benefit the parents in the same way.
>but it's not like people who are never going to have children or nephews don't care about money
No evo-psych proponent ever would suggest that they wouldn't care about those things, precisely because our preferences aren't rational, we don't think about it all in the grand scheme of maximising gene replication. We like certain things, and those things tended to (in the past at least) lead to greater gene replication.
I didn't catch what exactly you believe is wrong with the Trivers parent-offspring conflict argument. This seems like a fairly straightforward application of it. The child wants the best for him/herself while the parent wants a mix of best for child vs. best for themselves. Getting good in-laws (as clan allies / business partners) seems like an obvious benefit. This seems like the only actually good argument from the ones discussed...
I think Scott meant that parents base their decisions for matches for their children on rational thinking while children base their decisions also on sexual attraction. The latter is doubtlessly a product of evolution. Applied rational thinking is not necessarily a product of evolution. So the conflict doesn't have to be between parents and offspring. It can also be between thinking and feeling. Something like that.
Yes, it is only true in relative terms. I think the point was that those who will have the sex feel more and the parents think more, in relative terms.
Fundamentally, what is best for themselves should be that which is best for their kids. Maybe their wealth accumulation drive (to oversimplify things) evolved to best provide for their progeny, but the two aren't actually directly related and the former keeps firing after its useful for the latter.
What if instead of having one decision maker (children) striking a very difficult balance between wealth and looks in an even handed way, nature selected form two different sets of decision makers (parents and children) each overweighing one factor and then negotiating and fighting between them to agree on a balancing point?
As a society, we often choose multiplayer balancing strategies instead of monoplayer balancing strategies. We don’t give judges the very difficult task of figuring out everything about a case and then find the right solution, but give two lawyers the task of overweighing the merits of two opposing solution and then give the judge the much less demanding task of choosing which side is most persuasive. We do this in politics, we do this in other domains.
Is it possible that natural selection uses multiplayer strategies too? Would this be some kind of co-evolution but of different roles within the same species rather than of different species?
In reference to, "A healthy person, breathing because their body instinctively demands oxygen...", I'll point out that the urge to breath comes from build-up of carbon dioxide, not lack of oxygen. I don't think it changes your point in this case, but is an interesting bit of physiology to know. It leads to shallow-water blackout, which I guess is a blind-spot in our evolution?
👍 It's definitely a good thing to be cautious of. Especially when doing something like free diving in open water, where help is unlikely to find you in time!
I've said for a while that a likely reason for always getting conservative advice from loved ones is: they share in your downsides more than your upsides. If you have mind-blowing sex with a hottie, that's awesome for you, but your parents (if cool) probably think "that's great how nice for him". But if you try meth and enjoy it and get addicted, fired, and become homeless, your parents are going to feel obligated to cancel some pleasant plans of their own and help you with your mess of a life (perhaps in perpetuity).
So one always picks the riskier/fun-er thing for oneself, and the safer/boring-er things for loved ones.
Indeed. That's the perverse incentive of having a per need safety net, where you don't (fully) assume the bad consequences of your choice, but reap the benefits. Then reckless behavior can become a perfectly sane life-optimizing behavior. Caring parents are the best example of per need safety net, but it's not the only one. Health systems, some economic aids, mutualizing insurances,... Same incentives, same consequences...
I recently watched a Netflix documentary called 'Our Father'. Short version: before sperm banks had everything well in order, some fertility doctors substituted their own sperm whenever they needed to. This resulted in large numbers of people discovering through mail-in DNA kits that their fertility doctor was their biological father and they had potentially dozens/scores of half-siblings in the local breeding pool.
(Note: the epilogue text says they've found 44 docs who've done this so far. I have not verified any of this. The show was clearly trying more to drum up viral controversy, so I wouldn't be surprised if mitigating circumstances for some/much of this was left out.)
The subject of the documentary is a well-recognized doctor, whom everyone said had a lot of the kinds of traits the parents should be looking for - smart, successful, well-regarded, etc. When they interviewed the women this had been done to, they universally said this was a huge problem because they wanted to option to give consent. In a few cases, husband's sperm wasn't cutting it, so the doctor substituted his sperm without telling anyone - only to have later DNA profiling reveal to ~35yo adults their true paternity.
Many of the children/mothers start a campaign to out the doctor, take away his status in the community, end his marriage, etc. Lots of outrage in the show, and a desire that the man get sent to prison. Literally looks like they're trying to reverse the traditional parents'-choice selection criteria, after the deed is done.
Wondering how you would fit this into your framework here? It subverts the parents' claim, because all the truth came out 30+ years after the fact. Subverts the good-looking adaptation-executor, because they already got their hot-husband the whole time they raised their kids but they're still mad. (Would be like going bare-back thinking you might conceive and excited by that, but later finding out she's on the pill - then saying the pleasure is retroactively ruined. Or alternately, landing the hot chick, but then when you find out she's pregnant trying to justify that naw, she wasn't that good looking after all.)
All of this sounds much more shallow/simple than the way I think and act. It doesn't resonate. Maybe there's more here than any of the current paradigms explains. Thoughts?
If the women got the wrong sperm without consenting, it was like someone raped them gently when they were asleep. Or do I get something wrong? Is that not a cause to be upset, if the rapist happens to be both hot and free of veneral disease and you happen to only get to know it 30 years later?
Why do women tend to resent rape at all? At least in part because they actually prefer to mate with their mediocre husbands instead of some self-styled alpha.
Many of the women had already consented to using an unknown donor (remember this is before sperm banks when they could choose specific ... criteria?). They were told the person was a research fellow or whatever, whom they only used up to 3 times. In this case, the women later discovered that the source of the sperm wasn't what they were originally told, and that was why they were angry. The concept of rape was brought up, but it didn't exactly fit that profile given the circumstances. Maybe rape-adjacent?
It's an open question what percent of the women would still have consented if they were told in advance that-
A. [Infertile husband]: We can't locate a donor, or the donor's sperm expired. You could choose to reschedule, or the treating physician could use his own sample.
B. [Semi-fertile husband]: We've tried a few times with your husband's sperm and it's not working. We could continue those treatments but it will cost more, or we could use donor sperm from the treating physician.
Obviously, the ethical thing to do is to ask before you go charging in there so I understand why this would feel violating. But it also highlights how strong the drive is that this be an active decision. Say my wife surprises me with lunch. She selected both the fast food joint and my meal, yet I'm likely to be happy even if it's not exactly the decision I would have made if given the choice in advance. I'm better off because of the decision that was made, regardless of my participation in that decision.
Contrast this with marriage or conceiving a child. Some parents disown their child if they make the 'wrong' mating choice. If the fertility doctor inseminates with his own sperm instead of the donor sperm he promised, there is outrage.
I understand the difference between these scenarios and the surprise lunch. I'm not sure how any of Scott's descriptions help describe that difference, though. It's one thing to be strongly invested in a decision ex ante. It's another to feel strong indignation ex post. For some decisions, we have strong ex ante feelings about the outcome but no/little ex post reaction.
Whatever the women were promised, there was an imbalance of information. The fertility doctor knew he used his own sperm, the women did not. I wouldn't want a creepy fertility doctor sneaking past my house to get a glimpse of his kid.
But I agree that people are probably less upset if an anonymous donor wasn't anonymous than if the man who was supposed to be the biological father was not the biological father.
Fascinating. I think cuckoldry helps clarify what's missing here. I wonder if the underlying urge/drive isn't just "have sex", or even (to pull from the proverbial biological clock) "make babies", but rather there is a fundamental biological drive to form a coherent family unit. The adaptation-executor might interpret that in any of a number of different ways - which is where the tension between the parents and the children comes from in the hot/rich tradeoff. Both parties are still executing the same drive to form a coherent family unit, but both see that from different perspectives.
This would explain why the parents care as much as they do - this is their family they're concerned with. The evolutionary angle would be well served as well, since it ensures mate selection occurs across multiple competing criteria represented by different interests. It explains why the people in the Our Father documentary are upset - and even complain their lives are turned upside down from the children to the mothers and the cuckolded fathers. The action interfered with parent/child relationships, and undermined the structure of the family. It also explains why the simple act of obtaining consent obviates the whole issue, preserving the family structure without the stress of ex post negotiation.
If some of the women really believed the fertility clinic used their husbands' sperm, it is very serious just because those women unwittingly committed cuckoldry. Regardless of what they say about females and evolution, many women really don't want to deceive their partners. So if a fertility doctor deceived women into deceiving their partners, that is… kind of serious.
Isn't this uncertainty between the wisdom of our drives vs. our reason the essence of our humanity? I suspect it is the very reason we exist. We don't have the unconcern of the sparrow or the disregard of the lilies in the field. We must suffer through thinking and wondering whether thinking makes us better or worse off without ever knowing the answer. My guess is that this is the reason humans exist.
Just by introspection, it really doesn't seem like we have specialized mate-selection software for kin/allies, rather we just rely on type 2 style thinking (discernment). This isn't absent from personal mate selection, it just might be drowned out by type-1 style thinking (attraction) in many circumstances. But eventually the honeymoon period ends and you realize hey, maybe I don't want to marry this super hot person who is actually kind of boring and has a ton of debt.
My type-1 system chooses who I date (based on mainly appearance TBH), but ultimately my type-2 system decides whether or not to keep dating them based on other factors that a parent would probably also agree with. Ideally I will satisfice both for marriage, because the type 1 system can really mess stuff up if it doesn't get what it wants. (And, in my cultural milieu at least, parents strongly defer to this over their own considerations - e.g. "as long as they make you happy")
What is our theory about how evolution implements drives in the first place? And what is our theory about how life experience, ie learning, acts to implement these drives? I would have thought that a simple theory of primary and secondary reinforcers would work. Ie, A theory that posits a set of basic, 'hard wired' drives that appear in strongly in most animals. Food, sex, oxygen, freedom from pain, comfort and shelter etc are at that very basic level in that they require little or no learning to become a reinforcer of behaviour. Their capacity to immediately reinforce is 'wired in', presumably via the genome's influence on brain development. Then you hypothesise that some stimuli can acquire reinforcing properties through a learned association with these primary reinforcers. The point is that 'learned' or secondary reinforcers, cannot and will not be learned except through their association with a relatively small set of primary reinforcers. Social status for example, is a very powerful motivator of behaviour in apes and humans, but the signals associated with social status are often very subtle, and have to be learned. But how could they possibly be learned, except through their association with something which is already a reinforcer? Hence you conclude that the learned or secondary reinforcers only continue acting as reinforcers to the extent they continue to satisfy primary drives as the animal moves through its life.
So I end up endorsing some version of the boring hypothesis. As young adults, we find sexual attractiveness as a much stronger, more basic motivator than almost anything else. As an older person, for purely hormonal reasons, sexual attractiveness is not such a motivator anymore, but social status has lost none of its hold on me. Why does evolution arrange it that way, and not increase my testosterone supply instead of depleting it? The question almost answers itself. What need does evolution have for randy old people when it already has randy young people? Better to allow a graceful ramp down of the hormones, so that parents become helpers in their children's search for mates and status, rather than competitors.
I think "Caucasian liking Chinese women" might be covered elegantly under drives like 'novelty seeking' or 'ingroup vs outgroup preference.' i.e. A human starts by saying "this is what mom looks like" and then selects for or against that pattern based on hormones or mood or whatever.
First off, novlety isn't a primary mating drive. Thge vast majority of people marry the same race. Secondly, novelty cannot explain why white male/asian female pairings are vastly more common than white male/black female, asian male/white female and so on. Even amongst race mixers, there's massive asymmetries, and "novelty" cannot explain this.
"Thge vast majority of people marry the same race."
First, not all people have the same drives. I'm not saying "all people like novelty." I'm saying " novelty can be a drive in some people, and the genetic encoding for such a drive does not need to be complex."
Neither you or I are asserting that *all* Caucasians fetishize Asian women. Which is the argument that average marriage rates seems to argue against.
Also, not all sex is about marriage.
For example, sex with enslaved people was probably more about opportunity than a desire for a lifelong partnership or perhaps even a desire for sex with a person of that race in particular. i.e. it may have been primarily opportunistic.
From "Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas"
"Despite more than 60% of enslaved people brought to each region of the Americas being men, comparisons of ancestry estimates for the X chromosome and autosomes, as well as the comparison of mitochondrial (maternal) and Y (paternal) haplogroups, revealed a bias toward African female contributions to gene pools across all of the Americas.
However, this African female sex bias is more extreme in Latin America (between 4 and 17 African women for every African man contributing to the gene pool) than in British-colonized Americas (between 1.5 and 2 African women for every African man contributing to the gene pool)."
Similarly, a Caucasian man in Asia will likely have advantages in dating that an Asian man in America does not.
"Secondly, novelty cannot explain "
A desire for novelty in some people is not *sufficient* to explain all trends in all relationships, certainly. But this is a fallacy of the excluded middle. Most outcomes in life are multifactoral. But even the sum total of the human sex drive is not sufficient to explain all relationships, so why should a component of the sex drive which might exist in some people be called to explain all marriages? Sexual orientation exists, I think we can agree. But it is not sufficient, by itself, to explain lavender marriages in the early 1900s. There are cultural expectations to consider there, also. An outcome having multiple inputs doesn't weigh against any particular input. I mean, we could also dig into things like socioeconomic status and it's impact on male and female mate selection, relative height preferences, androgen profile preferences, cultural influences on men and women, the status of relative cultures, and cultural trends as promoting or prohibiting certain relationships. But trying to explain all relationships ever is probably an over-ambitious goal.
Again, my point was; for those who explicitly desire novelty in mate selection due to some kind of biological instinct, the mechanism for such a desire does not need to be elaborate.
The classic theory of “mens rights” proponents is that the optimal evolutionary strategy is:
1. Marry the rich ugly doctor and make sure he takes care of you and your children
2. Sleep with the poor hot stud behind the scenes and make sure his superior genes are passed on
So effectively the theory claims that women are driven to cheat on their “beta” husbands with “alpha” males. Sometimes statistics are brought up claiming that 10% of all children are not genetically related to their supposed father, but I’m not sure how good this data really is. In fiction the classic example would be Jamie and Cersei Lannister.
If we assume this is true, then the two strategies make perfect sense:
- If both parents and daughters went for ugly doctors, hot studs would die out and increase risks for the tribe at times of war
- If both went for hot studs, rich doctors would die out and increase risks at times of peace
- If parents voted for hot studs but daughters wanted rich doctors, it wouldn’t make sense as the whole point is to get the rich doctor to commit
- So we end up with daughters wanting hot studs secretly while pushed by their parents to marry the rich doctor
Personally I think that this theory is kind of garbage but that’s because all of evolutionary psychology is very much questionable. But if we accept that evolutionary psychology is real, then it kind of makes sense.
One possible answer is that parents don't get to have sex and wake up next to and watch and generally be in love with whoever suitor they favour. You do. Parents are simply interested in their grandchildren turning out OK, that's their biological imperative, but you would like to have a good time also. Of course you could say that having a good time with your girlfriend should be correlated with her being a good mother and thus you and your parents are looking for the same thing and thus this post, but there is no reason to assume that good-time-fun-sex people are Actually Good Parents. Birth control and so on have demonstrated that humans have a pretty big desire to just have a good time and glance at a pleasant body.
There's another potential conflict. If you marry someone poor but hot, you're a lot more likely to need continued support from your parents than you are if you marry someone who's a good provider. Parents would rather someone else be responsible for taking care of their grandchildren. Their children get the benefits of a sexy lover but the parents pay more of the costs - a classic recipe for conflict if there ever was one.
You missed a pretty simple explanation because you assumed parents are selfless child evolutionary maximizers. It's just an alignment problem.
Imagine your two suitors, one a beautiful but poor young woman and the other a plain but wealthy young woman who's your father's business partner. Your parents might want you to marry the plain one because they can enjoy more benefits from the marriage. If you marry a beautiful young woman they get somewhat more fit (beautiful or w/e) grandchildren. But that's by no means certain. If you marry the rich young woman then you definitely get the wealth (which they can use in a way they can't use your love). And on top of that they get connections to their business partner which benefit them in various ways.
Marriage as a way to create bonds across coalitions is pretty standard sociological stuff. And often neither the man or woman involved really had much choice. We have pretty common stories of resistance or of marriages where the couple don't seem to really even trust, let alone like, each other. Sometimes with good reason!
This is a common mistake in pseudo-evolutionary thinking. "I imagine X feature would be more adaptive so why doesn't it exist?" Evolution doesn't progress towards the most fit world. Instead it is a form of pattern reproduction where individual patterns that are able to survive and reproduce do so.
If you understand evolution in those terms your question becomes easy. "Why wasn't this selected for?" becomes "Why could genetic codes where parents could put their children's needs beneath their own survive and reproduce?" To which the response is, "Why would that prevent them from surviving and reproducing?"
In general, 90% of the time "why wasn't this feature I imagined brought into existence by evolution" is a bad question. Framed wrongly and proceeding from smuggled assumptions or a direction based view of evolution.
The situation where parents have an only child and will never again have children is evolutionarily rare, since most people (certainly most men) died while still at child-birthing age, and most families had more than one child. So you can conceptualize the conflict between the parent and the child as a conflict between two individuals with different evolutionary goals, who happen to share half their DNA and be related to the same set of people, analogously to how you think about siblings. In this case I think there are simple reasons why the interests would not be aligned in mate selection. Parents want status and alliances for themselves and their family. Children want genetic fitness and status for themselves. The father wanting his daughter to marry the business partner is an obvious example where these two interests differ. More generally things like stability are good for family functioning and status among older people, whereas hotness of mate slightly increases evolutionary fitness and creates status for the individual.
While I agree that it's not productive to try to explain everything as adaptive, I think that a lot of default conflicts between parents and children follow a predictable pattern where parents care about family honor or stability, while children care about themselves. I think these are resonances of (evolutionarily) meaningful differences of interest in human societies.
I agree, except on the fact that it's not adaptative. You got it with the traditional conflict of individuals sharing half their genes: the trade-off is not the same for pants and children. In particular, the genetic pay off of siblings succeeding is lower than that of children succeeding. So parents will try to maximize the total number of grand-children, while children will maximize the number of their own children mostly with niblings a distant second. Children are competing for parents resources, and this explains a lot of those parent/child conflicts. Kin selection theory works quite well on this imho...
Consider the (mother, father, suitor)-tuple as determining input on the suitor's choice. Wealth and visceral attaction are the only evolutionary relevant factors. But the suitor is in a far better position to evaluate the visceral attraction-part. The visceral attraction acts both a criterion, but also an incentive to act on the mating question at all. But there is no visceral drive to seek out wealth. So wealth is naturally underrated compared to visceral attraction in the suitor's preference system. To counteract this, wealth is overrated in the parents preference system.
If parents accounted perfectly correctly for the value of wealth, they'd not have enough inecentive to send a strong enough signal to the suitor to rebalance the process. Because the suitor will naturally discount parental signals over internal signals. So the conflict is not a bug, it's a feature so that the result averages out to a compromise.
How do we know evolution only took place on the individual level? History tells us not only about men and women fighting each other, but about armies fighting each other, killing or enslaving the losers and giving the winners resources to reproduce. As described by for example Peter Turchin.
So if Scott doesn't want to donate sperm in order to sire hundreds of children, that might be because groups of individuals who all strived for maximal reproductive opportunities for themselves were bad at forming armies and were extinguished by the less selfish men who became Scott's ancestors.
Societies consisting of men who intended to sire a few children and take good care of them were probably more successful than societies consisting of men who intended to sire hundreds of children that someone else would take care of. That way, there is an evolutionary logic behind Scott's lack of willingness to become the father of children he will never meet. Not siring an excessive amount on children is part of being a good citizen. And good citizens form strong states and strong armies, conquering the world.
Group selection works at the cultural level, but not the genetic level. Because genetic variance within groups vs between groups tends to be too great. A mutation creating a defector will have an advantage. But culture can very more starkly across similar groups (hence the proliferation of languages in New Guinea).
The people who built Stonehenge only make up the remaining 10 percent. Were really 90 percent of the Stonehenge builders less fit than the Indo-European invaders? Or did they just belong to the wrong group?
I didn't say that population replacement didn't happen. I said the variance within groups was too large relative to the distance between groups for the math of group selection to work.
Not for all features. Lactase persistence, for example, is close to 100 percent in Northern European populations and zero in East Asians. Great variance between groups, very little variance within them.
However, genes affect culture. If, for example, one group consists of 60 percent collectivist moralists and another group happens to consist of 50 percent collectivist moralists, the former group might be able to form an army and wipe out the latter group, where the proportions of genetic traits differ slightly. As this happened time after time in history, some traits were selected for and some were selected against. Some genes became more common because groups where they were more common vanquished groups where they were less common.
And isn't population replacement group selection? What could be more group selection than that?
Lactase persistence is individually advantageous, so there's no need to bring up "group" selection. And that individual advantage is why it reached fixation.
No, population replacement is not sufficient for group selection. Group selection requires that a gene lowers the fitness of the individual who possesses it, while benefiting the larger group. The problem with that is within-group there will be selection against that gene, very much unlike lactase persistence.
Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses some of the math and how it was so lacking in nature scientists had to deliberately engineer an example here:
Hm… why does it have to be a "need" for group selection as an explanation for there to be group selection? Couldn't there be both individual selection and group selection for, for example, lactase persistence? Why does group selection need to be brought in only when absolutely necessary?
Most traits that were probably group selected for were also beneficial to individuals. Intelligence, for example. Physical strength. If there is group selection in human populations, then there is group selection for many traits that are also beneficial for individuals and only for a few traits that benefits the group and imposes costs on individuals
But obviously such traits exist, because otherwise we would all be sociopaths.
A lot has happened in evolutionary theory since 2007. In 2007 scientists didn't know that we (Europeans) mostly stem from mass murderers. They thought the invaders from the steppe brought the language, their lactase persistence and not much else. Now we know they are ancestors to most of us, because they happened to kill off those who lived here before. What Eliezer Yudkowski argues against is the wishful thinking of the mid-20th century. The paleo-genetic facts emerged in the 2010s are the opposite of wishful thinking.
If I get you right, you mean that since being tall, strong, a good rider and lactase-persistent was good for the individual, then the Indo-European population replacement was nothing but an awful lot of invading individuals replacing less fit individuals in the original populations? Then I think of your statement that within-group variation is usually bigger than between-group variation. In the Iberian Peninsula, virtually 100 percent of all men carry Y-chromosomes from the Indo-European invaders. Were all the males in the original populations really such unfit individuals? Your statement about within-group variation suggests that they weren't. If they weren't individually unfit compared to the invaders and still failed to reproduce, then I think they were group-selected away.
> Imagine eg a human with a driving goal to have as many children as possible, who’s capable of thinking of things like donating lots of sperm to sperm banks. This is honestly the winning move in the evolutionary game, but humans haven’t been smart enough for long enough for evolution to instill something like this in us.
This is wrong in two very important ways.
First, in the specifics, humans already have this drive. Therefore there has obviously been enough time to instill the drive. There was a scandal not so long ago about an employee at a sperm bank who was discovered to have substituted his own sperm in place of most of the sperm clients thought they were getting. And Jeffrey Epstein was reported to have had an explicit goal of impregnating as many women as possible. This was generally reported in terms of "what a mentally deranged weirdo", despite the fact that it is the most evolutionarily normal goal conceivable.
Second, whether there's been time to instill the drive is not the right question. Humans already have the drive. But its prevalence is not what you might expect. Why?
The reason that drive is not very prevalent is that historically it wouldn't have accomplished much. The only evolutionarily useful drive is a drive that you can fulfill. If Jeffrey Epstein's stated goal had been to have sex with as many women as possible, no one would have called him a weirdo. But that's not because having sex with women is a better goal than impregnating them. It's worse! It's just because for almost all of history those were one and the same behavior, so there was very little reason (or ability) to target impregnation over sex.
If Epstein's goal was to spread his genes, wasn't it a bit stupid to try to impregnate as many teenage girls as possible instead of grown women? Are teenage girls more likely to carry the fetus to term and take good care of the child/adopt it to someone trustworthy compared to grown women?
For what it's worth, I've heard that peak fertility occurs around age 18.
Teenage girls living with their parents may be more likely to get abortions. But Epstein's girls, as far as I understand, mostly lived with him and each other.
Taking good care of the child is a concern that, in the modern day, doesn't matter at all. The child will be fed adequately and grow to adulthood no matter what you might think of the quality of parenting it receives.
Did Epstein succeed in producing a single child, as far as we know?
Just because fertility peaks at 18, women of that age are reluctant to give birth to the "wrong" child. If the goal is cynical reproduction maximization, targeting childless 35-year olds is probably wiser, because they have more to lose from an abortion themselves.
“Maybe evolutionary imperatives aren’t fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way if they have only one child, and another way if they have many children? That seems like a hard sell if you’re first claiming they are fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way, and children another.“
Factually, children act different from adults. For instance : being rich makes you more attractive to other adults as a suitor.
I don’t buy the only-child objection. Do people not care about their great-grandchildren?
"I don’t buy the only-child objection. Do people not care about their great-grandchildren?"
I don't see the relevance of the question. As I understand it, the hypothesis was that marrying a rich partner potentially helps all of your descendants and all of your parent's descendants, while marrying a genetically fit partner helps all of your descendants and some of your parent's descendants, so you have a greater incentive to care about the genetic fitness of your partner than your parents do. The objection is that if you are an only child then your descendants are all of your parent's descendants (aside from yourself), so your parent's incentives should be the same as your incentives. No matter how many generations deeper you look you are still only going to find people who carry both your parent's genes and your genes, so the incentives should still match up.
Agree with most points, just want to point out that the sperm bank thing might be an evolutionarily worse-than-it-appears strategy if the *thing being passed on* (and optimized over by evolution) is not just genes but the gene + accumulated-knowledge memetic structure, which you pass on to your children when you raise them (mannerisms, perspectives, opinions, etc).
This could contribute to explaining why the "want children but don't particularly care about wanton spreading of seed" drive of the author (which I think is quite common) hasn't been optimized into something else (despite other stronger reasons, like the relatively small timescale since which sperm-banks exist)
I think you dismiss Trivers theory too fast. A wealthy suitor is not only possibly helping your other children directly, he help them indirectly with 100% certainty: you do not have to worry (as much) about this particular child directly, it will not use your resources anymore so you can use those resources to help other children (including ones not yet born, if you are still at reproductive age).
This produce testable sex-asymmetric predictions: it's the resource-providing parent and/or the parent with the longer reproductive lifespan that should care the most about suitor wealth. I.E. the father, especially in male provider societies. Is it the case? Hell yes, it's a cliché in romantic comedies). It also predict parents will care much more about partner wealthiness for children not (yet?) wealthy, so young ones or ones who did not achieve material success. Is it true? I think so, for example the typical child whose potential partner get judged is a a young women. Not a middle-aged widowed son...
Women financial independence and later marriage should also decrease this effect, which indeed it does: In the social circles where women are wealthy and late-marrying (mostly well off western families), parent preference for wealthy mates (arranged marriage, in the most extreme form) is a thing of the past and even moral repulsion....
And finally, the effect (I will not have to spend resources on this child anymore, or even gain resources from him/her) is explicitly acknowledged by many if not most traditional cultures. In some sense, it's the whole point of marriage. So why not take them at face value?
In fact, you even have the meta optimizer implementing this global strategy: a hotness filter for partners (good genes) + a caring instinct for children + resource allocation algorithm ("fair" distribution based on needs/equality/genetic proximity balance). The higher wealth weighting by parents compared to childs is similar to child/parent difference of family resource distribution: child prefer an equal distribution (they would prefer to get most, but this is not viable as they are not controlling directly the distribution) and parents tends to distribute as needed even if it's not equal shares...Thinking more of this, it really favor Trivers hypothesis and maybe explain why you didn't find it so convincing: When thinking as parent providing children on a per-need basis, a non-wealthy suitor can be a net resource sink, which in fact is the biggest parent fear: a gold-digger leach that will consume family resource sucked through the "victim" child, not only jeopardizing this particular child future (grandchildren, more specifically) but the whole family. You could even push it further: the child favoring the hot suitor but still counting on a per-need family net is exploiting his siblings, in a cuckoo-esque genetic way....So much for romantic marriage ;-)
Appart from the joke, it's also a testable result: the siblings would be at least as much (if not more) critical of a hot but poor (and worse, likely gold-digger) suitor than the parents. Again, this seems spot on, both in real life and in romantic comedies...
This last effect is maybe what could tell models apart: siblings are around the same ages as the child choosing between hot and wealthy. "Hormones" and "Wisdom" theory suggest younger siblings will agree with "choose the hot one". "Family resource competition" (i.e. Trivers) predict it's those younger siblings which will advice the most for wealthy against hot.
Considering super scientific carefully factual evidences (romantic comedies and personal anecdotes ;-p ), I think Trivers wins hands down...
BTW, this would also predict that while parents want many grandchildren, children are not so hot on having many niblings. Sure, they are part-kinship but also reduce resources from your parents. I do not know if this effect is real, my family structure does not allows me to see it directly, and it would be quite selfish to admit (on the hot vs weatlhy, there is a wise and altruistic excuse ;-p ) so only anonymously-gathered preference could maybe tell...
Also in societies which tend to have a lot of cousin-marriages, arranged marriages of that kind are knitting together the wider family grouping and strengthening it. Resources are shared between blood relatives, not going to outsiders.
Arranged marriages will tend to be between a smaller pool of potential mates than romantic marriages, so there's a good chance that the marriage partners have some connections between their families already.
I wonder if romantic love is the short-term bonding solution; it gets the partner to stick around while the offspring is still a baby to help support it and the mother, then wears off after a year or two so that both parents can find new partners for maximum genetic recombination (and spreading of genes for the males).
I wouldn't be wedded to this idea, but I do think that short bursts of attachment have some kind of place in our whole evolutionary history. Sticking with one mate for a prolonged period requires different mechanisms.
Again, I wouldn't take these kinds of stories as serious science, but a bonding period of two years is long enough to make sure the offspring survives and then the parents can go their separate ways and have new offspring:
"Movies try to convince us we’ll feel this way forever, but the intense romance has an expiration date for everyone. Expect the passion to last two to three years at most, says Dr. Fred Nour, a neurologist in Mission Viejo, California, and author of the book “True Love: How to Use Science to Understand Love.”
I think your explanation is almost certainly right. Parents look at this as an optimization problem for "how do I ensure my child's happiness over the next 50 years, while also providing for him and the rest of his family," while suitors look at this as an optimization problem for "what makes me most happy right now." Suitors may try to focus on the latter but their lower-brain will definitely override that.
The question then becomes: Why are the parents the villains in all these stories? Why do we think people making decisions based on who they most want to bone right now are better at this than people taking the long view with the wisdom of age. Three possibilities IMO:
1) We're just wrong: Arranged marriages are often happier than chosen partner marriages, and divorce is higher in nations with less parental pressure re: who you marry. That... there are so many confounding variables there, but Occam's Razor says it's probably this.
2) We're wrong, except in the extremes: Arranged marriages produce 7/10 life goodness points on average, but often do much worse and almost never do better. Chosen partner marriages produce 4/10 life goodness points on average but occasionally score a perfect 10. When we write fiction, we like to fantasize about the perfect 10.
3) Parents aren't making a true judgment, they're just using a different, equally flawed optimizer: At one point social mobility was very difficult and so choosing a good partner from a good family was the only viable way to move up. Culture therefore ingrained the idea of "marry up" so strongly that it persists, even though that may not be the dominant strategy anymore. If this was true, you'd expect to see people returning to status as a proxy for partner value when social mobility goes down.
For the record, my Gen-Z friends (n=3) are way more likely to use earnings and social status as a dating criteria than people my age, and definitely are more likely to than my parents' generation (or at least they're more likely to admit it).
"The question then becomes: Why are the parents the villains in all these stories?"
Because parents are not thinking of their children's happiness, in the sense of "what gratifies my immediate urges?" sense. You don't have to have romantic love for an arranged marriage to work, just that the two people buckle down and do their duty by each other and their families and society.
Romantic love was seen as something separate and apart from marriage and family life. It wasn't something you chose, it struck you like a thunderbolt from the gods. You could indulge in it as play, like Ovid's witty Ars Amatoria, or in the mediaeval cult of courtly love, or the more cynical 18th - 19th century tradition of admitted lovers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicisbeo
It was only with the change to the Romantic era that the expression of emotions became valued, and that brought along in its wake with other challenges to the status quo the idea of free love, marriage for love, and marriage settled by the couple themselves. If you have marriage for love, then you must also have a means of ending the marriage when the love ends and you find yourself in love with someone else. And so our modern era, where romantic love has been elevated into this supreme good, and we are supposed to sacrifice all else on its altar - don't marry for money, don't settle for less than the soul mate, marriage is all about love and nothing else.
Of course in that paradigm, parents who tell you "that person you are infatuated with is the wrong person for you" and who try to come between you are the villains, even if they're correct.
"So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?"
I think it really does come down to "hormone driven". The parents of adult children (or children old enough to marry) should be at that stage in Hamlet "The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble/And waits upon the judgement" (however well that works out in practice) so they are looking at potential mates for their children in terms of "is this person a good provider/brings a large dowry? are they from a good family? will joining our families be to the benefit of both?" since they're invested in the long-term success of their genetic line.
The suitors/brides are at the stage of evolutionarily-driven "hot person, mate now!" drive to have children and to hell with 'does this person have the resources to support children', it's about immediate urges and gratification of same, *any* baby produced is a good baby at this level. We don't have children because we think they're cute, we have the reptile-brain "genital friction feel good" urge and if we go ahead with that, then before we figured out how to try and prevent pregnancy or terminate pregnancy if it happened or commit infanticide afterwards, children were the natural result of that. Then the 'urge to protect offspring' kicks in, because at the mammal stage we don't have 'hundreds of eggs laid and if enough hatch and survive to adulthood that keeps the species going' of other species. For humans, pregnancy and child-rearing is a big commitment.
Because we've got bits kludged on top of bits and we're intelligent *and* conscious, basic drives get over-ridden or diverted all the time (this is the whole impetus behind Freudian psychiatry, after all: how can the basic sexual instinct end up with fetishes and complexes? we don't get that with other drives like hunger or sleep). So the basic drive of "mate now" is still operating during peak reproductive years, but the complications on top turn that into "but only find tall Asian women in red bikinis arousing".
Okay, and why are certain people "hot" to us rather than others? You treat this like its some brute fact of nature and not an evolved set of preferences (and therefore, it should be based on fitness maximisation).
Your conclusion makes a lot of sense, but I would put a lot more weight on the parents' opinions because a lot of people just take the intuitive idea "good looks"="better genes" idea as proved beyond discussion, when it's not. As an ugly person with excellent health and two beautiful children in the 90th percentile in both athletics and school grades, I've always been suspicious of the idea that making you hot is simply nature's way of showing off your excellent genes. Human looks probably were such, a mere beauty contest, millions years ago, but evolution is tricky: I'd say human beauty is now a Keynesian beauty contest, in which the idea is not to look good, but to convey the idea that you are objectively good looking for a majority of viewers. For example, blue eyes give no genetic or visual advantage whatsoever and are very widely perceived as, ceteris paribus, more attractive and thus have been selected for exclusively on sexual grounds; even worse, women of several races have evolved neotenian traits to look younger to your sexual instinct when every other available evidence tells your they are older: not just blond, younger-girl hair among Caucasians, but more slender bodies with narrow, younger-girl hips (bad for childbirth!) among Asian women. None of these traits say "good genes!" They all say "genetic manipulation!" Women's well-attested attraction for high-testosterone idiots, preferably with a criminal record, is evidence that this trickery works both ways. One possible counter is that genes for traits like blue eyes are hooks that ensure other genes of yours will travel further (because they make your descendants more attractive) but this looks like an arms race where genes conveying pure sexual appeal with no fitness advantage and even some disadvantages (those narrow hips) appears to be gaining an edge.
>while missing a human-level goal of “maximize inclusive genetic fitness, eg by donating to sperm banks”
The human level is "listen to what the culture tells you". Like "The secret of our success" tells us, the culture is much smarter than individual humans, but while its development is immensely faster than evolutionary timescales, it's still slower than recent technological progress, so conventional wisdom still hasn't caught up with hip newfangled disruptions like sperm banks.
Question: do cultural practices have a place within the hierarchy of mesa-optimizers? For instance, the practice of marriage-arrangement has roughly the same goal as drive-motivated mate-seeking behaviour. But the practice does not connect to this goal through a neurologically thick drive the way mate-seeking behaviour does. That the practice is connected to this goal is determined in the way any practice is connected to a goal: by language, convention, tradition, i.e., social construction. Can practices, as social constructs, count as mesa-optimizers?
A simpler explanation: suitor and parents both want a high-status mate, but society is such that different things confer status among different age groups. This change is driven at least in part by older cohorts being wiser and having less intense hormones. This explanation has the added benefit of showing why children and parents don't like the same movies, music, etc.
I think it’s relatively simple: the child falls in love based on their nature (evolutionarily coded preferences) and the feeling of love is so compelling that they will do away with any reasoned assessments of their suitor’s status or wealth or potential as a good parent.
The parent naturally loves their kid, but has no deep reason-annihilating feelings about their various suitors, so they assess the suitors consciously, based on how they think that mate will impact their kid’s future. Do they have a good job, are they responsible, yadda yadda.
Evolution programs the child to fall in love with the suitor, and programs the parent to love the child, and naturally they will have different preferences for the child’s mate as a consequence.
Two things to add. First, our evolution differs enough from primates to have selected for menopause, so fitness of the grandchildren outweighs one near-universal imperative at least. Longer developmental cycles mean that once the hormones are out of the way the status is paramount.
Second, the status hierarchies are very different for paramours and their parents. Parent status goes up dramatically with "my kid is marrying a doctor"; a lot more so than "my kid's fiancé is really hot!". This is obviously downstream of the above factor.
The suitors' status hierarchy focuses a lot more on looks though. For one thing, most 20-somethings are very tightly stratified economically so looks make up a higher weighting of the status function. For another thing, 20-somethings are a lot hotter than 50-somethings, generally.
I was going to make a similar point, but you can recurse on <<Parent status goes up dramatically with "my kid is marrying a doctor"; a lot more so than "my kid's fiancé is really hot!">> - you could imagine a world where this is not the case, and that "my kid's fiancé is really hot!" confers as much or more status for parents than the doctor case. And I can conjure up stereotypical images of some types of parents (for some reason fathers more than mothers?) for whom this would in fact be the case.
But intuitively I agree with you, and I believe that the parental status factor is what's driving this whole phenomenon, so what's going on? Maybe it's that parents being older means they have less active sex drives? Not sure.
> while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner.
I think even this short and hypothetical intro holds an important clue. What if the parents care about their *own* business?
Then 'Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants.' would not apply, at least not as 'single' or 'most important' motivation.
That's the reason, why this whole example doesn't work very well, at least in my perception.
I have an alternate explanation of the "young man/woman -vs- their parents" question which I think is substantiatively different from the ones that have been proposed so far. The young man/woman and their parents are optimizing for roughly the same thing, but only coincidentally; they're each following 'programs' set by entirely separate mechanisms, which have converged to roughly the same place but from very different directions.
The young man/woman, obviously, is following regular evo psych dicta handed down by our [pre-]primate ancestry; seek out someone tall/strong and/or wide-hipped/large-breasted. The youth is mostly trying to get laid, and while this pursuit is channeled through cultural norms, getting laid is a game that our lizard brain is programmed to understand very well.
The parents are playing a much more abstract game, so the best their lizard brain can do to them is perhaps the general impulse "your kids are important, do well by them." Bereft of biological imperatives telling them how to accomplish this, they fall back on the next best thing; the complex of customs, habits, expectations et al coming in from the ambient culture. Importantly, the culture the parents find themselves in is a culture perpetuated by humans who have managed to survive and perpetuate their culture, and (if they're not on the absolute bottom rung of society) do so while maintaining some set of advantages. Cultures that survive in this way therefore tend to contain norms and habits which lead to their humans surviving and maintaining those advantages. Obviously I'm talking about "cultural evolution." One highly-adaptive custom, for some cultures, turns out to be that of parents actively ensuring that their kids marry someone able to help them maintain the hallmarks of their class. A youth in a privileged class who marries some awful punk, in contrast, is liable to fall out of that class (and thereby be lost to that class' culture.)
The two kinds of evolution have, in this case, converged on roughly the same objective - make sure the youth is paired with a high-quality partner, for very roughly similar concepts of "high-quality." But the tools available to biological and cultural evolution are very different - biological evolution can't (?) instill complex social ideas, cultural evolution can't (?) reprogram humans' lizard brain, etc - and this explains all the differences in how the two drives manifest themselves.
I think what you propose have strong similarities to Multilevel Selection Theory although it isn't exactly Multilevel Selection Theory. Multilevel selection theory says that evolution takes place on several levels of complexity simultaneously: Spermatozoon versus spermatozoon, indivual versus individual, family group versus family group, nation versus nation. Your idea is, if I understand it right, that evolution takes place on different level of consciousness. And why not? Different conscious levels are also different levels, so I guess that line of reasoning should fit into Multilevel Selection Theory too.
Enjoyed the back and forth on this. I'm curious to know how this varies across cultures and sub-cultures. For example, my mother and her social circle would place an absolute top priority on shared religious and cultural values. This still reads like some sort of evolutionary maximization (it involves a lot of very specific having and rearing children related considerations) but very differently from the "rich doctor" approach.
Concerning the issue whether parent-offspring conflict exist at all in humans, there are studies that suggest it does, like this study by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618655114
Chagnon studied the Yanomamö horticulturalists of Brazil and Venezuela. Among the Yanomamö, cross-cousin marriage is a social ideal. Chagnon found that people who married their cousins had slightly fewer children and children who suffered from inbreeding depression. Still, parents who made their children marry their cousins had more grandchildren. Cousin marriage apparently helped grandparents to arrange better marriage deals for their average child. Marrying your cousin seems to be slightly bad for you in the (male) Yanomamö world, but potentially great for your brothers.
"there’s no evidence at all that these animals’ parents play much of a role."
This paper is a dead link, but I would be confused if ape parents were totally apathetic about who their children mate with, in spite of it having very serious reproductive consequences for millions of years.
I'll bet if a mommy chimp sees her daughter daughter getting raped by a low-status male, she is very unhappy about it, and if she doesn't beat him up it is only because the male is stronger than her. But why evolve an emotion unless it can motivate you to take action that increases inclusive fitness? If chimp mothers are powerless to protect their children from adult males, that might explain apathy. Chimp fathers have no idea who their children are. If they had paternity certainty, they would probably quickly evolve an instinct to intervene when their daughters are raped.
> I'll bet if a mommy chimp sees her daughter daughter getting raped by a low-status male, she is very unhappy about it, and if she doesn't beat him up it is only because the male is stronger than her.
Pretty much every part of that is wrong. It's just not how chimpanzee sexual behavior works.
Chimpanzees are like most mammals, and unlike humans, in that they go into heat. A female in heat has sex with every male in the troop in sequence in a big public event. She can't reject anyone.
> It’s the same reason why porn sites have lots of material about people copulating with high-quality mates, but none about people finding high-quality mates for their children. “POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR”. Evolutionarily it makes sense, but the urge isn’t implemented on that level.
There is *definitely* material oriented towards these desires, it's just not marketed towards you. There's whole genres of literature centering middle-aged women and their desires, and while the personal desire for a handsome sexy man is definitely there, "my daughter also gets married to a handsome sexy man" is quite prevalent as well. Some examples:
Or how about the multi-generational drama Heartland, running for 15 seasons and full of characters designed to be identified with by audiences across generations (as in, there are three generations of protagonists, and as the years progress the younger ones get older, marry and have children, while their parents and grandparents remain important characters)?
According to "Women and Men in Film" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/189696 (You can get free access with a JSTOR account.) - women screenwriters were pretty common during the silent era, but by the mid-1930s they were moved into women's films and doing fix up work rather than feature writing. A few women screenwriters, e.g. Anita Loos, started in the silent era and kept going, but women were much less common by the 1930s. I had assumed that the transition was later. Thanks for getting me to dig this up.
I really don't have much else at the moment. I do know that soap operas are often written by women. They're low status, so it's sort of a ghetto.
I sometimes wonder if humans' desire to have children is a recent revolutionary response to early forms of birth control. Is there any evidence that animals other than humans actually want to have children, before they have children?
The solution to the problem seems fairly clear to me: the parents don't get to have sex with their children's mates. Attractive in-laws bind the parents' genes to healthy genes, but without satisfying the reproduction drive that proxies for that goal. The kids get genes + resources + pleasure, so they weight attractiveness relatively high. The parents get genes + resources, so they weight attractiveness substantially lower.
I feel like you are coming very, very close to saying this in parts of the essay, but you never quite spell that concept out so explicitly.
This looks like good old-fashioned parent-offspring evolutionary conflict. Suitors can get money from their parents if they need it, but the parents would rather not have to pay.
Once grandchildren are born, grandparents are obliged by evolution to help them, including financially. But they prefer to have independently wealthy grandchildren, so they can afford to have more grandchildren total.
Large muscles or big breasts are obviously selected for because they led to offspring survival in the past. But *now* those traits seem to mostly select for good sex.
I don't know if this discrepancy existed 20,000 years ago, but right now it seems like a clear case of suitors selecting for good sex, and parents selecting for good offspring. If we're looking for an evolutionary reason why that would be the case I think we're missing the point.
A part of the traditional narrative is that you support your children when they are young and they support you when you are old. And many of these narratives are very traditional. Having your children select for status/success means that they will be more able to care for you when you are old. Seems like simple selfish desires from that perspective. You could probably tie in something about how survival of people past reproductive age was beneficial to the society (child rearing, knowledge transmission, etc) so selecting for elder care is more beneficial to gene lines than selecting for reproduction.
Another line is a lot of these traditional narratives ALSO show the parents to be somewhat selfish: don't just marry a successful businessperson, but specifically the child of the businessman (or state) we want to acquire/merge/make peace with.
So now, even if adults aren't thinking about their future caretakers (and I've known a few who are) they could still maximizing the adaptation of "secure resources to take care of me".
That statement doesn't seem to be borne out by the link you provided. Excerpt from a quote in the article: "Calculations by Mueller and by Goran Ohlin (1969) indicate that a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85 at the level of living that is normal for old people in peasant societies." This seems to indicate that in a world where there were better investment options that this was a poor investment option, but it does not state that A) this didn't happen, or B) there were better places to invest.
If I missed something, could you help me by pointing it out?
"a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85"
That's ignoring that the kids help work on the farm and around the house doing odd jobs and even going off to work for others. No peasant child sat around the house and never lifted a finger until "mom/dad is 60 and now I support them", and besides the value wasn't counted in monetary terms.
I didn't read the papers that Bergstrom referenced, but I did give them the benefit of the doubt that child/adolescent labor is still a net negative compared to the amount of support that was needed to be provided by the adult. However your comment made me go read the reference pages a little more carefully and I had not realized that some of the research cited was on the Ache of Paraguay which throws more red flags for me.
In my Anthropology courses in the mid-late aughts the Ache were often mentioned as an example of being wary of older ethnographic research. As classic research would mention that there was no 60+ year old Ache, but modern research discovered that not only are there, but there had been at the time and they had been excluded either because they didn't fit the narrative or failures in translation/dating.
I think it's entirely plausible that the evolutionary drive in play here is the parents' desire for their children to flourish and thrive, and that "marry someone wealthy" is a culturally-constructed definition of success that determines what the drive "want your children to thrive" manifests as.
You might say "why don't parents just want their children to be wealthy without children" but I think a second-order consideration is that parents have a drive to have children, and so their culturally-constructed definition of "thriving" also bakes in having children as part of this; it's what everybody in every culture (prior to some 20th-century cultures) does when they are thriving. I think this is supported by the recent development of cultural acceptability for not having children; if this were a base evolutionary drive and not an expression of a cultural norm, I think there would not be so many couples that are completely fine with the choice of not having children.
I'm not really sure now plausible it is that parents have an evolutionary drive for grandchildren (distinct from the above direct pro-natal drives); were grandparents a significant part of the ancestral environment? I've not heard much discussion about grand-parental relationships in primates, though it seems like there are some examples in nature (e.g. https://www.livescience.com/64951-do-any-animals-know-grandparents.html). Maybe there is room for a benefit for encoding a special set of "grandparent behaviors" but I'm not sure how important this bit is.
> I tend to think that a few million years between primates without parental mate choice and the current day might not be enough time to give people really good innate parental mate-choice instincts.
Why do you say that? A few million years sound like a pretty long time. Do you have good intuition for how many generations it takes evolution to develop an innate instict of complexity X for a goal of evolutionary benefit Y? I often struggle with this when assessing evolutionary psychology claims, which often assume a sort of steady state of evolution fully converged to optimal adaptiveness (in the ancestral environment). Some people say evolution is pretty fast, and can instill instincts for cultural stuff within a few thousand years, some people seem to imply it's very slow.
What I suppose many have not considered is that this decoupling of sex drive and children is creating huge selection pressure for something other than sex drive (or in addition). Given some population with some inherited variance in the propensity to have kids, then the ones have the inherited propensity to have kids will be (probabilistically) more represented in the next generation. And that propensity will have greater representation in the next generation. At the meta level, the global population might plummet for two or three generations, but then it will bounce back. (Making huge assumptions about the magnitude of the selection pressure. But if the pressure is lower then the rate of population change is lower.)
Religious belief within a population is significantly heritable, so it's fallacious to treat stuff like this as divorced from genetics. And there are also significant genetic differences between more and less religious populations (e.g. arabs vs east asians), so on a global scale any religious fertility differential will have genetic implications.
The nature of religious belief (being Christian or Muslim for example) is not heritable in the genetics sense. It is transmitted from parent to children but of course not genetically, although religiosity is moderately heritable.
My point was that it was not necessary to postulate some genetics tendency to want more children when religion already accomplish the same thing : a tendency to want more children that is transmitted from parents to children.
Not entirely related to the subject of the post, but I wonder why sexual attraction is always framed as "people want to mate with pretty people because they're more likely to have many, healthy children" and not "people want to mate with pretty people because their children with them are more likely to be pretty, making it easier to spread their own genes"?
In other words, a peacock tail is, as far as I'm aware, completely useless and even actively detrimental for the well-being of the individual who has it. Why then is a pretty face considered some sort of signaling of health instead of our own version of a peacock tail?
In brief, peacock=handicap=signal mechanism usually leads to open-ended preference (the bigger or the brighter the better!) whereas average faces, in the sense of faces that do not depart from the average, are clearly perceived as very attractive and prefered over individual faces that always have some minor imperfections. (With an exception for features that are dimorphic for man/woman)
I think both effect are present (attracted to marker of good genes (in fact, it's more avoidance of genetic defects) and hoping descendent will inherit attractiveness, which is like a second order effect of the first effect. I think Peacock tail is the second order effect self amplifying because the marker is hacked by a few genes and not representative of the genome quality as a whole. I don't think we have many such things in humans, apart maybe blue eyes/blond hair/pale skin which may have self amplified enough to be detrimental wrt sun.
A peacock tail mechanism is also usually associated with male choice by females, whereas in humans men are much more selective than women for physical apparence.
Which fit with the fact that weak peacock tail effects (depigmentation, to much neotony (which go together), maybe large breasts) are female. Peacock tall traits in male are even less evident, because i do not much see survival drawbacks of male traits. Beard is not costly, and male body difference likely add instead of remove efficiency... But maybe I'm blind to some obvious stuff
The handicap nature of depigmentation seems quite dubious to me, as there was very strong selection in the ancestors of European and Asian populations favoring less pigmentation.
Eye and hair colors are probably a bit more likely, as there indications that what is favored is usually the rare colors, which is typical for signal/handicap mechanisms.
depigmentation is sex and age differentiated, and that was what I pointed at, rather that ethnic pigmentation difference, which is very well predicted by latitude so clearly adaptative. You tend to get darker as you age, and males are systematically darker than females, regardless of ethnicity. There are likely exception, but afaik, very little...So it's part of the stronger neotony in females, very likely a byproduct of male preference for youth.
But the difference between the sexes is very small and it seems unlikely to me that it could have any significant effect on survival ability. And as is frequently the case in evolution, this feature, the man/woman difference, could indeed be due to male preference for youth, but alternative explanations seem possible. For example, observed pigmentation levels are probably the results of antagonist selection pressures, for more pigmentation to protect against UV damage, for less pigmentation to let enough UV go through to be able to synthetise D vitamin or folic acid. It is possible that the optimum level of pigmentation is slightly lower in women, if for example they need more folic acide for pregnancy.
Hum in fact yes, I was blind in the typical way, focussing on physical traits and forgetting about behavioral traits. Generosity and taking risk in impressive activities which gain nothing in term of resource gathering or direct access to mate (but impress) may be the equivalent of peacock tail. It's always difficult to consider behavior as much as visible body change, but to get back to animal example, what are the peacock tails of paradise birds? the flashy colors and exhuberant, non-aerodynamic feathers? Or the crazy dances and nest building? Both, and maybe the relative cost in term or survival/energy wasted would tell the dance/nest building is in fact the longer tail....
Interesting! I think that risk taking is in fact an advantageous strategy, because of the historically higher variance of reproductive rate in men than women. As you said earlier, some male traits can be advantageous both because thay are associated with higher survival ability and because female prefer them, increasing reproductive ability. I think that male behavioral traits fall into this category (advantageaous for both) and not in the peacock category but that is just a hunch.
That's true for high risk high rewards activities, but here I was referring to high risk no reward (apart attracting female interest) activities. But indeed, those are difficult to uniquely identify in humans, because of the high impact of social status (which is itself completely tangled with female preference). Does doing a crazy dangerous but vain thing (slaying dragon) gain you the princess, or the admiration of your fellow knights which gain you the princess? Very difficult to say, and it's the same for generosity...Now are peacock tail a signal to female only? Peacocks are not social (as far as I know), but in social species non adaptive traits preferred by females will certainly signal something to other males and influence social rank, so this entanglement is likely not human-specific....
I think this is more likely a case of adaptation executer/fitness maximizer : men and especially young men are prone to high risk high reward activities because they are in average advantageous. But what evolution build is a higher tolerance (or even a taste for!) risk, wich will then sometimes be expressed in high risk low reward activities. It does not seem to me that these activities (reckless driving, binge drinking...) are used as signal by women.
Younger women are nearly always rated as prettier on average than older women, and younger women produce healthier children (and more of them). Certain aspects are almost certainly just preferences that evolved by coincidence, but broad strokes, it corresponds well. And of course, height, breast size, hip waist ratio are all obvious factors of attractiveness with fitness implications.
I'm a fan of a few simple explanations, which iirc were offered in the original article:
1. The difference in preferences between suitors and parents re: attractiveness isn't as big as we believe, because it is weird for parents to comment excessively on the looks of their child's partner. My grandmother had virtually no filter, and she would comment frequently on the looks of the partners of all her descendants, making it obvious their attractiveness mattered to her.
2. Parents don't have to have sex with their child's partner, so they won't directly benefit from their attractiveness to the extent that their child will. Likewise, they will benefit from their child's partner's status and resources.
To, like everybody else here, massively overthink this, I think it's as much about economics of Jane Austin's day as anything else. Romance novels were written by people for whom the effective intergenerational transfer of wealth was the only thing keeping their descendants out of grinding poverty. The world has since changed but the tropes haven't.
Men prefer masculine expressions but what these expressions are differ between cultures. So, cultural desires (mimesis?) need to be vague and have learning-input. Perhaps status signals are culturally variable and thus cannot be encoded directly (so no ”your daughter marry a doctor”-porn).
Also, humans tend towards the eusocial spectrum. Eusociality can be defined as the extent to which females give up reproduction. Human females, like orcas, do that by having a non fertile period at the end of their lifespan when they care for their grandchildren. No other primates go through menopause. Humans get pretty old considering our body size and are viable at old age considering mutation/selection-balance.
If menopause is a late invention evolutionarily, perhaps it had been instilled in us after cultural evolution and the culture-gene-coevolution really kicked in. To place status-recognition in a meta-adaptation would be more flexible and also an exaptation of other status-recognition-tools that should be relevant as soon as we became cultural primates in addition to social ones.
So, parents just follow the mimesis imperative - they crave what others crave, but for their kids and grandkids, and follow specific cultural cues indicating status. While suitors are more directly hardwired to find-and-fuck.
Also, women generally tend more towards culturally determined status ques and men towards direct biological fertility-markers. Perhaps parents/grandparents have more of a similar PI-logic as women, rather than a spread-genes-logic as men? If they should care for grandchildren rather than just fertilize everyone they see.
Actually, this looks like a good place to comment on something I've been thinking about off and on for a while.
Children frequently spontaneously express the belief that if they are left alone in the dark, they will be eaten by monsters. The belief is obviously innate; modern parents find it annoying and, if they address it at all, generally do their best to eliminate it.
What's interesting to me is that (1) this belief is quite correct [https://www.mural-wallpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S-AN42.jpg depicts a monster]; and (2) it would be difficult to have learned this information through experience. (Including the sense in which evolution itself is a process of learning through experience.) Organisms who encountered, and were eaten by, monsters, would not have been able to pass anything down. Organisms who avoided monsters could of course pass their genes along, but why did the specific belief evolve that the problem with being alone in the dark is specifically that monsters will eat you? There is an infinite space of beliefs that will lead you to avoid being alone in the dark, including a generalized sense that being alone is bad (which children *also have*) without any supporting details. The world is full of people who will happily tell you that their instinctive, unjustified fears are powerful enough to absolutely prohibit them from doing something they fear.
Maybe children that were more able to avoid being left alone in dark scary places tended to survive more often? The belief that if they are left alone in the dark they will be eaten by monsters, might protect against more than just literal monsters. It might also protect against attentional neglect from their parents for example.
And infanticide! In our cousins the chimpanzees and even more the gorillas, males kill children they don't believe they have fathered themselves. Children's fear of the dark and strangers may have such an uncanny origin.
> The belief that if they are left alone in the dark they will be eaten by monsters, might protect against more than just literal monsters.
Yes, but this is kind of the opposite of what I'm asking about. I already noted that children do not like to be left alone under any circumstances. But my question contrasts the innate belief "I should not be alone in the dark, because I will be eaten by monsters" with the hypothetical innate belief "I should not be alone in the dark, for reasons I cannot articulate". That second belief is just as powerful and behavior-altering as the first belief. I think it's worthy of note that -- in reality -- we hold the first belief, with a concrete reason why it's bad to be alone in the dark, and that reason is completely correct. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. But it's not obvious to me why a correct reason would have developed.
Consider the theory that we are supposed to learn about megafauna but that today this translates to learning about tractors. Or that pokemon are the perfect mythology since it exploits our tendency to learn about animals and plants, etc. What monsters are the kids afraid of? Whatever monster that they learn about through culture. I was watching Alien at a young age and I was very scared specifically for Aliens. My son fear a witch he has been reading about. Perhaps we have an evolved general fear that we always fill with culturally determined monsters?
Then if so, it would be a fun though not ethical experiment to raise a child with exatcly no scary inputs whatsoever, and study if the child got scared of super-harmless things.
Wait, isnt that movie Dogtooth about exatcly that?
“Maybe evolutionary imperatives aren’t fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way if they have only one child, and another way if they have many children? That seems like a hard sell if you’re first claiming they are fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way, and children another”
Surely this misses the point; evolution is stochastic, and traits stick and proliferate because they confer an advantage that increases the proportion of gene carriers in the population pool, until the gene fixes. So, advise children on optimal mates to optimise for grandchildren ---> higher fecundity, more healthy adult kids, more offspring, higher representation in the gene pool. BUT, optimise mate selection for attractiveness IF there is only one child? How likely is that to have happened that (i) there were human/ primate parents of only one offspring, AND (ii) there was a random genetic mutation event in those specific parents that solved for single-child mate-selection optimisation AND (iii) that optimisation was actually significantly better than just the “higher total fecundity based on total grandchildren pool” such that it proliferated in the population (hard to do with only one child...) and then fixed to replace the other, more general but probably more effective and evolutionary significant principle?
Also, to add, it makes sense to hold both thoughts (child one, parents another) because the child is the initial evolved response (high fecundity breasts, good, marry) and the parents the more nuanced, supplemental but additive in terms of fecundity. My point is that sub-specifying to one-child outcomes probably isn’t very additive to overall fecundity (again, kinda by definition if you only have one child...) and is also quite unlikely to have been present enough in the population (single child primate couples + enough evolutionary time for mutations), so it works for me to believe as an explanation.
I always thought that it was a self-preservation thing. If the children marry successful spouses then it’s more likely the parents will be better taken care of in old age. Grandparents do great childcare for their grandchildren when they are less financially burdened. If the spouse is successful, it will trickle up (in traditional families) to the parents and contribute to the wellbeing of their grandchildren.
This is overthought. Suitors and parents have different preferences about mates for the same reason (and preference result) that college students and parents have different preferences about students' college majors. The practical implications of wealth/jobs are obvious to parents, and less so to students/suitors who haven't really seen the full implications of money. Also the parents don't get to enjoy the benefits of the suitor/student preference (sex with a hot person / thrills of an intellectual major with no practical value) so of course they downweight those. Also older people have lower time preference. Evolutionary psych is powerful but the really is no reason to invoke it here when regular reasons are good enough.
"Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn’t differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?"
I don't think this is terribly hard to explain. Attractiveness can be directly determined from sensory data, matched against hardwired heuristics in the brain. Financial resources, requires specific culture-dependent knowledge - and if there's anything hardwired into the human brain to guesstimate how rich someone is, it's probably still "he's big and tall and muscular so probably a good hunter plus he can beat people up and take their stuff". Maybe a side order of "he has a deep commanding voice so he can probably get his friends to help him beat up other people and take their stuff".
Adolescents and young adults, by definition, have very little experience making adult decisions and learning from their mistakes. Their parents, by definition, do. And if they're still around eighteen or so years later to marry off their healthy children, then they probably don't suck at it.
Rational thought based on lots of experience trumps simple but time-tested instinctive heuristics, which trumps rational thought based on complete ignorance. Since some but not all children will have parents around to help them with mate selection (and other things), it makes sense for evolution to have given everyone a simple set of instinctive heuristics to determine "attractiveness" from direct sensory data, and also given people the ability to override instinct with reason as their experience base increases(*).
Whether that last comes from strength of reason increasing with knowledge, or strength of reason increasing with time and it's expected that time + not dead yet = you've learned some valuable lessons, or strength of instinct decreasing with time and/or wisdom, is negotiable. But it's almost a cliche that hormonal impulses become less powerful with age.
* Which is valuable for many reasons beyond choosing your kids' mates, but that's the subject at hand here.
> if there's anything hardwired into the human brain to guesstimate how rich someone is, it's probably still "he's big and tall and muscular so probably a good hunter plus he can beat people up and take their stuff"
It really doesn't take very long for adaptations to emerge.
On Raymond Chen's blog, he once remarked on an attractive female friend who had confided to him that she was unwilling to date anyone who didn't have at least a little bit of a potbelly.
Parents want a high status and wealthy son/daughter in law to obtain some of that status and wealth for themselves (and maybe for the grandchildren). Meanwhile, the person actually marrying wants personality and physical attraction because they have to spend every day with that person. Pretty simple.
My just so story, which I don't believe for a minute, but which I think explains the data adequately.
Let's say parental preferences in the ancestral environment determine who you marry 65%, and who you sleep with 50% (with most of that effect on who you sleep with mediated through marriage). Your preferences determine the rest. In marriage you should weight things 60-40 status/looks whereas in sex you should weight things 40-60 status-looks.
Because parental preference has a slightly greater relative effect on marriage rather than sex, it's built to focus somewhat on optimal preferences for marriage. Because the agent's own desires tend to have a bit more of a relative effect on sex, they are built to be optimal for sex. The conjunction of the two desire sets lead, in expectation, to optimal marriage and optimal casual sex behavior.
> Let's say parental preferences in the ancestral environment determine who you marry 65%
I think this is an underestimate; the ancestral environment is going to be much closer to 100%.
Taking two examples from Africa, I've seen it written that among the !Kung, a marriage is about the relationship between a man and his father-in-law. And among many interesting facts in Still a Pygmy, we learn that Isaac Bacirongo's mother was awarded to his father in a legal judgment (over the murder of a relative of the father's by a relative of the mother's).
(He records that his mother hated his father and frequently ran away and had to be retrieved. It's not clear how this would factor into measuring "parents determine who you sleep with X%". Parents completely determined that Isaac's mother would sleep with his father on a regular to semi-regular basis. She personally determined several other partners, which her parents presumably disapproved of.)
It feels like the further we get from the original rationalist community, the more we rehash the argument that was cleared up in 'adaptation-executers not fitness-maximizers'
Why are there so many people in the comments saying things like 'if the parents got to have sex with the hot guy they might feel differently' (as if his hotness is an innate attribute of him, with no 'why?' possible), or people literally complaining that ascribing behavior to evolution without evidence is unscientific, as if there were some possible source for new behaviors other than evolution
Debating everything over and over again is the default human behavior. LessWrong was created with the explicit purpose of settling some debates once and for all, so that the discussion could finally move at least to level 2.
Another institution that achieves the same is school, because at each grade you are supposed to understand the things taught at the previous grades.
Parents figured out (from experience) the most useful features to bring up offspring. They'll prioritize people with those features, because they know that it is much more difficult to make a functioning adult out of a baby, than to make the baby.
Also, there are thresholds. If the potential mate is obviously defective, the parents will have reservations. But otherwise, as long as the babies have decent survival capability, the upbringing they receive will matter more for their own reproductive potential, than a slight advantage in primal hotness.
Movie pitch: "Saw" only with Ondine instead of Jigsaw. Ondine is an ASMR-tist who operates on people's brains to knock out their breathing reflex. Then they have to go through a series of sleep-inducing challenges like make-up sessions, cranial nerve examinations, scalp massages, etc. in order to gain access to a respirator.
I think parents using human reason might be part of the explanation here but probably their own status is a bigger effect.
Given that parents don't experience a specific hormonal response to the hotness of their child's spouse they could fall back on:
explicit reason to improve their descendant's status
or
instinct to improve their own status
Using explicit reason might make parents prefer status over hotness for their child's spouse depending on how the explicit reasoning went. Using instinct to improve their own status would cause them to prefer status for their child's spouse as this gives them a potential alliance with a high status family which in turn raises their own status.
Given the frequency and strength of such disagreements I don't think that explicit reasoning can be the whole story - executing personal status adaptions seems like a bigger effect to me.
>> we have our two categories of positive traits: attractiveness and status.
I wonder if a plausible argument could be made that attractiveness is actually just another *kind* of status, and the disjunct between parents and children really is based on them operating in different status-subcultures.
Different sub-cultures assign different weights to different status-markers. Writing an influential law review article could mean a lot at the right conference of law professors, but if you're backstage with NY Philharmonic not so much.
So in that light, maybe it's not a question of "attractiveness" versus"status," but that "young-people status culture" and "old people status culture" assign different status-points to "physical attractiveness" and "income," respectively. So both the young bachelor(ette) and the parents are doing the same status analysis, but the bachelor(ette) is more likely to be wowed by the charisma factor while the parents are more likely to be wowed by the dollar signs.
And just as a fun side-note, looking at it that way you can sort of read "status" another dimension of "attractiveness," so maybe we could fold this in the other direction too. Monkeys are complicated.
I was surprised to see a selfish drive of the parents not highlighted.
For all but the wealthy, the younger generation is to some degree responsible for the care of their parents as they age. The quality of that care has a *very* strong relationship with the financial resources of their kids. Parents prefer wealthy sons- and daughters-in-law because it is likely to improve their own quality of life - that seems a simpler explanation.
One could ask why that preference remains for the wealthy parents, but I'd argue that the level of wealth that makes this a non-factor for parents has only recently been available to a chunk of society. The long-standing pattern, still mostly true, is that *extremely few people* have a level of wealth where gaining a doctor as a son-in-law doesn't improve their prospects for high quality care as they age.
When you pick a mate for yourself, you're optimizing for someone you're going to look at, talk to, and probably touch intimately nearly every day for the rest of your life. Ideally, someone who you can share your weirdest sexual fantasies and your scariest psychological issues with comfortably. (And it might well be perfectly rational to pattern-match those constraints to "tall Asian woman in red bikini" or whatever, by the way, given the right sequence of input data.)
When you pick a mate for your children, you're optimizing for someone you might talk to once a year at Christmas, and can feel comfortable showing pictures of to your friends at the senior center.
So if parents and children are optimizing for fundamentally things anyway, then it doesn't seem particularly surprising that they'll come to different conclusions, regardless of what class of reasoning they might be using to get there.
Is this post trolling? I am genuinely confused. Scott is using evo-psych mental kung-fu to execute a double backwards flip over the most obvious, probable and empirically verifiable explanation:
My father-in-law and mother-in-law are preoccupied with my status and not my hotness because they have no prospect of having sex with me. My mate, on the other hand, does.
Everything else is extra unnecessary detail. The only evo-psych you could possible shove into this explanation is "people like to associate with people with high status" and "people like to have sex even more than they like to associate with people with high status".
I think there is an even bigger element here: young people are trying to produce the most fit offspring (thanks hormones!), while older people want their children have a good life. A young woman going for a young man who is hot-tempered and reckless will likely result in children who're also more aggressive and prone to taking risks, which is a desirable quality from the point of view of evolution. But it will also be a harder life for the woman.
And it doesn't just apply to giving advice to your children: it's often said that women in their thirties and forties have less interest in dating "bad boys" and more interest in the "rich layer" type. Or more realistically, a "comfortable accountant" type.
It's similar to how younger men are more likely to take risks, to push boundaries and to commit crime. It's good for the species (or used to be), as evolution is fine if 20% of young people sacrifice themselves to foolish enterprises and perish, if another 10% do the same and succeed. But not a smart choice for the individual. (Thanks hormones!)
"but none about people finding high-quality mates for their children. “POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR”." - A rule 34 violation! (Is that the internet equivalent of discovering a parity violation? :-) )
Parents must survive to their offspring's sexual maturity to have any direct influence on their partner choice. Their very presence in this process is a signal of an environment where long term survival is possible and thus long-term planning has potential utility.
The reverse implies offspring without parental figures would be more likely to prefer short term reproductive strategies.
Its hard to imagine 'older nobleman/doctor/engineer' in the classless society of paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Status and money are today's addition to the mating strategies of Homo Sapiens, children became the property of their parents as well as the commodity on a marriage market since producing economy. G. Miller's in his brilliant "The Mating Mind" unravels this pretty well.
Exactly my thought: Parents look out for themselves as well as their kids. The conflicting interest here beyond "What parent wants for child" and "What child wants for self", is "What parents wants for self by wanting for child". Also, a child can be, or at some point in life become again, dependent on the parents, so a more economically viable suitor means that the parents are less likely to have to provide more for their child.
We have a desire to have kids because we have a desire to have sex. We have a desire to have sex because people with desire have their sex desire genes passed onto the next generation.
You're almost taking certain dispositions for granted, as if they weren't subject to evolution in the first place.
Historically, old people tended to consume fewer resources as they aged rather than depending on their kids.
http://www.econlib.org/was-having-kids-ever-a-paying-venture/
>There's no need to jump to evolutionary explanations (although I agree those affect things).
What on earth do you mean "jump to"? They underpin our preferences, so they should always serve as a foundation of explanation.
If humans were absolutist gene replication maximisers in a way perfectly aligned with our current environment, they wouldn't care about being looked after in old age. We aren't this way, and the question is why we aren't this way.
But romantic love is fickle and transitory, it burns out, and then what? You're yoked to someone you no longer have any interest in and want to get free of them. On the other hand, with an arranged marriage, both of you (ideally) agree to make it work and lasting love grows over time. So your parents do want you to be happy, but long-lasting happiness.
As an aside, this is why I dislike the character of Neil Gibson in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge"; he's basically "Okay, I married this hot South American lady and had kids with her, but now I'm tired of her since she got older and isn't as hot anymore, and I want the hot young governess instead. Unfortunately my wife still loves me and won't just get out of my way, what a bitch!"
"And you are his manager?"
"I have given him notice. In a couple of weeks I shall have shaken off his accursed slavery. A hard man, Mr. Holmes, hard to all about him. Those public charities are a screen to cover his private iniquities. But his wife was his chief victim. He was brutal to her—yes, sir, brutal! How she came by her death I do not know, but I am sure that he had made her life a misery to her. She was a creature of the tropics, a Brazilian by birth, as no doubt you know."
"No; it had escaped me."
"Tropical by birth and tropical by nature. A child of the sun and of passion. She had loved him as such women can love, but when her own physical charms had faded—I am told that they once were great—there was nothing to hold him. We all liked her and felt for her and hated him for the way that he treated her. But he is plausible and cunning. That is all I have to say to you. Don't take him at his face value. There is more behind. Now I'll go. No, no, don't detain me! He is almost due."
The problem gets solved by the wife killing herself (and attempting to frame the governess for her murder) and Gibson is free to marry the governess, who isn't adverse to marrying her older but very, very wealthy (did I mention he is stinking rich?) employer so she can 'reform' him and turn his mind to giving his wealth to charities.
Yeah, I have my doubts about the 'happy' ending. It's much more likely that Gibson will tolerate her do-gooding as long as she holds his attention with sex, and if/when he tires of her in turn, all that 'reformation' will end too. So much for marrying for love!
The problem in the story is as much that Neil's love had burned out as that Maria's hadn't. If Maria's love had waned in equal measure, then Neil could have been rid of her neatly and tidily, by way of nothing more than a lavish financial settlement. But, as you acknowledge, she kept on loving him, however much he tried to turn her off with boorish behaviour.
So much for transitory. And, by the way, Gibson's own alibi is flimsy by Holmesian standards. "There is no evidence that he left the house" - hasn't Scott taught us to be wary of "there's no evidence" claims?
Anyway, there's no law that says romantic love cannot transition to a love based on habit, mutual comfort, and trust once the hormones subside. And what do your parents know about long-lasting love, anyway? Or about happiness? (Larkin's 'This Be The Verse' being of course the definitive word on the matter.)
But what Gibson did is what Scott is exampling in the clash between parents and children: his choice was "I wanna bang the hot young woman" and so he married her. Then she wasn't so hot, so his feelings cooled and he moved on to the next "I wanna bang the hot young woman". His marriage - on his side - was based on that shallow sexual attraction, instead of growing into steady settled love based on mutual commitment to their family and each other.
It doesn't augur well for his second marriage, given that once again he has little in common with his new spouse (she is interested in using his money to do good, he is only interested in saying and doing whatever will keep her around for him) and once she ages out of looking hot or he finds yet another hot young woman he prefers, there is nothing to stop him trying to dump her for Number Three.
Gibson, in the story, offered the governess "I'd marry you if I could, but since I can't, I'll make you my mistress and provide sufficiently for you" but the governess didn't want that (or didn't value herself that cheaply, so she perhaps was hoping he would move to divorce his wife and marry her). This is not a guy who is making spousal choices on grounds other than hormones, even though by now he's old enough to know better, and I don't think his choices are turning out well.
>Anyway, there's no law that says romantic love cannot transition to a love based on habit, mutual comfort, and trust once the hormones subside.
Heck, there is no law that says they can't both exist at the same time. Imagining people in their 20s as *purely* hormone/lust driven strikes me as likely to be a mistake even if simplifying it that way makes the discussion/thought experiment easier.
By similar logic, no one really wants love or sex. People are just narcissistic and they assume that the world would be better if it contained more people similar to *them*.
The conflict between generations is that the kids wants partners similar to themselves (young, attractive), and the parents want their kids to have partners somewhat similar to the parents (rich). Everyone believes that "a copy of me is objectively the best possible partner, ever".
Exactly! We don't even know that most parents object to their offspring's mate choice. I get the impression that most of them are pretty happy with their in-laws.
It doesn't need to be "most parents" for the arguments to be valid, just "more parents". It's going to be a statistical argument anyway, but I don't see how you could assign error bars.
Arranged marriages have been the norm for vast swathes of the world's population for much of history. The fact that cultural changes have lead to its diminishment doesn't actually mean that genes don't affect these preferences, though I think you're not realizing the extent to which parents work to direct their kids social circles (which is broadly a way of influencing their mate choice).
Agree; Evo psych isn't quite as far down my badlist as psychoanalysis, but it's mostly contrived examples trying to 'explain' contemporary mores via labyrinthine evolutionary explanations.
Yesterday I read a mind bogglingly involved theory of why people are having fewer children nowadays by Robin Hanson which involved complex anticipation of child success maladapting to modern wealth.
At no point did I get the impression he had ever asked women (and women are posited as the scheming child minimisers here, which is another common Evo psych trope) why they're having fewer kids.
Whilst I'm not claiming that you can fully rely on self reported reasoning, it's a good place to start, and 'raising children is really hard nowadays' is a pretty common explanation, and requires no castles in the sky.
That, and the culture that insists on spending on experiences, maximizing independence and minimizing constraints so you can have more experiences.
Then there's the hard economics (surely something Robin Hanson is aware of) - having children interferes with career, which puts both woman's independence *and* her family's fate at risk, in a world where most couples can't really sustain a household on a single income.
Then there's the perceived *obligation* for women to work for money - over recent decade or two, the hard-won freedom to focus on career changed into social pressure, where some women feel they'll be judged negatively by society if they're not making money. I write "perceived", because from where I'm sitting, half of society will praise a stay-at-home mom for her choice, so it balances out. But it's not how the women close to me see it.
(I wouldn't give too much weight to how expensive and hard is to have children these days, as a factor in deciding to not have children. In my experience, this is something you truly learn only *after* you become a parent. You can't even imagine many of the hardships and money sinks until you experience them.)
So I agree - self-reports give some good clues here; there's no need for complex evolutionary-level explanation for what seems to be purely a socioeconomical dynamic. The evolutionary adaptations that are involved here are just the ones that make you care about physical safety and social status.
The simple explanation of "why are people having fewer kids" is that people prioritize status over child-rearing since in the ancestral environment if your status dropped too much you died and didn't have kids.
So since in a modern society having a parent devote more time to childrearing will result in lower family income without a compensating gain in status from a large family (since our society doesn't assign status to that and often assigns negative status to "trashy" large families), people have fewer children.
This also neatly explains why so many people have exactly 1-2 children instead of zero, because having zero children as a woman is still lower status than having at least one child.
There's a simpler explanation: having children is an emotional drive and there's now easy available stimuli wherever you look and whatever your preferences are to satisfy those. Being childless no longer means being lonely and possibly bored. And then, there's the question of maybe having too little time to engage in everything one might want to engage in within our default lifespans. TBQH all these are reasons to look into longevity extension tech.
A large fraction of American children these days are born to single-mothers, who do maintain a household on a single income. Arguably, the rise in that fraction is the result of our society being wealthy enough for that to be viable.
Where is your proof? Where is your data? Your post is at the very least no better than what the evo-psychs are being accused of - giving a just so story without scientific data to support it. "The culture insists..." is not science. It's not even close to being operationalized enough for a hypothesis to test.
>So I agree - self-reports give some good clues here; there's no need for complex evolutionary-level explanation for what seems to be purely a socioeconomical dynamic. The evolutionary adaptations that are involved here are just the ones that make you care about physical safety and social status.
I hope everyone appreciates this explanation is intellectually on the same level as proclaiming that 'all this stuff about greenhouse gas emissions is unnecessary, we know that the climate goes through natural cycles' .
FWIW, there are lots of historical examples where economic stresses causes a reduction in the number of children. And many people would seem to prefer a new car to a new child. So I don't think there's much to explain until you try to do more exact modeling.
Do you imagine that poor people don't have kids? Do you imagine single moms are mostly high income earners? Do you imagine that people 100 years ago had less kids than people today?
Today there are a lot more things to spend your money on. Rich people tend to have more children than poor people. In Ireland about a century ago people tended to put off marrying until in their 30's because of economic pressures.
It's also true that when there's a huge infant mortality, people tend to have lots of kids. They've go no idea how many will survive to adulthood. And when you say "single moms" you're ignoring various factors that cause those who own real property to be more likely to register their marriage.
Thanks for that. Sometimes you can just ask people.
That's literally not science, and offers nothing in the way of fundamental explanation.
"Whilst I'm not claiming that you can fully rely on self reported reasoning, it's a good place to start"
No, it's really, really not, the dubiousness of Hanson's theory notwithstanding.
The average women does not even contemplate things from an evolutionary perspective at all, and cannot give an explanation for the almost unviersal female preference for taller men other than 'tall guys are more attractive'. They almost certainly do find tall men more attractive, but it tells us nothing of the why. They prefer confident men, and self-report will almost never tell us why confidence is more attractive. Most people, but especially women (in my experience), are deeply skeptical of and/or hostile to the idea that all aspects of human behavior are heritable at all.
> 'raising children is really hard nowadays' is a pretty common explanation
Do you imagine it was easier to raise kids 100 years ago?
"Do you imagine it was easier to raise kids 100 years ago? "
That's a sort of yes/no kind of question. If you lived on a farm, children were much less of an economic drain 150 years ago. If you lived in a city, this was much less true. This is, of course, only one dimension of "easier", but it's also true that birth control was a lot harder. And almost all the population lived on small farms. (IIRC it was in the neighborhood of 70%, and in their parents [grandparents?] generation it was well over 80%.) Cities have traditionally not been able to replace their population. Partially this was due to diseases, but it was also because of economic pressures. And there's a time lag in social adaptation.
FWIW, there's still evidence that people living in dense groups don't meet replacement numbers. The reason is a bit questionable, but I *think* that a part of the reason is economic pressures.
Most developed, rich, industrialized countries have below-replacement fertility rates these days...
Even ones with generous child benefits and overall extensive welfare states (eg Scandinavian countries).
All of these countries (the US included) need immigration to maintain their population.
I'm working on a post (stay tuned!) about why "just so" arguments shouldn't be dismissed so quickly. Evolution works in a way that Keith Stewart Thompson calls "correlated progression," where every individual is an experiment, probing for varying solutions to the problem of existence. When iterated millions of individuals over a million years, evolution has the appearance of, in retrospect, divinity. Instead of reacting to changing conditions, evolution seemingly anticipates adversity, with latent traits springing into action at the right place at the right time.
Our whole existence has so much of the appearance of intelligence design, that things "just so" happening the way they happen is the norm, not the exception.
You've piqued my interest, but your post will need to address a couple of key issues:
1) How do we acquire evidence for these views that aren't just post hoc pattern matching? I'm willing to entertain either empirical or agent based modelling approaches, but pure reason doesn't cut it for me.
2) Why should we believe that this fine-grained evolutionary dynamic is usefully applicable to modern society and culture? I say fine grained because evo psych is either trivial (people want to have sex because sex makes babies) or assumes evolution can develop very specific behaviours which persists through cultural change.
FWIW, it's fine grained because there's a sample size of millions, and a filter that removes those samples that don't fit. So you get a shifting gradient as the nature of the filter shifts.
That said, there's a lot of places where it definitly *isn't* fine grained. Look into the path of the vagus nerve.
Thanks. I will incorporate these comments into my post. Regarding the evidence broadly in evolution regarding correlated progression, my initial touchpoint is At The Water's Edge by Carl Zimmer, which describes the fossil evidence for how fish gained feet (over 10m years) and how early mammals gained flippers (also over 10m years). As for whether these speedy evolutionary gears apply to recent human evolution, the evidence is scant. However, the 10,000 Year Explosion by Greg Cochran (who is on SSC's blogroll) hazards some theories.
Why don't you actually look into evolutionary psychology before being so dismissive? We don't tolerate this ignorant skepticism when it comes to things like climate change or covid, so why is okay here?
Good luck with that. Modern evolutionary biologists talk about something called the landscape. That's a way of thinking about developmental constraints and evolutionary tradeoffs. When the environment changes, the landscape changes. There's no divinity. There's no evidence that evolution anticipates anything.
As for the appearance of intelligent design, it's like finding a face in a piece of toast or a rock on Mars. Human minds look for it and find it. Hint: odds are it is not an actual face.
To me, it feels like you misread that post. It didn't read to me like thr author was claiming any of
- divinity
- evolution anticipating anything
- intelligent design
The actual quotes go:
"When iterated millions of individuals over a million years, evolution has *the appearance* of, *in retrospect*, divinity."
ie, if you look only at the result of a super complex process working over a super long time, that result may appear miraculous
"evolution *seemingly* anticipates adversity", set against evolution making new adaptations *after* changes in circumstances.
To my knowledge, that's how it works most of the time: evolution injects a bunch of random variation in traits, the environment changes, some of the previously neutral-ish changes (otherwise probably would have been selected out) are now advantageous. In retrospect, if you don't look closely, it "seems like evolution anticipating adversity", even if it's a "blind idiot god".
Basically the same thing for "our existence having so much of the appearance of intelligent design"
Again, "appearance of".
To me it seems like you're arguing against a position nobody stated (although I understand how certain phrasings in the post could lead to such an interpretation)
Evo-psych has a lot of bad examples and a smaller portion of good examples, you should learn to distinguish between them so you don't throw out the baby. :) E.g. the first thing I can remember is that old and long lived evo-psych hypothesis that girls growing up without fathers start mating behavior earlier and are generally more reckless because they... I don't remember the reasoning, maybe that they have to compensate for not having a protective male in their vicinity and need to find a new male to protect them. This was a good hypothesis, because it's falsifiable, and indeed, it got thoroughly falsified several times. Turns out that girls who lost their fathers in war didn't turn out reckless at all, though the girls left by reckless fathers still grow up more reckless than average, meaning it's mostly genetic probably. I think it was a nicely empirical and not just-so-story-esque thing to do to test this hypothesis.
Now and then there is a nugget, but there's an awful lot of bathwater. Worse, it's the kind of bath water that tends to be politically useful, often towards evil ends. I've seen some good research in the area myself, but, as others have noted, there are so many just-so and so-my-politics-are-right stories that I tend to be skeptical. To be fair, I'm like that with reports of new battery components and Alzheimer's drugs since so much money is involved.
>Honestly...this is why I dislike evo-psych. It's full of "just-so" stories about that try to explain human drives in evolutionary terms. But none of those stories actually have any strong empirical evidence behind them; it's idle speculation, not science
This betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of evo-psych science. All kinds of empirical work can help validates evo-psych theories. Honest question, have you read any books or listened to any lectures on the subject? Maybe you have, but your criticisms are absolutely indistinguishable from those who have not.
And I find an overwhelming majority of people who say stuff like this also believe in fantastical, logically incoherent notions of free will, as if its a better answer to say "oh, well everyone just *chose* to behave that way" (...)
Which is to say, not an explanation of anything at all.
>Unless we come up with a neurological mechanism for the difference in preference between suitors and parents
Nearly everything related to human behavior lacks a fundmanetal neurological explanation, so it's strange to be incredulous towards evo-psych in particular.
>or we can show empirically that such an instinct exists universally and increases reproductive fitness
One of the things evo-psychologists do is look at the extent to which certain behaviors are common across populations, and seeking high status mates is as common as any other high-level aspect of human behavior. Though, it absolutely does not need to be universal. It's like saying height can't improve reproductive fitness because not everyone is tall. It's a matter of probabilities.
>I mean, can Dynomight seriously think that somewhere in the human genome, there is a gene that encodes the "cause people to identify high-status mates for their adult children" protein? I mean, maybe it's possible that this is some complex polygenic trait, but we don't have any evidence of that
This is again naive skepticism. All aspects of human behavior are (to varying extents) heritable. It doesn't mean there's a gene that directly encodes for each highly specific behavior.
What happens in your view of things when a parent chooses a certain course of behavior like advising their offspring on mate preference? What causes this the desire for a parent to have these preferences? Unless you believe in supernatural souls that direct behavior, at some level all forms of behavior has to involve something at the biochemical and neurobiological level, be it in the generation of desire or the behavioral expression of it. You deriding the heritability of behavior as 'gene-for-particular-behavior-protein' hides the fact that any materialist explanation for the behavior must also involve fundamental biological factors.
When you have a conscious thought that is met with a corresponding behavior, how does this non-material experience even interact with your body to execute the action? You can say that there's some neural activity that gave rise to the thought, and this neural activity is doing the causation in the body....if so, then congratulations, you don't believe in free will.
And before you or someone else accuses me of needlessly talking about another subject (free will), the point is that you either have a strictly materialist (proteins and neurons and so on) view of behavior, or you have a dualistic view of the body to explain behavior. If you reject dualism, then dismissing the heritability of behavior on the basis that it would (supposedly) require certain proteins to carry out particular behaviors is special pleading.
Yep, was going to say this. There must be some evolved instincts in play there and they must be, broadly, nurturing instincts rather than reproductive ones. Would be surprising if those didn't exist in humans and didn't play some role in motivating prospective grandparents.
My impression is that for most mammals (with females living in herds of relatives and males roaming around alone) females have kind of low interest in male attractiveness: they mainly choose the territory and accept any male that comes with it, or wait until the males fight it out and then stay with the winner. This of course works as mate choice, preferring the strongest male (including the one who's keeping the best territory). Human females seem to have above average mate choice instincts, concentrating on the physical and mental traits of the males. Could be because we are long lived and the status of the male can change a lot during lifetime, so it's better to go with the one that seems to have high chances in a rapidly changing environment?
Elephants still seem to have some kind of trait based mate choice, preferring the oldest and biggest. 'Biggest' would be perhaps comparable to human preferences (though for us size alone is not quite as important) but 'oldest' is totally different in humans. Young women prefer young men, on average.
This anthropologist tends to downplay female mate choice, saying patriarchy controlled women instead:
https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/
But I can't quite believe it was that absolute
EDIT: I see he commented here to that effect:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws/comment/6612844
In stories about parent-child conflicts, dramatic necessity is sufficient to explain why the parents always prefer the rich suitor to the beautiful suitor.
The young people, not the parents, are always the protagonists (not in the original Greek sense of initiating the action, but in the common-speech sense of being the character the camera stays closet to and the audience sympathizes most with). It would be interesting to know why Western culture prefers youthful protagonists; but it is so, and has been so for centuries. Another reason the protagonists must be the children is that the protagonist must fight up a power gradient, and parents have more power than children.
The protagonists must be more-sympathetic than those opposing them, and it's more acceptable in Western post-Roman literary culture to love someone for their beauty than to love them for their riches or status. (Probably due not to over-valuing beauty, but to the Christian view of riches and status as corrupting, and of beauty as highly correlated with the Good.) It's also more-acceptable in post-Roman Western culture for a young person to be attracted to a young person than to an old person. Therefore, *in a story*, the parents will favor the rich old suitor; the child, the young and beautiful one. QED.
In reality, old rich men don't need the help of parents to get beautiful young women. And I don't blame those young women. Being rich is correlated with being smart and hard-working; neither being young nor being beautiful says anything positive about one's character.
It seems like in years past the protagonist in movie sense was significantly older than today, at least for men. Humphrey bogart, Cary grant, and Clark Gable were leading men in romantic roles until well into middle age. Even among women Katherine Hepburn wasn't that young for some of her roles either, and in Breakfast at Tiffany's both of the "young" stars sleeping with older people were over 30. Action stars seem to have a longer lifespan, from John Wayne to Bruce Willis. But was he his own producer? And Stallone also. I rarely watch movies but seems like all romance characters are trending younger.
For romance this is quite intuitive, as most romantic involvement happens at a young age. It's the same reason we don't see a lot of young protagonists in films about problems usually affecting old people, like dementia. Also, romance for older people is quite different and will not sell as much tickets.
You've never listened to the gossip at an assisted living facility.
There were a lot more women writing for Hollywood back then, so female stars had longer lives as romantic leads. Male writers have more trouble with this. If you look at television and now streaming, neither of which pay as well as Hollywood, you'll find older women in romantic leads.
Do you have statistics on the number of female writers in Hollywood over time? As opposed to television? I'm curious.
I'm not at all sure that has changed that much. Richard Gere was playing romantic leads well into his fifties, Leonardo di Caprio is nearly 50 and is still in films with women twenty years younger.
What is true is that most actors get better at acting as they get older - and also their later films are necessarily more recent and so perhaps easier to bring to mind?
Plenty of actors spend most of their twenties playing highschoolers and so don't get to start on adult roles until they reach thirty anyway
Don't forget Tom Cruise...
I read a guide to screenwriting once. It's first lesson was to make your hero a 35-year-old man.
Being rich is correlated with having money and other societal resources. It has nothing whatever to do with being smart or hard working. If someone wants a piece of that, it can pay to woo. This goes for men and women. I've known both and on both sides. From what I've seen, marrying for money is one of the hardest jobs out there, not that it always works out badly.
I think it depends what you mean by rich. I'd have thought there _might_ be a dip around the 20 million mark where you're not so smart/hard-working, but I think the general trend (definitely true for 5 million and 100+ million) is to be smart and hard-working.
I thought that there might be a peak around $10M-$20M, based on the rich people I know. (Of course, anecdotes are not data, but here goes.) That's the kind of money that you can earn with hard work, some smarts and a lot of luck. (One guy invented a sushi making machine. Another sold a travel software company to Google. Yet another worked for a bank in China.) Most of the big money is inherited, so if it's a lot over that range, odds are smarts had nothing to do with it. It was about the magic of compounding. It is a lot harder to get from $100K to $1M than from $10M to $100M. People with less were either not as smart or not as hard working, but most likely not as lucky. Chance favors the prepared mind, but there are a lot more prepared minds than lucky tickets. Remember, two inventors tried to register telephone patents that day.
How do you think people get money and other societal resources if not by being smart or hard working? Even if it's just by their ancestors being smart and hard working, that means they probably have genes for being smart and hardworking too.
Most of it was luck. You had to be in the right place at the right time otherwise all your smarts and hard work were unlikely to pay off. European serfs worked just as hard as 18th century American farmers, but serfs could work for a thousand years and never own their own land in Europe. They could in America thanks to our extensive resources and government policies.
Another common way was by violence and the threat of violence. A lot of fortunes in the US were made by businessmen backed by violent union busters, cavalry to clear out the land's original owners and kidnappers to procure an unpaid labor force. I'm not even counting the likes of Rockefeller who was known to blow up rivals oil rigs.
Since most wealth is inherited in our society, it doesn't matter if someone a hundred or five hundred years ago happened to be smart, hard working and lucky. You don't have to be smart or hard working to inherit.
Violence requires intelligence and hard work.
Serfs worked hard, but were mostly pretty stupid.
The claim that "most" wealth is inherited in our society is just completely wrong, especially in the context of 500 years. The vast majority of wealth on earth has been created by smart and hard working people in the last 50-100 years.
Yes, and laws to get wealthy boots off poor necks was a fair part of that.
There was a selective force. Smart serfs who let their masters know they were smart got killed.
Most wealth is inherited. It's highly concentrated, so we're talking about relatively few people. Sure, some of those at the very top may have had smarts and worked hard, but as you move down the list inherited comes up again and again. Also, most of the big success stories involve great wealth coming on top of not quite as great wealth. Building a real estate empire starting with $1M is not as impressive as building a real estate empire starting with $10 in terms of showing smarts and hard work. It's not impossible, but it takes less smarts and hard work.
>>Being rich is correlated with having money.
Big if true.
Oh yeah, rich vs high earning is an important distinction. Marrying rich is difficult, too many existing hanger-ons, too few of them. Marrying high earning is significantly easier (there are so many more of them who are single), and a lot of the time reaps immediate benefits such as reliability with bills and invites to family functions where family is generally also high earning (but at the top of the earning curve, whereas your partner is usually just starting out). You get a surprising number of excellent free meals if you date or marry a 2nd or 3rd gen high earner and very often access to a network of other late-career high earners, some of which may be in your industry, most of which have highly prized professional skills.
I'm noting this because I would call myself a 2nd gen high earner, though the perks I can offer are necessarily limited by all of them being in my parents' industry and also overseas in the Motherland. And I would call my partner a 3rd gen high earner even though his wage might not numerically qualify, but he's built up a comfortable reserve by living at home (which had sufficient room to house him as an adult, a perk of being 3rd gen) in his early career days and having basically no bills and also no education debt.
A 1st gen high earner (I know a few of those through uni) is rarer than a 2nd/3rd gen, and will come with more money neuroses (and potentially some maladaptive money habits, like aversion to investment), but they're also more likely to be exceptionally hard working and smart (I feel like I'm very slightly above average for both, which was just enough as a 2nd-gener to get a high earning career, but the 1st gens I know are definitely both of those things and much more so than me!)
"It would be interesting to know why Western culture prefers youthful protagonists; but it is so, and has been so for centuries. "
Short answer? The Romantic Era (think Shelley and Byron and Keats):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
"Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical.[1] It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity ...It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe — especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu).
...Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution. ...It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas."
Taking on the established order is a young man's game, and so the cultural heroes became the young challengers, the rebels, the Question Authority type still valorised to this day.
I wonder too how much is a selection effect put in place by mass media, specifically that while only part of your audience has experience as a full adult, nearly everyone was young once. So even middle aged people can relate to a Romeo and Juliet ("I once had a tempestuous relationship like that. *sigh*") but teenagers and 20 somethings can't always grasp why parents should be so concerned about who their kids marry. As a result the topics of mass media stories trend towards experiences of younger and younger protagonist characters.
I would hold out Breaking Bad the exception, with perhaps Game of Thrones showing the transition all in one show; all the old serious people get killed off very fast and it is mostly their kids navigating the story and becoming serious adults that matter.
Thank you for the great summary on romanticism :-)
> On the other hand, our built-in nutrition instincts are also what tells us to take a fifth donut after we’ve already eaten four, which even a moron can use their reason to figure out is a good idea.
Typo: "good idea" => "/great/ idea" (or maybe just a missing negation)
Lol I thought about making this exact same joke when I read it. Great minds…
> which even a moron can use their reason to figure out is a good idea
Typo, I think this should be "isn't".
Well done :)
I have some bad news for you
Have been wrong about donuts all this time‽
They are delicious
"POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR"
So now that the thought's been had... what's the over/under in how long before someone uploads this to pornhub?
Pornhub is the wrong place to look. This is just describing a Hallmark movie.
Hallmark! It's like Pornhub for your parents!
Tohron has won the thread.
He has clearly cracked the code.
I applaud you.
That's the sort of thing that would have appeared here:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ryan-creamers-pornhub-channel
If he were still uploading videos there.
> And we’re sure lucky it does, because otherwise we would have gone extinct as soon as we invented condoms?"
I think there's an extra quotation mark here.
Excellent points.
Also worth noting that status is no longer achieved in the same way as a million year ago, when instinctual physical attraction evolved.
Intelligence did play a role at the time, but it made more sense for evolution to focus attractiveness metrics on physical size and strength.
Now that conscientiousness is a much better predictor of status than physical size and strength, parental reasoning is rationally focusing on this metric, while instinctual attractiveness has become a less suited assessment mechanism. Young love is maladapted and focusing on a suboptimal proxy.
Height and attractiveness and intelligence are somewhat correlated, so child/parent judgement might not always diverge, but assessing conscientiousness is safer with a longer track record, hence parental preference for older suitor.
Note that this divergence is mostly relevant for daughter / male suitor. In the symmetrical son / female suitor situation, parental disagreement would be less likely because the best proxy for female fertility remains beauty. And I think there is usually less parental conflict in this situation empirically.
Physical attraction has been overrated. You want a mate with a sense of humor. Humans evolved a sense of humor to keep them from murdering their children.
I'd bet that for a female's parents considering male suitors a bit of age helps too. Historically males tended to die rather more frequently, usually younger and with foreign objects lodged in awkward places. Any older member of a group that typically dies young must have a lot going for them, and probably are likely to keep living for a while longer. Rather like how once children made it to about 10 they were likely to live quite a bit longer, a male in a relatively violent society that makes it to 30 or 40 with some wealth and status is probably going to live into his 60's. It's the 16-20 year olds that are likely to get themselves killed, regardless of how pretty they are, and their future productive capabilities are not entirely obvious most likely.
I think the variables you are considering are not independent. Younger male are more likely to get themselves killed *in the process of* gaining status. A very-high-status youngster (wealthy-heir type) should not be more likely to get himself killed than a wealthy middle-age professional. So your argument would obviously be valid if the young male suitor is low-status + seeking to gain higher status, but then you assume that the female status "compass" is broken in the first place: evolution should nudge her towards the older, higher-status male. If you reject that hypothesis, then you are not really solving for the problem of parent-offspring best-suitor-selection-algo misalignment. Unless I am missing something in your argument.
Sorry, I should have specified that I was thinking in terms of the hunter/gatherer tribal group, where wealthy-heir wasn't really a type, outside of maybe "current chieftain's sons." Otherwise, most young males should almost by definition be low status, as they have not had time to climb whatever hierarchy exists and are just out of the "child that does what adults tell them" phase.
Now, a younger male who was already one of the best hunters in the tribe, the fastest or strongest etc. might get to be higher status very quickly and thus be the optimal mate, but there are only going to be a few of those around at any given time relative to the number of young females looking for a mate. It doesn't require a broken compass for genetics to push females towards "First, get young, strong and high status. Then young and strong and maybe will get high status. Then older and high status, even though he probably has other offspring or even other wives that might be a higher priority." Note that part of that decision process is an estimate of what someone's future status is likely to be, which is a function of mental acuity and social experience, i.e. maturity. Parents who have lived through the process and seen what sort of young men are more or less likely to become high status and what sort are more or less likely to become dead are likely to come to different conclusions on that point than youngsters, even if their underlying decision process is the same. If the chieftain's son is an option, parents are going to be thrilled. If the young Adonis who is rapidly becoming the most respected hunter in the tribe is an option, great. If it comes down to a choice between a pretty decent kid who is maybe a little too rebellious and likely to get himself offed and an older widower who has a solid foundation in the tribe, the parents are going to go for the latter while the daughter has less frame of reference for judging the situation and might want the young guy. If she had all the experience her parents had she would probably come to the same decision, but genes don't necessarily help you predict who is going to be high status better than experience does.
I understand your point much better, thanks for the clarification!
It makes sense. But maybe the underlying algorithm might even be more of a risk-management aspect than ordered preference then.
Going for the young promising suitor is higher risk (risk of violent death, more female competition, risk of failing to reach potential) and higher reward (longer compounding, resource exclusivity (at least for a time)(. Going for the older established suitor is lower risk (proven track record), but lower reward as well (shorter resource-providing timeframe, potential resource-sharing with older offsprings).
That would imply that parents behave more risk-averse than their daughters, which seems counter-intuitive. Evolutionary speaking, they should push their sons to be more risk-seeking than they would because of the extreme skewness of male evolutionary fitness and risk-averaging as parents having/expecting other offsprings. But for daughters, I cannot see a clear reason for parents and daughter to have diverging risk appetite. Do you?
Oh, very much yes on the diverging risk appetite. Part is based on appetite, part is based on incorrect estimates of risk, but we should expect a divergence.
You mention the risk of violent death when it comes to the young suitor, but that is a bigger issue than you might be considering. What is the status of a women with a kid or two whose husband just died? Does she go back to her parents and put the burden of upkeep back on that household, or is she on her own? If one of her parents has died, especially the father, is going back for support even an option, or does your remaining parent need your support? What is the status of her kids if their father dies? Can they advance without a father's clout?
The risk of having your spouse die before your kids are of age weighed against a somewhat longer life and no complications of other kids is probably a very "winning is a bit better, losing is super bad" kind of situation. Successful gamblers generally don't bet it all on one hand, and this is possibly a big gamble. Notably it is possibly a bigger gamble for the parents if they have to take the daughter back into the family with her kids, support them and then find another suitor, while possibly having other kids to support and marry off. So more downside risk for the woman, lots more for the parents, and importantly not that much more benefit for the parents of a longer compounding time; they aren't going to be around to see the last 10-15 years of their kid's life, and besides, you have children to support you in your old age, not the other way around.
Parents are also absolutely more risk adverse than their teenage kids. That's sort of universal. Part of that is just understanding the risks better. Young people generally have a firm belief that they will never die, and neither will their true love. Thus they will far underweight the risk of early death.
At just a genetic level, a male spreading lots of wild oats is a slight benefit, and if his success requires some risk of getting killed parents are going to be less worried. With females, well they are the limiting factor in how many babies a group can have, and require lots of resources and protection during that process. Parents are always going to be much more cautious with that, if only to prevent their daughters getting knocked up without a male to help raise the children. So long as the daughter has someone to help support her and raise the kids, it is sort of a wash, but from the parent's perspective the difference between the father supporting the kids and their supporting the kids is a big one.
There is also the question of the value to the parents (and their other offspring) of having their daughter marry someone who is already higher status, just in terms of social alliances etc. Someone who might become higher status 5-10 years from now is a big gamble compared to high status that helps out now. One in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say.
I *think* your ideas of life a million years ago are oversimplified, or just wrong. Evolution sometimes drives body sizes smaller. Specialists were making fancy tools a million years ago. Etc.
Also, whether conscientiousness is a better predictor of status depends on how the money is earned. Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter. Think of many salesmen and corporate spokesmen.
"I *think* your ideas of life a million years ago are oversimplified, or just wrong." - could you expand?
"Evolution sometimes drives body sizes smaller." - of course, in other species, or for humans in case of resource scarcity. But generally speaking bigger/stronger men (at roughly equal intelligence) had a higher evolutionary fitness.
"Specialists were making fancy tools a million years ago." - Ok, can you explicit your argument?
"Also, whether conscientiousness is a better predictor of status depends on how the money is earned." - Sure, but high conscientiousness is a strong predictor of success *across* the board. Even artistic geniuses have to put the hours in.
"Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter." - I don't understand that sentence.
"Think of many salesmen and corporate spokesmen." - B2B sales people need *a lot* more than looks for success. I have been a decision-maker on quite a few large B2B contracts, and I can assure you that pretty but incompetent sales people have a 0% closure rate. Again, at equal competence, looks always help, but unless you go into very very shallow jobs, a strong competence foundation is required at the top. Even actors for whom physical appearance is a must have typically gone through a lot of hard work and rejection before succeeding.
Yes, evolution is driven by many different forces, often in contradictory directions and simultaneously. Big was often an advantage, but not always. The robustus lines tended to die out more frequently than the gracile lines. (Of course, there were more instances of the gracile lines, as smaller animals tend to be more numerous than the larger ones. This is as true among the hominids as among the other groups.)
I'm not sure of the exact time period but there was a woman potter back then who had a paralyzed side of her face, and did a self portrait (in clay). I can't turn up a link right now, but it was in Science News or New Scientist a decade or so ago. She was rather elderly. There many places where "tool factories" were in place. Sometimes the tools were exported (i.e. they were traded until they ended up a long distance from the place they were made.) There was an amber route that may have stretched from Denmark to Southeast Asia (or it may have been a more complex kind of trading, but the merchandise moved). I've heard several different dates for that amber route. In the Americas obsidian from Yellowstone was traded all over the continent, but I haven't heard any real dating on that.
What's difficult about "Various grifts depend heavily of attractive appearance and smooth patter."? Never bought a used car from a smooth talking salesman?
When you restrict the conception to B2B sales people, I must admit I don't know that territory. You could be right. But that's only one small area, and there are other areas where physical appearance isn't the primary requirement. (And I never asserted it was the primary requirement, though in some lines it's quite important. Even in academic settings.)
"The robustus lines tended to die out more frequently than the gracile lines." -> I imagine you are at least partially talking about Neandertal vs. Sapiens, but there was much more to it than sheer size. And Homo Sapiens average height went up over the past few 100k years.
"Never bought a used car from a smooth talking salesman?" -> Never, but more importanly the question reflects my concern with your line of thinking: you are cherry-picking examples rather than addressing the main point. To illustrate, of course you can cherry pick women that are much taller than individual men, but it does not change the fact that men are in average taller than women.
sorry, i'm confused here. What's the difference between the 'stupid' explanation:
> parents are older and wiser than suitors, and so less hormonally obsessed with attractiveness.
and the new one:
> the suitors are working off one level of drive, and the parents another, in a way suggesting they’re genuinely separate.
You even end with an example here:
> the same reason why I might be tempted to overeat at the ice cream shop, but my parents can easily tell me “you should watch your weight” (while facing their own temptations themselves)
would a 10 year old in an ice cream shop with her friends have the same kind of wisdom? It looks to me like this post is actually redefining ancient virtues like wisdom and prudence, using modern understandings of optimization algorithms.
The difference is that rather than parents being genetically predisposed towards selecting higher status mates (A), parents are clueless at a genetic level and instead have to wing it based on their heuristics (B)
are they _clueless_ at the genetic level, or just _less influenced_ by those drives, vs. a model of cause and effect?
it seems to be a reasonable way of talking about wisdom: learning how to navigate with reason rather than just following drives
The difference is that it's not about age. It's that it's easier to tell somebody else to resist their instincts than it is to resist your own instincts.
> it's easier to tell somebody else to resist their instincts than it is to resist your own instincts.
it's true, but this suggests that tinkering with your notion of identity - say, by meditative exercises that help you identify desires as things that arise and fall - a pretty effective trick for acting more as a fitness maximizer rather than an adaption executor
I toyed with the idea of being a fitness maximizer but it led to some pretty repugnant conclusions
what were you trying to maximize the fitness of?
if you ~only~ identify with your genes, it gets ugly, sure - but if you identify with some memes of your culture, and your own personal name, then it changes in interesting ways
That actually does seem like the sort of thing Trivers could more easily explain, and his theory of "genetic conflict" is tailored for a situation like this.
For those curious, I reviewed one of his books here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/the-folly-of-fools/
Succinct and accurate. Can "parental preference" really be distinguished from the preference of any observer whose goal is the wellbeing of the protagonist?
As a secondary point, the protagonist's potential mate has their own interests and may (consciously or unconsciously) be counterfeiting fitness signals. I'd expect an observer to be less susceptible to this than the protagonist.
Counterfeiting fitness signals? You mean, like make-up? *ducks away*
That's almost tautological. But more generally, physical attractiveness seems likely to be overweighted.
Probably the important test is whether friends and siblings both give the same advice as parents (the hypothesis suggested by this post) or whether siblings give the same advice as parents while friends give the same as the individual (the gene selection suggestion) or whether friends and siblings give the same advice as the individual while parents are the odd ones out (the age explanation).
Exactly.
It's not at all hard to imagine young peers encouraging each other to do stupid things that older adults say 'hey maybe don't drink until you vomit multiple nights a month'
Link at start of section 3 is dead
It could be that the fashion of it being religion that intelligence, grit, etc. etc. are all just environmental and not genetic is causing a lot of parents to say some very silly things about who are and are not good potential mates. It would be very taboo for a parent to say 'You shouldn't marry X because they're dumb and ugly and I don't want to have dumb and ugly grandkids'.
I. When people want to have sex, they might pick a partner who is sexually attractive at the expense of other good life choices or personality. When parents are selecting partners, they are thinking in terms of marriage. Parents don't want their children sleeping with sexier people. This might be not relevant for the studies linked in Dynomight's post though.
II. We would expect the child to find someone they find attractive already. Attraction is somewhat idiosyncratic. It would be odd for a parent to step in and say "this person is insufficiently hot for you." It wouldn't be odd for them to criticize the person on a more straightforward criteria like "has a bad job, is mean, etc" that isn't so subjective. Only you know how attracted you feel to your partner. The parents are left guessing, and it would be odd to assume the child isn't attracted and the parents had to step in. Same would go for sexual performance.
> When people want to have sex, they might pick a partner who is sexually attractive at the expense of other good life choices or personality. When parents are selecting partners, they are thinking in terms of marriage. Parents don't want their children sleeping with sexier people. This might be not relevant for the studies linked in Dynomight's post though.
The whole *point* of this post is asking *why* people are sexually attracted to people who their parents don't consider the optimal mate. People are attracted to people due to reasons that in significant part are ultimately a product of evolution, and presumably this is true for parents' judgements of potential mates for their offspring - they've both evolved to have a preference for fitness maximising mates. Why don't the judgements of potential mates between parents and children converge?
*Why* do people want to have sex with certain people? *Why* fundamentally are those people considered "attractive"? You're treating it like it's a meaningless, brute fact of people, but everything about our behavior and preferences has been significantly shaped by evolution. We find certain things attractive, fundamentally, because of evolution. Men having sex to young women with wide hips increases fitness, therefore men find these types of women attractive. Let's say that parents are good are picking partners for their children that maximise fitness. If these partners do in fact maximise fitness, the question is why aren't these types of people necessarily the most sexually attractive?
>It would be odd for a parent to step in and say "this person is insufficiently hot for you."
Says who? We're talking about evolution here - if doing this lead to better fitness, then we should expect it to have been selected for. Absolutely everything we do could be considered 'odd', but we evolved to do it so its not considered 'odd'.
> the drive to protect children once you have them
I think there's lot lurking in this phrase. "Take care of the kids you have" is a powerful evolutionary-driven imperative. The main thing is, the 20-year-old doesn't _have any kids yet_. They are not yet subject to this imperative, while the parents are.
You're right, I think there is a lot here. IMO, parents want their child to have a suitor with prospects, because they want their child's (and grandchild's) life to be easier. To me, this seems like "taking care of the kids you have" rather than evolutionary fitness for the grandchildren.
It's also worth contrasting the behavior of a 20-year-old, childless individual, and a 20-year-old single parent. My guess is that, while the former might choose a mate predominantly on the basis of attractiveness/beauty, the latter's preferences probably would lean towards providing for their existing children.
That's an excellent point. While there are certainly single parents who continually chase the same sort of people that made them single parents in the first place, it does seem to hold that many are looking for a much more stable relationship partner than their previous choice(s), and are willing to trade a lot of physical attraction and romantic aspects for that. I have heard some variant of "I just want a good dad for my son" quite a few times. (Not directed at me to fill the role, of course.)
But the whole point is precisely that this factor should be encoded in sexual preferences (and to a certain extent, it unambiguously is - women almost universally prefer wealthier/higher status men).
If half the females in a prehistoric human population were sexually attracted to men who were highly unlikely to protect and provide for their offspring, while the other half were attracted to men who were highly likely to be able to protect and provide, the genes of the former group should be expected to constitute a diminishing proportion of the toal gene pool with each successive generation.
Evolved factors do not primarily drive our behaviors by making us perform rational cost-benefit analysis on a given trade-off, they're more fundamentally going to be encoded in what we inexplicably find attractive in the first place.
I think humans have a generalized version of imprinting, like ducklings that imprint on the first animal they see after hatching, humans have a longish life stage of gaining data about the world and "learning" reactions to it that they thenceforth innately follow. This is not the same thing as reasoning about things from principles and data, but it's also not the same as having a specific built-in instinct.
I’m not seeing why one needs any deep or difficult theoretical reasons for this phenomenon. It strikes me as the same reason why a third party has an easier time giving me good dietary advice than I might settle on myself. My biological hunger urge might lead me to over-value flavor and cause me to eat too much, whereas my parents (or whoever), who do not experience the visceral pleasure of my eating, can give me a more rational assessment of what my diet should look like. Similarly, if the desirability of a prospective marriage partner can be assessed through two (let’s pretend, to simplify) considerations, one of which is strongly driven by a biological urge, then one’s parents, who are not going to be tempted to over-value the component grounded in a strong biological impulse, will be positioned to offer more objective advice. I guess one could ask why there is a biological urge to overeat or to over-value the sex drive relative to more dispassionate criteria of value in a mate, but if we accept the common observation that most people do so, then the differing opinions of parents can be fully explained, it seems to me, by the fact that they are looking at the situation as third parties who are not experiencing the biological drive.
Yeah I'm sure there's some nuance here, but I can't believe I'm three sections into the blog post and it hasn't mentioned the obvious reason:
The parents don't get to fuck the hot babe/studly stud. In a weird-ass world where they equally received that benefit, for some reason, then analyzing drift in preferences between the two would make more sense.
Even the kid will know it's a bad idea pretty often. People stay in shitty relationships with great sex all the time, man!
The whole point is: why is that hot babe/stud "hot" at all in the first place?
We evolved to find certain things attractive. Those things are generally those that maximise fitness (in a particular enviornment). *If* parents are good at identifying which partners will maximise fitness, then why isn't there a total convergence in what people have evolved to find sexy and the partners which parents have identified as being fitness maxmising?
You're talking about sexual attraction as if it's some brute fact of nature, divorced from many thousands of years of selection pressure. Men aren't attracted to wide hips because "wide hips are just what is attractive, period". We evolved to have this preference because of its impact on reproductive fitness. If wide hips were worse for giving birth, then we should expect that we would have evolved to find them unattractive.
The older I get, the more I dislike evolutionary psychology explanations for anything. We can all come up with convincing stories, but there is no reason to treat them as anything other than fiction.
That's because, once you are out of the reproduction age, your genes are no longer selected to prefer this clearly superior argument ;-)
But on a more serious note, I agree that it's easy to make an evolutionary psychology argument, but very hard to prove ir refute. We can compare with other species, but it's really not clear at all how transferable those attributes are and which species is a good reference point.
On the other hand, we know that evolution is the process that instilled us this specific behavior, so if you can't come up with an evolutionary psychology argument, it's at least an indicator that something is off.
Re: "we know that evolution is the process that instilled us this specific behavior" How do we know that? I don't even believe it is true.
Because you are the end product of a line of organisms stretching back a billion years, who were successful at reproduction some billions of times in a row, roughly speaking. That is, from start to finish, the genes that make up *you* were the genes that successful reproduced themselves, one billion times in a row. What are the odds that a game of chance is run a billion times in a row, and we find an individual (in this case individual set of genes) that wins each and every game -- that throws a natural 7 a billion times in a row -- that this individual has *any* component of his behavior *not* exquisitely tuned to win the game? Pretty much zero to as many decimal places as you care to inspect. You are the poker player that won a billion hands in a row, there's no chance any aspect of your strategy at the table has not been tested, some time or other, and not been found to be optimal.
The problem with most arguments against the exquisite tuning of natural selection is that it fails to comprehend, at some basic level, how very long the selection has been going on, how extraordinarily many times the harrow has weeded out the faulty. As a species, we have existed for less than a million years, but we share most of our genome with species that have existed for much, much, longer. Our core genes have existed for most of the past billion years. They have been tested and refined so many times that *nothing* that does not produce an optimal result survived, it has all been pruned out long ago.
"Because you are the end product of a line of organisms stretching back a billion years, who were successful at reproduction some billions of times in a row, roughly speaking."
So is everyone else (including ferrets) and yet we are scattered across a considerable range of behaviours. Whole distinct cultures and everything. People throwing themselves on hand-grenades to shield their unrelated comrades. Young Werther. The courtly love tradition. Hikikomori. Streaking across football pitches.
It seems that in my case evolution has tuned me in the direction of neuroplasticity and, yeah, adaptation-executing. My genes seem to predict my behaviour only in very broad terms, almost useless in the particular.
And sometimes I feel like a tuning fork myself.
I suggest you are overly impressed with the range of human behavior. As well one horse talking to another in a field may marvel at the diversity in horsey behavior. "Why, Carl over there loves munching on clover, while I myself can't stand anything but the tall fescue. And notice how Marian uses only the molars on the left? Thank God the great Left Molar Right Molar conflict is now over, and we can live in peace with each other."
It's understandable, we are embedded in our own species, and every little variation is important to us, but I rather suspect an alien biologist might well summarize the entire gamut of what we do in a paragraph or two[1] if we shared the textbook with the full range of conceivable life forms.
-----------------
[1] "Mostly harmless."
A damn sight better than just "harmless", at least.
Enjoyable rejoinder, but you've moved the goalposts. The question is not whether the variety of human behaviour is important in some species-independent sense but whether said variety exists and by dint of its existence demonstrates the limits of evolutionary fine-tuning. The Molar Schism would serve to show this just as well.
If anything, intelligence represents a terrific evolutionary hack allowing us to adapt to new or rapidly-changing fitness landscapes without having to laboriously sift allele ratios to do so. (This is weakly comparable to the evolution of the major histocompatibility complex, where there's selection in favour of maintaining a great variety of alleles as opposed to any specific individual ones.) To go back to Kaleberg's original assertion, it seems clear to me that plenty of human behaviours are not specifically instilled by evolution but instead enabled by an evolved, complex, somewhat fuzzy, behaviour generator.
Re: all the poor genes having been pruned out—no, that’s obviously untrue upon reflection. There are still genes around that kill kids before they get out of infancy. Reproductive matters are no different; poor genes get through the sieve by chance all the time.
There are genetic defects (like trisomy) that can severely impact children, and there are genes (like for sickle cell) that persist because they have other effects that are salutary, but if you can think of a single *normal* unmutated gene that has persisted for the past 100,000 years and which has nothing but evil effects, I'd be very interested to hear of it.
I think also you are confusing defects in DNA reproductionl, which produce brand-new mutant genes, with the pre-existing presence of evil genes. The former is what causes birth defects, not the latter.
“Unmutated gene”? What do you even mean by this?
Anyway, no, there are plenty of very bad genes that do not arise as errors in replication. Cystic fibrosis.
There is no exquisite tuning in evolution. That's a common fallacy.
The genes that reproduced only had to be about as good as the previous generation's for a large value of about. There's nothing that keeps fitness rising consistently and nothing to prevent it from falling as long as it works just well enough to stay in the game. My genes sure as hell haven't won a billion hands in a row. My genes just won a pot often enough not to lose all their chips. Also, that winning wasn't just about genes. They were also lucky that the chair never collapsed and the game never got raided which is a way of bringing up environmental factors and dumb luck.
Exquisite tuning is a common misperception about evolutionary theory. One of the big beefs people had with Darwin was that his theory wasn't about exquisite tuning. Things just had to be good enough, so it didn't matter if they were just as good or somewhat worse. One writer compared evolution to a telenovela and creationism to the Aeneid. In telenovelas stuff just keeps on happening. In the Aeneid everything is towards the eventual found of Rome. Arguments citing exquisite tuning often turn out to be about politics, not genetics.
Sure there is. Competition. It's certainly true the earliest cat predators only had to be a smidge faster than the earliest ungulates, and maybe they both lumbered across the veldt at walking speed, but the prey adapted and willy-nilly the predator had to, and so now we have cheetahs and gazelles, which are both about as swift as their biomechanics allow. What you say is arguably reasonable when new niches are abruptly created or vanish -- let us say post-glaciation or Chixculub -- but these are narrow little bands of history and irrelevant to the point anyway.
The rest of this is a farrago of metaphor and assertion, neither of which leave me with more to say than that I disagree entirely, sorry.
I regret to inform you that haemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, neurofibromatosis, polycystic kidney disease, achromatopsia, etc all exist.
And this is relevant how?
My reply was to Carl Pham above you, who was asserting that there's "zero to as many decimal places as you care to inspect" percent chance that any individual (as a set of genes) has been tuned non-optimally by evolution. These are examples of genetic problems that evolution has thus far failed to weed out.
You're saying that when normal genes are mutated things go wrong? This is suprising, why? And what relevance does this have to my point?
Then you do not believe in evolution.
“We know that evolution is the process that instilled us this specific behavior”
We don’t know this unless you ascribe to evolution basically all possible human behavior, in which case your definition of evolution is so broad it might as well just be called nature or the universe or God. This is the problem with evo-psych. It’s the lock opened by any key.
But... there is nothing except Evolution which can create new behaviors. I don't understand what you're saying. If these behaviors did not come from Evolution, where did they come from?
Is there a reason you’re capitalizing evolution, as if it was an entity and not just a chain of accidents?
Anyhow, no, like I said, that’s far too broad. That’s like saying that we should understand everything through the lens of chemistry. We can call it chemistry psychology because everything is basically just fancy chemistry. (I recognize that some people actually do this, but it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.)
The fact is that most behavior is better and more simply explained by treating people as if they think and reason, and assuming that behaviors arise from their thoughts and feelings rather than the dead hand of ‘Evolution.’ If you assume that every behavior humans have today—boarding the F train, writing Der Holle Rache, farming strikes for a god roll sniper rifle in Destiny 2, planning the perfect bento box, putting atmospheric satellites in orbit, etc., is basically just noise caused by sexual selection in early primates, then you’re going to have an extremely reductive and trivial understanding of the meaning and nature of most human endeavors.
Which is fine. You are allowed to believe that, just like the chemistry people are allowed to believe their comfortable simplicities. “Why does the Mona Lisa smile? Dopamine. Why do I feel this terrible longing when I think of all the world and the things in it that I will never know or see? Dopamine. Why did my wife leave me? Dopamine.”
I capitalized Evolution because Google speech to text capitalizes it, and while I'm willing to go back and correct certain typos, that's not one of them because Jesus Christ is it annoying
Also, that's not the mistake I'm talking about. All human behavior comes about from chemicals in the brain, but that doesn't mean that understanding human behavior through chemistry makes sense. Not because it's false but because it's too complex, you could spend your entire life trying to understand a single coherent thought at the level of the synapse spikes and you'd never figure it out in time. Just like trying to figure out the crazy connection between the selection pressure in the ancestral environment and girls starting to do 'wings' on their eyes with eye liner. (I might be a few years behind fashion.)
But I am seeing a lot of people who wouldn't object "the connection is so tortuously complicated that it's impossible to tease out information", but rather "there is no connection". People who are claiming that genes do not influence behavior, rather than claiming that the influence of genes upon behavior is computationally intractible and therefore not comprehensible or a particularly useful framework for understanding behavior.
It feels like exactly those misconceptions that EY wanted to clear up with the evolution sequence. And I remember having conversations on older SSC where that context was understood! I am disheartened to see we need to go back to linking the sequences at people to get back to the level we used to be at. It wasn't very fun lol. Linking people the sequences is probably almost as tedious as being linked the sequences and told to read them.
The argument is a bit too close to 'god of the gaps'. It's computationally intractable only as far as considering every possible behavior goes. But you don't have to: evolution has levers to tweak specific signal strengths, cell type mixes, et cetera, that is: it tweaks ~propensities~ of our mental models. The issue is that propensities on a statistical scale turn into a set of common strategies/behaviors. Over time, these become common and institute selection factors for underlying propensities and vice versa. You can't just focus on the outlier behaviors and tell us we can't see the evolutionary process within those. There's an aggregate trend, just like going from a micro to macro scale in econ.
As for explaining human behavior through chemicals: see all psychoactive drugs and substances - if an effect on behavior can be achieved through some of those, it can be reached evolutionarily also but with a far greater degree of precision. Whether or not it's a valid construct, you can tweak pretty much every component of the OCEAN scale, so selection has to be doing just that.
Well yeah. Evolution is broad. As an explanation it's superrior to "God did it" not just because it's less broad as evolution can only explain the behaviour of self replicators with specific parameters instead of any possible physical phenomena, but because we have a pretty good gear-level understanding of how exactly evolution works, while the will of God is a black box.
Funny, it seems to me that despite your protest that an evolutionary explanation is more predictable and understood, that the objection of many people to evo psych is that it provides an elementary justification for literally any mechanism whereby we can arrive at what we see. “Uh… we must do that because… it was a fitness advantage. Or, maybe, it’s a leftover bit that used to be a fitness advantage but isn’t. Or, it’s a conspicuously anti-fitness waste of resources that demonstrates that you’re so fit you don’t need to be efficient!” At least with “God did it” you’re being honest with yourself that you’re not introducing any new information into your science.
The kind of honesty you get from "God did it" explanations is overvalued in my opinion. It's like doing a stupid mistake while being fully aware that you are doing a stupid mistake, yet continuing to do it, nevertheless. The whole point of noticing your mistakes isn't getting virtue points for awareness, it's correcting them and doing less stupid mistakes instead, even at a risk of not knowing anymore what kind of mistakes your are doing now.
I agree that a layman with a glimpse of evolution methodology can use it to create explanations for nearly anything. Here should be a link to an xkcd comics of evolutional explanation of gravity, but I can't find it for some reason. That's why you should be carefull with such things. Experts of the field who can do the math right, generate postdictions and falsify them are less at risk here, because they understand the actual constraints which are not clear for you and me.
I agree with you except that I don’t see any more substance in the explanations of evo-psych experts than the explanations of laymen. I mean, how can one even become an expert in evo-psych when one cannot reproduce, experiment with, or falsify one’s beliefs? There quite literally is no math to do. So much for rigorous empiricism, and without that, science is just a fancy word for sophistry.
How about before being mindlessly dismissive, you make even a token effort to understand the field?
Maybe you have, I don't know, but the way you're talking is perfectly identical to the way people with no understanding of the field do.
The mate seeker uses system I heuristics, because that's what gets us excited. The parents use system II, because they don’t actually have to have sex with their new in-law. System I has not yet had time to catch up to the cultural factors that affect potential parenthood.
This is the old tension/dialectic between instinctive urges adapted gradually to hunter gatherer contexts and bourgeois values that make sense in cities.
"Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once."
Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Could there be a certain instinct to avoid incest here? I mean, maybe there's theoretically a way for parents to be drawn to exactly the same traits that correlate to sexual attractiveness without it feeling like sexual attraction but I'm having trouble imagining it. If a daughter brings home a suitor and the mother says, "Ooh, super hot!" you can see how this could create problems down the road that are even bigger than those created by the usual disagreements.
There's also the issue of who experiences the benefits and the downsides of the different types more. The parents don't get to enjoy having sex with the hot person, but they do have to deal with the aftermath of the hot person wandering around because everyone else thinks they're hot too. On the other hand, older folks are often in a more vulnerable position if crops fail/the house forecloses/somebody gets cancer or whatever, so they might end up benefiting more from having in-laws with means.
Maybe incest isn't the right word so much "parents and children competing for the same partner. " It has been known to cause lots of intrafamily conflict, which is bad for the family's survival.
While the "problems down the road" are a given in such cases, it's arguable whether /instinct/ is how they get avoided. The prohibition had to be explicitly coded, as far back as the books of the Torah. Leviticus prohibits father-in-law/daughter-in-law mating in 20:12 and mother-in-law/son-in-law mating in 20:14, both under penalty of death.
Over time such prohibitions turn into social norms, more than needing the actual draconian enforcement. And the prohibitions are justified in terms of the "problems down the road" that otherwise arise. But the fact that they needed to be codified as norms, runs counter to the concept of it being a "widespread instinct". There may be e.g. a prohibition against eating pork *because* most people's instinct would be to eat it - even if it wouldn't be a good idea in those times in that climate - whereas there is no prohibition against eating feces, which no-one who abides by their instincts would do anyway.
Those ancient cultural prohibitions therefore function as "amendments" to the things that the "built-in" human instincts do or do not (reliably) cover. They were assembled from wisdom and experience, to avoid the bad consequences that may arise from "merely following instincts". Meaning that if Leviticus 20:12 and 20:14 were written down, as they were, then human instinct was not something that could be relied upon to avoid such cases.
More directly, a daughter thinking "sex between me and Jack would be really hot, yay hot sex!", may result in the sort of sex that evolution would like to encourage. A *father* thinking "sex between my daughter and Jack would be really hot, yay hot sex!" requires that the father be inclined to think "sex involving my daughter and some heterosexual male could be really hot, yay hot sex!". Since the father is by definition a heterosexual male, and is in a position of influence and authority over the daughter, that could lead to some evolutionarily very suboptimal sex when the daughter enters her years of peak hotness.
So evolution is likely to discourage that whole line of thinking, whether father/daughter or mother/son and probably father/son and mother/daughter just to be safe. See Westermarck Effect. And with "yay hot sex!" off the table, parents wind up with only the boringly rational-economic criteria for mate selection.
Throughout much of human history, and across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, marriages were commonly arranged by parents or other kin. See Apostolou, M. (2007) 'Sexual selection under parental choice: The role of parents in the evolution of human mating' and Walker et al. (2011) 'Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices'. If you want to examine and theorize about the evolutionary history of human mate choice, and the role parental choice may have played, the dynamics across these societies are probably good places to start.
See also Chagnon et al. (2017) 'Cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamö shows evidence of parent–offspring conflict and mate competition between brothers'.
It’s about hot vs cute. Do you want the best looking guy you can get or the one most likely to stick around?
Yeah, there is that.
Maybe this is just what all the mesa-optimizer stuff means, but it seems like the simple explanation is that while we have a hormonal desire to reproduce, that's actually not our main behavioral goal.
When parents (or friends) advise use on relationships, they're thinking largely all the non-reproductive things we care about: a stable relationship with someone who you enjoy spending time with, who you can have a good standard of living with, etc, etc. Stuff we value, but are sometimes too "blinded by hormones" to see.
Suggesting that parents are doing 4D chess maneuvers to calculate/approximate the maximal yield for all their descendants just seems too to put too high of a premium on the raw evolutionary drive to me.
Okay, taking your logic to be correct - why are parents doing that? Why didn't they evolve to be more fitness maxmising?
But in reality, how do you not see that a "stable relationship" is *precisely* the kind of thing that IS fitness maxmising? Stable relationships is how you be confident that your children/grandchildren will be protected for/provided for.
There might be a very simple theory to explain suitors and parents' differences of preferences: Parents are old and their sex drive are dry. So their main consideration process is rational. Suitors are young and full of hormone and naturally get more influence from apparent characteristics.
The test case for this is to compare young parents/ or parents with substantial sex drive versus old and dry parents. Who would give more preference toward your in-law being hot? My experience point to quite a correlation. Sex-craze parent and uncle want me to marry the hot one and vice versa.
As a (relatively) young man with flowing hormones, I behave much more like a parent when I'm giving friends advice/judging their partners for suitability. Meanwhile, I can't follow my own advice in my dating life because irrational, hormone fueled urges are actually calling the shots.
Cart before the horse. The level of hormones is *the result of* natural selection optimizing behavior. Hormones don't peak in adolescence randomly, the *design* is for them to peak at that time, because the behavior that causes is optimal for some reason or other. Similarly, hormones do not decrease with age randomly, but by design, because for some reason or other it is better for the influence of hormones to wane as one gets older.
But why isn't there a convergence between these two things? Why aren't fitness maximizing traits precisely those that are the most sexually attractive? Sexual attraction is a matter of evolved preferences. There's nothing inherently "good looking" or "bad looking" about somebody, its all a product of preferences.
I think we could make sense of this problem with life history theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory)
A fast life strategy is one that is dangerous and results in high quantity, low quality offspring. Think of men having unprotected sex with random partners, and then abandoning their children to have the mother take care of them. Maybe some of the children won't turn out so well, but you make up for it in quantity. Slow life is the opposite: get married and invest heavily in a small # of children.
We know that people who grow up with single parents, parental neglect, or in a stressful environment, tend to adopt fast life strategies. Children in these environments actually go through puberty earlier, and are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors (i.e. fast life strategy). This may make sense evolutionarily - if there is social instability, have children ASAP with someone good looking, rather than investing for the long term. [https://www.biomedcentral.com/about/press-centre/science-press-releases/28-10-20]
So probably if you have parents around who you have a good relationship with, who can actually influence your mate choice, you're more likely to be in a world conducive to slow life strategy. Your parents already primed you for that strategy during your childhood by staying together and investing heavily in you and creating a safe environment for you, which literally will cause puberty to trigger later, and likely result in you focusing more on long term vs short term mating. Whatever social maneuvering they engage in when you are in adulthood is just a continuation of that phenomenon
Simple alternative rat framed explanation: both parents and children are status maximizers. How does the child maximize their status through mate choice? A partner who's highest status in their milieu, i.e. the sexy romantic one, who their friends will be like "good catch". Otoh, have you heard how parents talk about their children to other parents? Never "their spouse is so sexy" but "my kid married a lawyer/doctor/etc." The bride as business owner's daughter makes this even more straightforward.
I think the really interesting or challenging question is why people ascribe status in these differential ways, among different milieus. Like, there's no reason someone's dad couldn't be like "your wife is hot! Good choice son" and equally why a husband couldn't be like "I think it's so sexy that you're a doctor". Seems like a combination of some deep cultural ideas relating to stages of life and taboos on interaction with in-laws (apparently different cultures have different bans on the sort of in-law relationships that people can have, like maybe mothers are prohibited from speaking with their son-in-laws... I think Freud discusses this in Totem and Taboo). And also, for a cynical TLP take, marketing works.
"Like, there's no reason someone's dad couldn't be like "your wife is hot! Good choice son" and equally why a husband couldn't be like "I think it's so sexy that you're a doctor".
I think people might find it a little unsettling if the father was ogling the daughter-in-law, that's introducing an element of sexual competitiveness that is positively Freudian (and I can attest to one case from previous job where guy and gal are living together and have a kid -out of wedlock of course, boyfriend goes to jail - because of course this is the level we're at, girlfriend then shacks up with his father and has baby by *him*, fun and frolics ensue when boyfriend gets out of jail and finds out what happened).
All in all, generally better if Dad is not going "You sure scored a hot piece of ass, kid!" 😁
Oh, I completely agree it's not a good thing, and that there's Reasons it tends not to happen, but "why" remains an interesting question! Also what a wild anecdote...
I tell you, working in social housing was An Education 😀 I'm really glad to be working now as admin support in childcare and special/additional needs centres, much less drama! There's really not a whole heap of trouble that two to five year olds can get up to, by comparison! Johnny bites Stevie? We have A Policy to deal with that. Janie has a meltdown? We can cope with that. Billy does not play nicely? We have an entire protocol to deal with it. Way easier to cope with the minor problems of small kids!
Is there a sex-drive-adaption and another wanna-have-(more)-kids-drive? - I wonder, but I'd say: "No. probably not. But then ...": a) I (male) like the sex-thing and I like the kids-thing (going for the fifth now - envying Dshingis and Ziona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziona ) - and it is not "social-pressure", nope. If anything, more than 2 kids is a minus in my country, in my circles - and even grandma said: Enough, now, isn't it! - So, why I had no vasectomy, yet?!? - b) I know one relative that was not much into sex, but into kids and had 4. Maybe there are more? - Maybe it is more an adaption as in "A fertile landscape with prey/water/shelter is good to be in" thus: we feel good when wwe look at one, so we buy a "beautiful landscape painting with deers"? And mammals evolved to feel good about having kids around them? But then: why "Hotels for Singles"/"burnt-out teachers"/and: Please, get the kids out of here! - Anyway, great SA as SAS always does and an appreciated shout-out for a fine text by dynomight. And agreed: dyno's question is solved by the ice-cream/donut analogy. - Can I have a fifth? As a moron, I qualify!
I think the parents' motivation is to be explained at the cultural level. They would like respectability etc. No need for an evopsych explanation.
Yes. Well, it’s still evopsych, but human psychology is subject to two separate evolutionary tracks: innate behavior that is influenced by biological evolution, and learned behavior that is influenced by cultural evolution.
Biological evolution is still struggling to catch up with the advent of civilization, but cultural evolution has got its back. And cultures where parents meddle in their children’s marriage decisions are (presumably/apparently) more successful than cultures where parents let their kids make bad life decisions because they are horny.
But I think you and OP and Scott are all assuming that the parents' extra interest in success is adaptive (culturally). Not everything is adaptive.
True, but… why wouldn’t it be adaptive? Especially in modern times, where sickly kids can get antibiotics and women with bad ovaries / narrow hips / small breasts can get fertility treatments / C-sections / infant formula. Picking a successful mate seems like a better strategy for having reproductively-successful descendants than picking a “healthy” mate does. Biological evolution can’t move fast enough to adjust our preferences for that but cultural evolution can.
Okay, but WHY do they want respectability?
People reject 'evo psych' out of hand, but then just take it as a given that people have certain preferences and drives. Where do you think any of this comes from in the first place?
I don't reject evopsych at all. But just-so stories are the best-known failure mode around.
In this case, both parents and children want respectability as a type of status, which is a drive everyone accepts. The thing we're explaining is the difference in emphasis between the two, assuming it's real. But having a beatiful daughter-in-law gets little status. That should be enough of an explanation, shouldn't it?
Also, young people have an antagonistic drive towards disrespectability - maybe because iconoclasm is a part of future leadership, or something, but if this is itself a just-so story then substitute your preferred explanation for this part - and so again, it explains the difference in emphasis between parents and children on beauty versus status.
On this:
"An average Indian mother isn’t going to know about which physical features predict healthy pregnancies or which very minor skin imperfections signal poor immune function, but she is going to know that potential son-in-law X makes $20,000 a year more than potential son-in-law Y."
My question is how age fits into it (imagining a man trying to marry a woman). In the standard instincts vs reason story, I would think that the woman being young fits on both sides. Instincts to the extent people find younger people to be hotter; reason because a younger woman has more time to have more kids, and less chance of special needs kids. And yet my sense is that wanting to marry someone significantly younger is seen as typical instinct-over-reason behavior. And unlike really subtle looks-related indicators of fitness, like hips-to-waist ratio or facial symmetry, age is just a single number and anyone can understand the implications.
Another question is preference for in-group spouses. I.e. the group-X parents who want their children to marry people within group X. I'm not sure how that fits in with all this.
Is the sperm bank such a good strategy? The more people adopt it, the less successful it will be.
Sperm banks normally have a limit on how many children a single donor is allowed to have, it's usually a rather low limit, I think five or so? So if you play by the rules, that strategy won't get you a lot more kids than if you were to start a family in the old-fashioned way. (Although of course you can do both, so you can think of your extra offspring conceived via the sperm bank as a "free bonus".)
There have been multiple cases though where fertility doctors secretly used their own sperm instead of the donor sperm (or instead of the sperm of the male half of the couple trying to conceive) and sired hundreds of kids that way.
"Being in a position where you can secretly impregnate hundreds of women while they think they're getting someone else's sperm" is not an opportunity which many people will ever find themselves in; it certainly isn't something which evolution would have specifically programmed us for. But apparently, among the few people who do find themselves in that position, the temptation is there.
My 75 Kids!
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/deep-thoughts-drumsticks-to-dolphins/2724049
The sperm bank is not a good strategy because there is more to passing on one's nature than just the DNA. Or more precisely, the genes encode in the parent certain rearing behaviors that improve the fitness of the offspring more than mere possession of the DNA does. Consider it a variant of the green beard effect.
That's why all animals do not simply compete for maximum possible fertility, some kind of fish or housefly strategy of laying as many fertile eggs as is metabolically possible in a lifetime (which is what the sperm bank strategy is).
It's said that a chicken is just an eggs way of making another egg, but it has to be remembered that eggs (or rather the DNA) has ways of designing the chicken that are considerably more sophisticated (especially in a higher species) than encoding the instinct to "make as many eggs as possible as quickly as possible." That's *one* strategy, but it's pretty rarely chosen, I think only insects and fish do it. Most other "eggs" design "chickens" with considerably more sophisticated strategies. One assumes they do so because they are more successful ultimately.
I think it is that parents in societies with socioeconomic stratification like our own are more aware of the costs of raising children such that they can maintain or gain status. We did not evolve have an innate understanding of high real estate costs, for example. Thus parents are more likely to encourage their children to find high status mates and more likely to value status in prospective mates for their children than other desirable characteristics such as attractiveness.
Evolution says nothing about optimizing. If something is going to get carried to the next generation it only has to work just well enough. It does not have to be optimal. Piss poor may be 100% adequate. If you are following a putative evolutionary argument and notice the word "optimize" or a synonym, odds are you are not following an evolutionary argument. Odds are you are following a philosophical or political argument. Philosophers and politicians love the idea of optimal. It gives them an excuse for torturing and murdering people.
As long as a characteristic doesn't preclude reproduction, it may be carried to future generations. This is despite the Biology 101 joke that sterility is inherited: if your parents didn't have any children, you won't have any children. Evolution may favor certain characteristics if they lead to better reproduction, but if you've ever played with asymmetric dice where A>B>C>A, then you'd know that what comes out ahead in one case might not come out ahead in another. There's an awful lot of contingency which is science talk for dumb luck.
Biologists used to correct people who said organism X evolved characteristic Y. That was a teleological statement, a statement about purpose, and it had no place in an evolutionary discussion. They'd remind people that organisms don't evolve, populations do. If characteristic Y has become more common in organism X, that might be because characteristic Y offers some reproductive advantage. Alternately, characteristic X might be something that just happened to appear when some other characteristic, e.g. characteristic Z appeared, and that characteristic led to increased reproductive success. (See spandrels.) Or, it might just be dumb luck.
P.S. There's a hilarious 1983 paper "Why Are Juveniles Smaller Than Their Parents?" offering evolutionary arguments for why younger organisms are smaller than older ones of their species. To Ellstrand's credit, he was trying to be funny. The punchline: "In particular, another juvenile character is even more widespread than JSS (juvenile's small size) and deserves some thoughtful attention, the fact that juveniles ALWAYS seem to be younger than their parents."
P.P.S. As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!
"As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!"
Casting love and romance as methods of getting to breed (with recreational sex as a maladaptive variant of procreative sex, of course) is a way of taming love and romance, and shifting the discussion of those things under the streetlight of science. Such a move makes it theoretically possible to be objectively correct about love and romance, and that's a very seductive prospect.
What's "good enough" in one generation won't be "good enough" later when a more advantageous allele is sweeping to fixation and the population is at the Malthusian limits.
Absolutely right. Still, good enough at any given time is good enough.
This is why we can think of evolution like an optimizing process. A better allele pops up, and it gets selected. Eventually you wind up with the best possible alleles for a trait.
Best isn't the right word. It's just one that works. It doesn't even have to work well.
Optimization implies there is a goal. Evolution doesn't have a goal.
Optimization refers to genomes that become progressively better at replicating themselves. The genes that were "good enough" the previous generation tend towards extinction over a long enough time range because they get outcompeted.
Of course evolution doesn't have a goal, but it's perfectly valid to talk about optimization in these terms.
That's a retrospective analysis. Basically, you are arguing from the point of view that the current world as it exists is optimal. In that case, your argument is correct for some value of optimal. If the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteor, they'd be arguing today that mammals were a failure because they carried their young internally rather than sensibly dumping them out in eggs.
The "goal" is to maximize copies of your genes.
If you are talking about an evolutionary goal: there are no evolutionary goals. That's like saying water wants to run downhill. Water doesn't want anything. It still runs downhill.
I assume you mean the plural "your". Individuals don't evolve. Populations evolve.
This discussion is about stated criteria for mate choice and the difference between those criteria among between making mate choices and those offering advice on mate choice. I have no idea of how evolutionary "goals" are related to this.
>"Evolution says nothing about optimizing. If something is going to get carried to the next generation it only has to work just well enough. "
You're ignoring the fact taht different genes can get carried to the next generation to different extents, its a competitive process. And it's not just the next generation. Having kids who all die before giving birth means your line is snuffed out.
>"As long as a characteristic doesn't preclude reproduction, it may be carried to future generations. "
And yet, we are vastly different to our prehuman ancestors, and vastly more similar to each other than we are to our nearest evolutionary relatives. The idea that almost everything is getting carried forward to the next generation is plainly false, otherwise we wouldn't be humans, and humans wouldn't be so distinct from every other species.
>"Biologists used to correct people who said organism X evolved characteristic Y. That was a teleological statement, a statement about purpose, and it had no place in an evolutionary discussion. They'd remind people that organisms don't evolve, populations do. If characteristic Y has become more common in organism X, that might be because characteristic Y offers some reproductive advantage. Alternately, characteristic X might be something that just happened to appear when some other characteristic, e.g. characteristic Z appeared, and that characteristic led to increased reproductive success. (See spandrels.) Or, it might just be dumb luck."
Okay, SO WHAT?
Literally nobody here is saying what you're implying they're saying. We're exclusively talking about evolution on a population level. Literally nobody is saying an individual organism is evolivng whatever trait. We're talking about human beings as an entire species.
And yes, spandrels exist, again, so what? You can't just say "spandrels!" as the explanantion for any particular trait based purely on the fact that it would suit you to be a spandrel. Either millions of species become well adapted to their environment by sheet chance through untold billions of lucky dice rolls.....or the overwhelming majority of evolution of traits has not been spandrels.
You're literally just spamming entirely generic arguments because you have some ideological opposition to the heritability of behavior.
>"P.P.S. As for this discussion, a lot of people are confusing sex, love and romance here, and then they're mashing in "evolutionary" arguments. Holy, moly!"
Are you a creationist?
If not, then you are completely wrong to think that they're all separate. They're all evolved traits meant to maximally produce and raise children. There's absolutely ZERO basis for treating them as distinct from evolutionary considerations.
Unless you wish to imagine that love is something that not only evolved by random chance and ALSO that it helps enormously with pair bonding and child rearing, then there's no reason to think its not subject to the same slection pressures as everything else.
I am having trouble penetrating your mysticism.
Sure, the next generation gets its genes from the previous generation, but what does that have to do with optimizing? It just has to do with being able to reproduce. Just because some genes will make it, only half from each parent thanks to the meosis lottery, and others won't doesn't mean there is some kind of competition between chromosomal pairs, and it definitely doesn't mean that the resulting gamete has better genes. It's a crap shoot. That's why genetic drift is the usual state of affairs.
How does the fact that we are "vastly different to our prehuman ancestors" refute that the likelihood that we may have all sorts of genes from our ancestors as long as those genes didn't preclude reproduction? Sorry, but as far as genes go, almost everything does get carried forward, especially since we are talking about populations. There isn't some massive winnowing every generation. All humans share huge chunks of genome with minor variations here and there. If they didn't they'd have a lot more trouble finding mates.
I just keep finding mystical statements. For example, if you think that sex, love and romance are separate things, then you are a creationist. That's really hard to figure out. Try: If you think courage, valor and bravery are the separate things, then you are a flat earther. Separate things can be related and intertwined, but if you want to understand things, it helps to separate them. Please, don't get started on a evolutionary optimization argument about courage, valor and bravery. It's too early in the morning.
I think it is older / wiser and less hormones that explains the difference. I think the same individual would assess choices differently if they could go back in time and choose a spouse again. They would understand that lust is a passing phase and long term suitability is much more likely to lead to happiness.
But then why have we not evolved to listen more to the old when we are young?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/why_dont_the_yo.html
Okay, then why haven't we evolved to have hormones that lead us to the "wiser" choices in the first place? That's the whole point of this post. Why haven't we evolved to lust after that which is (supposedly) best for us?
I'm going to argue that the difference between "parents want different things than children, but can't distinguish between only have a single child vs. multiple" is not that unusual a distinction, nor should it b unexpected in evolutionary terms.
There are _lots_ of ways that humans change as they age behaviorally and otherwise. It is very easy to hijack/piggyback on those changes, but none of those changes have a way of telling if there is only a single offspring.
For example, the hormonal changes you mention a paragraph beforehand. Hormones change, and switch parents from valuing good genes to valuing good social standing. However, these hormonal changes mostly happen regardless of if you have one child or multiple children (or no children at all) so in order to get to that next level of fine grain thinking, you need to now invent a completely novel process, instead of just hitching onto an existing one. This is a _very_ non trivial distinction in evolutionary terms. Changing what an existing process does/borrowing it for a new use happens _all the time_. Inventing entirely novel processes almost never does.
-edit- I don't think this should really change your conclusion, I would agree that your final thought of "it's easier to make choices for someone else than yourself" is probably more likely, it just doesn't seem crazy to think that evolution could make exactly the level of distinction that you are skeptical of.
All three papers referenced over at Dynomight are based on stated preference surveys. WTF! There's nothing about actual conflicts over individual mate choice. People do not choose a set of criteria as a mate. They choose an individual. Try having sex with a bunch of criteria. So, how common is parent-child conflict over mate choice? I have no idea. Neither does Dynomight. In my circle such conflicts are quite rare. Most parents are relieved that their child has decided to "settle down" and maybe behave like an adult for bit. Now and then there is some drama, but while it makes for a good story, it is uncommon.
Also, no one is addressing the more relevant issue of family structure. The nuclear family is an anomaly. In many societies, one is expected to marry a cousin. Saudi Arabia is a great place for research on genetic defects thanks to this custom. There's an argument that western Christianity restructured the family with the council of Agde banning first cousin marriages. There's probably a pile of BS in there, but banning first cousin marriage does cut down on certain genetic problems.
Other important questions are: How tightly are children controlled by their parents? Where are they expected to live before and after marriage? How is property inherited? Can one obtain resources without parental approval? Those are cultural, not genetic. There are all sorts of structures, but no one is obviously superior. Maybe primogeniture made the British Empire what it was, but there are still an awful lot of people in France and China.
People in just about every society value romantic love, but in traditional societies long term relationships are supposed to be about sex, property and social status. That's why it is so often customary to have a spouse approved by the family and a lover on the side or, for men only, a wife and a concubine, that is, a wife whose children will not inherit. It's almost always about resources. In one society, women take two husbands. They say more sperm is better, though it's more likely about the other stuff that sperm providers can offer.
I loved the article BUT
To me as beautiful the various routes taken trying to analyze what is actually going on be it reptilian or complex thought genetics, I would like to remind people that in the mid 1960s an MIT professor gave students a summer assignment to model vison (Summer Vision Program 1966). I think we are still waiting on that one.
It's not just that I want the rich doctor to help my other grandkids. It's that I want my kid to not be dependent on me ever again.
Well, it seems to me the thing you're missing here is that social and pseudo-social systems, both those humans invent and those nature invents, seem often to be designed to have conflicting drives and that this can be highly adaptive. Consider heirarchy among primates: what are the drives of the chimps not alpha? (1) Be obedient to the alpha, so he doesn't kill you, and (2) kill the alpha and take his place. *Both* drives operate, all the time, even though they point in radically different directions, because it is adaptive (for the primate tribe) to have that tension continually in play. When the alpha becomes old or fat and lazy, (2) gets stronger, and when the alpha is young and strong, (1) gets stronger, and both are highly adaptive for the tribe's survival, maximizing quality of leadership while minimizing unnecessary conflict.
So I would think it a priori not unlikely humans might evovle a system in which one component (the offspring) have a greater drive for markers for physical fitness, while the other component (the parents) have a greater drive for markers of social fitness. As you point out, *both* are adaptive -- but in what mixture? The correct answer to that would readily vary with individual circumstances, the situation of the tribe, et cetera.
One way for the system to arrive at an optimal answer is to have "agent advocates" who press for one priority or another, like competing lawyers fighting a case in court, who each argue their best case, with an end result that may end up better than if the competition is sorted out within one agent.
A good reason why dividing the agency like that might improve the outcome is that the parents, through their greater experience, are likely to have a better judgment as to the social fitness a potential mate represents. So having the parents represent *that* point of view makes good sense. But having them make the decision *entirely* probably *doesn't* make sense, for at least some of the reasons you outline (e.g. the parents' interests are not identical to the childs' even at a crude physical level). So it makes equal sense (from the point of view of evolutionary adaptivity) to give considerable agency to the child, and give the child his own strong contrasting point of view (and physical fitness is readily judged acccurately by even very inexperienced individuals, one assumes), so that the end result is some complex situationally-dependent compromise between the drives of the child and the drives of the parent.
Another way to look at this is that optimizing outcomes in a rugged fitness landscape (and it hardly seems doubtful that evolutionary fitness is *very* rugged) requires the occasional jump uphill to escape local minima. So adaptation strategies that translate to "just go downhill" are routinely beaten by strategies that incorporate some degree of saltation. What better way to ensure saltation than to set up conflicting agents with conflicting drives, such that from time to time they reach different conclusions and something unusual happens? It's the social equivalent of mutation in physical evolution: perhaps most of the time children defying their parents produces a lower quality marriage, but in x% of the cases it produces a much *higher* quality of marriage in unexpected ways and the gene line gets a big honking infusion of fitness[1].
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[1] It's interesting that stories of children defying their parents vis-a-vis mate selection tend to end up with just this fairy-tale ending: the prince/princess defies the wishes of the king and marries a commoner -- *but* the latter turns out to be unexpectedly extraordinary, and brings much-needed hybrid vigor to the royal line.
Alternative theory: the parents might be driven by some drive other than maximizing the number of successful grandchildren. People seem to like money for reasons that do not directly tie into maximizing genetic fitness. I guess the drives that lead to this probably came from something related to that at some point, but it's not like people who are never going to have children or nephews don't care about money. Having a rich in-law benefits the parents financially (especially if it shores up a relationship with an important business partner). Having an attractive in-law doesn't benefit the parents in the same way.
>but it's not like people who are never going to have children or nephews don't care about money
No evo-psych proponent ever would suggest that they wouldn't care about those things, precisely because our preferences aren't rational, we don't think about it all in the grand scheme of maximising gene replication. We like certain things, and those things tended to (in the past at least) lead to greater gene replication.
I didn't catch what exactly you believe is wrong with the Trivers parent-offspring conflict argument. This seems like a fairly straightforward application of it. The child wants the best for him/herself while the parent wants a mix of best for child vs. best for themselves. Getting good in-laws (as clan allies / business partners) seems like an obvious benefit. This seems like the only actually good argument from the ones discussed...
I think Scott meant that parents base their decisions for matches for their children on rational thinking while children base their decisions also on sexual attraction. The latter is doubtlessly a product of evolution. Applied rational thinking is not necessarily a product of evolution. So the conflict doesn't have to be between parents and offspring. It can also be between thinking and feeling. Something like that.
Parents can also feel that their child's partner is just no good.
Yes, it is only true in relative terms. I think the point was that those who will have the sex feel more and the parents think more, in relative terms.
Fundamentally, what is best for themselves should be that which is best for their kids. Maybe their wealth accumulation drive (to oversimplify things) evolved to best provide for their progeny, but the two aren't actually directly related and the former keeps firing after its useful for the latter.
What if instead of having one decision maker (children) striking a very difficult balance between wealth and looks in an even handed way, nature selected form two different sets of decision makers (parents and children) each overweighing one factor and then negotiating and fighting between them to agree on a balancing point?
As a society, we often choose multiplayer balancing strategies instead of monoplayer balancing strategies. We don’t give judges the very difficult task of figuring out everything about a case and then find the right solution, but give two lawyers the task of overweighing the merits of two opposing solution and then give the judge the much less demanding task of choosing which side is most persuasive. We do this in politics, we do this in other domains.
Is it possible that natural selection uses multiplayer strategies too? Would this be some kind of co-evolution but of different roles within the same species rather than of different species?
In reference to, "A healthy person, breathing because their body instinctively demands oxygen...", I'll point out that the urge to breath comes from build-up of carbon dioxide, not lack of oxygen. I don't think it changes your point in this case, but is an interesting bit of physiology to know. It leads to shallow-water blackout, which I guess is a blind-spot in our evolution?
Yikes, I'm lucky I made it to adulthood! Thanks for this: https://www.shallowwaterblackoutprevention.org/how-it-happens
👍 It's definitely a good thing to be cautious of. Especially when doing something like free diving in open water, where help is unlikely to find you in time!
I've said for a while that a likely reason for always getting conservative advice from loved ones is: they share in your downsides more than your upsides. If you have mind-blowing sex with a hottie, that's awesome for you, but your parents (if cool) probably think "that's great how nice for him". But if you try meth and enjoy it and get addicted, fired, and become homeless, your parents are going to feel obligated to cancel some pleasant plans of their own and help you with your mess of a life (perhaps in perpetuity).
So one always picks the riskier/fun-er thing for oneself, and the safer/boring-er things for loved ones.
This seems correct.
Indeed. That's the perverse incentive of having a per need safety net, where you don't (fully) assume the bad consequences of your choice, but reap the benefits. Then reckless behavior can become a perfectly sane life-optimizing behavior. Caring parents are the best example of per need safety net, but it's not the only one. Health systems, some economic aids, mutualizing insurances,... Same incentives, same consequences...
But why is having sex with the best provider not what we've evolved to find the most fun?
I recently watched a Netflix documentary called 'Our Father'. Short version: before sperm banks had everything well in order, some fertility doctors substituted their own sperm whenever they needed to. This resulted in large numbers of people discovering through mail-in DNA kits that their fertility doctor was their biological father and they had potentially dozens/scores of half-siblings in the local breeding pool.
(Note: the epilogue text says they've found 44 docs who've done this so far. I have not verified any of this. The show was clearly trying more to drum up viral controversy, so I wouldn't be surprised if mitigating circumstances for some/much of this was left out.)
The subject of the documentary is a well-recognized doctor, whom everyone said had a lot of the kinds of traits the parents should be looking for - smart, successful, well-regarded, etc. When they interviewed the women this had been done to, they universally said this was a huge problem because they wanted to option to give consent. In a few cases, husband's sperm wasn't cutting it, so the doctor substituted his sperm without telling anyone - only to have later DNA profiling reveal to ~35yo adults their true paternity.
Many of the children/mothers start a campaign to out the doctor, take away his status in the community, end his marriage, etc. Lots of outrage in the show, and a desire that the man get sent to prison. Literally looks like they're trying to reverse the traditional parents'-choice selection criteria, after the deed is done.
Wondering how you would fit this into your framework here? It subverts the parents' claim, because all the truth came out 30+ years after the fact. Subverts the good-looking adaptation-executor, because they already got their hot-husband the whole time they raised their kids but they're still mad. (Would be like going bare-back thinking you might conceive and excited by that, but later finding out she's on the pill - then saying the pleasure is retroactively ruined. Or alternately, landing the hot chick, but then when you find out she's pregnant trying to justify that naw, she wasn't that good looking after all.)
All of this sounds much more shallow/simple than the way I think and act. It doesn't resonate. Maybe there's more here than any of the current paradigms explains. Thoughts?
If the women got the wrong sperm without consenting, it was like someone raped them gently when they were asleep. Or do I get something wrong? Is that not a cause to be upset, if the rapist happens to be both hot and free of veneral disease and you happen to only get to know it 30 years later?
Why do women tend to resent rape at all? At least in part because they actually prefer to mate with their mediocre husbands instead of some self-styled alpha.
Many of the women had already consented to using an unknown donor (remember this is before sperm banks when they could choose specific ... criteria?). They were told the person was a research fellow or whatever, whom they only used up to 3 times. In this case, the women later discovered that the source of the sperm wasn't what they were originally told, and that was why they were angry. The concept of rape was brought up, but it didn't exactly fit that profile given the circumstances. Maybe rape-adjacent?
It's an open question what percent of the women would still have consented if they were told in advance that-
A. [Infertile husband]: We can't locate a donor, or the donor's sperm expired. You could choose to reschedule, or the treating physician could use his own sample.
B. [Semi-fertile husband]: We've tried a few times with your husband's sperm and it's not working. We could continue those treatments but it will cost more, or we could use donor sperm from the treating physician.
Obviously, the ethical thing to do is to ask before you go charging in there so I understand why this would feel violating. But it also highlights how strong the drive is that this be an active decision. Say my wife surprises me with lunch. She selected both the fast food joint and my meal, yet I'm likely to be happy even if it's not exactly the decision I would have made if given the choice in advance. I'm better off because of the decision that was made, regardless of my participation in that decision.
Contrast this with marriage or conceiving a child. Some parents disown their child if they make the 'wrong' mating choice. If the fertility doctor inseminates with his own sperm instead of the donor sperm he promised, there is outrage.
I understand the difference between these scenarios and the surprise lunch. I'm not sure how any of Scott's descriptions help describe that difference, though. It's one thing to be strongly invested in a decision ex ante. It's another to feel strong indignation ex post. For some decisions, we have strong ex ante feelings about the outcome but no/little ex post reaction.
Whatever the women were promised, there was an imbalance of information. The fertility doctor knew he used his own sperm, the women did not. I wouldn't want a creepy fertility doctor sneaking past my house to get a glimpse of his kid.
But I agree that people are probably less upset if an anonymous donor wasn't anonymous than if the man who was supposed to be the biological father was not the biological father.
Your use of the word "gently" means I can't help but think of this notorious post:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/gentlesilentrape.html
Fascinating. I think cuckoldry helps clarify what's missing here. I wonder if the underlying urge/drive isn't just "have sex", or even (to pull from the proverbial biological clock) "make babies", but rather there is a fundamental biological drive to form a coherent family unit. The adaptation-executor might interpret that in any of a number of different ways - which is where the tension between the parents and the children comes from in the hot/rich tradeoff. Both parties are still executing the same drive to form a coherent family unit, but both see that from different perspectives.
This would explain why the parents care as much as they do - this is their family they're concerned with. The evolutionary angle would be well served as well, since it ensures mate selection occurs across multiple competing criteria represented by different interests. It explains why the people in the Our Father documentary are upset - and even complain their lives are turned upside down from the children to the mothers and the cuckolded fathers. The action interfered with parent/child relationships, and undermined the structure of the family. It also explains why the simple act of obtaining consent obviates the whole issue, preserving the family structure without the stress of ex post negotiation.
Yes, that blog post relates to this.
If some of the women really believed the fertility clinic used their husbands' sperm, it is very serious just because those women unwittingly committed cuckoldry. Regardless of what they say about females and evolution, many women really don't want to deceive their partners. So if a fertility doctor deceived women into deceiving their partners, that is… kind of serious.
Ah, you caught it before I did! I hadn't read down to your reply when I pointed to the same web page!
Robin Hanson wrote about a similar question: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/gentlesilentrape.html
Isn't this uncertainty between the wisdom of our drives vs. our reason the essence of our humanity? I suspect it is the very reason we exist. We don't have the unconcern of the sparrow or the disregard of the lilies in the field. We must suffer through thinking and wondering whether thinking makes us better or worse off without ever knowing the answer. My guess is that this is the reason humans exist.
Just by introspection, it really doesn't seem like we have specialized mate-selection software for kin/allies, rather we just rely on type 2 style thinking (discernment). This isn't absent from personal mate selection, it just might be drowned out by type-1 style thinking (attraction) in many circumstances. But eventually the honeymoon period ends and you realize hey, maybe I don't want to marry this super hot person who is actually kind of boring and has a ton of debt.
My type-1 system chooses who I date (based on mainly appearance TBH), but ultimately my type-2 system decides whether or not to keep dating them based on other factors that a parent would probably also agree with. Ideally I will satisfice both for marriage, because the type 1 system can really mess stuff up if it doesn't get what it wants. (And, in my cultural milieu at least, parents strongly defer to this over their own considerations - e.g. "as long as they make you happy")
Okay, but why are there 2 types at all in the first place? That's the question.
What is our theory about how evolution implements drives in the first place? And what is our theory about how life experience, ie learning, acts to implement these drives? I would have thought that a simple theory of primary and secondary reinforcers would work. Ie, A theory that posits a set of basic, 'hard wired' drives that appear in strongly in most animals. Food, sex, oxygen, freedom from pain, comfort and shelter etc are at that very basic level in that they require little or no learning to become a reinforcer of behaviour. Their capacity to immediately reinforce is 'wired in', presumably via the genome's influence on brain development. Then you hypothesise that some stimuli can acquire reinforcing properties through a learned association with these primary reinforcers. The point is that 'learned' or secondary reinforcers, cannot and will not be learned except through their association with a relatively small set of primary reinforcers. Social status for example, is a very powerful motivator of behaviour in apes and humans, but the signals associated with social status are often very subtle, and have to be learned. But how could they possibly be learned, except through their association with something which is already a reinforcer? Hence you conclude that the learned or secondary reinforcers only continue acting as reinforcers to the extent they continue to satisfy primary drives as the animal moves through its life.
So I end up endorsing some version of the boring hypothesis. As young adults, we find sexual attractiveness as a much stronger, more basic motivator than almost anything else. As an older person, for purely hormonal reasons, sexual attractiveness is not such a motivator anymore, but social status has lost none of its hold on me. Why does evolution arrange it that way, and not increase my testosterone supply instead of depleting it? The question almost answers itself. What need does evolution have for randy old people when it already has randy young people? Better to allow a graceful ramp down of the hormones, so that parents become helpers in their children's search for mates and status, rather than competitors.
But the question is precisely why are we sexually attracted to people our parents don't think are fitness maximisers?
Our parents could be wrong, of course. But if they're right, it seems like we should find those people most attractive.
I think "Caucasian liking Chinese women" might be covered elegantly under drives like 'novelty seeking' or 'ingroup vs outgroup preference.' i.e. A human starts by saying "this is what mom looks like" and then selects for or against that pattern based on hormones or mood or whatever.
Fetishes seem to be learned.
First off, novlety isn't a primary mating drive. Thge vast majority of people marry the same race. Secondly, novelty cannot explain why white male/asian female pairings are vastly more common than white male/black female, asian male/white female and so on. Even amongst race mixers, there's massive asymmetries, and "novelty" cannot explain this.
"Thge vast majority of people marry the same race."
First, not all people have the same drives. I'm not saying "all people like novelty." I'm saying " novelty can be a drive in some people, and the genetic encoding for such a drive does not need to be complex."
Neither you or I are asserting that *all* Caucasians fetishize Asian women. Which is the argument that average marriage rates seems to argue against.
Also, not all sex is about marriage.
For example, sex with enslaved people was probably more about opportunity than a desire for a lifelong partnership or perhaps even a desire for sex with a person of that race in particular. i.e. it may have been primarily opportunistic.
From "Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas"
"Despite more than 60% of enslaved people brought to each region of the Americas being men, comparisons of ancestry estimates for the X chromosome and autosomes, as well as the comparison of mitochondrial (maternal) and Y (paternal) haplogroups, revealed a bias toward African female contributions to gene pools across all of the Americas.
However, this African female sex bias is more extreme in Latin America (between 4 and 17 African women for every African man contributing to the gene pool) than in British-colonized Americas (between 1.5 and 2 African women for every African man contributing to the gene pool)."
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(20)30200-7
Similarly, a Caucasian man in Asia will likely have advantages in dating that an Asian man in America does not.
"Secondly, novelty cannot explain "
A desire for novelty in some people is not *sufficient* to explain all trends in all relationships, certainly. But this is a fallacy of the excluded middle. Most outcomes in life are multifactoral. But even the sum total of the human sex drive is not sufficient to explain all relationships, so why should a component of the sex drive which might exist in some people be called to explain all marriages? Sexual orientation exists, I think we can agree. But it is not sufficient, by itself, to explain lavender marriages in the early 1900s. There are cultural expectations to consider there, also. An outcome having multiple inputs doesn't weigh against any particular input. I mean, we could also dig into things like socioeconomic status and it's impact on male and female mate selection, relative height preferences, androgen profile preferences, cultural influences on men and women, the status of relative cultures, and cultural trends as promoting or prohibiting certain relationships. But trying to explain all relationships ever is probably an over-ambitious goal.
Again, my point was; for those who explicitly desire novelty in mate selection due to some kind of biological instinct, the mechanism for such a desire does not need to be elaborate.
The classic theory of “mens rights” proponents is that the optimal evolutionary strategy is:
1. Marry the rich ugly doctor and make sure he takes care of you and your children
2. Sleep with the poor hot stud behind the scenes and make sure his superior genes are passed on
So effectively the theory claims that women are driven to cheat on their “beta” husbands with “alpha” males. Sometimes statistics are brought up claiming that 10% of all children are not genetically related to their supposed father, but I’m not sure how good this data really is. In fiction the classic example would be Jamie and Cersei Lannister.
If we assume this is true, then the two strategies make perfect sense:
- If both parents and daughters went for ugly doctors, hot studs would die out and increase risks for the tribe at times of war
- If both went for hot studs, rich doctors would die out and increase risks at times of peace
- If parents voted for hot studs but daughters wanted rich doctors, it wouldn’t make sense as the whole point is to get the rich doctor to commit
- So we end up with daughters wanting hot studs secretly while pushed by their parents to marry the rich doctor
Personally I think that this theory is kind of garbage but that’s because all of evolutionary psychology is very much questionable. But if we accept that evolutionary psychology is real, then it kind of makes sense.
Such "data" is crap, while the real stats say otherwise:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/by-blows-paternal-age-and-all-that/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/elementary-my-dear-holmes/
So is group selection, incidentally.
One possible answer is that parents don't get to have sex and wake up next to and watch and generally be in love with whoever suitor they favour. You do. Parents are simply interested in their grandchildren turning out OK, that's their biological imperative, but you would like to have a good time also. Of course you could say that having a good time with your girlfriend should be correlated with her being a good mother and thus you and your parents are looking for the same thing and thus this post, but there is no reason to assume that good-time-fun-sex people are Actually Good Parents. Birth control and so on have demonstrated that humans have a pretty big desire to just have a good time and glance at a pleasant body.
There's another potential conflict. If you marry someone poor but hot, you're a lot more likely to need continued support from your parents than you are if you marry someone who's a good provider. Parents would rather someone else be responsible for taking care of their grandchildren. Their children get the benefits of a sexy lover but the parents pay more of the costs - a classic recipe for conflict if there ever was one.
You missed a pretty simple explanation because you assumed parents are selfless child evolutionary maximizers. It's just an alignment problem.
Imagine your two suitors, one a beautiful but poor young woman and the other a plain but wealthy young woman who's your father's business partner. Your parents might want you to marry the plain one because they can enjoy more benefits from the marriage. If you marry a beautiful young woman they get somewhat more fit (beautiful or w/e) grandchildren. But that's by no means certain. If you marry the rich young woman then you definitely get the wealth (which they can use in a way they can't use your love). And on top of that they get connections to their business partner which benefit them in various ways.
Marriage as a way to create bonds across coalitions is pretty standard sociological stuff. And often neither the man or woman involved really had much choice. We have pretty common stories of resistance or of marriages where the couple don't seem to really even trust, let alone like, each other. Sometimes with good reason!
Okay, why didn't they evolve to be child evolutionary maxmiziers? Why wasn't this selected for? That's fundamentally the question here.
This is a common mistake in pseudo-evolutionary thinking. "I imagine X feature would be more adaptive so why doesn't it exist?" Evolution doesn't progress towards the most fit world. Instead it is a form of pattern reproduction where individual patterns that are able to survive and reproduce do so.
If you understand evolution in those terms your question becomes easy. "Why wasn't this selected for?" becomes "Why could genetic codes where parents could put their children's needs beneath their own survive and reproduce?" To which the response is, "Why would that prevent them from surviving and reproducing?"
In general, 90% of the time "why wasn't this feature I imagined brought into existence by evolution" is a bad question. Framed wrongly and proceeding from smuggled assumptions or a direction based view of evolution.
The situation where parents have an only child and will never again have children is evolutionarily rare, since most people (certainly most men) died while still at child-birthing age, and most families had more than one child. So you can conceptualize the conflict between the parent and the child as a conflict between two individuals with different evolutionary goals, who happen to share half their DNA and be related to the same set of people, analogously to how you think about siblings. In this case I think there are simple reasons why the interests would not be aligned in mate selection. Parents want status and alliances for themselves and their family. Children want genetic fitness and status for themselves. The father wanting his daughter to marry the business partner is an obvious example where these two interests differ. More generally things like stability are good for family functioning and status among older people, whereas hotness of mate slightly increases evolutionary fitness and creates status for the individual.
While I agree that it's not productive to try to explain everything as adaptive, I think that a lot of default conflicts between parents and children follow a predictable pattern where parents care about family honor or stability, while children care about themselves. I think these are resonances of (evolutionarily) meaningful differences of interest in human societies.
I agree, except on the fact that it's not adaptative. You got it with the traditional conflict of individuals sharing half their genes: the trade-off is not the same for pants and children. In particular, the genetic pay off of siblings succeeding is lower than that of children succeeding. So parents will try to maximize the total number of grand-children, while children will maximize the number of their own children mostly with niblings a distant second. Children are competing for parents resources, and this explains a lot of those parent/child conflicts. Kin selection theory works quite well on this imho...
The person making the decision is motivated by sexual attraction.
The parents are motivated by simple risk aversion.
Sigh...and where does sexual attraction come from in the first place?
If it's an evolved phenomenon, then it provides no explanation to say that we mate based on sexual attraction.
simplified model:
Consider the (mother, father, suitor)-tuple as determining input on the suitor's choice. Wealth and visceral attaction are the only evolutionary relevant factors. But the suitor is in a far better position to evaluate the visceral attraction-part. The visceral attraction acts both a criterion, but also an incentive to act on the mating question at all. But there is no visceral drive to seek out wealth. So wealth is naturally underrated compared to visceral attraction in the suitor's preference system. To counteract this, wealth is overrated in the parents preference system.
If parents accounted perfectly correctly for the value of wealth, they'd not have enough inecentive to send a strong enough signal to the suitor to rebalance the process. Because the suitor will naturally discount parental signals over internal signals. So the conflict is not a bug, it's a feature so that the result averages out to a compromise.
How do we know evolution only took place on the individual level? History tells us not only about men and women fighting each other, but about armies fighting each other, killing or enslaving the losers and giving the winners resources to reproduce. As described by for example Peter Turchin.
So if Scott doesn't want to donate sperm in order to sire hundreds of children, that might be because groups of individuals who all strived for maximal reproductive opportunities for themselves were bad at forming armies and were extinguished by the less selfish men who became Scott's ancestors.
Societies consisting of men who intended to sire a few children and take good care of them were probably more successful than societies consisting of men who intended to sire hundreds of children that someone else would take care of. That way, there is an evolutionary logic behind Scott's lack of willingness to become the father of children he will never meet. Not siring an excessive amount on children is part of being a good citizen. And good citizens form strong states and strong armies, conquering the world.
Group selection works at the cultural level, but not the genetic level. Because genetic variance within groups vs between groups tends to be too great. A mutation creating a defector will have an advantage. But culture can very more starkly across similar groups (hence the proliferation of languages in New Guinea).
90 percent of the human genome in the British Isles was replaced between 2400 and 2000 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_British_Isles
The people who built Stonehenge only make up the remaining 10 percent. Were really 90 percent of the Stonehenge builders less fit than the Indo-European invaders? Or did they just belong to the wrong group?
I didn't say that population replacement didn't happen. I said the variance within groups was too large relative to the distance between groups for the math of group selection to work.
Not for all features. Lactase persistence, for example, is close to 100 percent in Northern European populations and zero in East Asians. Great variance between groups, very little variance within them.
However, genes affect culture. If, for example, one group consists of 60 percent collectivist moralists and another group happens to consist of 50 percent collectivist moralists, the former group might be able to form an army and wipe out the latter group, where the proportions of genetic traits differ slightly. As this happened time after time in history, some traits were selected for and some were selected against. Some genes became more common because groups where they were more common vanquished groups where they were less common.
And isn't population replacement group selection? What could be more group selection than that?
Lactase persistence is individually advantageous, so there's no need to bring up "group" selection. And that individual advantage is why it reached fixation.
No, population replacement is not sufficient for group selection. Group selection requires that a gene lowers the fitness of the individual who possesses it, while benefiting the larger group. The problem with that is within-group there will be selection against that gene, very much unlike lactase persistence.
Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses some of the math and how it was so lacking in nature scientists had to deliberately engineer an example here:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/group-selection.html
Hm… why does it have to be a "need" for group selection as an explanation for there to be group selection? Couldn't there be both individual selection and group selection for, for example, lactase persistence? Why does group selection need to be brought in only when absolutely necessary?
Most traits that were probably group selected for were also beneficial to individuals. Intelligence, for example. Physical strength. If there is group selection in human populations, then there is group selection for many traits that are also beneficial for individuals and only for a few traits that benefits the group and imposes costs on individuals
But obviously such traits exist, because otherwise we would all be sociopaths.
A lot has happened in evolutionary theory since 2007. In 2007 scientists didn't know that we (Europeans) mostly stem from mass murderers. They thought the invaders from the steppe brought the language, their lactase persistence and not much else. Now we know they are ancestors to most of us, because they happened to kill off those who lived here before. What Eliezer Yudkowski argues against is the wishful thinking of the mid-20th century. The paleo-genetic facts emerged in the 2010s are the opposite of wishful thinking.
If I get you right, you mean that since being tall, strong, a good rider and lactase-persistent was good for the individual, then the Indo-European population replacement was nothing but an awful lot of invading individuals replacing less fit individuals in the original populations? Then I think of your statement that within-group variation is usually bigger than between-group variation. In the Iberian Peninsula, virtually 100 percent of all men carry Y-chromosomes from the Indo-European invaders. Were all the males in the original populations really such unfit individuals? Your statement about within-group variation suggests that they weren't. If they weren't individually unfit compared to the invaders and still failed to reproduce, then I think they were group-selected away.
What are the societies with parents who don't care where the other half of their grandkids genes come from?
> Imagine eg a human with a driving goal to have as many children as possible, who’s capable of thinking of things like donating lots of sperm to sperm banks. This is honestly the winning move in the evolutionary game, but humans haven’t been smart enough for long enough for evolution to instill something like this in us.
This is wrong in two very important ways.
First, in the specifics, humans already have this drive. Therefore there has obviously been enough time to instill the drive. There was a scandal not so long ago about an employee at a sperm bank who was discovered to have substituted his own sperm in place of most of the sperm clients thought they were getting. And Jeffrey Epstein was reported to have had an explicit goal of impregnating as many women as possible. This was generally reported in terms of "what a mentally deranged weirdo", despite the fact that it is the most evolutionarily normal goal conceivable.
Second, whether there's been time to instill the drive is not the right question. Humans already have the drive. But its prevalence is not what you might expect. Why?
The reason that drive is not very prevalent is that historically it wouldn't have accomplished much. The only evolutionarily useful drive is a drive that you can fulfill. If Jeffrey Epstein's stated goal had been to have sex with as many women as possible, no one would have called him a weirdo. But that's not because having sex with women is a better goal than impregnating them. It's worse! It's just because for almost all of history those were one and the same behavior, so there was very little reason (or ability) to target impregnation over sex.
If Epstein's goal was to spread his genes, wasn't it a bit stupid to try to impregnate as many teenage girls as possible instead of grown women? Are teenage girls more likely to carry the fetus to term and take good care of the child/adopt it to someone trustworthy compared to grown women?
For what it's worth, I've heard that peak fertility occurs around age 18.
Teenage girls living with their parents may be more likely to get abortions. But Epstein's girls, as far as I understand, mostly lived with him and each other.
Taking good care of the child is a concern that, in the modern day, doesn't matter at all. The child will be fed adequately and grow to adulthood no matter what you might think of the quality of parenting it receives.
This article says Epstein gave his victims birth control:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jeffrey-epstein-paid-doctors-abuse-victims-miami-herald_n_5d84c594e4b070d468cb3790
Did Epstein succeed in producing a single child, as far as we know?
Just because fertility peaks at 18, women of that age are reluctant to give birth to the "wrong" child. If the goal is cynical reproduction maximization, targeting childless 35-year olds is probably wiser, because they have more to lose from an abortion themselves.
“Maybe evolutionary imperatives aren’t fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way if they have only one child, and another way if they have many children? That seems like a hard sell if you’re first claiming they are fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way, and children another.“
Factually, children act different from adults. For instance : being rich makes you more attractive to other adults as a suitor.
I don’t buy the only-child objection. Do people not care about their great-grandchildren?
"I don’t buy the only-child objection. Do people not care about their great-grandchildren?"
I don't see the relevance of the question. As I understand it, the hypothesis was that marrying a rich partner potentially helps all of your descendants and all of your parent's descendants, while marrying a genetically fit partner helps all of your descendants and some of your parent's descendants, so you have a greater incentive to care about the genetic fitness of your partner than your parents do. The objection is that if you are an only child then your descendants are all of your parent's descendants (aside from yourself), so your parent's incentives should be the same as your incentives. No matter how many generations deeper you look you are still only going to find people who carry both your parent's genes and your genes, so the incentives should still match up.
Imagine that I am an only child, and I have two children. Do my grandparents hope that my two children marry someone rich, or someone pretty?
Agree with most points, just want to point out that the sperm bank thing might be an evolutionarily worse-than-it-appears strategy if the *thing being passed on* (and optimized over by evolution) is not just genes but the gene + accumulated-knowledge memetic structure, which you pass on to your children when you raise them (mannerisms, perspectives, opinions, etc).
This could contribute to explaining why the "want children but don't particularly care about wanton spreading of seed" drive of the author (which I think is quite common) hasn't been optimized into something else (despite other stronger reasons, like the relatively small timescale since which sperm-banks exist)
I think you dismiss Trivers theory too fast. A wealthy suitor is not only possibly helping your other children directly, he help them indirectly with 100% certainty: you do not have to worry (as much) about this particular child directly, it will not use your resources anymore so you can use those resources to help other children (including ones not yet born, if you are still at reproductive age).
This produce testable sex-asymmetric predictions: it's the resource-providing parent and/or the parent with the longer reproductive lifespan that should care the most about suitor wealth. I.E. the father, especially in male provider societies. Is it the case? Hell yes, it's a cliché in romantic comedies). It also predict parents will care much more about partner wealthiness for children not (yet?) wealthy, so young ones or ones who did not achieve material success. Is it true? I think so, for example the typical child whose potential partner get judged is a a young women. Not a middle-aged widowed son...
Women financial independence and later marriage should also decrease this effect, which indeed it does: In the social circles where women are wealthy and late-marrying (mostly well off western families), parent preference for wealthy mates (arranged marriage, in the most extreme form) is a thing of the past and even moral repulsion....
And finally, the effect (I will not have to spend resources on this child anymore, or even gain resources from him/her) is explicitly acknowledged by many if not most traditional cultures. In some sense, it's the whole point of marriage. So why not take them at face value?
In fact, you even have the meta optimizer implementing this global strategy: a hotness filter for partners (good genes) + a caring instinct for children + resource allocation algorithm ("fair" distribution based on needs/equality/genetic proximity balance). The higher wealth weighting by parents compared to childs is similar to child/parent difference of family resource distribution: child prefer an equal distribution (they would prefer to get most, but this is not viable as they are not controlling directly the distribution) and parents tends to distribute as needed even if it's not equal shares...Thinking more of this, it really favor Trivers hypothesis and maybe explain why you didn't find it so convincing: When thinking as parent providing children on a per-need basis, a non-wealthy suitor can be a net resource sink, which in fact is the biggest parent fear: a gold-digger leach that will consume family resource sucked through the "victim" child, not only jeopardizing this particular child future (grandchildren, more specifically) but the whole family. You could even push it further: the child favoring the hot suitor but still counting on a per-need family net is exploiting his siblings, in a cuckoo-esque genetic way....So much for romantic marriage ;-)
Appart from the joke, it's also a testable result: the siblings would be at least as much (if not more) critical of a hot but poor (and worse, likely gold-digger) suitor than the parents. Again, this seems spot on, both in real life and in romantic comedies...
This last effect is maybe what could tell models apart: siblings are around the same ages as the child choosing between hot and wealthy. "Hormones" and "Wisdom" theory suggest younger siblings will agree with "choose the hot one". "Family resource competition" (i.e. Trivers) predict it's those younger siblings which will advice the most for wealthy against hot.
Considering super scientific carefully factual evidences (romantic comedies and personal anecdotes ;-p ), I think Trivers wins hands down...
BTW, this would also predict that while parents want many grandchildren, children are not so hot on having many niblings. Sure, they are part-kinship but also reduce resources from your parents. I do not know if this effect is real, my family structure does not allows me to see it directly, and it would be quite selfish to admit (on the hot vs weatlhy, there is a wise and altruistic excuse ;-p ) so only anonymously-gathered preference could maybe tell...
Also in societies which tend to have a lot of cousin-marriages, arranged marriages of that kind are knitting together the wider family grouping and strengthening it. Resources are shared between blood relatives, not going to outsiders.
Arranged marriages will tend to be between a smaller pool of potential mates than romantic marriages, so there's a good chance that the marriage partners have some connections between their families already.
Maybe romantic love is just a recent evolutionary adaption to combat millennia of rampant inbreeding then.
I wonder if romantic love is the short-term bonding solution; it gets the partner to stick around while the offspring is still a baby to help support it and the mother, then wears off after a year or two so that both parents can find new partners for maximum genetic recombination (and spreading of genes for the males).
I wouldn't be wedded to this idea, but I do think that short bursts of attachment have some kind of place in our whole evolutionary history. Sticking with one mate for a prolonged period requires different mechanisms.
Again, I wouldn't take these kinds of stories as serious science, but a bonding period of two years is long enough to make sure the offspring survives and then the parents can go their separate ways and have new offspring:
https://www.today.com/health/how-long-does-passion-last-four-stages-love-t108471
"Movies try to convince us we’ll feel this way forever, but the intense romance has an expiration date for everyone. Expect the passion to last two to three years at most, says Dr. Fred Nour, a neurologist in Mission Viejo, California, and author of the book “True Love: How to Use Science to Understand Love.”
I think your explanation is almost certainly right. Parents look at this as an optimization problem for "how do I ensure my child's happiness over the next 50 years, while also providing for him and the rest of his family," while suitors look at this as an optimization problem for "what makes me most happy right now." Suitors may try to focus on the latter but their lower-brain will definitely override that.
The question then becomes: Why are the parents the villains in all these stories? Why do we think people making decisions based on who they most want to bone right now are better at this than people taking the long view with the wisdom of age. Three possibilities IMO:
1) We're just wrong: Arranged marriages are often happier than chosen partner marriages, and divorce is higher in nations with less parental pressure re: who you marry. That... there are so many confounding variables there, but Occam's Razor says it's probably this.
2) We're wrong, except in the extremes: Arranged marriages produce 7/10 life goodness points on average, but often do much worse and almost never do better. Chosen partner marriages produce 4/10 life goodness points on average but occasionally score a perfect 10. When we write fiction, we like to fantasize about the perfect 10.
3) Parents aren't making a true judgment, they're just using a different, equally flawed optimizer: At one point social mobility was very difficult and so choosing a good partner from a good family was the only viable way to move up. Culture therefore ingrained the idea of "marry up" so strongly that it persists, even though that may not be the dominant strategy anymore. If this was true, you'd expect to see people returning to status as a proxy for partner value when social mobility goes down.
For the record, my Gen-Z friends (n=3) are way more likely to use earnings and social status as a dating criteria than people my age, and definitely are more likely to than my parents' generation (or at least they're more likely to admit it).
"The question then becomes: Why are the parents the villains in all these stories?"
Because parents are not thinking of their children's happiness, in the sense of "what gratifies my immediate urges?" sense. You don't have to have romantic love for an arranged marriage to work, just that the two people buckle down and do their duty by each other and their families and society.
Romantic love was seen as something separate and apart from marriage and family life. It wasn't something you chose, it struck you like a thunderbolt from the gods. You could indulge in it as play, like Ovid's witty Ars Amatoria, or in the mediaeval cult of courtly love, or the more cynical 18th - 19th century tradition of admitted lovers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicisbeo
It was only with the change to the Romantic era that the expression of emotions became valued, and that brought along in its wake with other challenges to the status quo the idea of free love, marriage for love, and marriage settled by the couple themselves. If you have marriage for love, then you must also have a means of ending the marriage when the love ends and you find yourself in love with someone else. And so our modern era, where romantic love has been elevated into this supreme good, and we are supposed to sacrifice all else on its altar - don't marry for money, don't settle for less than the soul mate, marriage is all about love and nothing else.
Of course in that paradigm, parents who tell you "that person you are infatuated with is the wrong person for you" and who try to come between you are the villains, even if they're correct.
"So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?"
I think it really does come down to "hormone driven". The parents of adult children (or children old enough to marry) should be at that stage in Hamlet "The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble/And waits upon the judgement" (however well that works out in practice) so they are looking at potential mates for their children in terms of "is this person a good provider/brings a large dowry? are they from a good family? will joining our families be to the benefit of both?" since they're invested in the long-term success of their genetic line.
The suitors/brides are at the stage of evolutionarily-driven "hot person, mate now!" drive to have children and to hell with 'does this person have the resources to support children', it's about immediate urges and gratification of same, *any* baby produced is a good baby at this level. We don't have children because we think they're cute, we have the reptile-brain "genital friction feel good" urge and if we go ahead with that, then before we figured out how to try and prevent pregnancy or terminate pregnancy if it happened or commit infanticide afterwards, children were the natural result of that. Then the 'urge to protect offspring' kicks in, because at the mammal stage we don't have 'hundreds of eggs laid and if enough hatch and survive to adulthood that keeps the species going' of other species. For humans, pregnancy and child-rearing is a big commitment.
Because we've got bits kludged on top of bits and we're intelligent *and* conscious, basic drives get over-ridden or diverted all the time (this is the whole impetus behind Freudian psychiatry, after all: how can the basic sexual instinct end up with fetishes and complexes? we don't get that with other drives like hunger or sleep). So the basic drive of "mate now" is still operating during peak reproductive years, but the complications on top turn that into "but only find tall Asian women in red bikinis arousing".
Okay, and why are certain people "hot" to us rather than others? You treat this like its some brute fact of nature and not an evolved set of preferences (and therefore, it should be based on fitness maximisation).
Your conclusion makes a lot of sense, but I would put a lot more weight on the parents' opinions because a lot of people just take the intuitive idea "good looks"="better genes" idea as proved beyond discussion, when it's not. As an ugly person with excellent health and two beautiful children in the 90th percentile in both athletics and school grades, I've always been suspicious of the idea that making you hot is simply nature's way of showing off your excellent genes. Human looks probably were such, a mere beauty contest, millions years ago, but evolution is tricky: I'd say human beauty is now a Keynesian beauty contest, in which the idea is not to look good, but to convey the idea that you are objectively good looking for a majority of viewers. For example, blue eyes give no genetic or visual advantage whatsoever and are very widely perceived as, ceteris paribus, more attractive and thus have been selected for exclusively on sexual grounds; even worse, women of several races have evolved neotenian traits to look younger to your sexual instinct when every other available evidence tells your they are older: not just blond, younger-girl hair among Caucasians, but more slender bodies with narrow, younger-girl hips (bad for childbirth!) among Asian women. None of these traits say "good genes!" They all say "genetic manipulation!" Women's well-attested attraction for high-testosterone idiots, preferably with a criminal record, is evidence that this trickery works both ways. One possible counter is that genes for traits like blue eyes are hooks that ensure other genes of yours will travel further (because they make your descendants more attractive) but this looks like an arms race where genes conveying pure sexual appeal with no fitness advantage and even some disadvantages (those narrow hips) appears to be gaining an edge.
My understanding is that subjective ratings of attractiveness are still correlated with other traits like IQ.
> Women's well-attested attraction for high-testosterone idiots, preferably with a criminal
> record, is evidence that this trickery works both ways.
https://youtu.be/pvvGR09P5XI
>while missing a human-level goal of “maximize inclusive genetic fitness, eg by donating to sperm banks”
The human level is "listen to what the culture tells you". Like "The secret of our success" tells us, the culture is much smarter than individual humans, but while its development is immensely faster than evolutionary timescales, it's still slower than recent technological progress, so conventional wisdom still hasn't caught up with hip newfangled disruptions like sperm banks.
Question: do cultural practices have a place within the hierarchy of mesa-optimizers? For instance, the practice of marriage-arrangement has roughly the same goal as drive-motivated mate-seeking behaviour. But the practice does not connect to this goal through a neurologically thick drive the way mate-seeking behaviour does. That the practice is connected to this goal is determined in the way any practice is connected to a goal: by language, convention, tradition, i.e., social construction. Can practices, as social constructs, count as mesa-optimizers?
If my in-laws were gold diggers by proxy for their daughter, they have shockingly low standards.
A simpler explanation: suitor and parents both want a high-status mate, but society is such that different things confer status among different age groups. This change is driven at least in part by older cohorts being wiser and having less intense hormones. This explanation has the added benefit of showing why children and parents don't like the same movies, music, etc.
I think it’s relatively simple: the child falls in love based on their nature (evolutionarily coded preferences) and the feeling of love is so compelling that they will do away with any reasoned assessments of their suitor’s status or wealth or potential as a good parent.
The parent naturally loves their kid, but has no deep reason-annihilating feelings about their various suitors, so they assess the suitors consciously, based on how they think that mate will impact their kid’s future. Do they have a good job, are they responsible, yadda yadda.
Evolution programs the child to fall in love with the suitor, and programs the parent to love the child, and naturally they will have different preferences for the child’s mate as a consequence.
Two things to add. First, our evolution differs enough from primates to have selected for menopause, so fitness of the grandchildren outweighs one near-universal imperative at least. Longer developmental cycles mean that once the hormones are out of the way the status is paramount.
Second, the status hierarchies are very different for paramours and their parents. Parent status goes up dramatically with "my kid is marrying a doctor"; a lot more so than "my kid's fiancé is really hot!". This is obviously downstream of the above factor.
The suitors' status hierarchy focuses a lot more on looks though. For one thing, most 20-somethings are very tightly stratified economically so looks make up a higher weighting of the status function. For another thing, 20-somethings are a lot hotter than 50-somethings, generally.
I was going to make a similar point, but you can recurse on <<Parent status goes up dramatically with "my kid is marrying a doctor"; a lot more so than "my kid's fiancé is really hot!">> - you could imagine a world where this is not the case, and that "my kid's fiancé is really hot!" confers as much or more status for parents than the doctor case. And I can conjure up stereotypical images of some types of parents (for some reason fathers more than mothers?) for whom this would in fact be the case.
But intuitively I agree with you, and I believe that the parental status factor is what's driving this whole phenomenon, so what's going on? Maybe it's that parents being older means they have less active sex drives? Not sure.
> while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner.
I think even this short and hypothetical intro holds an important clue. What if the parents care about their *own* business?
Then 'Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants.' would not apply, at least not as 'single' or 'most important' motivation.
That's the reason, why this whole example doesn't work very well, at least in my perception.
I have an alternate explanation of the "young man/woman -vs- their parents" question which I think is substantiatively different from the ones that have been proposed so far. The young man/woman and their parents are optimizing for roughly the same thing, but only coincidentally; they're each following 'programs' set by entirely separate mechanisms, which have converged to roughly the same place but from very different directions.
The young man/woman, obviously, is following regular evo psych dicta handed down by our [pre-]primate ancestry; seek out someone tall/strong and/or wide-hipped/large-breasted. The youth is mostly trying to get laid, and while this pursuit is channeled through cultural norms, getting laid is a game that our lizard brain is programmed to understand very well.
The parents are playing a much more abstract game, so the best their lizard brain can do to them is perhaps the general impulse "your kids are important, do well by them." Bereft of biological imperatives telling them how to accomplish this, they fall back on the next best thing; the complex of customs, habits, expectations et al coming in from the ambient culture. Importantly, the culture the parents find themselves in is a culture perpetuated by humans who have managed to survive and perpetuate their culture, and (if they're not on the absolute bottom rung of society) do so while maintaining some set of advantages. Cultures that survive in this way therefore tend to contain norms and habits which lead to their humans surviving and maintaining those advantages. Obviously I'm talking about "cultural evolution." One highly-adaptive custom, for some cultures, turns out to be that of parents actively ensuring that their kids marry someone able to help them maintain the hallmarks of their class. A youth in a privileged class who marries some awful punk, in contrast, is liable to fall out of that class (and thereby be lost to that class' culture.)
The two kinds of evolution have, in this case, converged on roughly the same objective - make sure the youth is paired with a high-quality partner, for very roughly similar concepts of "high-quality." But the tools available to biological and cultural evolution are very different - biological evolution can't (?) instill complex social ideas, cultural evolution can't (?) reprogram humans' lizard brain, etc - and this explains all the differences in how the two drives manifest themselves.
I think what you propose have strong similarities to Multilevel Selection Theory although it isn't exactly Multilevel Selection Theory. Multilevel selection theory says that evolution takes place on several levels of complexity simultaneously: Spermatozoon versus spermatozoon, indivual versus individual, family group versus family group, nation versus nation. Your idea is, if I understand it right, that evolution takes place on different level of consciousness. And why not? Different conscious levels are also different levels, so I guess that line of reasoning should fit into Multilevel Selection Theory too.
Enjoyed the back and forth on this. I'm curious to know how this varies across cultures and sub-cultures. For example, my mother and her social circle would place an absolute top priority on shared religious and cultural values. This still reads like some sort of evolutionary maximization (it involves a lot of very specific having and rearing children related considerations) but very differently from the "rich doctor" approach.
Concerning the issue whether parent-offspring conflict exist at all in humans, there are studies that suggest it does, like this study by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618655114
Chagnon studied the Yanomamö horticulturalists of Brazil and Venezuela. Among the Yanomamö, cross-cousin marriage is a social ideal. Chagnon found that people who married their cousins had slightly fewer children and children who suffered from inbreeding depression. Still, parents who made their children marry their cousins had more grandchildren. Cousin marriage apparently helped grandparents to arrange better marriage deals for their average child. Marrying your cousin seems to be slightly bad for you in the (male) Yanomamö world, but potentially great for your brothers.
"there’s no evidence at all that these animals’ parents play much of a role."
This paper is a dead link, but I would be confused if ape parents were totally apathetic about who their children mate with, in spite of it having very serious reproductive consequences for millions of years.
I'll bet if a mommy chimp sees her daughter daughter getting raped by a low-status male, she is very unhappy about it, and if she doesn't beat him up it is only because the male is stronger than her. But why evolve an emotion unless it can motivate you to take action that increases inclusive fitness? If chimp mothers are powerless to protect their children from adult males, that might explain apathy. Chimp fathers have no idea who their children are. If they had paternity certainty, they would probably quickly evolve an instinct to intervene when their daughters are raped.
> I'll bet if a mommy chimp sees her daughter daughter getting raped by a low-status male, she is very unhappy about it, and if she doesn't beat him up it is only because the male is stronger than her.
Pretty much every part of that is wrong. It's just not how chimpanzee sexual behavior works.
Chimpanzees are like most mammals, and unlike humans, in that they go into heat. A female in heat has sex with every male in the troop in sequence in a big public event. She can't reject anyone.
I am not an expert, but this paper seems to disagree with the assertion that chimpanzees in heat mate with all the men in the troop: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25344150/#:~:text=Chimpanzees%20(Pan%20troglodytes)%20have%20a,pairs%20mate%20exclusively%20with%20each
> It’s the same reason why porn sites have lots of material about people copulating with high-quality mates, but none about people finding high-quality mates for their children. “POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR”. Evolutionarily it makes sense, but the urge isn’t implemented on that level.
There is *definitely* material oriented towards these desires, it's just not marketed towards you. There's whole genres of literature centering middle-aged women and their desires, and while the personal desire for a handsome sexy man is definitely there, "my daughter also gets married to a handsome sexy man" is quite prevalent as well. Some examples:
- Cheese Shop mystery series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/52392-a-cheese-shop-mystery
- Mystery Shopper series: https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/josie-marcus-mystery-shopper/
- The whole "hidden object" game series has a lot of these themes as well.
Or how about the multi-generational drama Heartland, running for 15 seasons and full of characters designed to be identified with by audiences across generations (as in, there are three generations of protagonists, and as the years progress the younger ones get older, marry and have children, while their parents and grandparents remain important characters)?
According to "Women and Men in Film" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/189696 (You can get free access with a JSTOR account.) - women screenwriters were pretty common during the silent era, but by the mid-1930s they were moved into women's films and doing fix up work rather than feature writing. A few women screenwriters, e.g. Anita Loos, started in the silent era and kept going, but women were much less common by the 1930s. I had assumed that the transition was later. Thanks for getting me to dig this up.
I really don't have much else at the moment. I do know that soap operas are often written by women. They're low status, so it's sort of a ghetto.
I sometimes wonder if humans' desire to have children is a recent revolutionary response to early forms of birth control. Is there any evidence that animals other than humans actually want to have children, before they have children?
The solution to the problem seems fairly clear to me: the parents don't get to have sex with their children's mates. Attractive in-laws bind the parents' genes to healthy genes, but without satisfying the reproduction drive that proxies for that goal. The kids get genes + resources + pleasure, so they weight attractiveness relatively high. The parents get genes + resources, so they weight attractiveness substantially lower.
I feel like you are coming very, very close to saying this in parts of the essay, but you never quite spell that concept out so explicitly.
This looks like good old-fashioned parent-offspring evolutionary conflict. Suitors can get money from their parents if they need it, but the parents would rather not have to pay.
Once grandchildren are born, grandparents are obliged by evolution to help them, including financially. But they prefer to have independently wealthy grandchildren, so they can afford to have more grandchildren total.
Large muscles or big breasts are obviously selected for because they led to offspring survival in the past. But *now* those traits seem to mostly select for good sex.
I don't know if this discrepancy existed 20,000 years ago, but right now it seems like a clear case of suitors selecting for good sex, and parents selecting for good offspring. If we're looking for an evolutionary reason why that would be the case I think we're missing the point.
A part of the traditional narrative is that you support your children when they are young and they support you when you are old. And many of these narratives are very traditional. Having your children select for status/success means that they will be more able to care for you when you are old. Seems like simple selfish desires from that perspective. You could probably tie in something about how survival of people past reproductive age was beneficial to the society (child rearing, knowledge transmission, etc) so selecting for elder care is more beneficial to gene lines than selecting for reproduction.
Another line is a lot of these traditional narratives ALSO show the parents to be somewhat selfish: don't just marry a successful businessperson, but specifically the child of the businessman (or state) we want to acquire/merge/make peace with.
So now, even if adults aren't thinking about their future caretakers (and I've known a few who are) they could still maximizing the adaptation of "secure resources to take care of me".
Kids supporting their parents might be traditional in east asia, but not among agriculturalists generally:
http://www.econlib.org/was-having-kids-ever-a-paying-venture/
That statement doesn't seem to be borne out by the link you provided. Excerpt from a quote in the article: "Calculations by Mueller and by Goran Ohlin (1969) indicate that a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85 at the level of living that is normal for old people in peasant societies." This seems to indicate that in a world where there were better investment options that this was a poor investment option, but it does not state that A) this didn't happen, or B) there were better places to invest.
If I missed something, could you help me by pointing it out?
"a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85"
That's ignoring that the kids help work on the farm and around the house doing odd jobs and even going off to work for others. No peasant child sat around the house and never lifted a finger until "mom/dad is 60 and now I support them", and besides the value wasn't counted in monetary terms.
I didn't read the papers that Bergstrom referenced, but I did give them the benefit of the doubt that child/adolescent labor is still a net negative compared to the amount of support that was needed to be provided by the adult. However your comment made me go read the reference pages a little more carefully and I had not realized that some of the research cited was on the Ache of Paraguay which throws more red flags for me.
In my Anthropology courses in the mid-late aughts the Ache were often mentioned as an example of being wary of older ethnographic research. As classic research would mention that there was no 60+ year old Ache, but modern research discovered that not only are there, but there had been at the time and they had been excluded either because they didn't fit the narrative or failures in translation/dating.
I think it's entirely plausible that the evolutionary drive in play here is the parents' desire for their children to flourish and thrive, and that "marry someone wealthy" is a culturally-constructed definition of success that determines what the drive "want your children to thrive" manifests as.
You might say "why don't parents just want their children to be wealthy without children" but I think a second-order consideration is that parents have a drive to have children, and so their culturally-constructed definition of "thriving" also bakes in having children as part of this; it's what everybody in every culture (prior to some 20th-century cultures) does when they are thriving. I think this is supported by the recent development of cultural acceptability for not having children; if this were a base evolutionary drive and not an expression of a cultural norm, I think there would not be so many couples that are completely fine with the choice of not having children.
I'm not really sure now plausible it is that parents have an evolutionary drive for grandchildren (distinct from the above direct pro-natal drives); were grandparents a significant part of the ancestral environment? I've not heard much discussion about grand-parental relationships in primates, though it seems like there are some examples in nature (e.g. https://www.livescience.com/64951-do-any-animals-know-grandparents.html). Maybe there is room for a benefit for encoding a special set of "grandparent behaviors" but I'm not sure how important this bit is.
> I tend to think that a few million years between primates without parental mate choice and the current day might not be enough time to give people really good innate parental mate-choice instincts.
Why do you say that? A few million years sound like a pretty long time. Do you have good intuition for how many generations it takes evolution to develop an innate instict of complexity X for a goal of evolutionary benefit Y? I often struggle with this when assessing evolutionary psychology claims, which often assume a sort of steady state of evolution fully converged to optimal adaptiveness (in the ancestral environment). Some people say evolution is pretty fast, and can instill instincts for cultural stuff within a few thousand years, some people seem to imply it's very slow.
What I suppose many have not considered is that this decoupling of sex drive and children is creating huge selection pressure for something other than sex drive (or in addition). Given some population with some inherited variance in the propensity to have kids, then the ones have the inherited propensity to have kids will be (probabilistically) more represented in the next generation. And that propensity will have greater representation in the next generation. At the meta level, the global population might plummet for two or three generations, but then it will bounce back. (Making huge assumptions about the magnitude of the selection pressure. But if the pressure is lower then the rate of population change is lower.)
And this inherited variance in the propensity to have kids does not have to be genetics, religion works pretty well to create that!
Religious belief within a population is significantly heritable, so it's fallacious to treat stuff like this as divorced from genetics. And there are also significant genetic differences between more and less religious populations (e.g. arabs vs east asians), so on a global scale any religious fertility differential will have genetic implications.
The nature of religious belief (being Christian or Muslim for example) is not heritable in the genetics sense. It is transmitted from parent to children but of course not genetically, although religiosity is moderately heritable.
My point was that it was not necessary to postulate some genetics tendency to want more children when religion already accomplish the same thing : a tendency to want more children that is transmitted from parents to children.
Not entirely related to the subject of the post, but I wonder why sexual attraction is always framed as "people want to mate with pretty people because they're more likely to have many, healthy children" and not "people want to mate with pretty people because their children with them are more likely to be pretty, making it easier to spread their own genes"?
In other words, a peacock tail is, as far as I'm aware, completely useless and even actively detrimental for the well-being of the individual who has it. Why then is a pretty face considered some sort of signaling of health instead of our own version of a peacock tail?
Because we are more attracted to average (composite) faces than to ordinary, individual ones, strongly suggesting a non peacock tail mechanism.
And was this demonstrated in the kind of studies that used only american college students as subjects and have generally failed to replicate?
How does that follow? Are individual peacock tails prettier than average peacock tails?
In brief, peacock=handicap=signal mechanism usually leads to open-ended preference (the bigger or the brighter the better!) whereas average faces, in the sense of faces that do not depart from the average, are clearly perceived as very attractive and prefered over individual faces that always have some minor imperfections. (With an exception for features that are dimorphic for man/woman)
I think both effect are present (attracted to marker of good genes (in fact, it's more avoidance of genetic defects) and hoping descendent will inherit attractiveness, which is like a second order effect of the first effect. I think Peacock tail is the second order effect self amplifying because the marker is hacked by a few genes and not representative of the genome quality as a whole. I don't think we have many such things in humans, apart maybe blue eyes/blond hair/pale skin which may have self amplified enough to be detrimental wrt sun.
A peacock tail mechanism is also usually associated with male choice by females, whereas in humans men are much more selective than women for physical apparence.
Which fit with the fact that weak peacock tail effects (depigmentation, to much neotony (which go together), maybe large breasts) are female. Peacock tall traits in male are even less evident, because i do not much see survival drawbacks of male traits. Beard is not costly, and male body difference likely add instead of remove efficiency... But maybe I'm blind to some obvious stuff
The handicap nature of depigmentation seems quite dubious to me, as there was very strong selection in the ancestors of European and Asian populations favoring less pigmentation.
Eye and hair colors are probably a bit more likely, as there indications that what is favored is usually the rare colors, which is typical for signal/handicap mechanisms.
depigmentation is sex and age differentiated, and that was what I pointed at, rather that ethnic pigmentation difference, which is very well predicted by latitude so clearly adaptative. You tend to get darker as you age, and males are systematically darker than females, regardless of ethnicity. There are likely exception, but afaik, very little...So it's part of the stronger neotony in females, very likely a byproduct of male preference for youth.
But the difference between the sexes is very small and it seems unlikely to me that it could have any significant effect on survival ability. And as is frequently the case in evolution, this feature, the man/woman difference, could indeed be due to male preference for youth, but alternative explanations seem possible. For example, observed pigmentation levels are probably the results of antagonist selection pressures, for more pigmentation to protect against UV damage, for less pigmentation to let enough UV go through to be able to synthetise D vitamin or folic acid. It is possible that the optimum level of pigmentation is slightly lower in women, if for example they need more folic acide for pregnancy.
Hum in fact yes, I was blind in the typical way, focussing on physical traits and forgetting about behavioral traits. Generosity and taking risk in impressive activities which gain nothing in term of resource gathering or direct access to mate (but impress) may be the equivalent of peacock tail. It's always difficult to consider behavior as much as visible body change, but to get back to animal example, what are the peacock tails of paradise birds? the flashy colors and exhuberant, non-aerodynamic feathers? Or the crazy dances and nest building? Both, and maybe the relative cost in term or survival/energy wasted would tell the dance/nest building is in fact the longer tail....
Interesting! I think that risk taking is in fact an advantageous strategy, because of the historically higher variance of reproductive rate in men than women. As you said earlier, some male traits can be advantageous both because thay are associated with higher survival ability and because female prefer them, increasing reproductive ability. I think that male behavioral traits fall into this category (advantageaous for both) and not in the peacock category but that is just a hunch.
That's true for high risk high rewards activities, but here I was referring to high risk no reward (apart attracting female interest) activities. But indeed, those are difficult to uniquely identify in humans, because of the high impact of social status (which is itself completely tangled with female preference). Does doing a crazy dangerous but vain thing (slaying dragon) gain you the princess, or the admiration of your fellow knights which gain you the princess? Very difficult to say, and it's the same for generosity...Now are peacock tail a signal to female only? Peacocks are not social (as far as I know), but in social species non adaptive traits preferred by females will certainly signal something to other males and influence social rank, so this entanglement is likely not human-specific....
I think this is more likely a case of adaptation executer/fitness maximizer : men and especially young men are prone to high risk high reward activities because they are in average advantageous. But what evolution build is a higher tolerance (or even a taste for!) risk, wich will then sometimes be expressed in high risk low reward activities. It does not seem to me that these activities (reckless driving, binge drinking...) are used as signal by women.
Younger women are nearly always rated as prettier on average than older women, and younger women produce healthier children (and more of them). Certain aspects are almost certainly just preferences that evolved by coincidence, but broad strokes, it corresponds well. And of course, height, breast size, hip waist ratio are all obvious factors of attractiveness with fitness implications.
I'm a fan of a few simple explanations, which iirc were offered in the original article:
1. The difference in preferences between suitors and parents re: attractiveness isn't as big as we believe, because it is weird for parents to comment excessively on the looks of their child's partner. My grandmother had virtually no filter, and she would comment frequently on the looks of the partners of all her descendants, making it obvious their attractiveness mattered to her.
2. Parents don't have to have sex with their child's partner, so they won't directly benefit from their attractiveness to the extent that their child will. Likewise, they will benefit from their child's partner's status and resources.
To, like everybody else here, massively overthink this, I think it's as much about economics of Jane Austin's day as anything else. Romance novels were written by people for whom the effective intergenerational transfer of wealth was the only thing keeping their descendants out of grinding poverty. The world has since changed but the tropes haven't.
Men prefer masculine expressions but what these expressions are differ between cultures. So, cultural desires (mimesis?) need to be vague and have learning-input. Perhaps status signals are culturally variable and thus cannot be encoded directly (so no ”your daughter marry a doctor”-porn).
Also, humans tend towards the eusocial spectrum. Eusociality can be defined as the extent to which females give up reproduction. Human females, like orcas, do that by having a non fertile period at the end of their lifespan when they care for their grandchildren. No other primates go through menopause. Humans get pretty old considering our body size and are viable at old age considering mutation/selection-balance.
If menopause is a late invention evolutionarily, perhaps it had been instilled in us after cultural evolution and the culture-gene-coevolution really kicked in. To place status-recognition in a meta-adaptation would be more flexible and also an exaptation of other status-recognition-tools that should be relevant as soon as we became cultural primates in addition to social ones.
So, parents just follow the mimesis imperative - they crave what others crave, but for their kids and grandkids, and follow specific cultural cues indicating status. While suitors are more directly hardwired to find-and-fuck.
Also, women generally tend more towards culturally determined status ques and men towards direct biological fertility-markers. Perhaps parents/grandparents have more of a similar PI-logic as women, rather than a spread-genes-logic as men? If they should care for grandchildren rather than just fertilize everyone they see.
Actually, this looks like a good place to comment on something I've been thinking about off and on for a while.
Children frequently spontaneously express the belief that if they are left alone in the dark, they will be eaten by monsters. The belief is obviously innate; modern parents find it annoying and, if they address it at all, generally do their best to eliminate it.
What's interesting to me is that (1) this belief is quite correct [https://www.mural-wallpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S-AN42.jpg depicts a monster]; and (2) it would be difficult to have learned this information through experience. (Including the sense in which evolution itself is a process of learning through experience.) Organisms who encountered, and were eaten by, monsters, would not have been able to pass anything down. Organisms who avoided monsters could of course pass their genes along, but why did the specific belief evolve that the problem with being alone in the dark is specifically that monsters will eat you? There is an infinite space of beliefs that will lead you to avoid being alone in the dark, including a generalized sense that being alone is bad (which children *also have*) without any supporting details. The world is full of people who will happily tell you that their instinctive, unjustified fears are powerful enough to absolutely prohibit them from doing something they fear.
Maybe children that were more able to avoid being left alone in dark scary places tended to survive more often? The belief that if they are left alone in the dark they will be eaten by monsters, might protect against more than just literal monsters. It might also protect against attentional neglect from their parents for example.
And infanticide! In our cousins the chimpanzees and even more the gorillas, males kill children they don't believe they have fathered themselves. Children's fear of the dark and strangers may have such an uncanny origin.
> The belief that if they are left alone in the dark they will be eaten by monsters, might protect against more than just literal monsters.
Yes, but this is kind of the opposite of what I'm asking about. I already noted that children do not like to be left alone under any circumstances. But my question contrasts the innate belief "I should not be alone in the dark, because I will be eaten by monsters" with the hypothetical innate belief "I should not be alone in the dark, for reasons I cannot articulate". That second belief is just as powerful and behavior-altering as the first belief. I think it's worthy of note that -- in reality -- we hold the first belief, with a concrete reason why it's bad to be alone in the dark, and that reason is completely correct. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. But it's not obvious to me why a correct reason would have developed.
Consider the theory that we are supposed to learn about megafauna but that today this translates to learning about tractors. Or that pokemon are the perfect mythology since it exploits our tendency to learn about animals and plants, etc. What monsters are the kids afraid of? Whatever monster that they learn about through culture. I was watching Alien at a young age and I was very scared specifically for Aliens. My son fear a witch he has been reading about. Perhaps we have an evolved general fear that we always fill with culturally determined monsters?
Then if so, it would be a fun though not ethical experiment to raise a child with exatcly no scary inputs whatsoever, and study if the child got scared of super-harmless things.
Wait, isnt that movie Dogtooth about exatcly that?
“Maybe evolutionary imperatives aren’t fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way if they have only one child, and another way if they have many children? That seems like a hard sell if you’re first claiming they are fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way, and children another”
Surely this misses the point; evolution is stochastic, and traits stick and proliferate because they confer an advantage that increases the proportion of gene carriers in the population pool, until the gene fixes. So, advise children on optimal mates to optimise for grandchildren ---> higher fecundity, more healthy adult kids, more offspring, higher representation in the gene pool. BUT, optimise mate selection for attractiveness IF there is only one child? How likely is that to have happened that (i) there were human/ primate parents of only one offspring, AND (ii) there was a random genetic mutation event in those specific parents that solved for single-child mate-selection optimisation AND (iii) that optimisation was actually significantly better than just the “higher total fecundity based on total grandchildren pool” such that it proliferated in the population (hard to do with only one child...) and then fixed to replace the other, more general but probably more effective and evolutionary significant principle?
Not sure why that doesn’t make sense...
What am I missing?
Also, to add, it makes sense to hold both thoughts (child one, parents another) because the child is the initial evolved response (high fecundity breasts, good, marry) and the parents the more nuanced, supplemental but additive in terms of fecundity. My point is that sub-specifying to one-child outcomes probably isn’t very additive to overall fecundity (again, kinda by definition if you only have one child...) and is also quite unlikely to have been present enough in the population (single child primate couples + enough evolutionary time for mutations), so it works for me to believe as an explanation.
I always thought that it was a self-preservation thing. If the children marry successful spouses then it’s more likely the parents will be better taken care of in old age. Grandparents do great childcare for their grandchildren when they are less financially burdened. If the spouse is successful, it will trickle up (in traditional families) to the parents and contribute to the wellbeing of their grandchildren.
This is overthought. Suitors and parents have different preferences about mates for the same reason (and preference result) that college students and parents have different preferences about students' college majors. The practical implications of wealth/jobs are obvious to parents, and less so to students/suitors who haven't really seen the full implications of money. Also the parents don't get to enjoy the benefits of the suitor/student preference (sex with a hot person / thrills of an intellectual major with no practical value) so of course they downweight those. Also older people have lower time preference. Evolutionary psych is powerful but the really is no reason to invoke it here when regular reasons are good enough.
"Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn’t differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?"
I don't think this is terribly hard to explain. Attractiveness can be directly determined from sensory data, matched against hardwired heuristics in the brain. Financial resources, requires specific culture-dependent knowledge - and if there's anything hardwired into the human brain to guesstimate how rich someone is, it's probably still "he's big and tall and muscular so probably a good hunter plus he can beat people up and take their stuff". Maybe a side order of "he has a deep commanding voice so he can probably get his friends to help him beat up other people and take their stuff".
Adolescents and young adults, by definition, have very little experience making adult decisions and learning from their mistakes. Their parents, by definition, do. And if they're still around eighteen or so years later to marry off their healthy children, then they probably don't suck at it.
Rational thought based on lots of experience trumps simple but time-tested instinctive heuristics, which trumps rational thought based on complete ignorance. Since some but not all children will have parents around to help them with mate selection (and other things), it makes sense for evolution to have given everyone a simple set of instinctive heuristics to determine "attractiveness" from direct sensory data, and also given people the ability to override instinct with reason as their experience base increases(*).
Whether that last comes from strength of reason increasing with knowledge, or strength of reason increasing with time and it's expected that time + not dead yet = you've learned some valuable lessons, or strength of instinct decreasing with time and/or wisdom, is negotiable. But it's almost a cliche that hormonal impulses become less powerful with age.
* Which is valuable for many reasons beyond choosing your kids' mates, but that's the subject at hand here.
> if there's anything hardwired into the human brain to guesstimate how rich someone is, it's probably still "he's big and tall and muscular so probably a good hunter plus he can beat people up and take their stuff"
It really doesn't take very long for adaptations to emerge.
On Raymond Chen's blog, he once remarked on an attractive female friend who had confided to him that she was unwilling to date anyone who didn't have at least a little bit of a potbelly.
Parents want a high status and wealthy son/daughter in law to obtain some of that status and wealth for themselves (and maybe for the grandchildren). Meanwhile, the person actually marrying wants personality and physical attraction because they have to spend every day with that person. Pretty simple.
My just so story, which I don't believe for a minute, but which I think explains the data adequately.
Let's say parental preferences in the ancestral environment determine who you marry 65%, and who you sleep with 50% (with most of that effect on who you sleep with mediated through marriage). Your preferences determine the rest. In marriage you should weight things 60-40 status/looks whereas in sex you should weight things 40-60 status-looks.
Because parental preference has a slightly greater relative effect on marriage rather than sex, it's built to focus somewhat on optimal preferences for marriage. Because the agent's own desires tend to have a bit more of a relative effect on sex, they are built to be optimal for sex. The conjunction of the two desire sets lead, in expectation, to optimal marriage and optimal casual sex behavior.
Hence the result.
> Let's say parental preferences in the ancestral environment determine who you marry 65%
I think this is an underestimate; the ancestral environment is going to be much closer to 100%.
Taking two examples from Africa, I've seen it written that among the !Kung, a marriage is about the relationship between a man and his father-in-law. And among many interesting facts in Still a Pygmy, we learn that Isaac Bacirongo's mother was awarded to his father in a legal judgment (over the murder of a relative of the father's by a relative of the mother's).
(He records that his mother hated his father and frequently ran away and had to be retrieved. It's not clear how this would factor into measuring "parents determine who you sleep with X%". Parents completely determined that Isaac's mother would sleep with his father on a regular to semi-regular basis. She personally determined several other partners, which her parents presumably disapproved of.)
"Ondine's Curse"? Are there many other ailments that sound like D&D spells?
It's also a spell in D&D (or at least Pathfinder) but the spell was named for the medical condition, not vice-versa.
It feels like the further we get from the original rationalist community, the more we rehash the argument that was cleared up in 'adaptation-executers not fitness-maximizers'
Why are there so many people in the comments saying things like 'if the parents got to have sex with the hot guy they might feel differently' (as if his hotness is an innate attribute of him, with no 'why?' possible), or people literally complaining that ascribing behavior to evolution without evidence is unscientific, as if there were some possible source for new behaviors other than evolution
Debating everything over and over again is the default human behavior. LessWrong was created with the explicit purpose of settling some debates once and for all, so that the discussion could finally move at least to level 2.
Another institution that achieves the same is school, because at each grade you are supposed to understand the things taught at the previous grades.
Are there any debates that LessWrong has settled?
Parents figured out (from experience) the most useful features to bring up offspring. They'll prioritize people with those features, because they know that it is much more difficult to make a functioning adult out of a baby, than to make the baby.
Also, there are thresholds. If the potential mate is obviously defective, the parents will have reservations. But otherwise, as long as the babies have decent survival capability, the upbringing they receive will matter more for their own reproductive potential, than a slight advantage in primal hotness.
Movie pitch: "Saw" only with Ondine instead of Jigsaw. Ondine is an ASMR-tist who operates on people's brains to knock out their breathing reflex. Then they have to go through a series of sleep-inducing challenges like make-up sessions, cranial nerve examinations, scalp massages, etc. in order to gain access to a respirator.
I think parents using human reason might be part of the explanation here but probably their own status is a bigger effect.
Given that parents don't experience a specific hormonal response to the hotness of their child's spouse they could fall back on:
explicit reason to improve their descendant's status
or
instinct to improve their own status
Using explicit reason might make parents prefer status over hotness for their child's spouse depending on how the explicit reasoning went. Using instinct to improve their own status would cause them to prefer status for their child's spouse as this gives them a potential alliance with a high status family which in turn raises their own status.
Given the frequency and strength of such disagreements I don't think that explicit reasoning can be the whole story - executing personal status adaptions seems like a bigger effect to me.
>> we have our two categories of positive traits: attractiveness and status.
I wonder if a plausible argument could be made that attractiveness is actually just another *kind* of status, and the disjunct between parents and children really is based on them operating in different status-subcultures.
Different sub-cultures assign different weights to different status-markers. Writing an influential law review article could mean a lot at the right conference of law professors, but if you're backstage with NY Philharmonic not so much.
So in that light, maybe it's not a question of "attractiveness" versus"status," but that "young-people status culture" and "old people status culture" assign different status-points to "physical attractiveness" and "income," respectively. So both the young bachelor(ette) and the parents are doing the same status analysis, but the bachelor(ette) is more likely to be wowed by the charisma factor while the parents are more likely to be wowed by the dollar signs.
And just as a fun side-note, looking at it that way you can sort of read "status" another dimension of "attractiveness," so maybe we could fold this in the other direction too. Monkeys are complicated.
I was surprised to see a selfish drive of the parents not highlighted.
For all but the wealthy, the younger generation is to some degree responsible for the care of their parents as they age. The quality of that care has a *very* strong relationship with the financial resources of their kids. Parents prefer wealthy sons- and daughters-in-law because it is likely to improve their own quality of life - that seems a simpler explanation.
One could ask why that preference remains for the wealthy parents, but I'd argue that the level of wealth that makes this a non-factor for parents has only recently been available to a chunk of society. The long-standing pattern, still mostly true, is that *extremely few people* have a level of wealth where gaining a doctor as a son-in-law doesn't improve their prospects for high quality care as they age.
When you pick a mate for yourself, you're optimizing for someone you're going to look at, talk to, and probably touch intimately nearly every day for the rest of your life. Ideally, someone who you can share your weirdest sexual fantasies and your scariest psychological issues with comfortably. (And it might well be perfectly rational to pattern-match those constraints to "tall Asian woman in red bikini" or whatever, by the way, given the right sequence of input data.)
When you pick a mate for your children, you're optimizing for someone you might talk to once a year at Christmas, and can feel comfortable showing pictures of to your friends at the senior center.
So if parents and children are optimizing for fundamentally things anyway, then it doesn't seem particularly surprising that they'll come to different conclusions, regardless of what class of reasoning they might be using to get there.
Is this post trolling? I am genuinely confused. Scott is using evo-psych mental kung-fu to execute a double backwards flip over the most obvious, probable and empirically verifiable explanation:
My father-in-law and mother-in-law are preoccupied with my status and not my hotness because they have no prospect of having sex with me. My mate, on the other hand, does.
Everything else is extra unnecessary detail. The only evo-psych you could possible shove into this explanation is "people like to associate with people with high status" and "people like to have sex even more than they like to associate with people with high status".
I think there is an even bigger element here: young people are trying to produce the most fit offspring (thanks hormones!), while older people want their children have a good life. A young woman going for a young man who is hot-tempered and reckless will likely result in children who're also more aggressive and prone to taking risks, which is a desirable quality from the point of view of evolution. But it will also be a harder life for the woman.
And it doesn't just apply to giving advice to your children: it's often said that women in their thirties and forties have less interest in dating "bad boys" and more interest in the "rich layer" type. Or more realistically, a "comfortable accountant" type.
It's similar to how younger men are more likely to take risks, to push boundaries and to commit crime. It's good for the species (or used to be), as evolution is fine if 20% of young people sacrifice themselves to foolish enterprises and perish, if another 10% do the same and succeed. But not a smart choice for the individual. (Thanks hormones!)
"but none about people finding high-quality mates for their children. “POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR”." - A rule 34 violation! (Is that the internet equivalent of discovering a parity violation? :-) )
Parents must survive to their offspring's sexual maturity to have any direct influence on their partner choice. Their very presence in this process is a signal of an environment where long term survival is possible and thus long-term planning has potential utility.
The reverse implies offspring without parental figures would be more likely to prefer short term reproductive strategies.
Its hard to imagine 'older nobleman/doctor/engineer' in the classless society of paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Status and money are today's addition to the mating strategies of Homo Sapiens, children became the property of their parents as well as the commodity on a marriage market since producing economy. G. Miller's in his brilliant "The Mating Mind" unravels this pretty well.