Toronto Escorts

Human sexuality: what's the real story?

Scott75

New member
Jan 29, 2012
83
0
0
In another thread (that really had little to do with the subject of this thread), I brought up a book called Sex at Dawn, which paints a very different narrative of sexuality then the standard narrative. evilbaga then pointed out another book called Sperm Wars, which also disagrees with some aspects of the standard narrative. I thought it might be good to start on thread that attempts to analyze how we're really wired. Is the standard model correct or is it mistaken in one or more aspects? Let me know what you guys think. I'll start with the author of Sex at Dawn views to be the standard narrative:

Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human
sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard
narrative of human sexual evolution (hereafter shortened to
“the standard narrative”). It goes something like this:

1. Boy meets girl.

2. Boy and girl assess one another’s mate value from
perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/
capacities:

• He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence
of previous sexual experience, and likelihood of
future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment
is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young
mate with many childbearing years ahead and no
current children to drain his resources.

• She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of
future wealth), social status, physical health, and
likelihood that he will stick around to protect and
provide for their children. Her guy must be willing
and able to provide materially for her (especially
during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their
children (known as male parental investment).
3. Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another’s criteria,
they “mate,” forming a long-term pair bond—the
“fundamental condition of the human species,” as famed
author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed:

• She will be sensitive to indications that he is
considering leaving (vigilant toward signs of
infidelity involving intimacy with other women that
would threaten her access to his resources and
protection)—while keeping an eye out (around
ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man
genetically superior to her husband.

• He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities
(which would reduce his all-important paternity
certainty)—while taking advantage of short-term
sexual opportunities with other women (as his sperm
are easily produced and plentiful).

Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in
studies conducted around the world over several decades.
Their results seem to support the standard narrative of human
sexual evolution, which appears to make a lot of sense. But
they don’t, and it doesn’t.
While we don’t dispute that these patterns play out in many
parts of the modern world, we don’t see them as elements of
human nature so much as adaptations to social
conditions—many of which were introduced with the advent
of agriculture no more than ten thousand years ago. These
behaviors and predilections are not biologically programmed
traits of our species; they are evidence of the human brain’s
flexibility and the creative potential of community.

In the previous thread, evilbaga mentions "in Africa, where promiscuity is rampant - men actually invest more in their sister's children than their own (wife's) children. This gene stuff runs deep." I respond by continuing where the above excerpt left off:

*****************
[To take just one example,] we argue that women's seemingly consistent preference for men with access to wealth is not a result of innate evolutionary programming, as the standard model asserts, but simply a behavioural adaptation to a world in which men control a disproportionate share of the world's resources. As we'll explore in detail, before the advent of agriculture a hundred centuries ago, women typically had as much access to food, protection and social support as did men. We'll see that upheavals in human societies resulting from the shift to settled living in agricultural communities brought radical changes to women's ability to survive. Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different from those in which our species had been evolving previously.

It's important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species' existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers.
Later on, it states:
Several types of evidence suggest our pre-agricultural
(prehistoric) ancestors lived in groups where most mature
individuals would have had several ongoing sexual
relationships at any given time. Though often casual, these
relationships were not random or meaningless. Quite the
opposite: they reinforced crucial social ties holding these
highly interdependent communities together.

We’ve found overwhelming evidence of a decidedly casual,
friendly prehistory of human sexuality echoed in our own
bodies, in the habits of remaining societies still lingering in
relative isolation, and in some surprising corners of
contemporary Western culture. We’ll show how our bedroom
behavior, porn preferences, fantasies, dreams, and sexual
responses all support this reconfigured understanding of our
sexual origins. Questions you’ll find answered in the
following pages include:

• Why is long-term sexual fidelity so difficult for so
many couples?

• Why does sexual passion often fade, even as love
deepens?

• Why are women potentially multi-orgasmic, while
men all too often reach orgasm frustratingly quickly
and then lose interest?

• Is sexual jealousy an unavoidable, uncontrollable part
of human nature?

• Why are human testicles so much larger than those of
gorillas but smaller than those of chimps?

• Can sexual frustration make us sick? How did a lack
of orgasms cause one of the most common diseases
in history, and how was it treated?
I haven't gotten to the answers yet, but I'm working on it, laugh :)

A little more:
A Few Million Years in a Few Pages

In a nutshell, here’s the story we tell in the following pages:
A few million years ago, our ancient ancestors (Homo
erectus) shifted from a gorilla-like mating system where an
alpha male fought to win and maintain a ha*rem of females to
one in which most males had sexual access to females. Few,
if any experts dispute the fossil evidence for this shift.

But we part company from those who support the standard
narrative when we look at what this shift signifies. The
standard narrative holds that this is when long-term pair
bonding began in our species: if each male could have only
one female mate at a time, most males would end up with a
girl to call their own. Indeed, where there is debate about the
nature of innate human sexuality, the only two acceptable
options appear to be that humans evolved to be either
monogamous (M–F) or polygynous (M–FFF+)—with the
conclusion normally being that women generally prefer the
former configuration while most men would opt for the latter.
But what about multiple mating, where most males and
females have more than one concurrent sexual relationship?
Why—apart from moral disgust—is prehistoric promiscuity
not even considered, when nearly every relevant source of
evidence points in that direction?
After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human
beings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups
who shared almost everything. There is a remarkable
consistency to how immediate return foragers live—wherever
they are.
*
The !Kung San of Botswana have a great deal in
common with Aboriginal people living in outback Australia
and tribes in remote pockets of the Amazon rainforest.
Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that
immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly
universal in their fierce egalitarianism. Sharing is not just
encouraged; it’s mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for
example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable
behavior in these societies.

Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably, breastfeed one
another’s babies, have little or no privacy from one another,
and depend upon each other for survival. As much as our
social world revolves around notions of private property and
individual responsibility, theirs spins in the opposite
direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound
interrelation, and mutual dependence.
Though this may sound like naïve New Age idealism,
whining over the lost Age of Aquarius, or a celebration of
prehistoric communism, not one of these features of
pre-agricultural societies is disputed by serious scholars. The
overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social
organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in
all environments. In fact, no other system could work for
foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way
to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation
mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly.
And then they get to the part that I find to be the most interesting. I bold my favourite part:
We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A
great deal of research from primatology, anthropology,
anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental
conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have
spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small,
intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual
relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality
probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private
property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to
voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries,
and anthropologists support this view, having penned
accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate
sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or
shame.
If you spend time with the primates closest to human beings,
you’ll see female chimps having intercourse dozens of times
per day, with most or all of the willing males, and rampant
bonobo group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains
intricate social networks. Explore contemporary human
beings’ lust for particular kinds of pornography or our
notorious difficulties with long-term sexual monogamy and
you’ll soon stumble over relics of our hypersexual ancestors.


Our bodies echo the same story. The human male has testicles
far larger than any monogamous primate would ever need,
hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler
temperatures help preserve stand-by sperm cells for multiple
ejaculations. He also sports the longest, thickest penis found
on any primate on the planet, as well as an embarrassing
tendency to reach orgasm too quickly. Women’s pendulous
breasts (utterly unnecessary for breastfeeding children),
impossible-to-ignore cries of delight (female copulatory
vocalization to the clipboard-carrying crowd), and capacity
for orgasm after orgasm all support this vision of prehistoric
promiscuity. Each of these points is a major snag in the
standard narrative.
As the authors say, our testicles aren't quite as large as that of chimps... still, I thought that bolded part was just.. wow.
*****************
 

Scott75

New member
Jan 29, 2012
83
0
0
Responding from the thread this subject started in..

Apparently, it wasn't always so. Here's an excerpt from a book I've started reading, Sex at Dawn:
***BIG ASS QUOTES***
I haven't got around to reading that yet (or your quotes)...
I laughed out loud when I read that "BIG ASS QUOTES" bit you put in, laugh :)

but I guess its worth it and Ill get it from the TPL soon.
Ok.

For now, another book worth reading is "Sperm Wars".
I took a look at the article on it in wikipedia. I may not agree with some of the things he says, but others sounded quite interesting.
 

rld

New member
Oct 12, 2010
10,664
2
0
The comment about Africans investing more in their sisters children is likely because many African systems are matrilineal rather than patrilineal. Which of course, has nothing to do with genetics.
 

Scott75

New member
Jan 29, 2012
83
0
0
You're kidding right? For the same reason elephants, ducks, whales, and barnacles have huge slongs. To get to where it's got to get to.
My guess is that blackrock is on the money here. The important thing isn't the size of the penis; like plumping, it's generally as long as it needs to be to get from point a to point b. The real interesting thing, apparently, is the size of the testicles in relation to the species' bodies; it seems that this speaks of how often the species is expected to get busy.
 

evilbaga

Member
Jul 2, 2010
235
0
16
Responding from the thread this subject started in..
I laughed out loud when I read that "BIG ASS QUOTES" bit you put in, laugh :)

Ok.

I took a look at the article on it in wikipedia. I may not agree with some of the things he says, but others sounded quite interesting.
The part I most remember from the book is that a wife is 900% more likely to get pregnant during an affair than a tryst with her husband.
Reason? Simple, even though the impregnation is the same...the woman is more excited about the affair...and her body reacts accordingly to suck up the sperm.

Thus, women have innate evolutionarily adapted mechanisms to cuckold and/or get different/superior genesets.
 

evilbaga

Member
Jul 2, 2010
235
0
16
The comment about Africans investing more in their sisters children is likely because many African systems are matrilineal rather than patrilineal. Which of course, has nothing to do with genetics.
Unless likelyhood of genetic transmission affects social structure...
Ever read "The Selfish Gene"?
 

Scott75

New member
Jan 29, 2012
83
0
0
The part I most remember from the book is that a wife is 900% more likely to get pregnant during an affair than a tryst with her husband.
Reason? Simple, even though the impregnation is the same...the woman is more excited about the affair...and her body reacts accordingly to suck up the sperm.

Thus, women have innate evolutionarily adapted mechanisms to cuckold and/or get different/superior genesets.
That really does sound interesting alright. Personally, I wish we could go back to the type of culture that Sex at Dawn believes we had before the advent of agriculture; just with the agriculture, laugh :).
 

rld

New member
Oct 12, 2010
10,664
2
0
Unless likelyhood of genetic transmission affects social structure...
Ever read "The Selfish Gene"?
I have read the Selfish Gene, but I am in the Gould camp on this issue. I can see no mechanism by which the environment impacts genes directly and vice versa. I view genetic trends as a symptom or outcome of natural selection, not a cause. Genetic variation is a cause but not genetic trends. I also have very significant doubts about most of the whole field of evolutionary psychology.

And, even if we take for a moment the possibility that there is some genetic reason that men take good care of their sisters children, it poses two questions I am not sure how we answer even within that framework:

1) he shares 50% of his genes with his children and the same amount (roughly) with his sister's children. If in both cases there is a 50% transmission rate, what is the genetic evolutionary advantage with favouring his sister's children over his own?

2) if african cultures are older than say european cultures and this practice gives a genetic advantage, why did all of the younger european cultures flip around and become patrilineal? What is the genetic advantage in that?
 

rld

New member
Oct 12, 2010
10,664
2
0
My guess is that blackrock is on the money here. The important thing isn't the size of the penis; like plumping, it's generally as long as it needs to be to get from point a to point b. The real interesting thing, apparently, is the size of the testicles in relation to the species' bodies; it seems that this speaks of how often the species is expected to get busy.
I think the original question was somewhat asked in jest, but the BR13 explanation is only partially right, if our limited understanding of reproductive advantage in evolution is correct.

I preface my next comment by saying that the field of reproduction advantage in evolutionary theory is in its infancy and is changing almost monthly.

From an evolutionary perspective the issue is pretty simple. After the equipment meets the minimum standard to do the job, the question then becomes how has the equipment changed over time. Is the current iteration larger or smaller than previous iterations? What happens to populations with movement in either direction? After we know that information, you can then form some hypothesis as to why the size is trending in one direction or another.

IF the equipment size is not big enough to do the job, than the damned thing never reproduces and it becomes an evolutionary dead end.
 

Scott75

New member
Jan 29, 2012
83
0
0
Unless likelyhood of genetic transmission affects social structure...
Ever read "The Selfish Gene"?
The Selfish Gene was -awesome- :). One of my favourite books for sure. My favourite chapter was one that wasn't in the first edition of the book, called "Good Guys Finish First". It's not as simple as it sounds, though; in essence, the key to it working in evolutionary terms, requires reciprocal altruism. This is apparently what our ancestors did, which went to the point that apparently everything was shared; not just food, but each other, with the offspring being taken care of by everyone in the communal group.
 

rld

New member
Oct 12, 2010
10,664
2
0
The Selfish Gene was -awesome- :). One of my favourite books for sure. My favourite chapter was one that wasn't in the first edition of the book, called "Good Guys Finish First". It's not as simple as it sounds, though; in essence, the key to it working in evolutionary terms, requires reciprocal altruism. This is apparently what our ancestors did, which went to the point that apparently everything was shared; not just food, but each other, with the offspring being taken care of by everyone in the communal group.
While reciprocal alturism is a really cool idea, recent mathematical studies and modelling have cast a great deal of doubt on whether or not it really occurs in the animal kingdom.
 

evilbaga

Member
Jul 2, 2010
235
0
16
1) he shares 50% of his genes with his children and the same amount (roughly) with his sister's children. If in both cases there is a 50% transmission rate, what is the genetic evolutionary advantage with favouring his sister's children over his own?
I dont understand this at all. The whole point is, they are living in a promiscuous culture...ergo his 'wife' sleeps with other men. So he could share 0% genes with 'his' children. However since he shares 50% of his genes with his sister, he guaranteed shares 25% of genes with his sisters children (remember, he invests in his sister's children - not his brothers).

2) if african cultures are older than say european cultures and this practice gives a genetic advantage, why did all of the younger european cultures flip around and become patrilineal? What is the genetic advantage in that?
The advantage of patriarchy over matriarchy is men aren't constantly mateguarding and/or fighting with each other over the women - this frees them to co-operate with each other, make bigger badder weapons, and conquer the cultures around them that are still matriarchies. Thereby, through social evolution, their patriarchal tendencies spread. Its not a straight genetic advantage.
 

rld

New member
Oct 12, 2010
10,664
2
0
I dont understand this at all. The whole point is, they are living in a promiscuous culture...ergo his 'wife' sleeps with other men. So he could share 0% genes with 'his' children. However since he shares 50% of his genes with his sister, he guaranteed shares 25% of genes with his sisters children (remember, he invests in his sister's children - not his brothers).



The advantage of patriarchy over matriarchy is men aren't constantly mateguarding and/or fighting with each other over the women - this frees them to co-operate with each other, make bigger badder weapons, and conquer the cultures around them that are still matriarchies. Thereby, through social evolution, their patriarchal tendencies spread. Its not a straight genetic advantage.
Is there good data that these african cultures are more promiscuous? And by what manner do the genes tell a person it is more important to invest in his sister's children?

And, more importantly from a evolutionary perspective, is there evidence of pre-matriarchal cultures not being successful for that reason?

I apologize if you covered this before but I must have missed the other thread.

So you are suggesting that at some developmental tipping point, that genetic advantage takes a back seat to cultural advantage?
 

evilbaga

Member
Jul 2, 2010
235
0
16
Is there good data that these african cultures are more promiscuous? And by what manner do the genes tell a person it is more important to invest in his sister's children?

And, more importantly from a evolutionary perspective, is there evidence of pre-matriarchal cultures not being successful for that reason?

I apologize if you covered this before but I must have missed the other thread.

So you are suggesting that at some developmental tipping point, that genetic advantage takes a back seat to cultural advantage?
You're completely changing the signposts here. You accepted that they were more promiscuous and denied a relationship. now you are skeptical if they are.
I read it somewhere... I really cannot find it again. I cant 'prove' it.

But it makes solid sense from the selfish gene perspective.

So you are suggesting that at some developmental tipping point, that genetic advantage takes a back seat to cultural advantage?
Yes. Im suggesting that the greatest achievement of western civilization, and its basic engine, was not gee wizardry technology, but Long Term Marriages. Unfortunately, this screws over two groups - women, who now cannot share a geneset from the 'best' man. And 'alphas', who cannot impregnate multiple women.
 

blackrock13

Banned
Jun 6, 2009
40,087
0
0
Is there good data that these african cultures are more promiscuous? And by what manner do the genes tell a person it is more important to invest in his sister's children?

And, more importantly from a evolutionary perspective, is there evidence of pre-matriarchal cultures not being successful for that reason?

I apologize if you covered this before but I must have missed the other thread.

So you are suggesting that at some developmental tipping point, that genetic advantage takes a back seat to cultural advantage?
I think he would be surprised how many matriarchal societies still exist in the world. I can think of perhaps five in North America alone. many of them have been around since the dawn of modern man and earlier.
 

evilbaga

Member
Jul 2, 2010
235
0
16
I think he would be surprised how many matriarchal societies still exist in the world. I can think of perhaps five in North America alone. many of them have been around since the dawn of modern man and earlier.
Yes, and they are all back-assward places where the people live in mud huts.
 

blackrock13

Banned
Jun 6, 2009
40,087
0
0
Yes, and they are all back-assward places where the people live in mud huts.
Again you show how little you really know. It's been a while since any North American society lived in mud huts, the Adobe Indians set a side and I wouldn't be too quick to call those dwellings huts.
 
Toronto Escorts