Re: How to delay a moving van?

In article <1iam8dw.1gfgt1uqomowxN%zeborah@xxxxxxxxx>,
zeborah@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:

David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1ialxpx.14di2qw12k3fy1N%zeborah@xxxxxxxxx>,
zeborah@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:

How about "male people, on average, are more interested in and available
for sex than female people?"
<snip>
what one would
expect from rational behavior until quite recently (i.e. until reliable
and readily available contraception), and what one would predict from
evolutionary biology.

Given how fun sex is and how useful it is to create and reinforce social
bonds, from rational behaviour and evolutionary biology one would
predict that a) pregnant women would be as interested and available as
males, perhaps even more so to make up for lost time; and b) all women
would be as interested in and available for non-tab-A-in-slot-B sex.
Yet somehow our culture doesn't assume these things as it assumes that
"randy males" trope; in fact it rather assumes the opposite.

Interesting points. But ...:

1. Evolutionary biology doesn't care about fun, although rational
behavior does.

Evolutionary biology doesn't 'care' about anything, but fun is very
relevant. (In a circular way, perhaps, but much of evolutionary biology
is circular.) As an example, an animal is more likely to survive to
reproduce if it eats tasty food than if it eats untasty food -- because
the tasty food is more likely to be high in nutritious elements and the
untasty food is more likely to be poisonous, because... well, etc.
Fun/pleasure is set up in our brains to reward us for behaviours that
promote the survival of our genes, so a certain amount of hedonism is a
useful survival trait, so from an evolutionary biology point of view we
should want to do fun things.

All of that is correct. But it means that "being fun" is the control
mechanism, not the objective. Making sex fun is, presumably, a mechanism
to get people to have babies, thus reproduce their genes. To the extent
that people manage to have non-reproductive sex, they are evading that
control mechanism--functioning, in Dawkins' wonderful sf metaphor, as
revolting robots, promoting their own objectives over those of their
genes.

....

2. One of the social bonds sexual behavior reinforces is the pair bond
associated with long term mating in our species. That makes extra-pair
intercourse risky if the pregnancy is in the context of long term
mating. If it is in the short term context, then I agree with your
point.

I made no mention of extra-pair intercourse. To be more explicit: it
would be an evolutionary advantage to a pregnant woman to be "interested
and available for" sex with her husband in order to reinforce the bond
between them so that he'll stick around.

Agreed

Yet we as a culture do not
assume as a matter of course that pregnant women are desperate for sex
with their husband 24/7 in the same way that we assume that a man is
desperate for sex with anything that moves 24/7.

I don't think we assume that a man is desperate for sex with anything
that moves 24/7--you are moving the goalposts. My claim, which you
disputed, was explicitly that "male people, on average, are more
interested in and available for sex than female people." That's
consistent with pregnant wives being willing, even eager, to have sex
with their husbands. There is a very long distance between "on average
more interested in and available for sex" and "desperate for sex with
anything that moves 24/7."

Note, incidentally, that in the discussion of statutory rape laws which
(I think) spawned this subthread, the opinion I offered was about
teenage boys given an opportunity to have sex with an attractive woman
in her twenties. That's far short of "anything that moves."

And in terms of extra-pair intercourse, a pregnant woman A in a
relationship with B who succeeds in covertly sleeping with C has an
evolutionary win: if B happens to run away then she's got a bond with C
which increases the chances that C will hang around and look after her
child. Yet we as a culture do not assume as a matter of course that
pregnant women are evolutionarily driven to cheat on their husbands in
the same way that we assume that men are evolutionarily driven to cheat
on their wives.

The evolutionary "win" of a possible bond in case of a possible
desertion--a desertion made more likely by the risk that B will detect
the activity--isn't in the same category as the win of producing a child
at no cost to oneself.

<tangent to talk about (gasp) actual sf-relevant stuff>

It would be fun to work out various other whacky "Evolutionary biology
predicts that..." theories and assign those beliefs to an alien culture.
I've done this a bit with one species who firmly believe that the, hmm,
drone gender -- whose genes get passed on only if their siblings
reproduce -- is evolutionarily programmed to help their families, that
this is therefore their overriding motivation in everything, and that
it's unnatural for them to display any kind of extra-family altruism.

Have I at some point mentioned my idea for an alien species whose
biologists have proved that the only mammals who can evolve to
intelligence are marsupials? They themselves are, of course, marsupials,
and it's easy to show that non-marsupial mammals are caught in an
evolutionary trap. Big heads mean death in childbirth unless the pelvis
gets wider, but wide pelvises mean slower running mean death from
predators. Only by having the baby born very premature and then
continued outside the pelvis--the marsupial strategy--can a mammalian
species avoid this cold logic.

After observing earth for some time, they remain puzzled as to the
identity of the intelligent species that is invisibly running things.

</tangent>

3. Non procreative sex leads to arousal, which can lead to procreative
sex.

No, you're thinking of foreplay. Non-procreative sex starts with
arousal and leads to climax. Kind of like procreative sex, really, just
without the procreation....

Do you conclude that the invention of modern contraception had no
significant effect? Isn't that the implication of arguing that
non-procreative sex, always available as an alternative, was an adequate
substitute for procreative sex?

Going back to general views about males and females, one of the things
males complain about is that females are unwilling to "go all the
way"--i.e. limit themselves to (some subset of) non-procreative sex.

4. In any case, the question is not whether women are interested in sex
but whether they would be expected to be as interested as men. All of
your arguments apply to both.

I don't think the pregnant woman one applies to very *many* men.

The original point, that a pregnant woman is at no risk of getting
pregnant due to intercourse, applies to all men. All of the time.

My argument--that a man who succeeds in
sleeping with a woman who he is not going to be having a long term pair
relationship with has gotten an evolutionary win, and the woman has
probably gotten an evolutionary loss--still remains as a factor
encouraging promiscuity in men, discouraging it in women. Hence we would
expect men to be more inclined to promiscuity than women.

A man who succeeds in _making a woman pregnant_ when he's not going to
have a long-term pair relationship with her has gotten an evolutionary
win.

So far we are agreed.

Merely having sex with her, however, he's got an evolutionary loss

Having sex has some probability of getting her pregnant, and since the
payoff to him if it happens is large, sex is an evolutionary win for him
in expected value terms.

....

And the way humans do the K-strategy thing, such that children require
time and effort to be put into them to ensure their survival, and
demonstrably do better the more people put such effort into their
raising, it's not obvious to me that genes that encourage promiscuity in
their bearers are necessarily going to do all that much better in the
long run than genes that encourage their bearers to stick around and
make sure not only that their offspring survive in order to reproduce,
but also that their offspring's offspring survive in order to reproduce.

Genes that result in a man only following the promiscuous strategy might
indeed do worse than ones that resulted in his only following the pair
mating strategy, for the reasons you suggest. Genes that permit pair
mating but also encourage short term sex when the opportunity arises,
however, do better than either.

And even if after all this there is some small net differential between
the benefits of male and female sex drives... Well, so what?

Your argument jumps from "anything that moves 24/7" to "some small net
differential" with nothing in between. How about "if there is a
substantial difference between the sexual strategies programmed by
evolution into males and females?" Why do you rule that intermediate
possibility out of court?

There'd be
net benefits if we didn't have appendices, or if our knees or eyes were
better designed -- and those things don't need any extra complicated
sex-linking programming. Evolution doesn't do things just because
they'd be a good idea.

Evolution doesn't instantly optimize--and in the case of eyes we got
stuck on the wrong fork, left behind by the cephalopods, a very long
time ago, with no easy crossover. But it does tend to produce
phenotypes "as if" designed for reproductive success. Since males and
females differ precisely in their role in reproduction, that makes it
very likely that they will have different behavioral patterns with
regard to reproduction.

The human sex drive is pretty damned necessary,
yes, but setting up a specifically male sex drive *and* a specifically
female sex drive isn't necessary, any more than it's necessary for men
to not have nipples. Why go to that effort / why would such a thing
evolve when a plain old "Mmm, sex *good*!" drive will do 99.9% of
everything you need it to do?

Because a female who follows the optimal male strategy, or a male who
follows the optimal female strategy, will be less reproductively
successful than a female following the optimal female strategy or a male
following the optimal male strategy, of course.

And, unlike the case of the eye, it doesn't require a discontinuous
change, with all the parts changed together so they still work together.
All it takes is for people to vary in their taste for promiscuity, and
for that taste to be in part heritable, with the expression affected by
gender. From there on it's a continuous change.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

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