Tag: evolutionary psychology

In the “Moral Animal” the author presents a study about what undesirable actions by one’s partner to men and women react more, infidelity or falling in love with someone else. The study showed that, when asked to imagine their partner sleeping with someone else, men exhibited a much more extreme mental/emotional/physiological response than when imagining their partner falling in love with someone else. For women, it was quite the opposite, imagining their partner cheating on them “romantically” was more infuriating than the prospect of them cheating on them sexually. 

The evolutionary rationale behind this is as follows. For a man, if their partner cheats on them sexually, it increases the likelihood that he is going to invest his paternal resources propagating someone else’s genetic material. All of the men who have done this throughout human history are no longer in the gene pool, and thus genes which enable behaviors that avoid this situation have spread throughout the male species throughout its evolution. For a woman, emotional cheating indicates that a man will likely share more of his resources with the other woman’s offspring than with hers, decreasing the chance that her offspring will be evolutionarily fit. 

One of the most pertinent questions that society today has to answer is whether knowledge of the efficacy of birth control can change our evolutionary predilections. To a man in the evolutionary environment, gaining sexual access to a woman too quickly tended to decrease the chances of commitment and male paternal investment because ease of her participating in sexual activity with a new mate indicated higher chances of infidelity. Does that still hold true if people know that any amount of sexual activity will most likely not lead to offspring, and thus males are largely safe from being caught raising somebody else’s offspring? Maybe it is the introduction of sex into modern relationships so rapidly that is causing me to shy away from marriage and avoid commitment to current sexual partners. 

Regnerus potentially validates this point on page 65, though he does not go into the evolutionary logic behind it. “Men are more apt to morally disrespect such women as possible long-term partners and spouses due to their concern about future fidelity in the exchange relationship. At the same time, they value them as possible short term partners.” 

Regnerus focuses a lot on the ability of men to view the mating market as bifurcated, seeing a clear distinction between acting with sex in mind and acting with marriage (commitment, reproduction, male paternal investment) in mind. Their ability to do that can be theorized to be an outgrowth of men’s most lucrative evolutionary mating strategy in the evolutionary environment. 

The theory goes that men will experience the highest evolutionary rates of return if they keep in mind the high rates of paternal investment necessary to rear successful offspring. Part of the male reproductive strategy is to find a highly desirable female who is extremely evolutionarily fit, reproduce with her, and invest his paternal resources there. However, any children he has with other women still have a chance of survival without his resources, and thus the other part of the strategy is to have ‘quick flings’ to produce offspring with other women in the hopes that they will reach adulthood and be successful without him. It is likely that at least some will make it adulthood.  

Evident in this pattern is a clear distinction between sex and marriage when it comes to evolutionary goals. This concept is commonly thought of in politically incorrect terms as the “Madonna-whore dichotomy,” where men view women as candidates for either “cheap sex” to use Regnerus’ words or for commitment and sacrifice. The advent of birth control has not changed this dynamic, rather, it has simply allowed it to run amok but with far less reproductive consequences. 

Present in almost every single human society has been the expectation that females be much more selective in their choice of sexual partners than men. In many of these cases, the expectations for female behavior are actually self-imposed, with other women being the biggest detractors of women who break the sexual norms. There is an evolutionary explanation for this. 

Humans and primates and many mammals more broadly can be distinguished from other species on the planet because of the biological demands reproduction places on women. Human infants take a very long time to form in the womb, the process of birth can be very dangerous, and the infants remain completely helpless and then significantly dependent on their parents for a very long period of time. 

Human infants are distinguishable from the offspring of many other species in that they require high amounts of paternal investment in order to succeed. (as opposed to turtle offspring who are born alone and swim off to the sea immediately with no parental involvement) Maternal investment is usually assumed as a given, so the distinguishing factor that would impact reproductive results amongst human offspring is high rates of male paternal investment. Those females who mated in such a way as to secure high rates of male paternal investment throughout all of our evolutionary history have dramatically outcompeted those who haven’t, causing genes which increase the likelihood of behaviors that make women acquire a mate who will provide high rates of male paternal investment have spread throughout the species. 

Sexual selectivity amongst women is the evolutionary result of this process. The wrong choice of a sexual partner means life or death for a set of genes, and because women are the sexual gatekeepers that burden falls on them. Regnures presents evidence that validates this evolutionary line of thinking. He cites a 2012 study in the American Sociological Review on the amount of pleasure females experienced in different sexual encounters. The overwhelming consensus of the data was that the more sexual experiences with the same partner a woman has had, the higher the chances of orgasm: 11% for a first-time hookup vs. 67% for sex in a relationship lasting more than 6 months.  An evolutionary theorist would argue that since it is commitment from a male that increases the chance of successful offspring, it makes sense that the body would reward sexual behavior that increases the likelihood of that. Sex with a committed partner feels better and this should incentivize women to stay with their current partner in order to secure more male paternal investment for her offspring. 

The hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution took place in an environment that we in the first world are incredibly unfamiliar with. We know about the tribes of hunters and gatherers, small groups of people roaming around, and small villages, but the grand majority of us have not traveled to indigenous societies in less developed countries where people still live in an environment similar to this one. 

The reason I want to establish that the evolutionary environment is so foreign to modern people is that the evolutionary explanation for human behavior is incredibly concerned with this environment. It is actually very important to try to envision our species in its infancy to understand the line of argumentation that evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists present. This is also the chief reason why, though speaking in evolutionary terms can often sound insensitive, understanding that references to men and women are talking about early humans in an environment where almost all of their concerns were evolutionary should make this discussion sound much less morally charged. 

The theory goes that evolution (in the evolutionary environment) created the ‘knobs’ of human behavior that society turns up or down based on what is perceived as evolutionarily fruitful at that specific period of time. An example is the human practice of self-deprecation. There are evolutionary reasons that it developed in people, including the value in knowing one’s place in a hierarchy and not unnecessarily challenging the hierarchy and fighting losing battles.That is the knob, and society turns it, usually through how parents raise their children. Charles Darwin was highly self-critical, and much of his personal writing laments his actions and shortcomings. However, he had 10 children, 7 that lived to adulthood. Perhaps, in Victorian England, there was a value to putting oneself down? We could analyze today’s culture to try and determine how that knob should be set today

I am going to be writing a series of blog posts on the evolutionary perspective that Professor Riley alluded to when we began discussing the book “Cheap Sex”. I have been interested in evolutionary psychology for a long time and over the summer I read a book called “The Moral Animal, Why We Are The Way We Are” which gives a comprehensive overview of the field. The book presents the arguments, evidence, rationale, and moral conclusions one can derive from evolutionary psychological principles, and for each new section of the theory presented the book analyses the life of Charles Darwin to see whether he conformed with the logical conclusions of the theory he founded or not. I believe it is useful to discuss this perspective because it is intimately tied to the questions and problems that Regnerus writes about. Have birth control, shifting sex markets, and internet porn changed humans as a species, or are we acting in a predictable manner based on how we have evolved?

*Disclaimer: a lot of what I type here will sound very politically incorrect. Keep in mind I am not advocating for this position, merely presenting it. I recognize speaking in evolutionary terms frequently sounds brash and insensitive and maybe even discriminatory, but there is no way around speaking this way while presenting the argument.