OK, punctuated equilibrium is familiar enough, if still contentious.
For the rest, as you say, much wrong with it. Not least "men seduce
by acting; women seduce by being." Not my experience at all, except
maybe with very young women when I was very young myself. Of course
it would depend on what you mean by "acting" and "being."
Mark
At 12:03 PM 5/7/2006, you wrote:
>Greer's application of the phrase "male display" to poetry seems
>derived (though I'm not sure she's aware of it) from recent theories
>about the evolution of human language via sexual selection, which have
>been described in popular science books by authors such as Matt
>Ridley.
>
>Very briefly, the idea is this: Though evolution has traditionally
>been thought of as a slowly incremental process, there are examples of
>evolution happening by leaps -- drastic changes in a species which
>occur, in terms of evolutionary time, very suddenly. One theory is
>that such sudden changes are driven by sexual selection. For example,
>suppose in a certain species of birds females, for whatever reasons,
>are more likely to mate with a male that has a red dot on its tail.
>Thus males with red dots will have more offspring than those without,
>and those male offspring will inherit the father's red dot. But also
>-- and this is fundamentally important -- the female offspring will
>inherit their mother's tendency to prefer to mate with red dot
>males. Thus the next generation will have an increased number both of red-dot
>males and of females who prefer them, and the generation after that
>will have still more of both. The process will recycle and feed on
>itself to quickly spread both male red tail dots and female preference
>for them throughout the species. And if bigger red dots are more
>attractive to females than smaller ones, the same process will
>generate a rapid increase in the typical size of male red dots over
>the generations.
>
>Some anthropologists and prehistorians believe that human language was
>such a sudden evolutionary leap. And it's been suggested that this
>sudden leap, like others, was driven by sexual selection. If women
>are more likely to mate with men who can articulate language, their
>offspring will inherit both their father's articulateness and their
>mother's preference for articulate men, and the prevalence and
>elaborateness of that articulateness will rapidly spread through the
>species.
>
>Such at least is the theory, which of course has all sorts of things
>wrong with it, and if you want to argue with it please note that
>you're not arguing with me, since I don't claim it's true. But I do
>think it's an interesting idea, and worth pursuing to see where it
>leads. I want to preface the following remarks not with "Here's
>what's true," but with "What if this were true?"
>
>I'm not aware that any science writers have tried to connect poetry in
>particular with such an evolutionary process, but the theory does fit
>intriguingly with the fact that one of the two basic themes of poetry
>is seduction (the other is mourning.) If the theory seems sexist
>because it appropriates much of poetry as a male capability, it could
>also be seen as being at least not incompatible with feminist concerns
>about female voicelessness.
>
>Men seduce by acting; women seduce by being. That statement is
>offered as, and surely can be defended as, a description of the
>cultural reality. Yes you there in the back. "But that's only the
>cultural reality from a male point of view!" Well of course it is.
>What other view can I take? Anyway: If seduction poetry is a
>linguistic sexual display action, then it is essentially male, which
>means that women can enter into the whole half realm of poetry which
>is seduction display only by taking on a male voice. The problem of
>finding a specifically female seduction voice remains to be solved.
>
>It's interesting in this regard that the classic female seduction poem
>in western literature, Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite (a translation of
>which I posted here recently) consists entirely of an appeal to a more
>powerful (though to be sure female) third party to effect the
>seduction: the poet herself in this case performs no linguistic
>action directly for the benefit of the desired person. Or does she?
>Is the poem really addressed to an observer, the desired? I don't
>know. As usual with Sappho, I'm left admiring and grasping.
>
>--
>===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
>
>===================================
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