--
Nicholas M. Gotts
The Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen AB15 8QH
Scotland, UK
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http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/fearlus
On 27-Jan-09 at 8:19 pm, Keith Henson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Nick Gotts <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> On 26-Jan-09 at 9:55 pm, Keith Henson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>> There are many very similar definitions for the human EEA. they all
>>> stress that all humans lived as hunter-gatherers since our line split
>>> from the chimps up to 10,000 years ago. A more technical definition
>>
>> Er, make that about 7,000,000 years. Still, what's 3 orders of magnitude?
>
> The split with the chimps was more or less 7 million years ago. About
> 10 k years ago some humans started living as farmers. Sorry if my
> statement wasn't clear.
Ah, I see. I did think this was a bizarre error!
>>
>>> is the weighted contribution to genetic selection of the physical and
>>> social environments humans lived in up to the present. Contemporary
>>> hunter gatherer groups are considered the closest to this at present,
>>
>> Weighted how and over what period? Which hunter-gatherers? Inuit? Khoisan?
> Shoshone? We simply don't know
>> much about the so-called EEA: the size and structure of social groups, the
> frequency of conflict, mating/matrimonial systems, the
>> main sources of nutrition (which of course varied greatly over time and
> space). Nor is it obvious that cognition
>> and motivation divide into the neat little packages evopsych requires.
>
> We actually know a great deal about human hunter gatherer groups. Not
> only do with have contemporary and near contemporary examples, but we
> know a great deal about how they lived from ecological modeling. They
> lived in small groups where the group size was controlled by the
> ability of the ecosystem within reach to feed them. With few if any
> exceptions, they reproduced till they overfilled the ability of the
> ecosystem to feed them and then groups went to war if something else
> didn't reduce the population. So war was more or less constant. It
> is unlikely that mating systems were outside the known ones, all of
> which (for example) require males to attain a degree of status before
> they get much nookie.
>
Contemporary hunter-gatherers, and most near-contemporary ones, are atypical of what Paleolithic h-gs in at least two respects:
they are confined to areas of very low productivity, where agriculture and pastoralism are not feasible (hence, their group size and
structure will differ from h-gh societies in richer environments); and they have all had prolonged
contact with non-h-g societies. We know these contacts have radical cultural effects: e.g. all Central African "pygmy" groups speak
Niger-Congo languages, although these almost certainly came to the area with iron-age agriculturalists from West Africa, and all such groups trade with settled peoples for tools, agriculturally-derived foods, etc. What is your evidence for the claims that almost all such societies overfilled their environments' capacity to feed them, then went to war? Among contemporary h-gs individual murder and clashes between small groups are common, but war is most certainly not. Why is it unlikely that mating systems fell outside the modern range?
It is likely that at least some Paleolithic h-gs were sedentary or semi-sedentary, exploiting rich food resources, like the recent societies of the Pacific north-west, and the pre-agricultural (mesolithic) Natufian of the Levant. Such peoples live quite differently from nomadic h-gs in impoverished environments. We have little if any idea what proportion of Paleolithic people lived in this way, although there is evidence that at least some did so in Ice Age Europe. Hence, we have no idea how to "weight" different social circumstances, even if we understood the selective pressures in different forms of h-g society.
> Evolution, of course, doesn't require "neat little packages." It
> works just fine with sloppy traits. Selection does not have to be
> universal either, only about 1 in ten women were captured in any given
> generation (if the Yanamano data is representative) but the
> capture-bonding psychological mechanism is nearly as universal in
> human populations as walking.
>
The point about "neat little packages" is that this is exactly what evopsych assumes: cognitive "modules" for foraging, mate choice, status competition, etc. We simply don't know whether this is true. The Yanomamo are not h-gs, so I'm not sure what you think their relevance is. What is your evidence for the claim that "capture-bonding" is near universal?
>>> though some (Dr. Gregory Clark) argue that particularly strong
>>> selection happened in the centuries leading up to the industrial
>>> revolution.
>>
>> In other words, no-one knows what selective forces were acting when.
>
> Dr Clark is working in a time frame where there are written records.
> So he can make a hell of a case about the strong selection forces from
> the mid 1200s to 1800 in England. Recent selection of course overlays
> older selection that fairly well fixed a lot of traits (like
> capture-bonding and the behavioral switch that leads populations into
> wars).
Clark's work, if correct, would of course undermine the claimed universality of traits supposedly selected for in the mythical EEA.
>
>>> The Wikipedia article is an ok place to start on this
>>> subject.
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology
>>>
>>> This is excellent background:
>>> http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
>>>
>>> There are about 750 links and 140 books that Google finds for the phrase.
>>>
>>>>> If you want to prevent war in the long term, figure out what it takes
>>>>> for women to decide to reduce the number of kids they have to
>>>>> replacement (or below). Or figure out some way to increase economic
>>>>
>>>> We know that: educate girls, improve the status of women, make contraception
>>> and abortion readily available.
>>>
>>> I don't believe anyone understands the mechanisms that lead to women
>>> deciding to have small numbers of children. For example the status of
>>> women changed much more slowly than the birth rate in China and Japan.
>>> But if you do have a model, I would be most interested, especially in
>>> how it might apply to Arab or Islamic countries with high birth rates.
>>
>> I didn't say it was the only way to reduce birth rates, but it does appear
> to be completely reliable.
>> The reason is also, if you think about it, bleedin' obvious, and does not
> require
>> backing from pseudo-scientific just-so stories: women take the risks of
> pregnancy and childbirth, and most of the work of child-rearing.
>> Give them greater social power and more options, and they'll have fewer
> children.
>
> I don't disagree with your points in the above paragraph, but let me
> give you an example. About 40 years ago the Irish women, including
> those in Northern Ireland, reduced their birth rate to near
> replacement. I make the case in my paper "Evolutionary Psychology,
> memes and the Origin of War" that the combination of low population
> growth and modest economic growth resulted in rising income per
> capita--obviously. I make the claim on EP grounds that rising income
> per capita can be expected to shut off behavioral mechanisms (such as
> the enhanced propagation of xenophobic memes) that in times gone by
> and even today synchronized a tribe's (nation's) warriors for a do or
> die attack on neighbors. This model is based on wars being
> genetically costly and that you have to expect mechanisms to evolve
> that would limit wars to situations when the genetic consequences of
> not having a war were worse.
This sounds to me like a load of hooey. You have provided no evidence that war was near-universal in Paleolithic
times. (Ironically, it is far more likely among sedentary h-gs than among the "small groups" you hypothesize, as the former have the manpower for sustained conflict, and far more possessions to defend and to steal.) Wars between chiefdoms or states are seldom "do or die" - the main exception probably being when pastoralist groups run out of grazing. Most wars of which we have historical records have resulted from competition between elites for wealth and power - and are also used to cement elite power over the bulk of
the elite's own population.
>
> So you would expect low to zero population growth to be associated
> with groups who not starting wars (or related). So EP makes a case
> for understanding such observations as the small number of wars in
> Europe post WW II.
>
Since there are many other adequate explanations, why should we take this sort of speculation seriously?
> But EP is no help in figuring out why Irish women (on average) made a
> major reduction in the number of kids they had. (Or the rest of
> Europe before that.) After all, easy birth control was not a feature
> of the stone age. The usual response for animals seeing good times is
> to have all lthe offspring they can. That was the human response up
> till not so long ago and still is in much of the world.
How do you think you know that?
>
> It may be "bleedin' obvious" to you, but I don't understand how women
> obtained "greater social power and more options" OR how this might
> come about in parts of the world that are still have high birth rates.
What I said was "bleedin obvious" was that if women gain greater social power and more options, they will
have fewer children - so if we want to halt population growth, we should promote these changes.
To understand how they have come about to varying extents in many societies, and why they have not in some, you need to look beyond
supposed universal human traits selected in the "EEA", to history, economics and sociology.
>
> Keith Henson
>
> PS. On average women still have 1 plus kids. That indicates a model
> where women put a decreasing value on children beyond one or two.
> What is the function and where eoes it come from?
Your assumption that there is such a "function" applicable across time and space is unjustified.
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