--
Nicholas M. Gotts
The Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen AB15 8QH
Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1224 395266 (direct)
Tel: +44 (0)1224 395000
Fax: +44 (0)1224 395010
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/fearlus
On 28-Jan-09 at 11:14 pm, Keith Henson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Nick Gotts <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> 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:
>
>>> 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.
>
> snip
>
>> 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?
>
> Azar Gat's paper "The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory
> And The Causes Of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting."
> http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf It's not like
> overpopulation is new. People have had the reproductive capacity to
> fill their niche and then some for at least a million years. How else
> would we have spread all around the world? As to war (fighting,
> clashes, pick any term) how else were human numbers brought down?
> It's not like humans have serious predators except for other humans.
> That's the consequence of being the top predator.
Starvation of course. Modern h-g women are well-known not to have a child more than once in 4-5 years. This is maintained partly by the depression of fertility caused by breast-feeding - at least when food supplies are limited - and partly by cultural norms. Of course if there is empty and usable habitat, h-g societies will expand into it, but there is no reason to assume that in general, populations will expand and bring about inter-group fighting where there is no such territory. I'm not saying this will not happen, but fighting is always a risky option. Nomadic h-g groups will in general have a strong incentive to avoid such clashes, or indeed being too close to other groups, since resources will be most available in areas others are not using.
>
>>Among contemporary h-gs individual murder and clashes between small groups are
> common, but war is most certainly not.
>
> "During a period of 20 years, Warner (1937: 157-8) estimated death
> rate for the Murngin was 200 men out of a total population of 3000 of
> both sexes, of whom approximately 700 were adult males. This amounts
> to a range of 30 percent of the adult males. Violent mortality among
> the women and children is not mentioned. Pilling's estimate of at
> least 10 percent killed among the Tiwi adult males in one decade comes
> within the same range (1968: 158). The Plains Indians showed a deficit
> of 50 percent for the adult males in the Blackfoot tribe in 1805 and
> 33 percent deficit in 1858, . . . "
I'll follow up your references.
>
>>Why is it unlikely that mating systems fell outside the modern range?
>
> Can you present a plausible example that falls outside current human
> mating systems? The most divergent I can think of is Tibetan.
Complete promiscuity as in chimpanzees. Group marriage. "Chain" marriage (where an older man marries a younger woman, she later marries a younger man in addition, etc).
>
>> 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.
>
> For all examples I know about, the genetic selective factors don't
> differ much over the entire range of hunter gatherer groups. For
> example, rich environments are associated with a few men having more
> wives but that has little if any effect on the kinds of personality
> and physical traits that are favored by selection. From Gat:
>
> "To how many wives could the most successful men aspire? There was a
> significant environmental variation here. In the arid Central Desert,
> four, five, or six wives were the top. However, in the more rich and
> productive parts of Arnhem Land and nearby islands in the north, a few
> men could have as many as ten to twelve wives, and in some places, in
> the most extreme cases, even double that number. There was a direct
> correlation between resource density, resource accumulation and
> monopolization, social ranking, and polygyny.13 Naturally, the
> increase in the number of a man's wives generally correlated with his
> reproduction rate (number of children)."
Why would this not make a difference in the traits selected for? It seems quite obvious that it would!
>
>>> 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 emerging evidence is sure strong for such psychological traits
> such as ranking potential mates. Men prefer young women, women prefer
> socially powerful men. As far as I know, this is universal across
> cultures. It isn't much of a jump to assume these psychological
> traits (modules if you like) are the result of evolutionary selection.
>
It is an enormous jump, when there are perfectly satisfactory alternative explanations.
You get exactly the same "pretty young + rich old" pairings among gay men, and have
you never heard of gigolos? Men have held most of the resources for centuries, so
cultural conditioning is a quite sufficient explanation.
>>The Yanomamo are not h-gs, so I'm not sure what you think their relevance is.
>
> "The Yanomamo are hunter and horticulturalists rather than pure
> hunter-gatherers. However, the fundamental question in dispute is
> relevant to hunter-gatherers as well." (Gat)
That's an assertion, not an argument. I'll read Gat's paper and see if it is supported.
>
>>What is your evidence for the claim that "capture-bonding" is near universal?
>
> I am not aware of any cases where the full conditions existed to
> elicit "Stockholm syndrome" but then failed to do so. I am certainly
> eager to be informed on such cases.
>
That's not what I asked. you claimed that "capture-bonding" (men kidnapping and raping women,
and the latter then bonding with them) happens in almost all cultures, and (implicitly) can be assumed to have
done so throughout the Paleolithic. It is not at all clear that so-called "Stockholm syndrome", or any of the other
disparate phenomena you brought in (hazing, military training, spousal abuse, consensual S&M) have any relevance to this.
> snip
>
>>> 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.
>
> I hardly see how. Evolution has no reason to stop because humans
> started practicing agriculture. There is strong evidence lactose
> tolerant genes spread like wildfire in groups that kept dairy animals.
> It doesn't mean that older traits are going to disappear or even
> become less common unless they are in direct conflict with new
> conditions. I don't understand why you ascribe such a rigid model to
> evolutionary psychology.
Of course selection has continued, and I'm well aware of the lactose case. However,
to the extent this applies to psychological traits (which is completely unknown, given
the enormous plasticity of human behaviour), it would undermine the claims of
universality evopsych makes.
>
> Of course, Clark's work *is* politically incorrect.
>
I'm afraid anyone who uses the term "politically incorrect" immediately loses a
lot of credibility as far as I'm concerned: it's usually a sign that someone wants
to make racist or sexist claims without being called on them.
> snip
>
>>>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.
>
> Again, you are using a rigid definition of war where I am using it in
> the broad sense that might even include chimpanzee groups killing off
> neighbors. Pick your preferred term for organized killing between
> groups prior to agriculture and I will use that.
You have given no evidence whatever that this was universal or anywhere near it
in the Paleolithic. Clearly, there are potential advantages to members of a group that
kills others in this way. There are also clear disadvantages, and we have no way of knowing what
the balance between these was over the course of the Paleolithic.
>>>
>>> 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?
>
> Can you provide a few URLs that point to some of these other "adequate
> explanations"?
Not immediately, although I can certainly find some. However, some possible answers
are immediately obvious:
1) That Europeans in general, and their elites in particular, had
learned by bitter experience that war causes immense destruction and suffering, and could see
that further wars among themselves could well be even worse.
2) That no sufficient reason for such wars had arisen. It's worth noting, as a counterexample
to your hypothesis, that the 19th century in Europe was comparatively peaceful (no general
wars between 1815 and 1914, what wars there were mostly fought between professional soldiers
for limited aims) - and that this was a time of extremely rapid population growth.
3) That institutions were set up to avoid such wars: EU, NATO, UN, Council of Europe, etc.
>
> Are any other explanation rooted in biology? Specifically in the root
> of biology, that is evolution?
You assume everything in human behaviour must have such an explanation. This
is true only in a trivial sense - that most of the things we do require language,
social interaction, planning, etc.
>
> Most I have seen are sociological "explanations" that at best are
> circular. Sociology is this floating, isolated piece of human
> knowledge. Other human knowledge is one seamless piece where physics
> merges at the edges with chemistry, chemistry into biochemistry and
> biochemistry into biology.
You evidently know nothing of sociology. The useful parts of it are closely linked to
social psychology, economics, history, anthropology...
>
>>> 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?
>
> Looking at historical population growth curves. That's how I know it.
That only tells you the population grew. It does not tell you that people were
maximising their number of offspring - so you don't know the latter.
>
>>> 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.
>
> How? Specifically what can I do, or even what can a government do to
> promote "these changes" in Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia or Darfur?
>
The answer would be different in different cases of course; but in general, there
will be grassroots organisations supporting women's rights. Support them. Micro-credit
is also effective. Obama has just taken a massive step in the right direction by
rescinding the ban on US funding of organisations that have any connection
with abortion.
>> 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.
>
> I don't see any of these areas of study offering even an understanding
> of the situation much less a path out of the problems.
>
> If you do, don't keep it a secret.
You clearly haven't looked, and I suspect have no intention of doing so. If I'm
wrong, start with institutional economics, world-system theory (Chase-Dunn in particular),
the social psychology and experimental economics work on altruism/cooperation
and conflict, and demographic work on recent changes in birth rates.
>
> Keith Henson
--
Please note that the views expressed in this e-mail are those of the
sender and do not necessarily represent the views of the Macaulay
Institute. This email and any attachments are confidential and are
intended solely for the use of the recipient(s) to whom they are
addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not read,
copy, disclose or rely on any information contained in this e-mail, and
we would ask you to contact the sender immediately and delete the email
from your system. Thank you.
Macaulay Institute and Associated Companies, Macaulay Drive,
Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, AB15 8QH.
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
X-GWTYPE:USER
FN:Gotts, Nick
TEL;WORK:01224 395266
EMAIL;WORK;PREF;NGW:[log in to unmask]
N:Gotts;Nick
END:VCARD
|
