Armchair evolutionary psychology

The following started out as a quick comment to a post on Jesse Marzyk’s evolutionary psychology blog (http://popsych.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/what-causes-male-homosexuality.html#comment-form). He was covering a couple of different theories of why homosexuality exists, none of which made a whole lot of sense to me (the germ theory of gayness?)

I actually got the basic idea from a reddit post of all places, and over the past year I’ve fleshed the theory out to its current state. Whether or not its right, it’s a nice piece of evolutionary logic. Enjoy.

 

Bisexual behaviour in some situations seems fairly clear-cut to me. If opposite-sex mates are unavailable, or are too risky to pursue, then it is useful for humans to pursue a strategy of engaging in non-reproductive matings with whoever *is* available in order to gain experience with relationships. Therefore young teenage girls often engage in mild bisexuality in order to get experience with sexual relationships without all that icky, dangerous “sex” stuff (children and stds at age 14? No way!). Similarly, men can be “prison gay”. It’s said that the Royal Navy ran on rum and buggery. In modern day Afghanistan it’s not gay if you’re under 30, given that it takes so long to be financially established such that you can afford a wife and family.

Of course, when the benefits of increased social experience and learning are outweighed by social censure due to prohibitions against homosexuality, gay experimentation is rare. No homo to be seen on Jersey Shore. I doubt homosexual behaviour amongst otherwise straight individuals is very common in Saudi Arabia.

Given that it can be adaptive to engage in sexual relationships with the same sex in certain circumstances, it would make sense for us to experience a certain degree of sexual attraction for the same sex. If there’s a persistent adaptive opportunity to be had shagging same-sex peers, then this information should be hard-coded. As such, some people are more attracted to the opposite sex than other.

Crucially, I would expect this trait to present as a spectrum, rather than an either/or phenomenon. Everybody’s a little gay, just some more than others. Some men are born as dick-swinging alpha males, with all kinds of inbuilt social skills out of the box. They don’t need to spend time learning to get women – these early peakers can do it from puberty onwards.

Other men are going to be a little slower to mature, and rely more on slowly learning about their environments than trusting genetically hard-coded information. For them, being a bit effeminate, staying out of fights, not competing for women too early, and getting sexual experience from members of the same sex will be a better strategy.

And, similar to autism spectrum disorder, some men will take this strategy so far that they knock themselves out of the gene pool entirely because they never sleep with women. It’s worth mentioning that strong society prohibitions against homosexuality actually *increase* levels of such homosexual genes, by forcing homosexual men to reproduce. Ditto for women, 100 years ago a homosexual woman would probably be forced into marriage and children. Gay genes aren’t an evolutionary liability if you live in a society that forces children upon you.

Anyways, it’s plausible story. I don’t know how right it is, I’m not a researcher, but I think it has potential. Comments?

Back From Vacation

Had to take a break from blogging and commenting, I was starting to do it for the wrong reasons. A few weeks of solid time spent with some guys who are more alpha than me has me back on the right track.

New books that should be on anybody’s reading list: The Dictator’s Handbook and EO Wilson’s upcoming book. I’m not going to link, you’re all perfectly capable of using google.

The biggest thing that the last few weeks have taught me: alpha behavior is something that people inflict on people who they think are below them. It’s a complicated program, not something that’s easy to consciously carry out. With practice it’s easy to consciously judge when you’re fucking it up, but carrying it off convincingly requires attitude and perseverance.

And even then, alpha males don’t act alpha around each other. It’s a more complicated dance, one designed to shore up coalitional cooperation. A mix of costly signaling and very complex, largely unstudied game theory. This idea is still largely on an intuitive level for me, but read about those two books (or better yet, read them) and you’ll have a better idea where I’m coming from.

On Heritability of Personality and Racial Stereotypes

Something that always bothered me in the past was the assertion that “so-and-so doesn’t understand country-x, they have a different culture”. For example, the frequent assertion by Chinese people that they don’t need Western democracy, because their culture is different. Chinese people are people too: how could they be exempt from the “worst system in the world (apart from all the other ones)”?

However recent work on the rapid pace of contemporary human evolution has led me to change my mind. You’ll often see me pimping out books like The 10,000 Year Explosion or Before The Dawn, both of which elaborate on this idea and the evidence for it.

Let me begin with an uncontroversial idea: personality is at least somewhat heritable. If your dad was friendly to everyone, it’s likely that you will be as well. If your twin is a lazy pot smoker, you’ll probably be similar. What’s more, the extent to which your personality is flexible must be defined by your genes too (see: Pinker’s The Blank Slate). If you’re susceptible to having your personality modified by your environment, you’re only like that because you’re genetically programmed for that to be possible.

And so things like respect for authority, or teamwork, or laziness, or trust for strangers are all potentially heritable traits. Sure, they can be taught, or be an artifact of the local environment, but it’s entirely possible for someone to be genetically programmed to be either very friendly, or homicidally paranoid.

If something can be genetically programmed, then it is very likely that it will be evolutionarily selected if the long-term environment makes this advantageous. Imagine that myself and all my ancestors have lived in a dangerous place like the Papua New Guinea highlands, where murder accounts for upwards of 30% of all male deaths. We’re likely to be mistrustful of strangers, oriented towards short term, rather than long term goals (could die next week…), have fewer psychological inhibitions against killing and a few other traits too. These would be perceived as local cultural traits by your average anthropologist, however it is likely that these traits would also be genetically programmed, and thus highly resistant to imposed cultural change.

Imagine a group who has lived for thousands of years as rice farmers. This is an occupation requiring long hours of work, trust of strangers, teamwork, respect for authority and social conformity. Sounds an awful lot like your average Asian person, and rapid human evolution predicts that these traits will also be in-built and resistant to cultural change.

For most of human history it has been perfectly acceptable to suggest that different races have different personalities, however in recent decades this has become politically incorrect. However it is now clear that we were right all along: evolution acts quickly enough for small differences to exist between ethnic groups, and these differences are consistent with the requirements of local environments.

Thus, when Europeans, with a long history of personal freedom mixed with group cooperation, attempt to force democracy on groups with a long history of intertribal warfare and mistrust of strangers, it should be no surprise when it fails. The modern Chinese government is essentially Facist, yet this should be no surprise given their high degree of respect for authority and willingness to submit to the requirements of the group at the expense of personal freedom.

Furthermore, given the long history of economic participation by women in European society, but a long history of subjugation in other societies, it should be no surprise that European women push for personal freedoms much harder than women in other countries.

Next time someone tells you that we need to “change the culture” of a place, remember this principle. Culture comes from somewhere, and that place is the aggregate of evolutionarily selected personalities. Different long-term environment equals different mix of personalities equals different individual strategies for survival within that environment. Afghanistan can switch to liberal feminism no more quickly than Westerners can switch to patriarchal tribalism.

Women’s conscious perception of their relationship criteria

This is turning into fucking twitter, short posts.

Why do women have long criteria of their ideal man, then break it without conscious awareness of why?

See Rob Kurzban’s Hypocrite. Conscious perceptions exist to drive communication. People need to communicate things that look good for them in a social situation, and to not be consciously aware of things that make them look bad.

Relationships are socially acceptable. Slutty chicks might steal your man, but relationship girls are safe to be friends with. Therefore, in most situations, chicks won’t be aware of their slutty orientation thus helping them lie about that fact.

On Relative Perceptions of Social Status Hierarchies

“Ian, on any trip there will be one guy who’s a complete cock. If you don’t know who that guy is, if everyone you’re with is a good bloke, it’s probably you.”

Never trust anybody who writes a blog

Seriously, the more alpha I get the less motivation I have. Blogs are a definite sign of attention seeking behaviour.

By the way, the previous article, those were books not articles. Try amazon, they’re worth the read.

Been busy

Been busy with work

Read On Intelligence, Before the Dawn and The 10,000 Year Explosion