From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Aug 16 2002 - 09:10:11 MDT
Damien adds
> [Lee writes]
>> few [people] can pretend to have one set of motives while
>> secretly harboring another without at least giving tiny signs.
>> So women would evolve the ability to see through such deception,
>> and conclude---either logically or on the basis of intuition---
>> that this particular man was in some ways a phony.
>>
>> So an arms race ensues: the genes' strategy for some men will
>> continue to evolve even better patterns of deception, and women's
>> detectors will also evolve correspondingly.
>
> This is routine ev psych. I gather that sociopaths/psychopaths are often
> compellingly persuasive to their victims exactly because they *don't*
> convey that subtle blip unintentionally revealing the cognitive/affective
> glitch or doublespeak.
This instantly raises the question, Why haven't their genes come
to dominate? How can it be that the other two classes of men in
this extremely simplified break-down---namely the genuinely
altruistic (from a woman's point of view) and the non-sociopaths
who simply feign altruism around women---have succeeded evolutionarily
against the sociopathic?
> I *think* this damaged module has even shown up in brain scans
> (or rather failed to showed up where it ought to have done); a
> quick google didn't settle this.
Perhaps this genetic flaw (from our perspective, of course) also
has other repercussions besides a tendency to have lots of offspring.
For example, before many opportunities to mate have arisen, such
people have already run afoul of society's other rules, and perhaps
already have a criminal record or have been shunned or killed.
Lee
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