From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 19:01:17 MDT
> >For a man, the ideal strategy was to be more promiscuous.
> No solid evidence whatsoever has been produced as to the
> relative promiscuity of early man versus early woman.
That kind of evidence would be difficult to find, and I don't
know of any either. What I was trying to do is posit a reason
for the evidence I did offer--that female victims of sexual
abuse suffer more damage that males. There /is/ plenty of
evidence for that, and the evolutionary explanation is pretty
compelling--at least as compelling, if not more, than 90% of
what is commonly accepted in human psychology courses.
> Several recent studies based on DNA sampling have projected that
> as much as 25% of children may not be fathered by the husband of a
> given women. This has led many scholars to posit that early woman
> may have taken on a larger number of partners than previously supposed.
As I mentioned, there's no particular selection pressure on women
for the carefully selected "co-investment" mate to be the same man
as her selected "good genes" mate; Ridley speculates that this is a
common pattern, and I don't doubt that many women then and today may
have extended the pattern to more than two (there are even societies
with explicit polyandries). Nonetheless, the overwhelming economic
risk of completely random promiscuity for a woman compared to the
complete lack of similar risk for a man is too large to /not/ have
been an evolutionary pressure, and it does serve to explain the
likely origin of many admittedly cultural biases and some hard data
such as the study cited.
I'll also admit to a data point for the counterargument: the same
pressures should exist for Bonobos, who have obviously not fallen
upon the same solution (Bonobo females screw as often as they eat;
including with inanimate objects and other females). I'm a big fan
of hard evidence, and I admit there's little here. In the absence
of proof, one should base opinions on plausible and likely
explanations rather over desires. Perhaps it is my subconscious
desire to justify male promiscuity that makes me want to believe
this explanation (I doubt it; I was a virgin at 25 and have not been
promiscuous since, so I have nothing to justify). But that works
both ways: desire for political equality can cloud one's judgment of
real physical and psychological differences (I'll call that "Sharon
Presley Syndrome").
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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