Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

I love me some Echidne of the Snakes, who has the chops to thoroughly and repeatedly discredit the two or three standard tropes of evolutionary psychology that are all we ever hear of it.

But when it came to dismantling the serially disgraceful Satoshi Kanazawa could have stopped right here

Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence.

Read the quote in context here.

10,000 years is as little as 1% of the estimated age of homo sapiens. And at most a quarter of the age of what at least used to be called our subspecies, homo sapiens s.

For most of that time our sizes, shapes, and colors may have varied but our brains? Probably not so much.

Which means we might not have needed much intelligence 10,000 years ago. (coughbullshitcough!) But we had the intelligence anyway!

It’s not even an insult to Kanazawa that a child born 40,000, or 500,000, or possible even a million years ago but educated today would stand the same chance as Kanazawa of landing a professorship in economics and political science at the London School of Economics. (The insult would be to say anyone, from any era, with more intelligence than he would have chosen a less disreputable line of work.)

At any rate, the fact that, need it or not, we have the same size brains today that we had 10,000 years ago and beyond… but didn’t need them until recently undercuts rather then reinforces Kanazawa’s fantasies about the evolution of human behavior. That a professor at a fucking school of economics would overlook, oh, say, theories of rational, enlightened self-interest in favor of biologically determined behavioral “central planning” says pretty much all you need to know about the professor and… the institution that chooses to retain him.

Boy, where would Evolutionary Psychology and its more deterministic uncle Sociobiology be without the sexual revolution?

All that seed-spreading. All that “natural promiscuity” among men. All that “natural reticence” (coughRule Number Onecough) in women.

What do you suppose it would have looked like if it had been proposed not in 1975 but in, say, 1875. That was at the height… but also near the end… of the 3,000-year-old male-chastity and semen-conservation movement when Kellogg’s corn flakes and Graham’s flour and crackers were sold over the counter as it were to promote what was then the very, very popular idea of sexual and seminal “continence” in men. What if it had been proposed in India today, where Ayurvedic medical theory still holds that semen is a vital essence, even single drops of which are expended only at a man’s peril?

What if it had been proposed by the ancient Greek athletes, warriors, philosopher, and physicians?

What if it had been proposed in the U.S. or England as recently as 1957?!?!?

I’m… pretty sure you’d hear all manner of research “proving” that instead of profligately screwing anything that moved and then moving on you’d hear earnest, intent, and scrupulously collated research papers “proving” that men value marriage as a way to insure the products of their “investments” of precious-bodily fluids were kept safe and healthy until they reached their own reproductive years. I’m sure you’d hear “just so” stories about how harem-owning Sultans and polygamist Mormons did their level best to sequester and impregnate their myriad wives as conservatively as possible in order to protect their own health. I’m also pretty sure Satoshi Kanazawa would still be implying that Russian women are whores, but based instead on suppositions about their “evolutionary” desire to ruthlessly and promiscuously extract as much semen as possible from as many men as possible.

In other words there still might be such a thing as evolutionary psychology but I’m pretty sure that when it came to research human sexual behavior it would look almost completely different than it does today.

For one thing I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be so single-mindedly obsessed with proving that sexual attitudes that are scarcely more than a century old… and possibly less than 35 years old!... have been the sexual status quo since time out of mind.

Which, I might add, the highly-contingent timing of evolutionary psychology and sociology don’t undermine the concept that components of behavior are shaped by selective pressure. Such behavior is clearly demonstrable in animals and even plants. And it’s very hard to imagine human behaviors, even sexual ones, weren’t similarly shaped.

It does however tend to undermine many of their most often-repeated, and lurid, popular, and bias-confirming hypotheses about gender.

Summary: Having established that many evolutionary psychologists have studied no biology since high-school we turn to the question do evolutionary psychologists study psychology? Plus, challenging an accusation that criticism of ev-psych comes from “creationists.”

Via a tip from Twitter, reporter Kyle Wind of the Hudson Valley Daily Freeman says

NEW PALTZ — A SUNY New Paltz psychology professor attributes the evolutionary importance of maintaining close social bonds to his study’s finding that people are more upset by the idea of a spouse or significant other cheating with a friend or relative than with a stranger.

To conduct the study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in late November, researchers surveyed two groups of college students to explore infidelity in heterosexual relationships through the “identity of the interloper,” said Professor Glenn Geher, one of the academics behind the study and the chairman of SUNY New Paltz’s Psychology Department.

...

From a “strict evolutionist perspective,” Geher said, “one might predict that we’d be more OK with our partner cheating with, for instance, our brother, who shares 50 percent of my genetic combination, but that’s definitely not what happens.”

...

Researchers actually quantified the level of distress based on the identity of the person with whom participants’ partners would theoretically have sexual encounters by assigning rankings.

In the first sample, the group’s 194 women rated the thought of a partner cheating with their mothers as most upsetting, followed by, in order, daughters, sisters, friends, aunts, former lovers, nieces, cousins, co-workers, and strangers at the bottom of the list.

Similarly, the 65 men rated distress levels over the idea of their significant others’ sexual infidelity with their fathers at the top of the list followed by brothers, sons, friends, uncles, former lovers, cousins, co-workers, nephews, and strangers, according to the study.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m going to stop right there, having also left out a bunch of other… fascinating declarations about what Glen Geher says must be true about evolved behavior because one commenter, j2bryson, asked a really important question about the significance of that ordering.

“I wonder if this tells us anything about indentification with one’s partner, as these are the same people one shouldn’t one’s self have sex with.”

As usual I don’t have unpaid access to academic journals so I’m just going to assume that Geher meticulously documents how his experiment distinguishes ordinary social and psychological reactions to the prospect of near-incestuous relationships from evolutionarily-directed ones.

For instance while determining that his late-adolescent (i.e. university student) research subjects weren’t thrilled with the idea of a partner having sex with mom or dad did he he carefully control for differences in the same student’s reaction to the prospect of mom and dad having sex with each other? Because, dude, most young people cover their ears and go “la la la” about that.

For instance did he spend time discussing the peculiarly popular genre of written and photo porn with labels like “hot wife” and “loving wives” seem to have on middle-aged men? Did he assay the relative popularity of these stories based on the affinities of the approved-of interlopers who, as I recall, very often involve male relatives, best friends, and employers or employees?

And of course did he do any screening to answer j2bryson elementary question about people’s well-documented aversion to provide controversial answers to controversial questions?*

In other words while hopping all over the place trying to demonstrate evolutionary psychology did he do any psychology psychology?

Until proved otherwise I’ll assume, of course, that the answer is yes on all counts and that Geher’s confident that despite his small and narrow sample size he’s adequately filtered out all possible noise from his data such that the only possible explanation for his results involve inherited behavior selected for over many thousands of generations and preserved for many thousands more.

Ok, I’m not. I’m pretty sure he did none of those things. But if I find out he did all that, and that his findings are indeed incontrovertible, then you’ll see the retraction right here.

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What puzzles me is why evolutionary psychologists rarely investigate the almost certainly selected for tendency in humans, especially young adults, to gravitate towards group conformity that j2bryson. It’s easily reproduced (in fact it’s difficult to avoid.) It’s almost certainly less complex demonstrating a general human behavior than the kind of highly-contingent sexually dimorphic behavior. Especially since the gendered nature of that behavior often dissolves or even reverses as individuals age. But no, despite complexities that make their tasks almost exponentially more difficult it’s all sex or nothing at all with these guys.

I mention this in part to counter a conceit, forwarded by a number of Evolutionary Psychologists including Prof. Gher (pdf) that the only alternative to their specific variety of evolutionary psychology_ is either religious fundamentalism or…

...a new kind of creationist (Ehrenreich & McIntosh, 1997), so to speak, rooted in secular intellectualism. These so-called new creationists are, in fact, very different from fundamentalist Christians in their ideological foundation. The new creationists may be conceptualized as academics and scholars who study varied aspects of human affairs from the perspective of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM; Pinker, 2002), a model for understanding human behavior which is largely premised on the notion of the blank slate.

First of all, sorry, whatever else one might call Barbara Ehrenreich she’s got enough history of science credentials to deserve better epithets. Second of all, as I think I demonstrate pretty consistently including in this post above, one can be entirely sympathetic to the notion of natural selection on behavior… while still being completely impatient with sloppy methodology, conclusion overreach, and unbelievably consistent status-quo-oriented selection bias in subject matter in the face of almost no basic research. That professors and department heads must resort to accusations of secular “creationism” in order to fend of criticism from other scientists speaks volumes.

Following up on my previous post about the latest g-spot debunking researcher.

I mentioned earlier that in the early 20th Century Freudians accused women who responded to external clitoral stimulation of being immature, repressed, and otherwise sexually incomplete. Then in the 1970s, after Masters & Johnson, David Rubin, etc., women who responded to vaginal stimulation rather than “correct” external-clitoral stimulation were thought to be... immature, repressed, sexually incomplete, and/or in thrall to patriarchal notions about intercourse. (In her big report Shere Hite sounded particularly exasperated about women who claimed to enjoy penetration.)

Of course the whole debate — Freudian, sex “revolutionary,” and feminist alike— was still patriarchal to the core. In fact migrating genital stimulation to the external clitoris completed the dominant notion that women’s internal genitals were an utterly passive emptiness of interest only to penises going into and babies coming out of, end of story.

This latest research about the non-existence of the g-spot seems to be part of that same tradition by the way. Via Debbie Notkin at Body Impolitic and Dr. Petra Boynton it turns out that back in 2005 the same researchers who are now debunking the g-spot published another twins-based study on women’s orgasms. As an article in The Guardian put it

Tim Spector of St Thomas’s hospital in London, who led the research, said: “The theory is that the orgasm is an evolutionary way of seeing if men can prove themselves to be likely good providers or dependable, patient and caring enough to look after the kids.”

It gets better though

The findings suggest the failure of some women to orgasm regularly is not a dysfunction, but a sophisticated mate-selection strategy that evolved during prehistoric times.

...

Women who orgasm very easily may be more likely to be satisfied with poor quality men.

“Perhaps women who had orgasms too easily weren’t very good selectors,” Professor Spector said.

He said it, with his bare face hanging out, here.

Never mind that these same researchers consciously discarded women who's "common use of digital stimulation ... may bias the results." Never mind that they excluded women who had never had intercourse. Never mind that they asked somewhat... leading questions like "Do you believe you have a so called G spot, a small areas the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?" They used twins! They're evolutionary psychologists! It must be true!

Keeping women’s genitals passive responders to men’s prowess instead of, say, active, sophisticated, and highly-organized systems of organs in active, sophisticated, and highly-organized autonomous human beings is in keeping with the same researcher’s g-spot conclusions as well.

No-sex class much?