h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

saw that in dear deidre

its where you have sex with your aunty after you take here jeans off

I still disagree ~jwf~.

Plenty of recent examples eg during the second world war women stepped very easily into male occupations and roles (and didn't like having to give them up afterwards). And British women pioneers in NZ in the 1800s stepped outside of traditional roles to an extent, again our of necessity.

Yes there are gender roles within egalitarian cultures, but they're not prescribed in the way that they are in patriarchal ones. So when it's necessary women can do 'men's' work.


There's a difference between women *have* to be in the kitchen because they're not good at the other stuff (biology determines destiny) and women usually being the ones running the house because they are the ones who raise children and it makes more sense for them to be home centred.

>> I still disagree ~jwf~. <<

Yeah, women do that don't they.


~jwf~

No we don't

Sexual drives are what evolution uses to keep the genes reproducing themselves. In other words, if your mum and dad didn't fancy each other, you'd have never been born.

Most animals just reproduce as much as possible and let their offspring compete with the offspring of others for limited resources. For some animals who put a lot of energy into producing only a few but high quality offspring the competition may be very costly.

Evolution found a way to reduce the number of competitors by preventing them from being born in the first place. You give your kids an advantage by attacking others, especially females, that you see in a sexual display. If you can't boff them yourself, stop them from boffing anyone. There's a gene that makes us want to have sex for ourselves and a gene that makes us want to stop others from having sex.

In humans this takes the form of antipornography, antiobscenity, anti anything to do with sex. Most of the posts in this thread try to give cultural or religious explanations for it but that doesn't explain why every culture and every religion has this feature. It also doesn't explain why many animals do it.

Your post Tumsup goes a long way to explain the recurrent sex scandals of American 'televangelists'. They preach a strict sexual morality to their followers (stop others from having sex) but they go ahead and do what ever they want with their private bits.

No wonder they're so opposed to evolutionary theory: Darwin hangs their dirty laundry out in public.

anhaga, you're right, when the Right Rev gets caught in the motel with Miss B Havin he may be a hypocrite but he's acting in a perfectly natural biological way.

Stanley, I don't know if you're still ing this thread but I suspect that the reason that you asked the question was that you couldn't think of a biological reason for modesty and you were going to say god did it.

On n'a pas besoin de cette hypotese.

Someone please fix my bad French here.

i think stanley has more problems than modesty now that jesus has come back, in the form of a tranny david shayler

I'd like to see some evidence that there's a clear biological determinism explanation for things that vary so widely across cultures and throughout history. Did the middle class Victorians have it, but not the working classes? And going a wee bit further back, clearly Caligula didn't have it. Mary Whitehouse had it, yes? Do both men and women have this gene? Do naturists lack it? And how does it work in homosexuals? Come on man you need to give some scientific references here if you're going to go the simple biological determinism root on this.

I really don't get this genetic explanation for every facet of behaviour. Yes our genes create our brain structures, they create hormones etc but within that Homo sapiens operates within this thing called 'culture' which operates in a variety of ways, given our basic biology.

(And apologies jwf for my last unnecessarily vehemently expressed post; blame it on my rubbish genes ).

Hi Effers, I was just off to bed when I saw your post. I promise a defense when I get up.

>>I really don't get this genetic explanation for every facet of behaviour<<

That's because it's theoretical.

Or are you saying, Tumsup, that there is a specific anti-sex gene? In which case I'd like to know it's scientific name and who and when it was discovered.

There *is* a problem with this evolutionary psychology stuff in that it's inherently untestable. Nevertheless...given the prevelance of the type of behaviour Tumsup describes, it does seem reasonable to posit a biological cause.

Effers quite rightly points out that things are a lot more complicated than that. This doeesn't necessarily kill the genetic hypothesis, though. Genetics doesn't imply determinism: gene expression is frequently dependent on environmental factors. It may well be that the (hypothetical!) anti-sex gene kicks in more or less, depending upon cultural circumstances. We observe, for example, that our own culture has oscillated between licentious and prudish over history. (And the geneticist Steve Jones points out the the Royal Navy used to have a rule that homosexuality was illegal less than forty-seven days out of port. After that, we can expect the gene to be expressed.)

Yes, evolutionary explanations for behaviour are problematic. On the other hand...we should never forget that *all* our behaviour is biological. What else?

Yes in absolute sense, everything we do is based on the biology at our disposal. But just suggesting such and such a behaviour is down to a particular behavioural eg antisex gene, is different from eg saying certain gene complexes, (because genes are expressed in different ways according to what other genes are also present), evolved to produce consciousness and learning in Homo sapiens, allowing for the ability to operate within a particular 'social', because we are essentially social creatures

Human behaviour changes in different contexts. The famous Milgram experiment demonstrated that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

And people clearly alter and adapt their behaviour during their lifetimes. The ability to change behaviour within the context of 'culture' is surely one of the reasons for our success biologically.

I've never had much time for this evolutionary psychology stuff. I find it unscientific because it cannot be properly tested; therefore it can produce no meaningful evidence.

In other words, biology isn't solely genetic. It's as much about how the organism responds and what environment it is in. You know, all that complex interconnected stuff (rather than the reductionist, it all comes down to this stuff)

I too find the kind of assertions in Tumsup's post very limited, especially when they are presented as scientific fact

I'm 2/3rds the way through an essay that I'll post a link to, and some bits from. It's a critique by Max Dashu of a book by Cynthia Eller that was a critique of the feminist interpretations of prehistory. It's covers many of the issues that have come up in this thread, plus it shows that there is considerable academic work involved in the egalitarian prehistory theories rather than them being based on just a few naked dolls (as someone put it earlier).

It also shows the very wide range of cultures that have been/are egalitarian/matrilineal from all parts of the planet.

So, lots of examples

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html


>>
Old-school academics as well as post-structuralist upstarts like to scold refractory feminists about evidence and certainties. The pretense of disinterested objectivity reminds me of what Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization: "I think it would be a very good idea." The notion that mainstream academia is somehow value-free, but feminist perspective is necessarily ideological and agenda-driven, is still widely held. Covert agendas pass easily under the banner of objectivity.
<<

>>In other words, biology isn't solely genetic

nnn...yes and no. Obviously genetics determines the nature of the organism that interacts with its environment. What we can say is that behaviour can't necessarily be predicted from genetics alone. But I don't think Tumsup was saying that.

Certainly we should be very wary about biological determinism. It's a fallacy to regard one form of behaviour (eg modesty; heterosexuality; pariarchy) as 'natural' and another (licentiousness; heterosexuality; egalitarianism) as unnatural. Even leaving aside the phenomenon of 'Exuberant Variation', there's no reason to suppose that our normative behaviour is that which is most conducive to human happiness.

Or as David Hume put it, 'Is does not beget ought'.

hello all.

Effers, I had a couple of pops last night so this morning I had to read my own posts to find out what I said. I did at one point use the word determine and I apologize for that, I'm certainly no genetic determinist. I do stand by what I said, I could have said it differently.

If you accept that the body is a consequence of development according to genetic code (subject to environmental influences) and if you accept that the brain is part of that body then you can't escape the conclusion that that brain will behave according to certain trends and that those trends will be shared by individuals sharing the same brain plan.

In insects, those trends are so simple that it might as well be called determinism. As you move up the evolutionary scale that determinism starts to break down since, in order to deal with chaos, you have to dance with it. Freedom evolves.

Ed said it better than I can but I didn't mean to say that there is a string of DNA that 'determines' antisex behaviour. I only pointed out that feelings of anger and/or disgust at witnessing others sexual display is a universal in human beings and some other animals. To say that it exists in different degrees in different people is only saying that cats come in different colours.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead is famous for going to Samoa to prove that sexual repression is a cultural artifact. She wanted to believe it, she was duped. Her 'Samoa' doesn't exist.

>if you accept that the brain is part of that body then you can't escape the conclusion that that brain will behave according to certain trends and that those trends will be shared by individuals sharing the same brain plan.<

No but you brought up a specific gene as an explanation for certain sorts of specific behaviour; nothing about trends, as you are now calling it.

The whole thing is incredibly complex. We know that the cerebral cortex is more highly developed in Homo sapiens than in any other organism, and it has the capacity to 'learn' ie new neuronal links can grow during life enabling new learning.

As far as I'm concerned if a scientific explanation is brought in to discussion you need to link to the actual experiments which give the evidence.