Hi Everyone,
I am responding in "batch" mode to several comments here:
> From: "Santos, Ines" <INES92@psy.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 15:53:54 GMT
>
> By concealing their estrus, or, as it is argued by displaying it all
> the time, they diffuse the attention of the males and therefore stand a
> better chance of choosing to have sex with someone who is more likely
> to help looking after the children.
This hypothesis suggests that unadvertised (or misadvertised) estrus
throughout the cycle enhances female choice, which is to the advantage
of the female. Force would become less of a liability insofar as the
likelihood of becoming pregnant at any particular time was concerned,
but it seems as if it might become more of a liability overall, because
survival and well-being are at issue too, not just reproductive choice
and outcome.
> I do not know whether we are going to cover this in
> lectures, but it seems to me that we can reason and analyse our
> behaviour and make choices.
We will indeed cover it. The big question about sociobiology and
cognition is: what role does cognition play? It is clearly proximal,
rather than distal, in any particular situation or decision, and in
that sense it may over-ride both distal "inclusive fitness" influences
and their proximal carriers. But of course cognition itself had its
distal factors that shaped it. All of this will come up later when we
individual experience, but rather shared with all/most people: those
are more likely to be the proximal pushes/pulls still exerted on us as
a legacy of the distal factors that shaped us in our EEA.
Sorting them out is pretty tricky, especially because of the hermeneutic
tyranny of the sociobiological Just-So story. But, as you will see, the
"cognitive choice" story can sometimes be just as much like astrology as
the Darwinian one...
> From: "Roberts, Craig" <CRAIG92@psy.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 16:06:24 GMT
>
> us men get raped too. Where is the reproductive success in that?
It's much rarer; it happens mostly in prisons (which was not anticipated
in our EEA) and is clearly nonreproductive (though it could be a variant
or distortion of selective fixation on ambiguous reproductive cues).
As in the stickleback example, behavioural and emotional patterns (such
as sex and aggression) can often overlap or flip from one to the other
under conditions of high arousal.
Sexual domination (of both females and males) may be a part of overall
domination, which may indeed have to do with territoriality and power.
The question then becomes: how sex-specific is any of this? Because to
the extent it's not, the distal reproductive considerations become
irrelevant.
There's always two sides (at least!) to these sociobiological
questions, as you see...
> From: "Witting, Abigail" <HELEN92@psy.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 16:52:42 GMT
>
> if... males can never be sure of paternity then how can you explain
> the fact that men feel they have a right to take part in the decision
> to abort a child?
That sounds like a mostly proximal, cognitive matter to me. But there
are also distal reasons (connected with paternity uncertainty) why
there might be some hostility toward the pregnant state or toward
newborns in males.
> From: "Hewes, Alexa" <ALEXA92@psy.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 14:40:36 GMT
>
> it is a known fact that it is low status men who are
> more likely to rape. This would imply that they feel the need to
> dominate something in order to increase their self-esteem.
I don't see the connection. Low status could be because of poverty, in
which case it is part of a general pattern of taking what you want/need
by force because you can't get it other ways.
Males lower in the dominance hierarchy also tend to be more
opportunistic and aggressive, since the top males (usually also older)
control most of the resources. But this is true for everything:
food, females, property, territory, hence not sex-specific.
> Sexual abuse does not have to constitute actual penetrative sex... the
> ejaculation of the male does not appear to be the motivating factor,
> which again implies that sexual abuse of any kind, including rape is
> driven by the craving for power.
As discussed earlier, we would have vanished long ago if ejaculation
had become the sole and central proximal objective of sex, because
masturbation satisfies that completely. Sex is dyadic, and so a lot of
its proximal rewards must be in that dimension. This also leaves open the
door for aberrent fixations on some non-ejaculatory cue or behaviour
pattern.
Stevan
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