Being sensible about Patriarchy

Just because something is used propagandistically does not mean it is not a thing.

Patriarchy is authority being presumptively male. The more presumptively male authority is, the more patriarchal the society is. At its simplest, authority is competence + deference. The wider and more significant the realm of presumed male competence, and of expected deference to the same, the more presumptively male authority is.

That an area of life is presumptively male does not, of itself, generate patriarchy. Having presumptive sex roles is not patriarchal. The addition of expected deference is crucial. For without such expected deference, there is no authority, just things folk generally do.

To understand patriarchy, we need to start with the basics of sex and gender.

Sex
Sex is determined by what gametes your body is structured to produce. If it is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes you are male. If it is structured to produce large, sessile (immobile) gametes, you are female. This is so whether or not viable gametes are produced.

If your body is structured to produce both, you are both male and female. If your body is structured to produce neither, you are neuter. (As distinct from being deliberately stripped of the ability to produce gametes, which is being neutered.)

If your body has elements of both male and female sexual structuring, then your sex can be somewhat indeterminate (i.e., intersex), but normally your body will favour one type of structuring over the other. Such mixed cases do not mean that sex is not binary. It just means that a (very small) proportion of folk do not have bodies that are entirely on one side of the border between sex-typical biological structures.

[Sex is binary at the level of reproductive function, due to there being only two gametes, but, in humans, is bimodal rather than binary at the level of bodies.]

We cannot do sex-reassignment or sex-change surgery. We cannot shift the structuring of your body to produce different gametes. We can only do gender-reassignment surgery that changes the visible physical manifestations of biological sex. Hence hormonal supplements are needed by trans folk, as we cannot change your body to change the pattern of hormones it produces.

Children
Homo sapiens are mammals. Female mammals have mammary glands so that when the child emerges, their immediate food source is on-tap.

In most mammal species, that means the male plays no role in raising children, as the female is already committed (via the mammary glands) to feeding the children. This is the cad strategy for reproduction. The more the children have to be taught how to feed, and the longer they have to be fed before they can feed themselves, the more likely some male involvement in the feeding of the offspring is (the dad strategy).

Male provision is not to be confused with mate-guarding. Mate-guarding is about taking possession of the fertility of a female for one’s own use, excluding other males. It implies nothing regarding the care of children. Most mate-guarding mammal species have cad-strategy males. They are just possessive cads.

In contemporary foraging societies, on average, children do not “break even” in producing and consuming calories until about the age of 20. So, a Homo sapien child, on average, has likely represented about a 20 year-feeding-protection-and-instruction investment. This was not possible without provisioning males.

In contemporary foraging societies, men provide a majority of calories to the group, an overwhelming majority of the protein to the group and almost completely dominate provision of calories and protein consumed by post-weaning children. The only evolutionary stable way to get males to invest that much effort in provisioning children is having them feed the children that are presumptively theirs. That is, to go beyond biological paternity and create the social role of father. Especially given the level of teaching required to get Homo sapien children able to fend for themselves.

The need for provisioning males for the raising of children gave a powerful incentive for women to adopt and follow norms regulating their sexual behaviour so as to encourage such male commitment. This is interactive. The stronger the restrictive sexual norms, the stronger male provisioning is likely to be. The weaker the restrictive sexual norms, the weaker male provisioning is likely to be. A common cross-cultural pattern is for men to be willing to use violence to enforce fidelity norms, as their social standing, including their identity as a father, is at stake. Another common cross-cultural pattern is for women expressing aggression towards another woman to cast doubt on her adherence to fidelity norms.

A very common cross-cultural pattern is for a man’s mother to be concerned with policing the behaviour of his wife (or wives). She has an obvious interest in ensuring that their children are indeed (biologically) her son’s and in the protecting the reputation of her son. Remembering that propriety is, in this context, fidelity + reputation. Or, at least, preserving the presumption of fidelity.

All known foraging societies recognise the social role of father. A small number of (farming) societies do not have the social role of father. Instead, men invest in their sister’s children. As a genetic replication strategy, given one shares less genes with a niece or a nephew than with a son or a daughter, unclehood is inferior to fatherhood — provided males can be reasonably confident about the paternity of children.

The above patterns are the result of us being the big-brain ape and so the cultural ape. We are the fattest ape, as our energy-hog brains (our brains consume about a fifth to a quarter of our calorie intake) require a certain base level of energy to function. Hence we have more fat reserves than other apes. Women’s body naturally have significantly higher fat content than men’s bodies, as women regularly support two brains (the extra energy-hog brain being supported either in their womb, or via lactation).

Our brains need time to grow after birth, due to constraints on the size of a baby head’s able to emerge through pelvis (aggravated by bipedalism requiring narrower hips for physical stability). Hence how helpless our infants are, as far more of their development is after birth. They have to be fed and then taught. We have the fattest infants in the biosphere. Being the cultural ape, we have to learn to be effective occupiers of human niches by a mixture of being taught, observation and participation.

Risk and roles
Across this lengthy process of raising Homo sapien children, risks needed to be, where possible, transferred away from the care of children. Especially as if a mother died, her young children were also likely to die. This created human sex roles—sex roles being the behavioural expression of sex—that generally involved very different patterns of acquiring subsistence by males and females, hence quite different skill patterns.

In foraging societies, men would engage in the more dangerous forms of subsistence (hunting larger animals, getting honey). Women would engage in the less dangerous forms of subsistence that you could do while minding the kids (gathering plants, hunting small, relatively immobile, animals such as lizards).

A lot of the gathered plants would require significant processing, as plants (being immobile) evolve ways to discourage consumption of their flesh. This need for more processing of plant food tended to skew calorie and nutrient contribution in foraging societies to the energy-dense, highly bio-available nutrients in the food provided by men.

Men tend to form teams, because that is how they provided for, and protected, their women and children. Women tend to form cliques, as intimate emotional connections provided support for the long haul of motherhood. One can see this pattern in almost any schoolyard.

A complication is that the more disagreeable and less neurotic girls (“tomboys”) may gravitate towards team play. The more agreeable and more neurotic boys (“sissies”) may gravitate towards cliques.

Some cultures had explicit roles for “manly” women and “womanly” men. Generally, however, a male who attempted to adopt female patterns was rejecting the risks that males were expected to shoulder. This was not a way to be respected.

Gender
Being the cultural species, Homo sapiens do not only have sex roles. We also have narratives and expectations about sex. Hence, we have gender: the cultural expression of sex. To a large degree, the categories of man and woman are socially created.

Those who are same-sex attracted, or who are tomboys or sissies, are gender-dysphoric. They are somewhat alienated from standard expectations about sex. Trans folk are sex-dysphoria. They are alienated from the sexual structuring of their bodies.

Being sex-dysphoric is likely to also imply wishing to fit into the behavioural and cultural expectations of the other sex. Being gender-dysphoric does not imply alienation from the sexual structuring of one’s own body. Conflating sex-and-gender is a great way to engage in muddy, even disastrous, thinking.

The absence of matriarchal societies
While it is certainly true that families, and even groups, can have matriarchs, no known human society has been matriarchal. The requirement of men to take on higher-risk roles in order to support the raising of biologically-expensive children has meant that authority could not be presumptively female across a society. Hence the absence of matriarchal societies. Matriarchal families and figures are, however, entirely possible.

The non-universality of patriarchy
The absence of matriarchal societies does not remotely mean that all human societies are patriarchal in any strong sense. It is entirely possible to have a human society where male and female authority co-exists. That is, authority is not presumptively male across the society, so it is somewhat gender-egalitarian. Such societies are more common within particular patterns of subsistence, though a majority of societies known to the ethnographic record have been patriarchal. For instance, around 88% of traditional societies only had male political leaders (though political leadership is not the only manifestation of authority in societies). Nevertheless, even among generally patriarchal societies, the extent and intensity of the presumption of male authority has varied greatly.

There are relatively gender-egalitarian foraging and horticultural (hoe-farming) societies. If a society does not create the social role of fatherhood, then it is also likely to be relatively gender-egalitarian, as inheritance will be female-line and the connections of men to the next generation will be via their sisters. In many societies, men treasure the sister’s son relationship — they are males of the next generation a man is unambiguously related to.

Patterns of leverage
What determines how patriarchal a society is — i.e., how strongly authority is presumptively male in the society — is the relative social leverage of men and women. Women always have the leverage of sex and fertility. Men have whatever leverage comes from not being tied to the day-to-day care of children.

Any asset in a society that cannot be effectively managed while minding children, will be a presumptively male asset. Hence, while women have been very important for the transmission of culture, men have tended to dominate the creation of culture. Cultural narratives have thus tended to predominantly reinforce and validate male concerns. Hence also women have tended to be associated with nature (given their role in reproduction and child-rearing), men with the creation of culture. Such creation of culture is often conceived as a struggle for order against the more chaotic or resistant elements of nature.

The classic assets increasing male leverage are pastoralism (i.e., animal herds) and plough farming. In such societies, the predominant productive asset will be a male asset. This has been universally true in pastoralist societies. It is usually true in plough farming societies, with a few exceptions. One exception was Pharaonic Egypt, as land was re-allocated after every Nile flood. It was effectively Pharaoh’s asset rather than an asset of village males. Another is if the society does not recognise the social relationship of fatherhood, such as the in Mosuo of China. As there is no social role of fatherhood, land is passed down matrilineally and is not a male asset. (Men still do the ploughing.)

If the main productive asset in a society is presumptively male, this makes women largely dependant on male provision. This generates patterns of presumptive male authority, though the degree to which it does so can vary widely.

In low-population-density societies where the men are likely to be away, traditions of armed women are likely to develop so as to be able to defend hearth and home. This raises the leverage (and status) of women. In steppe societies, for example, while men owned the animal herds, women owned the dwellings; the yurts or gers.

Any pattern of periodic male absence tends to increase the status of women, as women will have to manage things in the absence of men. We can see this pattern operating in steppe societies, in Celtic and Germanic Europe, in Sparta (where men lived in the barracks for much of their life), in Rome (where elite men were often away in the service of Respublica) and in medieval Latin Christendom. This is generally an elite pattern, but elites disproportionately set social norms.

These were all, to varying degrees, single-spouse societies in that even an elite man would only have one wife, and a woman one husband. (There is some evidence that the original Indo-Europeans may have operated a single-spouse marriage system.) Celtic and Germanic societies often did, however, permit concubines able to produce legally recognised children. (In Brehon law, for example, it did not matter for your family identity who your mother was, merely who your father was.)

If elite males are required to have only one wife, then that tends to raise the status of women, as the natural thing to do is to have partnership marriages (united by care for their children), with the wife (or sometimes his mother) operating as their husband’s (or son’s) deputy when he is away and helping to manage the household when he is present. This is very much not the pattern in polygynous societies where wives competed for the prospects for their children. This meant that leaving one of the wives in charge in the absence of the husband was a recipe for disaster. (If concubines able to produce legally-recognised children were permitted, this tended to weaken the effect of having only one wife: mistresses are concubines whose children have no inheritance rights.)

Single-spouse marriage societies thus tended to make women managing assets a normal part of the society, even if the main productive assets were presumptively male. This tended to raise the status of women and lessen the degree to which authority was presumptively male. Though the effect was much stronger if there were patterns of male absence. Thus Sparta (where men lived in barracks for much of their life) was noticeably less patriarchal than Athens. Rome was also noticeably less patriarchal than Athens, with Rome become less patriarchal as its empire grew, increasing the pattern of elite male absence and so wifely management of assets.

Being a patrilineal society generates at least some presumption of male authority, as family identity is via the male line. If it is also a kin-group society, that means that family identity and kin structures will be organised around related males. This tends to increase male leverage within the society and the presumption of male authority. Especially if, as was commonly the case, the fertility of women is treated as an asset of their kin-group. (Treating women’s fertility as an asset of their kin group leads to honour killings, which are ways of enforcing commitment to the kin group.) As authority and wealth is typically transferred from father to son in patriarchal societies, such societies tend to be very controlling of female sexuality.

If a society permits polyandry (notably because of resource constraints where key productive assets lose value if divided), this tends to increase the potential leverage of women and to undermine any presumption of male authority. If a society permits polygyny, that tends to undermine the social leverage of women. This is particularly so if the main productive asset is presumptively male, as then the wives of (elite) males will be competing with each other for the prospects for their children, where the favour of the (shared) husband is crucial. Clearly, that will foster a general presumption of male authority.

Though it was true that even in societies that permitted polygamy, single-spouse marriages were the dominant form of marriage, again, elite patterns tended to dominate the generation of presumptions about authority.

Hoe-farming (horticultural) societies meant women having a (much) bigger role in food production than in plough (agricultural) societies, as hoe farming can be done while minding the kids. This permits much higher levels of polygyny (as it reduces the level of provision males have to engage in to support a wife) but also makes women less dependant on male provision. Hoe societies tend to have stronger patterns of female authority than plough societies. The question of the relative level of social leverage can become a complicated one.

In societies where assets are transferred between generations, there can be something of a trade-off between between transmitting genes and transmitting wealth. The stronger the incentive to minimise division of resources among children, the more likely single-spouse marriage systems are, bringing together male investment in high paternity-confidence children and female fidelity to her spouse so as to gain increased investment in her children. If such pressure is sufficiently strong all the way up the social system, polygamy may not be permitted.

The more important investment in the human capital of children, particularly sons, is for their prospects, the more likely it is that single-spouse marriage is going to be selected for. This likely helps explains why highly patriarchal Brahmin and Confucian societies had a wife and (maybe) concubine(s) pattern more than full-blown multiple wives. Indeed, the intense investment in memorisation required to raise a Brahmin child likely explains the rise of the Indian caste (jati) system.

Brahmin law was particularly insistent on male authority. It was, after all, the society that valorised widows burning themselves to death on their husband’s funeral pyre.

How well members of a sex can coordinate with each other also affects social leverage. In polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group, plough-farming societies the ability of women, particularly elite women, to coordinate with each other was often very limited. Conversely, it has tended to be very easy for men in such societies to coordinate with each other, especially if male-only cults develop. Such cults are very common across human societies. Greater male coordination tends to increase male social leverage.

Increases in population density, without a commensurate increase in applied technology, tend to reduce the status of women. As population density increases, there is likely to be less male absence, discouraging the arming of women and reducing the level of women’s management of resources. There is also likely to be more pressure on social niches, encouraging more rigid delineation of sex roles. England was significantly more patriarchal in the C18th than it had been in Saxon times, around a millennium earlier.

Precisely because social leverage matters, history is not simply a pattern of upward improvement in the status of women, but of shifts back and forth.

Raiding and warfare
How raiding and warfare operates in a society also affects social leverage. If raiding and warfare is sufficiently endemic, that generates a premium on male cooperation. That tends to favour patrilineal kin systems, as related males who have grown up together are likely to be more effective in combat operations.

In small-scale societies, especially patrilineal ones where women marry away from their natal kin, endemic raiding and warfare particularly tends to generate male cults as it is important for the men to be able to coordinate planned raids and attack without women warning their relatives. Such male cults often enforce their privacy through ferocious punishments. That increases male social leverage, generating a presumption of male authority and providing a social mechanism to establish and reinforce male authority.

Endemic warfare and raiding can, however, encourage single-spouse marriage systems. Polygyny means that some men are cut out of the local marriage market. If circumstances are such that a premium is put on local social cohesion, then single-spouse marriage systems can be selected for so as to maximise the number of local males with a commitment to the local social order via having their own wife and children. (Note, this does not imply that reducing reproductive variance among men is what is being selected for.) Such pressure for single-spouse marriage for greater social cohesion can also apply to minority religious groups, such as the Alevis.

Shifting social leverage
What is hopefully clear from the above is that patriarchy is not some nefarious male plot. It is a social phenomena driven by the relative social leverage of men and women in a society. The level of patriarchy can thus vary widely between societies. It can also vary in the same society across time, if the underlying social constraints change in ways that shift the leverage between men and women.

That the Christian Church sanctified single-spouse marriage (including no concubines), insisted on the importance of legitimacy (making it very important who your mother was and whether she was married to your father), insisted on female consent being required for marriage, strongly supported female testamentary rights (and the property rights entailed therein) and, in conjunction with manorialism, broke up kin groups, meant that the status of women was significantly higher in Christian Europe than was the case in Islam, Brahmin India or Confucian East Asia. As I have noted previously, feminism was only likely to arise within Latin Christendom-cum-Western civilisation.

Technological change since the emergence of mass-prosperity societies, starting with the development of railways and steamships in the 1820s, has tended to further increase the status of women. The increase in the number of low-physical-risk jobs, the development of domestic technology (reducing the time-and-physical-skill-burden of managing a household), and the development of mass education (reducing the time-and-attention burden of raising kids), as well as shrinking family sizes, have all greatly increased the capacity of women to earn income outside the home. The fall in transport and communication costs has also made it easier for women to coordinate and organise.

The most dramatic change, however, has been the legal and technological changes that have given women unilateral control over their fertility. This has decoupled sex and marriage, a huge social shift in itself. But it also meant that women have been able to invest in higher education, greatly increasing their employment as professionals, managers and other high-status jobs. These changes have also greatly increased women’s role in the creation of culture.

Hence we now have the first societies in human history increasingly without presumptive sex roles. This is a dramatic cultural and evolutionary novelty. Needless to say, gender expectations and narratives have been in considerable flux.

These changes also mean that men and women have fairly similar levels of social leverage. As biologist Bobbi S. Low notes:

...men’s value to women is no longer solely or primarily resource value, and women’s value to men is no longer solely or primarily reproductive value.

Women still have the leverage of sex and fertility, but that is strongly age-dependent, is somewhat weakened by the relative availability of sexual outlets and the undermining of the status and value (and so the appeal) of fatherhood.

The presumption of greater maternal involvement in child-raising is a universal human cultural pattern that, while it shows variations among cultures, is substantially driven by biology. It is not a manifestation of patriarchy. Due to the biological processes of pregnancy and lactation, cultural conceptions of motherhood, while they do vary, vary much less than do cultural conceptions of fatherhood, which (unlike biological paternity) is a socially created role.

Apart from some rapidly fading cultural traces, contemporary Western societies do not face the problems of patriarchy. Instead, developed societies face the problems of dealing with a dramatic level of evolutionary novelty. Such as the dramatic fading of presumptive sex roles.

Beating the patriarchy drum may be emotionally satisfying, and have some residual propaganda value, but it is mostly just a giant, self-indulgent, distraction from working through the continuing implications of these dramatic changes and the sea of evolutionary novelty we find ourselves in.

[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, from Medium.]

The Wild West as natural experiment

In the American West, both Euro-American and Chinese-American societies had a shortage of women: but that had very different consequences for women.

Annie Oakley in the 1880s.

Thanks to the Christian sanctification of single-spouse marriage, its insistence that a woman’s consent was required for a valid marriage, and the disappearance (under the pressure of Christianity and manorialism) of kin groups from Europe (apart from the Celtic and Balkan fringes, where manorialism did not reach), women had much higher status in Euro-American society than was the pattern in polygynous societies with kin groups, such as Islam (which permitted multiple wives) and China (which permitted multiple concubines).

In polygynous societies, particularly ones where men controlled the productive assets, and so wives were dependant on the incomes of their husbands, the wives (and concubines) of an elite male competed with each other for the prospects for their children. (Mistresses are concubines within a single-spouse marital system whose children therefore have no inheritance rights.)

In kin-group societies, particularly patrilineal kin-group societies, the fertility of women was an asset of their kin group. So, women tended to be married off early, to maximise the value of their fertility and to minimise the chance of something unfortunate happening. Frequently to significantly older men. Especially as it often took time for men to get together the assets and social standing to make them good (multiple) marriage prospects.

By contrast, in Christian society, an elite man would only have one wife, the joint parent of his heir and other legitimate children. She did not have to share that status of her husband with any other woman. It was thus common for even elite European Christian men to leave their wife in charge when they travelled. (Not something that was sensible for a husband with multiple wives to do.) 

A Christian wife, including of an elite male, was typically responsible for managing the household. Women having publicly acknowledged control of significant resources was a normal part of social dynamics. Both the Latin (Catholic) and Greek (Orthodox) Church held that a woman’s consent was required for marriage, with the lack of kin groups giving that consent greater weight.

In the American Wild West in the later part of the C19th, it being a frontier society, there was a shortage of women. This was true among both settlers of European origins and those of Chinese origins. The consequences for the women of this shortage, however, differed dramatically between the two cultures.

In Euro-American society in the West, married women tended to be treated with considerable deference. There was prostitution, but it was run by women. The prostitutes often made good incomes and pioneered social freedoms that contemporary American and Western women take for granted. The madams were often successful businesspeople: frequently, one of the most successful business people in their town. (Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States is a useful source for this social history.)

Western States pioneered votes for women, explicitly in the hope of attracting more women to their State. (The main argument against votes for women was that they would vote for Prohibition: which, of course, turned out to be true.)

In other words, in Euro-American frontier society, the women reaped the benefits of their scarcity premium.

The picture in polygynous-with-kin-groups (i.e. clans) Chinese society in the American West was very different. There, elite Chinese men mate-hoarded, regularly having a wife and concubines. The remaining women were largely forced into prostitution, controlled by the tongs or triads (which are substitute clans). So, in Chinese-American society in the American West, the scarcity premium of women was largely harvested by men.

As the natural experiment of the American Wild West demonstrated, what marriage system a culture had, whether it was polygynous or had a single-spouse marriage system, and whether it was based on kin groups (particularly patrilineal ones) or not, had quite dramatic effects on the status and prospects for women.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]

Why it makes a difference which sex wears the distinctive headgear

It can mean assuming a protective role, or an off-limits status.

Source

Sikhi and Judaism have several things in common. They are both scriptural religions with a line of religious teachers: the prophets of the Torah and the Tanakh and the gurus of Sikh tradition. They are both minority religions who have suffered a long history of persecution. In both religions, it is the men who wear the publicly distinctive clothing, specifically head gear: turbans in the case of Sikh men, various hats and caps for Jewish men.

The last two similarities go together. By wearing publicly distinctive clothing, Sikh men and Jewish men become the first line of defence of their communities. They stand, clearly labelled as men of their community, and so ready to be the first to take whatever crap comes their community’s way. They thereby form a protective line around the women and children of their community.

If one is not prepared to embrace this role of publicly-marked protector, one is not fit to be a husband and father within that community. The distinctive garb is a test of character and commitment.

Dominion rules

In Islam, the pattern is rather different. There, it is the women who wear the most publicly distinctive clothing (also headgear). The garb of Muslim men can be somewhat distinctive, but that is also often about minority status. Even so, the publicly distinctive clothing of Muslim women is a very obvious feature of Islam, even if the adherence to such practices have varied widely across time and place.

Ever since Muhammad became ruler of Medina in 622, mainstream Islam has been a religion of domination. Much of the Quran, the hadiths and Sharia are concerned with how to behave towards non-believers, and with the regulation of non-believers under Muslim rule (the dhimmis), all based on the presumption of rightful Muslim dominion. The famous concept of people of the Book expresses this presumption of Muslim dominion and of its rightful expansion. Muslim dominion flows from, and is justified by, submission to the rules of the Sovereign of the universe.

What makes the various minority forms of Islam (Ibadis, the third version of Islam, Alevis, Ismailis, Ahmadis, etc.) much less problematic to deal with is that, as permanent minorities, their versions of Islam have had to eschew the outlooks of presumptive dominion. This is not the case with mainstream Sunni Islam, which retains the traditions and outlooks of the religion of domination it has been since 622 (so almost 1400 years).

Dynamics of polygyny

From it origins Islam was a polygynous religion. A Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man. A Muslim man can have up to four wives, though he is also permitted sexual access to, as the phrase in the Quran goes, those that your right (i.e. sword) hand possesses. If 5 per cent of Muslim men have four wives each, that means that 15 per cent of Muslim men do not have possible wives from within the Muslim community.

This problem of substantial numbers of Muslim men having no marriage prospects within the community is one that all polygynous societies have to deal with. There are four possible patterns of response.

(1) Do nothing and so have a bandit problem. This is the pattern of Chinese history, where a polygynous elite left an underclass of males with no marriage prospects that turned to predatory behaviours. This is why bandits are such a feature of Chinese history and literature. Indeed, as more wealth and income inequality meant more polygyny, so more excluded underclass males, and as peace and stability (such as from the rule of a long-established dynasty) tends to lead to rising wealth and income inequality, the bandit problem tended to worsen as each Chinese dynasty aged.

The reason why peace and stability leads to rising economic inequality is, first, there is some tendency for the sorting processes of commerce to lead to the accumulation of property and, second, that all societies tend to form self-serving interest coalitions that impede the operation of the society and advantage their (generally well-connected) members. Both processes lead to rising inequality. Prolonged peace and stability gets in the way of the removal of such interest coalitions. Hence, prolonged peace and stability tends to lead to increased economic inequality.

(2) Also permit polyandry. Some polygynous societies have also permitted wives to have more than one husband. A low-status male might not be able to afford a whole wife, but he might be able to afford a half, a third, or a quarter of one. In such cases, brothers would often marry the same woman. That way, the children who weren’t their sons and daughters were their nieces and nephews. (China was too patriarchal a society, and Islam too patriarchal a religion, to accept polyandry as an acceptable social pattern.)

(3) Some version of wait-your-turn. This was generally a pattern of hoe-farming societies, where women did most of the farming, so wives were not dependant on their husband’s income. In such societies, a man who survived long enough had a good chance of entering the marriage ladder. Such societies could also have some version of the boy-wife phenomena, where a as-yet-unmarried male would enter into a relationship with a younger male. This relationship was typically formally acknowledged and involved some equivalent of bride-price, such as a gift of the spear. The expectation was that the relationship would end once the older male got married (to a woman). (There is some evidence of an analogous practice in Southern China.)

(4) Those people over there have women, steal their’s. This was the pattern of every pastoralist raiding society ever and of other raiding folk, such as the pagan Norse. Going a-Viking was the seafaring equivalent of pastoralist raiding on horseback. The various Great Walls of China had a range of purposes, but impeding the stealing of Chinese women by pastoralist raiders was one of them.

Arabia at the time of Muhammad was, of course, a few towns scattered among a pastoralist raiding society. From 622 onwards, Islam sanctified the stealing of women who had not accepted Muslim dominion. This sanctification appears in the Quran (the phrase those your right hand possesses occurs 15 times), in the hadiths, in the sira, the life of the Prophet (such as killing all the men of the two Jewish tribes of Medina and distributing their women and children as slaves), and in Sharia, where the marriage of any woman seized by a Muslim man is immediately annulled (so, of course, she becomes sexually available).

Islam never had any difficulty recruiting ghazis, holy warriors, precisely because (1) there were Muslim men without good marriage prospects due to Muslim polygyny and (2) Islam sanctifies stealing women who were outside the protection of the umma, the Muslim community. The virgins a Muslim martyr — someone who was killed fighting for the umma — is supposed to receive as his heavenly reward is just the after-life apex of an entire system of sanctified sexual predation.

The two great drivers of Islamic expansion were conquest, significantly driven by the pattern of polygyny and sanctified sexual predation, and trade (as Sharia also provided a generally superior commercial law system and network).

Hence, in Islam, it is women who wore the most publicly distinctive clothing. There were two main reasons for this. First, in a multi-wife household where the husband controls the wealth and income, wives compete for the prospects for their children. So elite Muslim women needed to protect their reputations and veiling signalled their “respectable woman” status. Second, in societies where sexual predation was religiously sanctioned, Muslim women wearing distinctive clothing made it very clear who was off-limits.

This is a very different dynamic than that of Sikh men and Jewish men wearing the publicly distinctive headgear.

Since the 1970s, a third reason has been added. Under Sharia, to convict a man of sexual assault generally required a confession or four male witnesses. This generated societies with a high level of segregation by sex that therefore generally did not evolve norms for dealing with women wandering around in public away from their neighbourhoods.

Muslim jurists actually discussed the issue of when it was permissible for women to go out in public. Up until the C19th, Muslim visitors to Christian countries would express their surprise and disorientation at how busy the streets of Christian cities were, because there were all these women going about in public. They would also express their surprise (and at times their contempt) for how deferential Christian men were to Christian women: the Muslim (male) observers sometimes describing it as the Christian men being unmanly.

During the C20th, there was a shift away from veiling by Muslim women, due to the influence of a westernising understanding of modernisation. This trend reversed in the 1970s among middle class Muslim women as they began to go outside their neighbourhoods for education and then employment. Wearing the headscarf, and even more the veil, broadcast their commitment to Islamic norms, thereby providing protection and self-commitment in societies with a long history of sexual segregation.

This massive increase in religious signalling by Muslim women presumably helped along the Islamic religious revival of recent decades. In the West, it sharpened the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim women.

The underlying point remained to identify those women who had accepted the norms of Islam and so were off-limits. Thirteen centuries of sanctified sexual predation against women who had not accepted the norms of Islam deeply embedded within mainstream Muslim society social schemata (patterns of belief) and social scripts (patterns of action) of sanctified sexual predation against women not under the protection of the umma.

So, what happens if millions of Muslim men get imported into non-Muslim countries so that there are critical masses of men who accept such schemata and such scrips? You might well get mass sexual assaults and systematic sexual predation against (unveiled) women.

Oh look, we did.

With survivors reporting their attackers used religious justifications. The same ones used by Islamic State adherents in raping Yazidi women.

A problem cannot be dealt with if it is not acknowledged. And it really does matter which sex wears the distinctive clothing.

(Cross-posted from Medium.)

Some considerations of evolutionary theory

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (1900-1975)


Pair bond is not the same as sexual activity
One of the things I find somewhat frustrating is not consistently using terminology that distinguishes between pair bonding and who an organism has sex with. Clearly, there is some overlap and connection there, but they are not the same thing and it encourages sloppy thinking to use the same terminology to cover both.

Thus 'monogamy' can mean only has sex with one person or only has one spouse. This ambiguity can derail discussions and confuse analysis.


Genes play games
All that is required for game theory to operate is patterns of stimulus and response in a competitive environment. We can reasonably think of genes as playing a game, the replication game, where success is measured by replication. If you replicate, you are still in the game, so you are a winner and you remain a winner for as long as you are still being replicated.

These replication games that genes play are not only recurring, they are also probabilistic. A replication pattern will always have some failures. It is generating enough successes to stay in the game that is crucial.


Genes do not have intentions
The Selfish Gene is a very vivid and memorable metaphor. It is also an unfortunate one, as genes do not have intentions. Life is a Game Genes Play, or something similar, might have been a better title.


Parenting is altruistic behaviour

Biologists seem to have this odd notion that parenting is not altruistic behaviour, on the grounds that it is not altruistic to reproduce one’s genes. The notion that acting in a way that permits one’s genes to replicate does not show altruism is to imply that something cannot be altruistic if it conforms to the intentions that genes do not have. Or that genes are part of an organism, even when in another organism.

Parenting absolutely is altruistic behaviour. It is one organism investing in the interests of another. The tensions between the interests of the parent and the child provide a nice example of how of genetic replication is distinct from the interest of the organism. Tensions that are particularly stark in the case of neglectful, abusive or child-abandoning parents.

Parenting is the form of altruism that genes have to induce in order to replicate.

Once it is realised that parenting is altruistic, then it is much less of a leap to develop analyses of forms of altruism, in the sense of acting for the benefit of others, that do not as directly result in the replication of genes specific to the acting organism. Investing in the benefit of other organisms can absolutely be a successful gene replication pattern, at a probabilistic level. Especially if played out across a large enough number of individuals.

Confusing what altruism is—other-directed behaviour to the benefit of the other—with genetic replication patterns is an example of how natural and easy it is for us to confuse our frames of reference. Particularly if we use intentional metaphors (which are, of course, very natural to us) to apply to replication-game-playing genes that do not have intentions.


Survival strategies drive genetic selection
There is a critique of evolutionary theory that says that random mutation is not nearly enough to create the prolix orderings of life. This critique, associated particularly with mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski, is, of course, correct. Selection processes are, however, much more ordered than that.

The survival strategies of organisms create selection pressures. Organisms can only choose survival strategies compatible with their existing biological capacities. But, within those capacities, a range of survival strategies are likely to be possible.

Once enough of a species successfully selects a particular survival strategy, that sets up selection pressures, and selection pressures that are much more ordered than random mutation. (I am riffing off a 9 minute discussion of exploration by organisms by evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein.)

A very nice example of this provided by human pastoralism. All human pastoralist populations that are large enough, and persist in their pastoralism long enough, develop lactase persistence: the ability to consume milk as adults. This allows them to generate about five times as many useful calories from a given amount of grassland as those who just raise animals for slaughter. This is a huge biological advantage.

Here’s the thing, however. Pastoralist peoples do not develop the same mutation. The lactase persistence mutation that allowed the Indo-Europeans to spread so far is not the same lactase persistence mutation as that of East African pastoralists such as the Masai.

So, which mutation develops, and how long it takes to turn up, that clearly has a random element. But the choice of survival strategy sets up selection pressures that are not random. Hence there is more order in observed biology than can be explained by random mutation, as the survival strategies of organisms inject order into selection processes.


Homo selection was for adaptability
The answer to the question of what is the human diet? is: prepared, particularly cooked, food. All human populations cook their food. Even the Inuit, who have to go to considerable extra effort to do so. We are cucinovores, food preparers, especially by cooking.

When we examine the diet of human populations, especially the pre-industrial diet, the striking thing about human diets—apart from food being actively prepared and frequently cooked—is the huge variety of human diets. Human beings can live and reproduce quite successfully on remarkably broad range of diets. (Problems with particular diet patterns usually don’t seriously kick in until after our reproductive peak.) This speaks to our adaptability as a species. An adaptability that has seen us permanently inhabit every single continent except Antarctica.

By adaptability I mean the capacity to choose and operate a variety of survival strategies (and therefore survive in a wide variety of ecological conditions). Prior to the development of farming and pastoralism, human beings were foragers, but there was considerable variety in those foraging strategies. And, of course, foraging then often led onto farming and pastoralism. Modes of living which also had considerable variety within them.

This adaptability has some manifestation across the hominin line, but is what is particularly distinctive in the genus Homo.

The combination of bipedalism and grasping hands led to tool using. This probably started with Australopithecus picking up stones to split bones and skulls from the kills of other species to get at the fat and brain. Access to such nutrient-dense food allowed us to give up gut tissue for brain tissue (the expensive tissue hypothesis).

We then moved on to making tools, increasing our adaptability. Choosing to scavenge in the middle of the day, when the major predators were resting, led to developing sweating and increased long-distance running capacity. We could then start running down animals with our expanded tool use, choosing hunting over scavenging. Giving us even more access to nutrient-dense food.

Being bipedal freed our hands for communicating by gestures. Increased use of tools moved communication to the face and mouth.

Use of fire and other food preparation both expanded the range of possible foods and further accelerated giving up gut tissue for brain tissue. At each stage, the expansion in capacities led to a greater range of possible survival strategies.

The predominant thing being selected for was that adaptability. Hence the rather prolix speciation of the Homo line. Different populations would choose different survival strategies, leading to different selection pressures. Yet, the general pattern is clear: selection for adaptability won out. Homo sapiens were the most adaptable form to appear, and relatively rapidly became the last biped primate left standing in Africa.

Our margin of superior adaptability over Homo neanderthalensis seems to have been relatively thin, as Neanderthals successfully blocked our exit from Africa for many generations. But Homo sapiens had enough of an adaptability advantage to get past the Neanderthal block in two waves, around 80,000 years ago and again around 50,000 years ago. And we Homo sapiens then became the last bipedal primate left standing anywhere by absorbing and replacing all other Homo populations.

So we became the tool-making ape, the running-and-throwing ape, the gesturing-then-talking ape, the fire-using ape, the food-preparing and cooking ape, the trading ape, the artistic ape, the ritual ape ... All manifestations of being the adaptable ape. It was that adaptability which was being selected for. As the more adaptable, the greater the range and variability of ecology and climate we could successfully reproduce in and the greater range of ecological changes (some of us) could survive.


Defence mechanisms and healthy eating
The prime defence mechanisms of animals is mobility. The prime defence mechanisms of plants, given they generally cannot move, is to wage chemical and other biological warfare against their predators. A process that can include considerable production of anti-nutrients.

Human evolution relied at various crucial stages on access to animal food, particularly saturated fats and organ meats, because they are so nutrient-dense. (There is no plant food remotely as nutrient-dense as liver.) For human nutrition, there are essential proteins, there are essential fats. There are no essential carbohydrates. With enough protein and fat, your body can produce all the glucose it needs.

We process animal foods for palatability. We process plant foods for palatability and to render them sufficiently non-toxic to consume.

So, thinking in evolutionary terms, how likely is it that saturated fats are not nutritionally sound for humans? How likely is it that plant-based foods are inherently or systematically nutritionally superior for humans than animal foods?

Markets and persuasion are also selection environments. How likely is it that selection for food-persuasion agendas is going to be for maximising extractable income? Which generates more corporate income, animal products or plant products?

So, does that raise questions about the anti-meat, pro-plant-based agendas being so assiduously pushed?


Norms economise on the effort required to sustain cooperation
When looking at human sociality, the selfish-versus-altruistic division is not very useful. Our range of interactions with others is much more varied than that.

What is striking is how much we are a normative species. Our nearest genetic relatives, the other African great apes, show some (very limited) level of normative behaviour. Enough to sustain the level of sociality they display. We Homo sapiens show far more.

Norms economise on the effort to sustain cooperation. Once a norm is established, interactions become much more predictable and therefore much more manageable. A whole lot of attention time and calculation effort is no longer required.

Attention and cognitive capacity are both scarce items. We have powerful tendencies to adopt mechanisms that allow us to economise on them. Hence the development of our normative capacity in situations where there were considerable pay-offs to cooperation. Cooperative payoffs that expanded as our normative capacities expanded.

Being so strongly the normative ape has permitted us to be much more complexly social. Which increased our adaptability. Which clearly increased the replication of our genes. A pattern of replication via cooperative sociality that we have spread to every continent, including temporary visits to Antarctica.

Norms can generate significant reciprocative behaviour. In fact, quite complex patterns of such. But they can also generate significant altruism, even amazing levels of self-sacrifice. All of which is a by-product of norms’ ability to increase and spread populations, and thus greater gene replication, through greater social cooperation by economising on the effort to sustain cooperation.


Resources affect reproductive strategies
Birds tend to pair bond, with both parents contributing to raising the chicks. This is because eggs are fragile, chicks cannot feed themselves and once the egg is hatched, neither male nor female birds have an advantage in feeding the chicks. Given a certain level of difficulty in obtaining resources, the male and female expression of genes have equivalent cards to play in the replication game, despite the females producing the eggs. They are therefore equally invested in raising the chicks, if their genes are to replicate. Hence the frequency of not only pair bonding among birds, but of the Dad strategy:  the male investing in the protection and feeding of the offspring. As distinct from the Cad strategy:  deposit one's sperm but provide no other assistance in the raising of offspring.

In certain circumstances- - for instance, if laying the egg means the female bird needs immediate nutritional replenishment- - then the replication pressure may be for the male bird to do more of the post-egg-laying care. To, in effect, equalise energy expenditure in order for successful replication to be sufficiently likely.

If, however, resources are particularly abundant, then male birds will likely revert to a harem strategy. (I.e. a mate-guarding Cad strategy.) With sufficiently abundant resources, what cards the female-expressed genes have to play in the replication game is much less of a concern for the replication of the male-expressed genes. All the male bird has to do is feed himself and keep other males away. If a completely promiscuous strategy is used (a pure Cad strategy), they might not even have to do the latter. The replication pay-off of more impregnated females being greater than any loss from the drop in investment in individual chicks. Hence it is sufficiently easy for the male-expressed genes to stay in the game such that a replication strategy other than pair bonding is used. The females are thus stuck with the eggs, and so raising the chicks, while more intense male mate selection provides some replication compensation for the lack of male investment in raising the chicks.

The general propensity of birds to pair bond is very unlike mammals, where females have mammary glands (so the food is right there when the baby mammal pops out) and hence are far more inherently invested than male mammals in raising their offspring. Female mammals provide baby-feeding resources from their own body and food consumption. Thus, in mammals, the male and female expression of genes do not have equivalent cards to play in the replication game.

Hence male mammals are very rarely significantly involved in raising their offspring. They may be pure Cads, they may be mate-guarding Cads, or even coalition Cads (a group of males sharing a group of females), but they are very rarely Dads.

Homo sapien males are a conspicuous exception. They are an extreme case of successful replication strongly favouring male investing in offspring. The Homo sapien big-brain strategy has resulted in particularly helpless babies whose brains and cognitive capacities have to develop outside the womb. Hence Homo sapien children take 15 years or more to be successfully raised to reproductive age.

In foraging societies, it is not practical to raise Homo sapien children without male contribution to provision of resources and protection. Hence Homo sapien males generating such a strong Dad strategy, contributing protection and resources to child-raising. (A few farming societies have an Uncle strategy instead - brothers contribute to raising their sister's children.)

With the dramatic expansion in mass prosperity, resource thresholds undermining the Dad strategy as described for birds has kicked in, but in a way that expresses human social complexity. At lower socio-economic levels of mass-prosperity human societies, the balance of resources compared to the cost of raising a (poorer) child has undermined the Dad strategy of investing in children. A Cad can still have children reach adulthood without bothering to contribute to their upbringing.

Conversely, women can abandon the Feeder strategy (seek to keep the guy around) in favour of a Breeder strategy (rely on their own income). Family law systems can also generate incentives, particularly if child custody is presumptively awarded to the mother, to move from a Feeder to a Breeder strategy. Especially as the state can be enlisted to extract income from fathers without that provision of income giving fathers any leverage for any role in their children's lives beyond cash-cow. They become a Shadow Dad - the financial costs without the participation, authority and status benefits of fatherhood.

All these factors encourage the rise in single motherhood, particularly among lower socio-economic levels of society.

These interactions also mostly explain the 'gender gap' in US (and other developed democracies) politics. Single mothers and divorced women have an incentive to vote for the side of politics more favourable to welfare expenditure and for family law to favour women. The latter can include, but is not limited to: establishing fatherhood (but not motherhood) as a matter of strict legal liability, giving mothers presumptive child custody, not requiring a DNA test to allocate paternal financial obligations, using the state to impose paternal financial obligations thereby (as noted above) profoundly undermining the leverage of fathers, not penalising use of false accusations as a legal tactic.

At higher socio-economic levels of human societies, the cost of raising a child is considerably greater and the value of social connections and networking considerably higher. So the Dad strategy is still going strong.

Human marriage is the ritualising of human pair bonding to support the Dad strategy. The above patterns mean that marriage is keeping on keeping on in the upper levels of Anglo and Northern European society, but decaying in the lower levels. To the advantage of the children of the upper levels of society and the disadvantage of the children of the lower.


Same-sex attraction transposes a thoroughly normal characteristicA characteristic that about half the members of a species have is a thoroughly normal characteristic of the species.

About half the human species is sexually attracted to males. A small proportion of those with this normal characteristic are themselves male.

About half the human species is sexually attracted to females. A small proportion of those with this normal characteristic are themselves female.

The same-sex attracted have a characteristic that is normal for the other sex, but not for their own.

The question is with regard to same-sex attraction is not, why does this male or female have this weird characteristic? It is, why does this male or female have a characteristic that is so common in the other sex but rare in their own?

The trait itself does not need explanation, only the transposition. Moreover, if neither the trait nor its transposition is itself significantly genetic, then the gets in the way of genetic replication, if transposed to the other sex, issue becomes moot, as there would not be specific genes, or specific gene expression, that were being selected against by that transposition. There would be no need for an explanation in terms of the chances of specific genes replicating.

Same-sex activity, even same-sex pairing, is much more common in nature than people generally realise. Which tends to weaken the expectation that same-sex attraction has a specific genetic cause rather than, say, an epigenetic or a population-dynamics cause.

Once we realise that it is the transposition that requires explanation, it then becomes more likely to be a population-level question, rather than just something that is weird in an organism because it gets in the way of replicating their genes, so should not be persistent.

Especially as it is an empirical question how much same-sex attraction does actually get in the way of gene replication. Thus, in those human societies where marriage is essentially a universal expectation, any reduction in the propensity to replicate any specific genes due to same-sex attraction may well be quite muted.

Suppose the expression of the trait in the other sex is significantly genetic and same-sex attraction is a serious block to gene replication, which it is likely to be in societies where same-sex pairing is accepted. Why would same-sex attraction persist in a population?

One proposal is the ‘gay uncle’ hypothesis—same-sex attraction increases the reproductive success of the siblings of the same-sex attracted person. In societies with very strong kin-group patterns, this has some plausibility as a ‘survive in the gene pool’ mechanism. But while most human societies do have strong kin groups, this is not a human universal across human societies.

Attitudes to same-sex attraction are strikingly varied across human societies. It seems unlikely that mechanisms that occurs in some societies but not in others, or that have varying degrees of social intensity, would have much explanatory value in explaining a recurring pattern across human societies. Especially given that same-sex activity and pairing turns up in many other species. Which brings us back to population-level analysis.

We are a significantly cognitively dimorphic species. That is, an overwhelming majority of men have a bundle of cognitive traits no woman has and an overwhelming majority of women have a bundle of cognitive traits no man has.

It seems likely that the same-sex attracted would disproportionately turn up in the cognitive-traits-bundles overlap group. This would imply that gay men would often display cognitive patterns that we more commonly associate with women and that gay women would often display cognitive patterns that we more commonly associate with men. (This in addition to having the attraction focus that we associate with the opposite sex.) Which is, of course, exactly what we do observe.

What makes us expect that the mechanism to associate cognitive traits with physical sex would operate to perfectly differentiate by physical sex? Why would it not sometimes cross-over? Same-sex attraction then becomes simply a transposition resulting from non-perfect association of cognitive phenotype with sexual phenotype.

Note that there is an interesting benefit to this pattern of overlap and transposition for us as a profoundly cultural species. Having a small, cognitively cross-matched group could assist in communication between the (cognitively dimorphic) sexes. Moreover, in a cultural species, having a small but persistent group more inclined to invest in cultural activity rather than children would also be collectively beneficial. In fact, these two features would run together.

It seems likely that the first occupation to split off, at least in part, from subsistence activities was shaman. Shaman often come from the cognitively cross-matched, displaying same-sex attraction and other cross-gender behaviour. It seems unlikely that any specific pattern of genetic replication would be generated by this role. At the very least, however, having such a persistent cognitively-cross-matched minority would assist in sustaining the advantages that we get from being a cultural species.

A cognitively complex, yet significantly cognitive dimorphic, species would generate more dimensions across which cognitive traits common in one sex might get transposed to another. It is a sign of our adaptability as a species that this too could be turned into an advantage via sustaining cultural and social connections.



These musings are part of the intellectual scaffolding for a book to be published by Connor Court looking at the social dynamics of marriage. As they are somewhat a work in progress, these musings may be subject to ongoing fiddling.

Sex, Sexuality and doing evolutionary reasoning badly

This post by Darwinian Reactionary provides an excellent example of using evolutionary reasoning badly.

He is using evolutionary reasoning to critique the notion of sexual orientation. There are lots of problems with the concept of sexual orientation. Starting with the fact that human sexuality is multi-dimensional. There is (1) who you fall in love with, (2) who you are sexually attracted to and (3) who or what can provide sexual release. The randier you are, the wider (3) is likely to be, and the broader than (1) and (2) it is likely to be.

As lots of homosexual men down the ages have discovered, a significant proportion of straight young men are, in the right circumstances, seducible. That does not make them bisexual or homosexual, it just makes them randy. Men, particularly young men, in situations which systematically deny them social contact with young women are likely to use other men for sexual release. That is true in prisons, on long sea voyages and in countries which practise sexual apartheid.

The concept of sexual orientation does not really cover all those dimensions. It also does not cover terribly well the evidence that female sexuality seems to be moderately more fluid than male sexuality.

Evolutionary complexity
The problem with Darwinian Reactionary's critique is not that it is directed against the concept of sexual orientation, nor in invoking evolutionary reasoning, it is how evolutionary reasoning is used.

The first difficulty is simply assuming homosexuality is an absolute evolutionary disadvantage: in effect, that it completely blocks reproduction. Lots of homosexuals have had children. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that homosexuality is somewhat of an evolutionary disadvantage in that homosexuality presumably does reduce the propensity to reduce. It is, however, an empirical matter how much it actually does. An empirical matter that, moreover, is likely to vary significantly from human society to human society.

How much a barrier to reproduction homosexuality actually is matters, because it affects how strong the evolutionary pressure is against any genetic basis for homosexuality. The less of a barrier to reproduction homosexuality turns out to actually be, the less evolutionary selection pressure there is against it, and the less a puzzle its persistence in human populations is.

Let us presume, however, that homosexuality is enough of a barrier to successful fertility as to create a significant and persistent element of evolutionary pressure against it. Then we have a puzzle to be answered: why is it persistent? Note that this is not quite the same puzzle as: why does it exist? The latter is a puzzle of identifying the causal mechanism, the former is a puzzle about the persistence of the causal mechanism.

The “gay uncle helps sibling reproduction” hypothesis has some empirical support, though probably not enough in itself to explain the persistence of homosexuality. Especially if we assume homosexuality is an absolute barrier to reproduction, there may be problems with making the evolutionary mathematics work. It would be an informative exercise to work out what level of depressed reproduction above zero is sufficient for the mathematics to work, remembering that the more children the gay uncle tends to have, the less plausible any advantage to sibling reproduction is. Perhaps both effects cancel each other out, but it seems worth checking range and scale.

Cognitive dimorphism
Leaving aside the problem of assuming an absolute selection disadvantage, a further problem with Darwinian Reactionary’s use of evolutionary reasoning is that it is not based in the complexities of being Homo sapiens.

What is missing from the evolutionary reasoning in Darwinian Reactionary’s post is what is often missing from such reasoning: any sense that we are specifically dealing with Homo sapiens. It is all just logic pertaining to a sexually reproducing species. Nothing specific to Homo sapiens is involved.

Three factors specific to Homo sapiens appear relevant: (1) we are the cultural species, (2) we are the non-kin cooperation species and (3) there are significant, at least partly innate, cognitive differences between men and women. (1) and (2) are relevant because homosexual men have a persistent, cross-cultural tendency to be disproportionately involved in cultural activities, (3) because homosexuals have a persistent, cross-cultural tendency to display cognitive traits more common in the other sex. Indeed, their defining characteristic—who they are sexually attracted to—is the most obvious example of this but, revealingly, not the only one.

As an aside, this makes all the more annoying the tendency to reason abut homosexuality and homosexuals in ways which make it blindly obvious that one has entirely failed to consult the experience of actual gay folk. (A tendency much more obvious in the comments on the aforementioned post than the post itself.) One may choose what one does (or does not do) for sexual release. One does not choose who one falls in love with or what one is attracted to.

Attraction to one’s own sex is just as visceral as attraction to the opposite sex. Indeed, it makes much more sense in terms of having a cognitive feature typical of the opposite sex than being something weirdly free-floating. Though it is then a cognitive feature embedded in a different hormonal pattern. Attraction to men plus testosterone is different than attraction to men plus oestrogen, just as attraction to women plus oestrogen is different form attraction to women plus testosterone. Seeing homosexuals as having a cognitive feature more typical of the other sex also separates homosexuality from genuine para-sexualities (such as paedophilia), which are much rarer and much more clearly connected to trauma and dysfunction.

If the persistent difference in cognitive patterns between the sexes is an evolutionary advantage (and it surely has to have been to be as marked as it is), then some mechanism or mechanisms need to persist to maintain the patterns of cognitive difference by sex. If cognitive convergence between the sexes to the extent of being homosexual discourages reproduction, that would be a mechanism which would help maintain cognitive differences between the sexes. Some of the distinctiveness in physiological tendencies among homosexual men and women may point in that direction. Working out the evolutionary mathematics involved is way, way beyond my mathematical knowledge and understanding, but it would seem a useful exercise. One that gives homosexuality a much broader functional role in evolutionary dynamics that may be sufficient for it to be low instance but persistent, particularly if added to the "gay uncle" effect.

A key feature to remember about evolutionary reasoning is that we are talking about population dynamics. For instance, the persistence of psychopathy and sociopathy (or whatever the current approved labels are) at such low levels in human populations illustrate that (1) lack of empathy and normative engagement are not evolutionary advantages except as, at best, parasitic strategies on the overwhelmingly more dominant strategy(ies) using empathy and normative engagement and (2) if they are not propagating as a minor niche parasite strategy, then they are much more likely to be recurring malfunctions of the mechanisms supporting the dominant evolutionary strategy(ies).

Cultural species
That homosexual men in particular have been persistently, disproportionately involved in cultural activities is not much of a puzzle. To the extent that one does not invest in children of one’s own, the greater the pressure to invest in activities that generate social support and status independent of having one’s own children. Providing cultural services does that.

Having cognitive traits that are more “cross-sex” may well aid in creating broadly resonant cultural services, giving homosexual men both more incentive to invest in, and more capacity to successfully provide, cultural services. (That homosexual women have not been so significant is explicable in terms of the value placed on female fertility being such that taking on other roles was discouraged: especially if their fertility was women’s dominant social leverage.)

In the cultural species, having a low instance but persistent minority disproportionately willing and able to invest in cultural services would seem a clear advantage in realising the benefits of culture. Whether this can plausibly be “cashed out” genetically seems doubtful. But add in the helping to block cognitive convergence plus some level of aid to sibling reproduction, and there may well be enough selection effect to lead to the persistence of a low instance sexual minority in human populations. Which makes Darwinian Reactionary's attempt to characterise homosexuality as "selected against" with therefore straightforward consequences to how homosexuality then can, or cannot, be reasonably characterised a naively simplistic application of evolutionary reasoning.

I am absolutely for using evolutionary reasoning to think about why Homo sapiens are the way we are. Applying evolutionary reasoning to Homo sapiens is, however, a much more complex issue than the sort of naive evolutionism that Darwinian Reactionary is using.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Sex and gender

This is based on a comment I made here.

If you think the bodies are sexed (clearly true) and psyches are sexed (a bit murkier, but broadly true) then it is easy to get more than two genders.

Male (male in body and psyche)
Female (female in body and psyche)
Third (body and psyche don't match).

Plenty of human societies have worked on that basis.

You can even work on a simple matrix and get four genders (male-male, female-female, male-female, female-male). But third gender classification (really "other") is more common.

And some societies, without going all the way to third gender, have operated on sub-genders (e.g. males held to belong to a separate category because, hey, not sexually interested in girls). Western notions of sexuality are a way of modifying gender identity.

Sexuality or gender?
Back in the C19th, with the intersection between growing anthropological awareness of other societies' takes on gender with a critical mass of urbanisation, secularisation and communication making gender/sexual minorities more able to begin to organise, there was an argument in Western circles about whether queer folk should be treated as third gender. The notion of "homosexual" (and its derivatives, heterosexual and bisexual) won out, as it seemed more scientific and less of a shift of basic presumptions.

What we are seeing is a revisiting of that debate. Unfortunately, it is turning up on the wrong side of postmodernism, so rather than being grounded in ethnography and empiricism, it is all about feelz and discourses. Hence the ludicrous explosion of "genders".

Bio-error
What has not helped is that feminism has tended to talk so much about the penis & vagina, which actually do not mark the differences between males and females nearly as much as people think, as they both perform the same functions (bring gametes together, provide sexual pleasure). One's an innie (so receives) and the other's an outie (so penetrates), but they otherwise perform the same functions. If you take that as the key distinguishing feature between male and female, then, if one surgically turns one into the other, you have changed sex.

Except, of course, you haven't. People have just been surgically adjusted to better support a change of gender identity. Which, if we had a three gender system, would be fine--it would then get rid of those tedious and fruitless debates about who is a "real woman".

What really distinguishes male from female are testes, ovaries and mammaries. And no trans surgery actually provides those, just the external form of them. Hence trans surgery does not actually change one's sex, just physical form to support a change of gender identity. Something that there is a long history of via castration, such as eunuch priests and hijras.

All about the mammaries
Rather than the penis and vagina, the key for understanding the statistical patterns of cognitive differences between men and women is, in fact, the mammaries. (Mammaries are on the sex that gives birth, so that they are right there when the baby emerges.)

We are the cultural species, that is the secret of our success. To be the cultural species, we need big brains. So big, that they have to keep developing outside the womb.

Which requires extended childhoods, which leads to the oddness of the human mammaries--they are unusually large and prominent, they don't change shape all that much when lactating, and they can keep operating for years at a time to support those long childhoods. Hence female homo sapiens are the childminding sex. But we are the cultural species, which means we are the public space species. If one sex is the [what is compatible with] childminding sex, then the other will be the "everything you can't do while minding kids" sex, which makes it (the males) disproportionately the public space [i.e. outside household and immediate surrounds] sex.

In subsistence societies, producing the next generation requires a lot of available resources and attention. So, until the dramatic changes in production and reproduction technology over the last two centuries, the allocations of roles by sex in human societies has radiated out from [what was compatible with] childminding.

We have been the cultural species for many, many generations. Thousands of generations. Easily enough time to select for variated cognitive patterns. And even more than our long pregnancies, our long childhoods has driven that (hence mammaries being the most biologically important driver of cognitive differences).

So, irony of ironies, the biology required to be a species which can socially construct so much means that cognitive differences between men and women cannot be entirely socially constructed. Even more ironically, in societies of mass prosperity, the statistical cognitive patterns of men and women are becoming more divergent (pdf), not less, just as the notion of presumptive sex roles is being abandoned.

But these are very complex mechanisms, with a lot of overlap, and nature is always "throwing" the "genetic dice". Moreover, genes are not molds, they are recipes. So the "epigenetic dice" is also being "thrown". And all before we get into social and environmental influences. Hence psyches not lining up with biological sex in neatly differentiated ways. Nor, for that matter, does physical sex always line up in neatly differentiated ways.

Hence needing some language to talk of the people who do not fit. Having a third gender category does solve a lot of problems, which is why so many societies developed it. But that does not excuse the multiplying genders nonsense.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]