Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots Seksuele ontwikkeling Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Prostitutie Pornografie"Genes cannot be selected that sacrifice their own continued existence so that different genes can continue instead; self-sacrificing genes have no future. Genes that are good at producing traits that get more copies of themselves into new individuals spread, those that are bad at it don’t." Lynn SAXON - Sex at dusk - Lifting the shiny wrapping of Sex at dawn, p.18
Lynn SAXON"Not evolutionary biologists (their interests are psychology and Ms Jethá is a practicing psychiatrist) the authors presented an attack on what they called the ‘standard narrative’ of evolutionary psychology." [mijn nadruk] (3)
"Reading their book I felt increasingly concerned that their argument was presented as being backed by scientific evidence. There were many blatant errors and false representations which readers were accepting as factual evidence."(4)
"I am in the first instance presenting a fuller and corrected picture of the ‘evidence’ put forward by Ryan and Jethá, and then adding other evidence which has been omitted. While I have included some thoughts and interpretations that are my own, my main intent is simply to get across better and more honest information." [mijn nadruk] (5)
[Erg negatief en denigrerend over dat boek. Je vraagt je af waarom. Omdat Ryan een PhD heeft in de psychologie en niet in de biologie? De auteur is naar eigen zeggen namelijk evolutionair biologe. ]
"We are apes. We are animals. Humans – Homo sapiens – share a common ancestor with the other African apes: chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla."(7)
[Dit is al zo fout qua formulering. Nee, we zijn geen apen, we zijn mensen. Dat we afstammen van apen, maakt ons niet tot apen.]
"Yet we look to whatever evidence we can find to try to piece together an understanding of our ancestors, often in an attempt to understand more about ourselves today: more about our ‘true’ nature, whatever that might be. One aspect of this nature we particularly like to debate is our ‘natural’ sexual nature, and in the modern Western world especially this has become a pressing issue as infidelity and divorce and ‘sexual liberation’ and ‘sexual dysfunction’ have changed the world from the one our grandparents knew (or at least thought they did)."(8)
[Waarom zouden we we meer van onszelf kunnen leren door terug te kijken naar de voorlopers in onze biologische evolutie? En wat heeft de biologische kant van seksualiteit te maken met maatschappelijke problemen op het vlak van relaties? Niets.]
"I believe the strongest evidence is that pair-bonding, mate-guarding, and male parental investment in (usually) his own biological offspring extends far back in our evolution, and that casual sex within a group would not and could not have been workable for Homo sapiens – it could not have evolved. A norm of multiple open simultaneous pairings by women as well as men, I will argue, did not exist. Agriculture certainly changed a lot for humans but it was a change in degree of traits that were already well established rather than a change in kind." [mijn nadruk] (15)
"In the West we emphasize recreation rather than procreation in connection to our sexual needs, though why this particular recreational activity should have such a powerful control over us is not fully appreciated. We seek and expect the physiological rewards, which is what we think it is about, yet we despair at the negative aspects that also spoil the party. If sex is fun why is such misery connected to it? Only by understanding the evolution of sex and the sexes will we understand why this is, and understand how ‘recreational’ sex is inextricably tied to procreation and reproductive success." [mijn nadruk] (16)
[Wat? Seks als plezier maken is verbonden met seks als voortplanting?]
"Sex at Dawn is almost all about sex and not much about children, yet evolution is very much about reproduction – variation in reproductive success is evolution."(17)
"Ryan and Jethá simply say that all men in the group will all equally share the parenting of the offspring because it is for the good of the group, but group selection arguments have been almost totally dismissed in evolutionary biology and with good reason. The unit on which selection acts is the ‘gene’, and the ‘gene’s eye’ view has given us the best (and sometimes the only) way to understand what we observe across species."(18)
[Wat heeft wat R&J zeggen te maken met groepsselectie? Alsof wat mensen qua seks doen alleen te maken heeft met je individueel voortplanten en je genen overdragen. Wat een onzin. ]
"Genes cannot be selected that sacrifice their own continued existence so that different genes can continue instead; self-sacrificing genes have no future. Genes that are good at producing traits that get more copies of themselves into new individuals spread, those that are bad at it don’t."(18)
[Dat is dus onzinnig evolutionair denken. Alsof seks en/of de keuze voor een sekspartner erop gericht is om genen door te geven. Alsof we zouden kunnen ruiken wat de beste genen in een ander zijn, en zo meer. Het maakt seks en de keuze van partners tot biologie en dat is het niet. ]
"If we just look at this thing called ‘sex’ as being a need and a resource on a par with food which is being ‘unnaturally’ or antisocially restricted, then removing restrictions so that the resource of sex can be shared seems a straightforward solution. But when we understand what sex is we can understand why it is different from food."(20)
"Evolutionary psychology is focused on current, usually Western, human behaviours, and it tends to easily lose contact with the science of evolutionary biology after taking in a few simple generalizations about males and females and applying them to all kinds of weird and wonderful things. And this includes the evolutionary psychology story told in Sex at Dawn."(21)
[Ze vindt evolutionaire biologie een echte wetenschap, evolutionaire psychologie niet.]
"Natural selection is the mechanism by which evolution occurs due to certain traits being selected over their alternatives. Traits that better enable survival and reproduction in a particular environment are the ones that, on average, are passed on to more offspring.(...) Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution which is recognized as being in action when particular traits spread down through the generations because they provide survival and reproductive advantages over the alternative traits."(26)
[Yep, maar dit is dus niet toepasbaar op mensen.]
"Being an egg producer or a sperm producer is how female and male came into being and it is how the sexes are defined in biology."(27)
"Female mate choice was finally, in the 1970s, given the full attention Darwin would have wanted. (This was also a time in the West of an active and significant women’s movement which may well have some connection.) As well as looking at how female mate choice led to display ornaments in males, such as showy feathers and bright colours, it also became obvious that females were often mating with more males than (from previous thinking) they needed to or, it was believed, did."(32)
"Recognizing that females in many species are not essentially monogamous has been an immensely important breakthrough but ‘why’ still needs to be understood."(33)
"In the 64 experiments by Bateman, 21% of males failed to fertilize any eggs while only 4% of the females failed to produce young (Hrdy 1986), so this does show the greater variance in male reproductive success compared to female which, Bateman said, was what determined the greater eagerness of males to mate. The males who successfully compete to fertilize more of the available eggs will pass their genes on to larger numbers of offspring while those who fail in the competition will pass theirs to few or none."(35)
[Zelfs Batemans conclusie suggereert dat mannetjes weten dat ze minder 'reproductive success' hebben dan vrouwtjes. Waar komt die 'eagerness to mate' anders vandaan? Ook een stiekem uitgangspunt: dat ze er op uit zijn om zo veel mogelijk nakomelingen te krijgen die hun genen dragen. Ineens is de samenhang met de 'natural environment' vergeten. ]
"Bateman’s basic insight that the greater variance in the reproductive output of one sex compared to the other leads to a greater eagerness to mate by that sex still stands, only rather than it being just the males who have the greater variance we now know that in some species it is the females. The sex – male or female – which has the greater variance in numbers of offspring is the sex most eager to mate." [mijn nadruk] (37)
[En dat wordt kritiekloos overgenomen. Vragen worden niet gesteld.]
"This brings in another important aspect of reproduction besides the mating: parenting. It is often when one sex is busy parenting a brood while the other sex has the eggs or sperm available for fertilization that the differences in eagerness to mate exist. It was Robert Trivers who went on to show that it was parental investment rather than the sex of the individual that was the important factor. The sex with the largest parental investment is a limiting resource for which members of the other sex compete (Trivers1972)."(38)
"When females are removed from the ‘mating market’, such as in mammals due to the conception, gestation, and milk provisioning that falls exclusively to the female, the ratio of reproductively available males to females, known as the operational sex ratio, is often male-biased: there are many more males seeking females for their eggs than females seeking males for their sperm."(39)
[Dit vooronderstelt dat seks er alleen is voor de voortplanting. Een zwanger of zogend vrouwtje zou hier dan niet meer interessant voor zijn. Wie zegt dat? Hebben vrouwelijke dieren die zwanger zijn geen (zin in) seks dan? In het hele verhaal is opvallend hoe er over zaken als seks bij dieren in menselijke termen gesproken wordt. Het is levensgevaarlijk en misleidend.]
"Readers of Sex at Dawn who have little or no previous understanding of evolution and natural selection are unlikely to question arguments about the evolution of human sexuality when only human evolution is addressed, albeit alongside some sparse information from other apes. But taking humans out of the whole of the evolutionary adventure to stand alone easily disconnects us from the rest of life, where we have come from, and all the evolutionary mechanisms that potentially apply, or have applied, to us. This, in effect, makes any such argument little different from any other origins myth, including religious ones." [mijn nadruk] (53)
[Maar dat is precies wat we moeten doen.]
"It is relatively easy to understand why a male might be keen to mate with pretty much any fertile-looking female because selection has led to that being a successful strategy in the males of most species. When bodies have evolved to serve eggs things are a bit different, and female sexual motivation and strategies are often less obvious and more complex and therefore more difficult to elicit. When parenting is involved then selection acts differently again, and we are a species where parenting looms large. (...) We have come a long way from the promiscuous male and the ‘coy’ female but some, including the authors of Sex at Dawn, have been so struck by the fact that females in many species show something other than a monogamous passivity that they have become a little over excited and have sought to show female sexuality as being as indiscriminate as it can often be in the male."(54)
[Het argument is steeds dat mensen deel uitmaken van de evolutie en dus hetzelfde seksuele gedrag vertonen als fruitvliegjes ofzo, omdat dat de meest succesvolle strategie is voor nakomelingen. Maar daar gaat seks bij mensen al lang niet meer over. Zowel de evolutionaire psychologie als de evolutionaire biologie overschatten zwaar wat de evolutie voor invloed heeft op en betekent voor het concrete gedrag van alledag van mensen. Ik ga het boek dus niet helemaal lezen en ga direct naar de conclusies:]
"In addition to many serious errors there are numerous omissions of what is highly relevant information if we are not to be left with a misleadingly fictitious picture of sexual behaviours in other societies. And though my added information about natural and sexual selection and other species may be of limited interest to the readers of Sex at Dawn, understanding evolution as a whole is crucial to all of us if we are to understand ourselves better and to grasp the evolutionary pressures on our sexual relationships."(549)
[Nee, dat is dus niet zo. Beweringen almaar herhalen maakt ze nog niet waar. Dit is een slecht boek, omdat het niet kritisch is naar eigen uitgangspunten. Weg ermee.]