MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
demons, the shortfall of sociobiology is that it attempts to draw wide-ranging conclusions about a very complicated and ever-changing thing (human psychology and politics) from a necessarily small set of data. Sure, it's perfectly plausible that somewhere out there is a woman exactly as you described, swooning for a dude who treats her like crap, because the majority of her female ancestors did the same thing for survival and/or procreative reasons, and this manifested as a genetic predisposition.
But how do you prove that?
Without a time machine to go back and do copious, repeated, randomized behavioral studies each with a large n, we have no way of knowing how prevalent the behaviors suggested by archaeological evidence really were, let alone the full set of factors, both environmental and genetic, that made people do what they did back then. Most ancient people have vanished without a trace, and survival of remains into the present day does not necessarily correlate with greater survival success in life. This is ignoring all issues relating to the interpretation of historical and archaeological evidence.
I've found with pretty much every personality type (a fluid and nebulous concept in and of itself) I've ever encountered, I've been able to come up with a scenario or set of conditions in the past that would have made it an advantage, and therefore a marker of strength and well-adaptedness. If a predisposition for being one given way can be genetic, why couldn't a genetic predisposition to find that trait attractive in a partner also persist residually through the generations, regardless of whether either predisposition continued to confer any advantage?
Change is the only constant. Environments are in constant flux, and genetic recombination and mutation will ensure that gene pools are too. Each puts pressure on the other in countless, complicated ways. The end result is that there are always many kinds of people with many kinds of tastes, and with a gender-balanced population in the billions (or even far smaller, insh'allah!), there can always be someone for everyone. Why do the majority of people happen (or seem) to prefer one thing? Because the world is round and the sky is blue. The best thing is knowing that A) just as you might not be in the majority, neither are all people of the opposite sex, and B) what the majority wants now almost certainly won't ALWAYS be what the majority wants, if the distant future matters to you.
But how do you prove that?
Without a time machine to go back and do copious, repeated, randomized behavioral studies each with a large n, we have no way of knowing how prevalent the behaviors suggested by archaeological evidence really were, let alone the full set of factors, both environmental and genetic, that made people do what they did back then. Most ancient people
I've found with pretty much every personality type (a fluid and nebulous concept in and of itself) I've ever encountered, I've been able to come up with a scenario or set of conditions in the past that would have made it an advantage, and therefore a marker of strength and well-adaptedness. If a predisposition for being one given way can be genetic, why couldn't a genetic predisposition to find that trait attractive in a partner also persist residually through the generations, regardless of whether either predisposition continued to confer any advantage?
Change is the only constant. Environments are in constant flux, and genetic recombination and mutation will ensure that gene pools are too. Each puts pressure on the other in countless, complicated ways. The end result is that there are always many kinds of people with many kinds of tastes, and with a gender-balanced population in the billions (or even far smaller, insh'allah!), there can always be someone for everyone. Why do the majority of people happen (or seem) to prefer one thing? Because the world is round and the sky is blue. The best thing is knowing that A) just as you might not be in the majority, neither are all people of the opposite sex, and B) what the majority wants now almost certainly won't ALWAYS be what the majority wants, if the distant future matters to you.
