A star was born this week in Stockton, California: Jeremy Meeks, a 30-year-old convicted felon whose hunky mugshot — featuring dreamy slate-blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones — has turned him into a viral heartthrob....What on earth are you talking about? Strong sexual attraction to a man with low ethics and little impulse control is a great way for a woman to reproduce. Thus she brings about the survival of the species, who will be physically strong and with that helpful lack of impulse control (unless we get a mutation...).
“This is a really great example of an evolutionary lag — how women still find things attractive that don’t necessarily translate well into the modern world,” Vinita Mehta, a Washington, D.C.–based psychotherapist, tells Yahoo Shine. Because while being muscular and tough enough to thrive in dangerous situations might have been necessary for human survival back in caveman times, “these are not the things that help us survive and reproduce today,” notes Mehta, who is writing a book titled “Paleo Love” about how Stone Age genes can complicate modern relationships.
That's what evolution is about. It doesn't have a moral trajectory.
Oh, well. Here's your bumper sticker.
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The science writer I like perhaps the best, Nick Lane, finds himself drifting into this conceptual error all the time, and is constantly bringing himself up short. It's a common shorthand to describe an evolved mechanism as if the organism had done something consciously clever. Often it's a harmless shorthand, but it's a good idea to remind ourselves constantly that we're talking (if we're traditional evolutionists) about a mechanistic process that responds to whatever environment presents itself to each generation. The organism isn't getting better in a moral sense or even striving to achieve a practical goal for future generations. "Evolution has no foresight," Lane often says, meaning that chance mutations pop up and respond to chance alterations in the environment, some of which work better than others. And there's no guarantee that what used to work will still work when the environment changes.
The same isn't true of deliberate changes in human culture, which can be guided by foresight. There's no guarantee that it will be wise foresight, or that foresight will overwhelm chaotic or irrational forces, but at least there is an element of conscious planning. Ditto, of course, for controlled breeding of domesticated animals.
But when people talk about how evolution produced modern people with improved ethics and so on, they're not usually talking about efforts of will expressed in culture. They're usually talking about mechanistic evolution, which they mistakenly believe gives their opinions some scientific weight.
Occasionally I used to see bumper stickers proclaiming, "Don't Start the Evolution Without Me!" Often accompanied by a Darwin Fish. :)
LittleRed1
It is odd that people often refer to the need to survive in violent/anarchic times as something left over from "Caveman Days." The least acquaintance with history will of course confirm that episodes of violence and anarchy have been common in times much more recent than those of the cavemen
OTOH, I'm not sure why "lack of impulse control" would be an asset for survival in such circumstances. If I were going on an extended and very rough camping trip, facing the likelihood of attack by Bad People, lack of impulse control would not be among my criteria for selecting my companions.
It's only helpful in a way -- it causes people to mate who wouldn't otherwise. Lots of things are correlated with a drop in the fertility rate, like hard economic times. It often makes sense not to mate. So, low impulse control can be correlated with higher fertility, and obviously fertility is the very mechanism of evolution.
Now, of course, the children have to survive! And there higher impulse control is better, for protecting the kids. This is the evolutionary root of cuckoldry, I suppose, whereby a man of higher impulse control ends up caring for the kids of a man of lower impulse control (but more compelling sexuality).
And that generally means adultery, or at least "cheating" -- again, there is not exactly a strong relationship between evolution and morality!
There's a lot subsumed in the word "control." In a perfect world, we'd give instant play to the right impulses and restrict all the wrong ones. The problem is, we don't always judge correctly which are right and which are wrong in the circumstances, and to the extent we learn good rules of thumb for one set of circumstances, they won't necessarily serve us well in the next.
If we controlled all our impulses, we'd never do anything. If we even delayed all our impulses, we'd miss out on a lot.
The organism isn't getting better in a moral sense or even striving to achieve a practical goal for future generations.
It's embedded in Tex's statement, but I wanted to highlight that evolution doesn't even produce better organisms, only better organisms for a particular environmental circumstance. They will be worse organisms in a different environment.
“these are not the things that help us survive and reproduce today,”
How wrong can they get, the morally retarded eggheads.
If the girl that Hillary Clinton dealt with in the rape trial, had force for survival and reproduction, she wouldn't be 50 and in jail for drugs right now.
Or does the LEft think the HCs will leave them alone and that the Left's cannonfodder blacks will do the same.
There is a sequence that bears on this topic in Hans Fallada's 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? The protagonists, Sonny and Lammchen, are a likeable young couple trying to survive in late-Weimar Germany and having a rough time of it. One day, their gangsterish friend Mr Jachtmann takes them to see a movie..in which the following play-within-a-play occurs.
The film's protagonist is a young bank clerk, very much in love with his wife...the wife being less than happy with their financial circumstances. The clerk begins thinking how easy it would be to steal money, and one day his hand actually moves toward a pile of currency...but he just can't do it. He is noticed, though, by his friend the Management Trainee (son of a bank director), who takes pity on him and gives him money.
The clerk cannot bring himself to tell his wife how he got the money, but implies he has embezzled it. She is thrilled..."You did that for me?"...and their relationship improves dramatically.
But the Management Trainee meets the wife, and falls in love with her...still, "she only had eyes for her husband, that brave, reckless man, who would do anything for her." Finally, the Management Trainee tells the wife the truth about how the clerk got the money, and she laughs in her husband's face.
Note the implied priorities of the wife's attraction...her husband the Thief is more attractive than the high-status and well-off Management Trainee. However, the Management Trainee is more attractive than her husband the Recipient of Charity. Also, her husband the Recipient of Charity is clearly less attractive than her husband the Mere Bank Clerk.
When the movie ends, Sonny is devastated, frightened by the parallels between the movie and his own situation. But in the end, Lammchen (who Fallada presents as an almost but not completely ideal woman) remains loyal to him throughout the book.
For anyone who might be interested, I wrote a review of the above-mentioned book Little Man, What Now?, The book provides insight into what life was like in Weimar Germany, in addition to being very well-written.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/29873.html
There was also an American movie made from the book...while not on the same level as the novel--a force-fit happy ending, for one thing...is still worth seeing. Review here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/29967.html
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