While we have little enough for you here, look elsewhere: long-term commenter Rick O’Shea has finally started a blog of his own. Bullet Points: watch this space. We’ve enjoyed what’s there thus far, and I’d agree with Tam- once upon a time, being grossly obese was as good an indicator for status as a diamond-encrusted smile…
Content will probably continue to be light while we busy ourselves preparing for the Bloggerdammerung. The free ice cream machine is prone to hiccups like that unless I run across something that simply demands I drop what I really should be doing instead to rant about it.
In the meantime, belatedly, Vicious Circle 63. In which we discuss internet memes, I hold out for an incorrect pronunciation, Stingray’s rage transcends the mute button, and he once again finds a way to permanently scar those thought permanently hardened.
Geek Mind
Via Popehat we present a game that has sucked up way more of my Friday than it should have. And way more “Oh god damn it, what the hell was the name of that?” moments than I’d care to admit. See a screenshot of a game, name the title. Simple as that.
Oh, and for a free hint if you get Dr. Mario, it makes you spell out “Doctor.”
I seem to have accidentally dedicated my day to socializing in Gunblogger Conspiracy, a short thing. I have driven Stingray crazy by pointing this out, now it’s your turn.
MGM Lion. Watch him. No, seriously, don’t look at the majestic lion in the logo, watch his face.
Glances to the left- at his trainer. Cued commentary, not a roar (a very different noise with a specific context) but the big cat equivalent of a dog barking on cue. Glances back- no treat? Second cue?- okay- same trick. Glances back at the very end- where’s my cookie, dammit?
Theoretically you know the lion is a trained animal, but once you start watching his face the feel of the intro changes a lot and it becomes impossible to unsee.
If you are a foodie or simply very interested in what’s in your food and how it tastes, you probably already know of the concept “umami”, the fifth basic taste along with salty, bitter, sour, and sweet. In Western countries the concept is usually expressed as “savoriness”. What fewer know is that umami has a single and very direct source; as sweetness as a sensation is triggered by simple sugars and their molecular imitators, umami is triggered by glutamates. Glutamic acid, a nonessential amino acid, is the natural source, and monosodium glutamate is the manufactured one. Glutamic acid is usually bound up in a protein in its natural form, but only free glutamates provoke the strong savory taste; foods with naturally high amounts of free glutamates are the ones that provoke the strongest sensation of savoriness. Many meats have a fair amount of free glutamates, as do tomatoes, mushrooms, breads and other yeast products, and especially many varieties of cheese- thus explaining the perennial popularity of a slice of pizza*.
Since humans seem to be strongly drawn to savoriness- soy sauce is another potent source of free glutamate, and it is one of the world’s most ubiqutous condiments, with tomato sauces being just as popular in other quarters of the globe- making sure a meal has sufficient glutamic acid content is one way to guarantee that otherwise boring ingredients will be delicious. Bearing that in mind, a markedly successful recipe we tried recently that doesn’t look like it would be all that tasty unless you know this particular fun fact:
Cheesy Eggplant Bake
1 medium eggplant, peeled
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 tablespoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 egg + 2 egg whites
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 large green pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
2 (14.5 ounce) cans stewed tomatoes
6 ounces part skim mozzarella cheese, shredded1) Slice eggplant crosswise into 1/4-inch rounds. Arrange rounds in a colander in your sink and sprinkle salt all over them. Walk away for half an hour. When finished, “rinse under cold water and pat dry with paper towels.”
2) While eggplant is sitting, combine bread crumbs, garlic salt, and pepper in a shallow bowl or on a plate. In a separate shallow bowl, whisk eggs. When eggplant is done, douse each slice in the egg mixture. Then dip in the bread crumb mixture to coat. Shake off any excess and/or drippy-ness.
3) In a large skillet, heat 1/2 tablespoon oil over medium-high heat. Cook a few rounds until browned, about 2 minutes per side. When finished, arrange in 13×9-inch baking dish. Repeat for second batch.
4) Preheat oven to 350°F.
5) Heat last 1 tablespoon oil in same skillet over medium-high heat. Add green pepper, onion, and mushrooms. Cook until onion is softening and pepper is crisp/tender, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Top eggplant with mixture. Add tomatoes on top of that, spreading evenly.
6) Cover with tin foil and bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven and take off tin foil. Sprinkle cheese on top and bake another 25 or 30 minutes, until cheese is melted and a little brown. Serve to applause.
We substituted zucchini for the peppers since I don’t care overmuch for peppers but I do like squash quite a lot.
High-scoring sources of glutamates in this dish: Mushrooms, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, eggs, bread crumbs. Medium-scoring: eggplants and peppers, both nightshades and relatives of tomatoes, and zucchini as well if you use that. Delicious content: high to match. Meat necessary to create sufficient umami for deliciousness: none whatsoever. Much to our surprise, given that neither of us had ever had eggplant or an eggplant-containing dish before and were moved to rate it higher than “meh”, but there you go.
*If you think you are sensitive to MSG and a meal at a Chinese restaurant bothers you but pizza doesn’t… the MSG is not your problem.
As I’ve complained here in the past, Kang loves to hunt and keeps a steady rolling death toll on the local rabbits and squirrels. As you can imagine, this creates a perennial carcass-disposal problem, especially since she’d prefer to just eat it and this is not healthy for her for a number of reasons, most of them parasitical.
So, we worked hard on “trade” and she decided it was a fun game and that her very favorite treats (now reserved for “trade”) were worth more to her than a chance to eat a rotting bunny. At first we had to follow her around for awhile before she concluded we wouldn’t leave her alone and decided to make the trade, then she began immediately dropping her prize and trotting over for the goodies, then she became willing to come all the way inside for it. This was the goal: nice easy no fuss trade. At this point we largely stopped paying close attention and considered the problem solved, short of stopping her from going after critters in the first place, which is not likely to ever happen given her drive.
Then we noticed that we never had to discover a random carcass while hanging out in the back yard anymore. There was no shortage of carcasses, it was just that we just happened to spot her with one from the kitchen window each time because she was conveniently playing with it within easy line of sight.
Then yesterday when one of us spotted her flinging a dead squirrel about, by the time we came back to the back door she had already dropped the squirrel and was waiting expectantly. When I went to clean it up it was damn ripe, too, though relatively intact- evidently she had saved it a day or two.
I think we are now actively being cued. And while I won’t argue that the “training treats” on the bag is very much truth in advertising, I have to say I really don’t at all care for MY reward.
Dr. Venkman, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of “dodge” or “hustle.” Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman, and you have no place in this department or in this University.
Here at the Nerd Ranch, if you want to start a serious no-shit look-for-your-teeth brawl, a statement akin to the above is your best bet to getting there. That said, if you replace the name “Dr. Venkman” with “Dr. Erich Ritter” you will have a 100% accurate statement.
Erich Ritter is a behavioral ecologist with his PhD from the Bangladesh Post Office Zurich University*, and according to his biography is “is the only professional applied shark-human interaction specialist.” He is a poor scientist.
One of Dr. Ritter’s main tenets is that most shark bites are not attacks, but accidents. The shark was not out for human blood, but was curious, stepped on, had PMS, or was actually reflected light from Venus in a pocket of swamp gas. To a point, I agree with this. White shark attacks on surfers have frequently been chalked up as a case of mistaken identity, as the profile of a surfer paddling out strongly resembles the shark’s preferred seal prey. Further, he has in the past postulated that he can control interactions with sharks simply by modifying his heart rate.
In 2002, while filming for Discovery Channel’s annual “Shark Week,” Dr. Ritter achieved applied shark-human interaction with a bull shark and his leg.
In an attempt to demonstrate his theory about heart rates and the complete safety of being around sharks, Dr. Ritter employed the methodology of wading out into waist-deep water populated with a high concentration of bull sharks, and chumming the water. Yes, the same bull sharks responsible for more applied shark-human interactions than any other species. The same bull sharks with more testosterone at ambient levels in their blood streams than Mark McGuire in a batting cage. To call this experiment poorly designed is an understatement.
At any rate, the predictable outcome occurred and Dr. Ritter was dragged to shore sans most of his leg. After his recovery, since blood sells, Discovery gave him another show, “Anatomy of a Shark Bite.” In this bit of popular tripe, Dr. Ritter uses “state-of-the-art robotics” and computer animation to recreate the event and, supposedly, analyze the mechanics of how shark bites physically work, presenting the work in the context that this is somehow very poorly understood, despite a myriad of studies, papers, and research that did not originate with a video clip that should have appeared on MTV’s “Jackass” instead of any show claiming to be serious and remotely scholarly. It’s been many years (thankfully) since I saw the show in question, but some of the more egregious design flaws included using steel for the shark’s teeth in the robot, ignoring the mechanical force multiplier of a lever and considering air-line PSI to be the same as applied PSI in the pneumatic shark-jaw, using fixed jaws (ignoring the rather significant motion and mechanic from the fact that real shark jaws extend and rotate through different angles during the biting process, rather than just the “Hungry-Hungry Hippos” model used in the “state of the art robotics”), and reproducing the vigorous nuanced shaking motion sharks normally create via their entire bodies by having Biff and Slab push the robot back and forth. The computer modeling was essentially “Here’s a CGI shark! Ain’t it pretty?” On the plus side, they did put a fair degree of effort into getting the shape of the teeth right between the various shark species they were “recreating” the bites of.
When the show originally aired, I was so astounded at the lack of effort to bring anything to the table other than flash and shock images from the original attack, that I wrote to Dr. Ritter. As this was several computers ago, I no longer have either my original letter or his reply, but I detailed the above flaws with the bite-model he used along with some others that I’m sure I’d recall if I re-watched the show, asked about some obvious mathematical errors presented in the show, and in general asked what the fucking fuck he called that piss poor excuse for modeling, and could you maybe own up on a few things that are just flat wrong, though amazingly I did so politely. His response was essentially “Piss off, I have a PhD and you don’t.”
Now as I said, in broad principle I agree with Dr. Ritter. I don’t believe many shark attacks on humans occur out of malice or predation, and that sharks overall have very clear body language. Fins stiff and down, swimming slowly? Good sign not to keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve waded in a school of leopard sharks and emerged without any damage, though I don’t believe for an instant that it had anything to do with properly controlling my heart rate. Not chumming the water might have been a factor, but I digress. Given this position, and that I sincerely do believe that the overall message that we should not fear sharks and should protect them, I chalked Dr. Ritter up as a pompous blow-hard who on the balance probably does more good for sharks than harm (at the very least, he’s directly contributed to the nutritional needs of one bull shark, which is more than I’ve done) and let it go.
Those in the audience of the TV watching persuasion have probably noticed that once again it’s time for Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week. I can’t really say that this has been the event to look forward to that it was in the past, and ever since the laughable spectacle of a show described above, I haven’t paid much attention to it. This does not preclude catching bits and pieces during dinner, or while channel surfing in the evening, however, which brings us to another point of why Dr. Ritter is a poor scientist. Flipping on the boob-tube the other evening, LabRat and I came in on the Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion to a show I missed the title of revolving again around shark bites. The Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion in question? Dr. Ritter will reproduce the experiment that led to his tragic accident!
Except there were only nurse sharks (a species noted for being extremely docile, especially compared to bull sharks, the odd lemon shark (inquisitive but also not noted for high aggression levels), and maybe a blacktip reef shark out at the edge of the bay.
And there was only Dr. Ritter in the water instead of him and the camera crew and a couple other guys.
And he was moving much more slowly and cautiously.
And there was a spotter watching the sharks from safety calling out positions.
Oh, and there was no chum in the water. That might be a little factor.
One of the central features of real science is repeatable experiments. If you say you managed to start up cold fusion, but can’t ever duplicate it, then that pretty much goes in the column headed “Bullshit.” If experiment A is dropping a baseball from a height of ten meters and measuring the amount of time before it hits the ground in order to determine acceleration due to gravity, and experiment B is pushing a baseball across a table with a spring, these experiments are not equivalent. They do not contain the same variables, they do not measure the same things, and the — do I even need to keep hammering this point? They’re not the same experiment, and the outcomes are not outcomes that can be measured against each other.
Look, Dr. Ritter’s original stunt was to have Steve Urkel march into a group of Hell’s Angels with a baggie of meth around his neck knocking over their beers and calling them all sweet-cakes. The “recreated” experiment was telling Nigella Lawson that unfortunately the butter for her toast was not pre-softened, we’re terribly sorry ma’am, so breakfast is on the house.
Sure, there are disclaimers all over the shows about how you shouldn’t jump in the middle of shark lagoons yourself, and those really are pretty good warnings for once. These didn’t-make-the-cut clips from “Jackass” are dangerous, whether you know what you’re doing or not. Dr. Ritter trying to prove his theory via this methodology is disingenuous at best, and at worst… well, take a look at his leg. There are much better ways to go about analyzing and observing shark body language and stimulus response. There’s something to be said for stepping away from the cage, since they do obviously provoke a curiosity response from the shark, but the flailing ape with bubbles coming out of its head is sort of a fin-scratcher to our toothy friends too. Honestly this guy’s body of work is like a “how-to” for anti-science. Really, I’d like to suggest that if he’s going to keep at his body of work in this manner, he step things up a bit, get a wet suit, and go prove his theory with the great whites. Someone else even helpfully made a template for how a show like that should look. I bet the endings are almost identical, too. This one will just be wetter.
*In all fairness, ZU may actually be a very good institution. Its alumnus and his holier-than-thou attitude and camera-seeking behavior, however, does not present a stellar image of the institution.
Via Popehat, whose own pungent commentary on the subject is not to be missed, a Bruce Walker column over at American Thinker whose basic thesis seems to be “almost all Americans are secretly conservatives and there’s only an appearance of rough equality of liberals and conservatives because liberals are so mean conservatives are afraid to admit it”. To wit:
The institutional stranglehold that the left has on American society is almost Orwellian in its breadth and intensity. Why would anyone in America willingly call himself a “conservative” when the left has so insidiously smeared conservatives with the failed leftist malignancies of National Socialism and Fascism? Conservatives, to the omnipresent organs of leftism, are like Dalits in India: untouchables, loathsome and despised. So the upper-caste leftists think nothing of privately joking about Rush Limbaugh in agony or gratuitously smearing Fred Barnes or Karl Rove as racists. Leftists are simply terrorists. Many closet conservatives, I suggest, are too frightened to be open and honest about what they believe.
The first and most obvious point to make is that “conservative” and “liberal” are blanket terms that describe varying degrees of loose tribal affiliation to gigantic baskets of ideas and philosophies, some of which are in direct conflict with each other, and thanks to that self-identified conservatives and liberals may have more in common with each other than than they do with other conservatives and liberals. I generally call myself a conservative if pressed to make a political identification without time to explain in depth, but that’s because it’s the identification I see as most relevant given the priorities I put on my various values, current majority face represented by liberals, and today’s battleground issues; anyone who’s read me for awhile knows I have a lot of “liberal” views as well and that I don’t think much of any of the most popular figures on the right.
What I find so amusing about the article is that if I went in and did some search-and-replace functions on “conservative” and “liberal” and changed the language to fit leftist tropes, it could have been published in Nation and been about how the vicious right-wing attack machine was preventing the progressive views that are really dominant from gaining political traction. Goodness knows I’ve read dozens of such posts and pieces in varying places I visit that lean leftward rather than rightward, and they are all quite sincerely meant. Whenever Republicans or Democrats win a big political victory and manage to gain a substantial majority in Congress and an executive of their own brand, they generally tend to behave as though they believe this is true and the bulk of America approves broadly of their flavor of agenda and promptly make a bunch of policy overreaches that lead to a backlash in the following election, and then everyone involved instantly forgets what lessons there might have been in that and repeats the cycle endlessly.
The right and left attack machines both exist. There are vicious demagogues of every imaginable political flavor, and in my experience neither side is markedly more civil than the other; press the right buttons and the venom flows, usually with a justification about fighting fire with fire or rationalization about being “brave” if questioned. Shutting down opposition by making it unpleasant to be the opposition is so tempting a tactic no philosophy is immune, though some tend to be more passive-aggressive and self-deluding about it than others.
My major objection to the Walker piece, though, is the implicit attitude that being criticized for your politics, even unfairly and mean-spiritedly criticized, is such a devastating experience that it equates to terrorism. Leaving aside the loathsome practice of borrowing actual atrocities where people die to make your hurts seem more serious, it’s just astoundingly whiny.
This just in! Having strong opinions and beliefs about anything will mean getting criticized for it, sometimes by people who are meanypants doodoo heads about it. Whether it’s your politics, your religion, or your feelings about semiautomatic handgun models, if you are at all outspoken about them someone at some point, sometimes even a someone in a position of power relative to you, is going to hand you a ration of shit about it. Absolutely nobody has any sort of right to even be insulated from this. No matter how profoundly you believe yourself to be in the right, being right grants absolutely no special privileges or immunities to you and your beliefs. The Great Pumpkin isn’t real, and being sincere about things counts for absolutely nothing in terms of what rights you have in the way others treat you, so long as they aren’t actually assaulting you.
And this is not that big of a deal. If you’ll stop reacting to insults with temper tantrums, you might find that you now have the time to realize they’re actually a much less unpleasant experience than throwing tantrums is. I’ve been called all manner of things and had my beliefs characterized in all sorts of inaccurate and insulting ways, and the worst consequence is transitory irritation followed by writing some people and forums off as possibilities for reasonable conversation. This has overall resulted in my staying friends with a lot of liberals and remaining a regular in several places dominated by liberals, because I really don’t mind being basically regarded as mildly insane and somewhat misguided- after all, I think the same of them. Astoundingly I have suffered no consequences whatsoever from being open about my politics aside from the occasional tiff with people that just can’t return civility if they think they are In the Right.
The ability to be secure in your opinions, values, and beliefs even if someone is mean to you about them is an adult life skill. If you are not in possession of it, I don’t recommend advertising it through national media.
Sorry for the lack of post; Stingray has been wrapped up in a hurricane of appointments and meetings, and I just Did Not Feel Well today.
Service of free ice cream will resume shortly.
I was listlessly kicking around a post that requires some extra research that on a warm breezy afternoon I was feeling frankly uninclined to do at that moment, then a friend of mine dropped rant material in my lap. So off to the races we go to savage an old favorite target, an “evolutionary psychologist” (actually JUST a psychologist, if he knows much about primate or human evolution it’s not evident from his writing) hawking his new book about how humans are really exactly like chimpanzees and human culture is a sinister plot.
Let’s fisk!
Seismic cultural shifts about 10,000 years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries, it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists and covered up by moralizing therapists.
You have to give him credit for not weaseling around; his thesis really is that ten thousand years ago humans suddenly began behaving unnaturally across the world and that this is the result of an ongoing cultural plot. Or rather- bear in mind I’ve not read the book as I’ve gotten no indication it would be worth my time except as exercise for my spleen- the Western world. His knowledge of how those strange primitives in places untouched by Abrahamic religion, modern medicine, and psychologists and their cultural practices seems not to extend beyond Margaret Mead being pranked by the Samoans.
In recent decades, the debate over human sexual evolution has entertained only two options: Humans evolved to be either monogamists or polygamists.
Only if you have exclusively been following the debate in pop psychology. Actual evolutionary biologists and anthropologists aren’t this binary, nor do they always approach it as a rigid dichotomy.
Couples who turn to a therapist for guidance through the inevitable minefields of marriage are likely to receive the confusing message that long-term pair bonding comes naturally to our species, but marriage is still a lot of work.
Well, yes. That’s because sharing your life with another adult human with their own thoughts, wishes, desires, and goals is, in fact, inherently a lot of work. If you do polyamorous relationships right they’re also a lot of work, if not actually MORE, because it gets more complicated with each individual added to the relationship. Just because something is natural to the human species does not make it EASY; it’s indisputable that we evolved as a savannah-based omnivorous hunter and gatherer, but I challenge you right now to go to Africa, walk out into the Serengeti, and make an easy, comfortable, and fulfilling living at it. I suspect it also takes a lot of work.
Few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to persuade a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and stop being gay.”
….Dude. How old is this guy? Does history really start at the last fifteen years for him?
But most insist that long-term sexual monogamy is “normal,” while the curiosity and novelty-seeking inherent in human sexuality are signs of pathology.
Well, it does seem to be “normal” in the sense that heterosexuality is “normal”, i.e. what the bulk of the species has done most of the time through most of recorded history. And that humans are normally curious and novelty-seeking is an idea acknowledged as far back in the Bible in the sense of creating an origin story specifically centered around the trait and bothering to make a long list of proscriptions that are only necessary if it frequently occurs to people to do them. I’ve honestly heard of a lot more therapists telling people to stop being gay than I have of therapists telling people that wanting to fuck different people is pathological.
Thus, couples are led to believe that waning sexual passion in enduring marriages or sexual interest in anyone but their partner portend a failed relationship, when in reality these things often signify nothing more than that we are Homo sapiens.
Well, yes, they do in fact portend a failed relationship if acting on these desires is unacceptable to your partner, brainwashed by culture as he or she may be or not. There’s a massive difference between telling a therapy client their desires are unnatural and telling them that they are destructive. While it is in fact difficult to find a therapist that will view opening a relationship as one of a list of potential options that will end in a good result for the couple, I think the psychological conspiracy to deny that human nature can include a wandering eye exists only in Mr. Ryan’s head. And in the therapists’ defense, fucking around on your partner will in fact be very destructive unless both of you have agreed, have excellent self-knowledge, and excellent communications skills; it’s very far from something that will make people magically happier because they’re being “natural’.
This is a problem because there is no reason to believe monogamy comes naturally to human beings.
Only if you are extremely selective and sometimes ignorant or deceptive about those reasons. More on that later, but also “Aside from the fact that it mysteriously seems to be built into a ton of human cultures. AGH CONSPIRACY.”.
Our ancestors evolved in small-scale, highly egalitarian foraging groups that shared almost everything. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their so-called “fierce egalitarianism.” Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory.
Question: At any point, did you ask these anthropologists whether the sharing of everything included mates? In the polygamous cultures, is it considered culturally acceptable to have sex outside of those bonds? I kind of doubt it, because the conception of total egalitarianism in modern-hunter-gatherer societies is itself more pop-culture mythmaking than reflection of cultural anthropological reality. Go here if you want to know more.
Although our social world revolves around private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins toward interrelation and mutual dependence.
This is an unscientific comment, but I seem to recall some notions of interrelation and mutual dependence including free love had some really exciting effects in various quickly failed hippie communes of the sixties.
Little thought is given to who owns the land, or the fish in the river, the clouds in the sky, or the kids underfoot. An individual male’s “parental investment,” in other words, tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman — or harem of women — and her children, as conventional views of our sexual evolution insist.
This is just… patently making shit up at this point. I have no idea where he got this notion other than somewhere out of his own idea of what an awesome primal society would be like. For one thing, visit the hunter-gatherer wiki hosted by the Ohio State University anthropology department as a way of counteracting the sort of mythmaking I mentioned, go to nearly any page having to do with the structure of individual hunter-gatherer societies, and note how very, very often the words wife, husband, and marriage are used, almost as though it were taken as the norm. For another thing, it’s in complete contradiction of logic to think that hunter-gatherer society would have a totally laissez-faire attitude toward sex and whose children were whose: hunter-gatherers live in SUBSISTENCE SOCIETIES. The number of births a group has per year isn’t a matter of extra baby showers, it’s a question of whether there’s going to be enough food to go around. There’s no birth control and no abortion- it’s something any such society has to be very concerned about.
But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably. It became crucially important to know where your property ended and your neighbor’s began. Remember the 10th Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that [is] thy neighbor’s.”
Actually, possessions appear pretty much immediately in any hunter-gatherer society that has found an area rich enough to settle for awhile. It’s not an Agricultural Conspiracy, people appear to naturally want things of their own as soon as they don’t have to pack it out every few weeks.
With agriculture, the human female went from occupying a central, respected role to being just another possession for men to accumulate and defend, along with his house, slaves and asses.
Not so much. Women are possessions in quite a few hunter-gatherer societies, some of which are screamingly and violently misogynist. Astoundingly, hunter-gatherer cultures don’t shake out into a unitary Garden of Eden state, there’s a massive amount of variation between them. It’s almost like humans are naturally an intensely cultural species.
Students are taught that our “selfish genes” lead us to organize our sexual lives around assuring paternity, but it wasn’t until the shift to agriculture that land, livestock and other forms of wealth could be kept in the family. For the first time in the history of our species, biological paternity became a concern.
So this dude, who is pontificating on human evolution… that’s evolution, the game in which the most successful are the ones who produce the most children and grandchildren who go on to become reproductively successful themselves… in a species in which the investment in child care necessary to produce offspring that become reproductively successful is the most intense of any on the planet… is asserting that humans had no reason to ever care who had fathered a child until the ancient equivalent of X-boxes and McMansions became involved.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA *gasp* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!
*sniff* *wipes face* Moving on.
Research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same conclusion: A nonpossessive, gregarious sexuality was the human norm until the rise of agriculture and private property just 10,000 years ago, about 5 percent of anatomically modern humans’ existence on Earth.
The term for this would be “blatant and egregious lie”, unless his most recent source was Desmond Morris, who was himself highly problematic for a host of reasons. Though it’s a funny lie, in that anatomically modern humans have not existed for long enough for ten thousand years to represent 5% of our period of tenure on earth.
The two primate species closest to us lend strong — if blush-inducing — support to this vision. Ovulating female chimps have intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and bonobos famously enjoy frequent group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and conflict-free.
This is also a blatant and egregious lie. Even ovulating female chimps don’t take all comers; while it is possible for an aggressive male to pressure and bully a female chimp into sex if he has enough male buddies to help him out, this generally only happens to low-status females. For the majority of female chimps lucky enough not to be Sally Low-Status, they may mate with more than one male, but she chooses which ones carefully. As for the bonobos, while they are indeed famous for being unique among primates for frequent non-reproductive sex, it’s not “group sex” where “everyone” lies around afterward having worked all conflicts out; it’s mostly sexual contact between females, who as the dispersing and non-related-within-a-group sex are the ones with the most potential for conflict. The males do engage in some mutual diddling from time to time, but it’s not an Ape Orgy and who has REPRODUCTIVE sex with whom is still important.
The human body tells the same story. Men’s testicles are far larger than those of any monogamous or polygynous primate, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve standby sperm cells for multiple ejaculations.
Also a blatant lie, or at the least very misleading. Next to our two closest relatives he’s been extolling as our wild equivalents, our testicles are incredibly puny, our sperm count low, and our sperm sluggish. I am linking to an upload because I honestly can’t figure out whether a skinned testicle is a SFW image or not, but here is a chimp’s testicle and a chimp’s brain, in human hands for size comparison’s sake: Balls vs. Brains. Speaking of testicle size relative to body size.. this image is definitely not safe for work.
Men sport the longest, thickest primate penis
True, but penis size isn’t actually relevant to how many times a male can ejaculate and produce useful sperm. The cat family relies on induced ovulation- that is, the female doesn’t ovulate at all until she’s mated several times- and has several representatives, especially lions, who specialize in Endurance Sex. Their penises are only as large relative to their bodies as is needed to penetrate. Which suggests that big dicks on male humans may have a lot more to do with bipedality and the angle of penetration having gotten trickier relative to when we were still using our knuckles for locomotion. Which also suggests that Mr. Ryan is mixing a fair amount of his own identification with masculinity and what makes it into his “scientific” analysis.
as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm when the woman is just getting warmed up
I say it up there, it comes out here. You’re doing it wrong, sport.
These are all strong indications of so-called sperm competition in our species’ past.
Women’s pendulous breasts, impossible-to-ignore cries of sexual delight, or “female copulatory vocalization” to the clipboard-carrying crowd, and capacity for multiple orgasms also validate this story of prehistoric promiscuity.
Uhhhhhhh. For one, breast size or the fact that we even HAVE breasts when we’re not lactating has nothing whatsoever to do with promiscuity, and the fact that the thinks this is self-evident tells me WAY more about his fantasies than I ever wanted to know and I have to scrub my brain now. Ditto vocalizations during sex. As for capacity for multiple orgasms… well, there’s less real reason for why they SHOULDN’T exist if not for prehistoric gang-bangs than why they should. If you’re not losing a dose of protein and DNA for every orgasm, why should the sensory response be limited?
“But we’re not apes!” some might insist. But we are, in fact. Homo sapiens is one of four African great apes, along with chimps, bonobos and gorillas.
I’m actually going to quote someone else on this, because she said it well enough that her metaphor is now a term in my head for bullshit “we are just like this species we’re related to” evo psych. Blog is NSFW, but take it away, Holly:
I agree that human behavior is evolved, but I believe that we evolved into humans. If we still had the hierarchies and behaviors of apes on the savannah, we’d be apes on the savannah. (Also, even apes are often more complex than Kanazawa assumes.) It’s like saying “dolphins are descended from land creatures with legs, therefore dolphins have legs.” And the idea that men are harem-keeping sperm machines and women are antler-contest-judging baby machines is some serious dolphin legs. Morality, creativity, abstraction, empathy-these are our flippers.
Now that I’ve about run out of post to fisk- the rest is basically a condescending “oh, you can CHOOSE to be monogamous, but it’s silly and unnatural and good luck with that”- further commentary.
I really love how his fantasy primatology and fantasy anthropology are in direct conflict with each other. The term “sperm competition”- which is not so-called at all as it’s a recognized concept in those sections of evolutionary theory addressing sex- is competition. The chimps waiting for a turn- or just as likely just waiting because the lady in question isn’t interested- aren’t high-fiving each other and getting turned on by the gang-bang, they are in competition with each other. They’re not all buddies while the sperm does the heavy lifting. Chimps, along with all other primates with boisterous ovulation, have great big canine teeth: they’re not for being fierce hunters, they’re for tearing up other males. Male bonobos have much smaller canines than male chimps, but they’re still bigger than female bonobo canines. Hominids, in interesting contrast, had drastically diminishing canines as well as diminishing sexual dimorphism (the degree to which male and female bodies in a species are different) in canines as early as Ardipithecus- four million years ago. Primate “free love” isn’t peaceful and it isn’t all that free either, but it looks like we stopped needing those physical weapons for it quite a long time ago.
More than that, as I’ve ranted multiple times here in the past so I’ll try to keep this time brief, Ryan completely and totally ignores our biggest, completely non-hypothetical difference from chimps and bonobos: we have concealed ovulation and sexual receptivity completely uncoupled from fertility. No one can tell when a woman is fertile, including the woman. This dramatically lowers the fitness payoff for males using a promiscuous mating strategy; the odds are always highest that whatever female he’s successfully mated with wasn’t even fertile at all, which hugely lowers the value of the time and effort put into each mating. It also hugely raises the value of any strategy that involves investing much more into many fewer women- odds are she’s bound to be fertile at some point, and if you put your time and energy into either guarding her from other males or winning enough of her friendship that she really likes mating with you over others you not only pump up the odds you’ll have a kid, it also puts the kid into reach to help make sure that he or she makes it to reproductive age.
This doesn’t mean humans are definitely naturally monogamous. I don’t think cultures in which polygyny IS the norm are warped cultural conspiracies either. But, as I have gone into much more detail in previous posts if you want to trawl around in the archives, it DOES mean that monogamy is one of several that make a sound reproductive strategy for human males.
In the meantime, if you want to read a book about human sexual evolution and primate sexual strategies, don’t go to a pop psychologist with fantasy visions of evolution and anthropology, go to a real evolutionary biologist that’s extensively studied primates: Why Is Sex Fun, by Jared Diamond. Now with 600% more science than the nearest competitor! I would argue it needed to be a much longer book, but it’s still much more worth your time than Ryan’s.
