DISQUS

Soni · 2 years ago

"Most middle-class Americans can easily raise five or six children, and feed, clothe, and shelter them all very well. Yet most couples only want (and have) two children. This is a mystery for evolutionary psychology."

This is hardly a mystery, at least to my mind.

It seems obvious to me that the reason to have many kids is to ensure that at least a few of them survive to pass on genes, like a dandelion. But this strategy is only actually viable in a high-stress environment, because kids take lots of resources to raise to reproductive maturity and so having tons of kids is expensive and only really works when most of them are likely to die before they reach sexual maturity anyway. Also, in a stressful environment, resources are scarce and closer to borderline in terms of ROI in producing them. Ergo, it is in the family's best interest to have lots of workers around to ensure subsistence levels of resources are achieved.

OTOH, the advanced civilizations of Westerners all but guarantees that a high ratio of kids born will live, so they can genetically afford to have fewer and invest their surplus resources into ensuring the kids live a long and healthy life, rather than going for the dandelion approach. Plus, resource acquisition is relatively easy and therefore Westerners do not have to resort to breeding their own labor pool to ensure adequate resource accumulation.

Your mileage may vary, but it makes sense to me. Why strain your resources unnecessarily with a lot of kids if you don't have to?

adri · 2 years ago

because their parent want more kid if the first kid beautiful and have a good chance to increase their income because a lot of people like beautiful, that can used in media such as tv, film,advertising

jason · 2 years ago

"When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate."

Perhaps this explains why cultures in general place high importance on conservative values and long held traditions because they are trying to stabilize environmental condition to allow evolution to occur.

Con · 2 years ago

One flaw in this storyline is that the environment has actually remained sufficiently constant for most people for long periods over the last 10,000 years to be capable of driving evolution. Starting about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, and spreading gradually around the world, the neolithic revolution turned most of the world's population into farmers, living a lifestyle that changed very slowly between its introduction and maybe 150 years ago. This has had evolutionary effects, such as the lactose tolerance of northern Europeans whose farming systems relied (and rely) to a significant extent on milk production. My guess is that there are two main reasons for the evolutionary hang-overs in behaviour described here. One is that they have not resulted in significant disadvantages over the last 10,000 years. The other is that the evolutionary roots of much of our behaviour are very deep, shared in essence with chimpanzees and bonobos, and it would take significant evolutionary pressure to eradicate them, as opposed to driving the minimum behavioural changes required for efficient survival and reproduction.

ben · 2 years ago

i hate to be a troll here, but this sounds like total bullshit.

i'm sorry :(

Dan Colman · 2 years ago

Criticism is fine, indeed welcomed here, but how about a little substance (or else it looks like trolling)....

DC

L.B. Jeffries · 2 years ago

This is nothing new from a philosophical point of view. Olaf Stapledon broke down the species and behavior patterns from an evolutionary perspective in 1930 when he wrote 'Last and First Men'. 2 billion years of evolution for our species, breaking them into 18 variations due to their genetic differences and behavior patterns. We, the first men, don't fare very well.

Give it a wiki to get a better idea.

JLM · 2 years ago

I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with either the premise, or the way they are explaining the concept. The quote you sent infers that the parents are some how able to purposefully have more of one gender or the other, which I don't think is possible.

I can sort of see how it makes sense if they are talking about populations of parents instead of individuals: a population of parents who have a trait that is more valuable to girls will quite likely have their female descendants survive/thrive better than their male descendants. However, the more I read it the more I think they are talking about individuals, in which case I think they are BSing:

"In a representative sample of 3,000 young Americans, those who are “very attractive” had 36% greater odds of having a daughter compared to everyone else."

That makes no sense at all. There is no way that genes that will one day in the future determine how beautiful a baby is will affect the likelihood of an X-sperm fertilizing the egg over a Y-sperm... I call shenanigans.

JLM · 2 years ago

More that I disagree with:

"... and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age."

It's called empathy. I suppose that the fact that it may be a fictional story may come in to play, but I think that part is only a tiny part in why we react this way. I'm sure that neolithic hunters cried when someone told them a sad story...

JLM · 2 years ago

"For example, why do most middle-class people in western industrial nations have so few children? Most middle-class Americans can easily raise five or six children, and feed, clothe, and shelter them all very well. Yet most couples only want (and have) two children. This is a mystery for evolutionary psychology."

It's not a mystery. Well, it's true in the same sense that it's a mystery why some people like chocolate and some people don't... It has far more to do with the fact that unlike previous generations/societies, we don't need to have many children to help us provide for ourselves. Thus, the negatives associated by some with having many children VASTLY outweigh the positives, and so we don't have as many children. This is also very much a cultural issue, but I don't think it has a god damn thing to do with evolutionary psychology; or rather, it has no more to do with it than it does with a myriad of other issues. Obviously evolutionary psychology is important, very important in particular issues, but I think these guys are out to lunch with what they've said in this interview.

Roberto Gonzalez-Plaza · 2 years ago

There is no science-substance-behind this book: pure fantasy. Read Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2007. "Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (gTWH)", Journal of Theoretical Biology. 244: 133-140. Nada, zilch. We should select for better editors....

JLM · 2 years ago

Alright, it's finally sunk in; it was what I said in the first post; they aren't explaining it very well. It took me this long to realize that they were talking implicitly about a gender-having genes but explicitly about the beautiful-having genes.

That is, genes that increase the tendency to have a particular gender will become tied to the genes that benefit a particular gender:

This link would happen when the two genes "met in the wild": there was a bigger advantage for the beautiful+girl-having combo than any of the other combos (beautiful+boy-having, ugly+boy-having, ugly+girl-having), and so that combo proliferated more effectively. In fact, it proliferated more effectively than the other beautiful+? combos, and thus, created the correlation between being beautiful and having girl-having genes.

CPR · 2 years ago

This is another example of extremely shoddy thinking being passed off as cutting edge science. They don't even know the basics of when EP originated: they say it began in 1992, which is totally wrong. E.O. Wilson published SOCIOBIOLOGY in 1975. This was the origins of applying evolutionary theory to human behavior. The authors' apparent ignorance of the fact that evolutionary psychology is simply another name for sociobiology is shameful.

As previous comments have noted, the premise that evolutionary processes are "stuck" and that significant change cannot have happened in 10,000 years is simply false. Not just false, but embarrassingly so.

EP could be a useful, important discipline, but it is dominated by people like these (and Pinker) who are peddling sloppy thinking in lieu of serious science.

J. Goodrich · 2 years ago

You should note that Mr. Kanazawa has never actually shown that beautiful people have more daughters. The original piece was shown to be faulty by professor Mark Gelman. Links to Gelman's work:

a href="http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf

a href="http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/power.pdf

Also check out his blog post on the same topic:

www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archive...

I have a series of posts on Mr. Kanazawa's arguments. This link takes you to the last post which gives the links to earlier ones:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2007_07_...

A final post on the question is here:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2007_09_...

Nancy · 1 year ago

Evolutionary psychology is a cobbled together collection of just-so stories that are nothing but a sinking life raft desperately clung to by those those who long for the glory days of patriarchy. We will one day soon look back at books like this and laugh and laugh.

And the premise that "beautiful" people have more daughters has been debunked.

More and more women are dating younger men. Within the past 50 years. Less than an evolutionary time span. Only an evolutionary psychologist could believe that it's just a coincidence this has happened at exactly the same time as women have become more financially independent.

As our last good president said - it's the economy, stupid!

MArk KEmmitt · 9 months ago

There are better explanations for why people have more girls than boys or vis a versa. I read somewhere that there was a strong correlation between the sex of a child and that of previous generations, something to do with balancing the generations and explaining the pretty constant sex ratios. Sorry for not having a link or explaining it very well.

36% chance isn't really much at all, and isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder so how exactly is it satisfactorily defined for this sample?