In incorrect analysis of evolution by a Christian website.

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Today I thought I would kill time reading some Christian articles on web when I bumped into this site.
It had an error of understanding.

“If sexual preferences are rooted in the late Paleolithic era, men worldwide should now be looking for stout muscular women with broad backs, sturdy legs, a high threshold to pain, and a welcome eagerness to resume foraging directly after parturition."

Not so, Stout muscular women need lots of food, muscles need energy . In hunter gatherer time, food was at a premium. A small non muscular women had advantages even in Palaeolithic times.

http://trevormajor.com/2009/what%E2%80% ... o-with-it/

This is very surprising.

Both hypotheses have the problem common to 'evoutionary psychology,' which is that they involve men making up just-so stories to justify their (mostly) culturally-driven desires and the social status-quo.
The supposed problem with 'stout, muscular women' would also apply to men, and vice-versa. Large men take vast amounts of calories just maintain homeostasis; in places with scarce resources, men and women are both small and less robust (see, for example, the efe and other pygmies). In areas with plentiful resources, men and women are both larger and stronger. In cold areas, humans and other animals tend to be more robust; in warm areas, humans and other animals tend to be more gracile.

“If sexual preferences are rooted in the late Paleolithic era, men worldwide should now be looking for stout muscular women with broad backs, sturdy legs, a high threshold to pain, and a welcome eagerness to resume foraging directly after parturition. It has not been widely documented that they do”

The article seems to ignore the work of Sigmond Frued and incorrectly attributes sexual preference to darwinism. Sexual preference is learnt during childhood and comes to the fore at puberty. This explains why different cultures from around the world all think that their men/women are the most desirable.

So we would not have the preference of an ancestor living thousands of years in the past.

First of all, this article has nothing at all whatsoever to do with evolutionary psychology, it's simply an article on a Christian website trying to justify discrimination against against homosexuals. So, I agree that the article is rubbish.

However, I totally disagree that evolutionary psychology is about "making up just-so stories" or that it's "culturally-driven". Evolutionary Psychologists actually try look for species-wide in humans that is independent of culture and Steven Pinker, for example, generally comes up with what could be regarded as proper scientific theories that can in principle be tested empirically. What I don't understand is, most biologists already accept that a lot of animal behavior is the result of evolution and natural selection, so why is it so controversial when the same reasoning is applied to human behavior and psychology. We are animals too after all, albeit intelligent ones.

When the human race switched over to agriculture the child bearing potential of women became important. Mate with the women with substantial pelvises, for they will bear many sons to till the fills and protect the herds.

ruveyn

The article has to do with evolutionary psychology in that it is someone who misunderstands science and is making up a just-so story about what he thinks would have been selected for in our cave-dwelling past, and is countered by someone else making up another story about why that wouldn't be true. Neither hypothesis is presented with a single shred of evidence - just the assumption of the hypothesizer that of course this hypothesis is true, because everyone knows that this is how things work!
I would correct you to say that evolutionary psychology should look at species-wide behavior, but many (ie, the vast majority) of the studies that gain traction in the popular science press are exclusively based on western samples and cater to western assumptions, and are very poorly conducted. Just to take the example that sticks out most in my head, there was one study out of England a year or two ago that was touted as 'proving' that women prefer pink and men prefer blue, based exclusively on people who had been living in England for at least 6 years, and most of them longer. The 'control' sample was a group of people who had been born in China but had mostly spent their teens (at least) in England; in the 'control' population, men still had an aversion to pink tones, so the researchers concluded that the color preference was robust. If you looked at the data, though, the Chinese-English showed significantly less color bias by gender than did the native English (not that this point was ever mentioned in the popular science press).
Unfortunately, studies which reinforce western beliefs about how men and women 'should' act, and about what 'should' be considered attractive, are rarely scrutinized as well as they should be before being reported in the mainstream press and taken up even by skeptical men as bolstering their ideas of why men really are more rational/more intelligent/more scientific/less compassionate/unable to do housework/unable to remember dates/fascinated by football/fascinated by blondes/redheads/brunettes (whichever the researcher prefers)/ whatever is convenient for men to believe.

another case-in-point: according to the nurses in the obstetrics department at my hospital, it's the shape of the pelvis rather than the size that is relevant to child birth - and my relatively thin-hipped sister-in-law had an easy 4-hour labor (with a normal-sized baby) to prove them right. Likewise, breast size is determined by adipose tissue and big breasts have nothing to do with how much milk is produced for the infant.

As for Upper Paleolithic preferences, the miniature "Venus" idols of that period show the female form as obese - large, extended bellies, hips and buttocks. Because of the constant fear of famine, perhaps heavyset women represented prosperity.
I believe in Darwinian evolution, but the fact remains, human beings are so complex that other factors figure into the desirability of a mate other than evolutionary psychology.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

precisely.

Its like saying "the fact that men are big and broad shouldered disproves evolution because evolution wouldve selected for men to be small so they could survive on fewer calories and would be better at catching small game."

So take your pick build-a-bear style to make your own dumb argument!

The existence of Kitty Cats( or lions) proves ( or disproves) evolution because of the all the advantages ( or disadvantages)of small (or large size.

You would think that over-sized me would be an evolutionary anomaly.
Most Cro Magnons during the Upper Paleolithic were huge people, with big bones and thick muscle, as well as big craniums. And yet, they appeared as gracile when compared to the Neanderthals with their short but hugely wide builds.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The cro mags were gracile. It as the Neanderthals that had the thick bones. They were of a different but related species to cro magnon. The cro mags were basically us.

ruveyn

While Cro magnons were gracile compared to Neanderthals, they were still very robust by modern standards - though admittedly they were still within modern physical standards.
And while Cro Magnons were modern humans, not all modern humans are Cro Magnons. The true Cro Magnon population was one type of Upper paleolithic European, though the name has been wrongly thrown around in more recent times to cover all modern humans of that era. Much of their population disappeared by the Neolithic by the immigration of the first farmers of the R1b haplogroup into Europe, who were by evidence of the mass graves they left behind rather violent to the point of being genocidal. That, and the fact that the more gracile built farmers were more able to digest cereals without developing diabetes (unlike the hunter gatherer Cro Magnon descendants), and had their pick of the local women when they decreased the number of men through warfare, thus thinning out and eventually breeding out much of the Cro Magnon populace. Later, eastern horsemen carrying with them the lactose tolerant R1A gene arrived, allowing more of their children to survive and thrive with cows milk. It's only in the Germanic northwest and the mountains of the Balkans that the subclade of haplogroup I, representing descendants of Ice Age Cro Magnons, where populations displaying robust Upper Paleolithic characteristics are represented in appreciable degrees. And even there, they had interbred with the Indo-European steppe nomads and the farmers out of Asia that no pure Cro Magnon exists.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I was gonna say what rev said.
Cro mags were essentially us.
So Im not sure what your point is.

Cro magnons were NOT in any way intermediate between neandethals and any modern race of living humans. They were modern humans- pure and simple.

Chimpanzees are ten times as strong as humans the same wieght. Neanderthals were more like non human primates in being heavy boned and heavily muscled- intermediate between us and chimps. And they evolved to be short and stocky to retain body heat in the ice age.
Our cromagnon ancestors were invaders from the tropics who retained longer limbs to dissapate heat.
So neanderthals were a whole different species. Cromagnons were just a variation on us.
Though they may not have been exactly like modern europeans nor exactly like any other living race.


They were taller than modern europeans on average. They probably werent as a pallid as modern europeans.

The subsequent waves of migrations brought other adaptation.

But to change the subject.

It sounds like someone came up with my theory about the spread of indoeuropean languages indepent of me!
I came to the conclusion that some small tribe of people in southern russia about 5000 years ago reached a critical mass in the number of individuals who had the freaky talent to digest milk as adults. Because of that that tribe became enpowered to spread out take over the vast areas of western asia and europe that are now populated by indoeuropean speakers. It was like a new technology. Actaully it was a double genetic accident- the adult people could digest milk, and they had cows that could give milk even after the calves were weaned.

There is recent book about the rise of Indoeuropeans from steppe nomads, but this recent book attributes it all to horsemanship. The Indoeropean were early horse domesticators and that what caused them to fan out from the steppes.

My theory is that it was all about cows and not horses.
Part of my evidence is that modern PIE languages share words that indicate that the PIE tribe were almost certainly a bunch of status seekers obsessed with wealth in the form of collecting cattle.
Our own words like "cattle" and "chattel" are part of the legacy.

So I was going to write my own book.

I even thought of a way to test my theory.

If my theory was right it would mean that the basques ( linguistic holdouts from pre Indoeuropean times) might be less able to digest milk as adults than thier indo european speaking surrrounding Nieghbors in Spain and in France.

I looked on the internet for information about "lactose intolerence among Basque People" but found nothing.

But I did stumble upon a map of the distribution of lactose intolerence in Europe.

Basque country is essentialy the Pyranness mountains on the border between Spain and France. The map showed that lactose intolerence( diary phobia) to be more common in a huge swath of southern france and northern spain and to be less common ( and milk love to be more common) in both countries as you move away from their common border - they handle milk better in both southern Spain and in the Eastern and northern parts of France than they do on the French Riveira and in the boreder areas of both countries that contain the region of the modern Basque ethnic group. More or less what I predicted.

But now your telling me that my idea, that its all about cows ( as well as about horses), is now accepted as fact.

Apparently this is one of the fruits of the human genome project.

Darn!
Im flattered that the world came around to my way of thinking about it- but apparently someone beat me to publishing my idea!


Oh well.

Sorry anthropology beat you to the punch - - by a number of years.
But as for Cro Magnons, I never said they were intermediates between Neanderthals and us - rather I said that some of us, depending where our ancestors hailed from, have more Cro Magnon ancestry than others do.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer