Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused | Hacker News Reader

Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused

jseliger.com

15 pointsjseliger18 comments

I found myself very irritated by quotes like this:

"The book argues that humans are not “naturally” monogamous. That might be true. But Sex at Dawn doesn’t prove it."

"males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar.” But they don’t have any evidence for that"

If they don't, I think it is safe to assume it is because the authors assume their readers have a bit of life experience. And not because there aren't volumes of biological and historical evidence to support these claims if they wanted to include it.

I just don't see these two points as even being controversial enough to be up for debate. You don't need that much romantic history to know that men have a strong appetite for sexual novelty, and that highly desirable men are not monogamous, that women know this ahead of time and are willingly complicit in their non-monogamy.

Ok, I guess for the type of guy who would write these critiques, some things need to be spelled out on paper. You can just step outside in the world though and not need it to be.

Even the "obvious" isn't necessarily true. How much is cultural, and how much is biology? If you can't show something's not cultural, have you shown anything aside from supporting/fighting prejudice with prejudice?

The grandparent is really similar to a post someone just left on my review. In response, I wrote:

It's not obvious at all that this is more true than men than of women, or if so, how. That's why people making these kinds of claims need evidence—otherwise you're merely telling stories and repeating stereotypes. For another example of this general principle, see Mark Liberman's http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/s... Women use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000 - or so says a new bestseller. Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."</a>.

Oh, ouch. The author for that number-pair also wrote "Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes", "Why Men Lie and Women Cry", and "Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking." (from your link)

Scientific-credibility nose-dive right there.

If you can't show something's not cultural, have you shown anything aside from supporting/fighting prejudice with prejudice?

You can do a reasonably good job of showing (or at least suggesting) that something is biological rather than cultural if you show that (a) it exists in all or almost all human cultures and (b) it makes sense for human minds to be designed that way, ie. it's sensible from an evolutionary point of view.

If I understand correctly, Sex At Dawn is arguing that something (full-on no-holds-barred human polyamory) is natural despite the fact that (a) it is practiced in almost no cultures and (b) it doesn't make a lot of evolutionary sense.

Oh, and (c) it's not consistent with a helluva lot of other instincts we have, like the powerful sexual jealousy instinct. I suppose they'd claim that's just cultural.

The grandparent is really similar to a post someone just left on my review. In response, I wrote:

It's not obvious at all that this is more true than men than of women, or if so, how. That's why people making these kinds of claims need evidence—otherwise you're merely telling stories and repeating stereotypes. For another example of this general principle, see Mark Liberman's <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/s... use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000 - or so says a new bestseller. Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."</a>.

There are lots of things that we supposedly all know from life experience that are completely and totally false.

On the point about male's appetite for variety and novelty, life experience can give you enough of a hunch that this is biologically innate, and not cultural. Stacks and Stacks of books on human history, recent tabloids, and the NSA's archive of everyone's web browser histories can pretty much confirm this hunch for you if you're still not convinced

I'm not really arguing that specific point, I'm just saying common knowledge and life experience mean absolutely nothing in the context of anthropology--or any science, as a matter of fact.

And the fact that males have been in the dominant position culturally for effectively all of recorded time implies what cultural influence? That males have had the ability to choose partner(s) for so long has affected a lot, but implies nothing about biological predispositions to "novelty".

Also consider that male-polygamy not too far back in time for much of the western world was relatively expected ("mistresses"), but female-polygamy often meant death. That sort of influence tends to leave some lasting impressions on a culture.

To really catalog everything that’s wrong with Sex at Dawn, I’d have to go back through at least five or six books (and probably more) and at least a dozen papers. It would take me all day.

I feel the same way about The God Delusion, quiet enjoy the book and the arguments it puts forward but to actually take an unbiased look at all the arguments from many sources that are being put forward and notable refutations of these would take a seriously long time.

Dawkins isn't a "real" expert on e.g. theology.

My favorite anti-religious author is Ingemar Hedenius, but that is afaik only in Swedish.

This refutation of a book I've never heard of is not particularly interesting to me.

I could go down the front page making comments like that, I suppose? "This collaborative filtering plugin for a framework I don't use is not particularly interesting to me", or perhaps "This GUI elements library for an Adobe tool I don't use is not particularly interesting to me". People have heard of different things!

I find it worse when something random about a technology you would never read apart from it being an article on HN is interesting to me. I've spent a whole heap of time reading stuff about Haskell(for one example) that is posted here but I haven't used it and don't know if I'll ever get around to learning it.

I've heard of it because there was a discussion about it last week:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522325

I was pretty skeptical of the book's claims, at least as they were summarized in that thread. So this review was interesting to me. (I had nothing to do with the submission though.)

I still recommend The Red Queen by Matt Ridley to anyone interested in this subject.

Thanks.

I strongly suspect this only made it to the front page because somebody voted multiple times with different accounts.

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