Is There Anything Good About Men?

As to your point, while I would not assume people are strictly rational it’s important to understand the transition points where rational behavior becomes destructive for society. Not because everyone acts in a strictly rational fashion but rather because there is a tendency for the average individual to do so. for example corruption often links to both the benefit and the risk of being corrupt and enforcement is far more important than what's in the books. IMO, the most important insight is given a large population there are usually several productive approaches that tend to balance over time.

PS: If you think about it Sociology and Psychology are considered separate disciplines for obvious reasons. But economics is plenty complex to avoid being merged with Sociology because how you exit a burning building is only peripherally related to which brand of soda you buy.

That is, our behaviors may be influenced more by our instinct than our reasoning. Our instincts are the result of a random exploration process where only certain strategies could win. Rational reasoning is not required.

All experts in this field agree that humans inherit behaviour genetically. For example, the rooting reflex.

Separate in what way from animals?

1. Homosexuals by not being inclined to reproduce may now contribute excess resources to the group well-being.

2. Homosexuals can pick up slack child-rearing duties, e.g. in cases of orphaned children, and do so without the complications and child favoring that happens very frequently when a child is adopted by someone with his own offspring.

Furhter contributing: Homosexuality is not strictly binary, it is a combination of factors, so that those who never mate will not contribute too strong of a homosexual orientation to future generations, there are those who are bisexual or "a little gay" who can keep passing the genes that will make some portion of the population homosexual. Cultural norms of course will play in here as well sometimes being more permissive, other times not, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is subtle genetic idea of balance that is driving this cultural throttle to the homosexual thing.

The big thing to remember tho, is that evolution doesn't always select on individual basis, but frequently on a group basis.

NOTE: i use active words here, as if evolution has a goal, but that is just because I don't want to write like: the selection pressures sometimes result in an overal systemic balance and species or group wide advantage while at the same time resulting in some individuals with a much lower reproductive probability.

The cornucopia of debilitating mental illnesses that we tend to suffer from implies that this is almost certainly the case, and there are a lot of things that go into this.

Regarding traits like homosexuality, it's likely that the genetic "cause" ends up so widespread because the possession of it (or of a close precursor) is not necessarily that devastating to reproductive success, and may even be beneficial when it's not expressed as homosexuality. For instance, it's pretty well established at this point that whatever predisposes people to homosexuality genetically is not the whole story, a lot of it has to do with the embryonic environment, upbringing, and possibly sheer chance, so if there are other beneficial things about that mutation (or set of mutations), then as long as they outweigh the probability that homosexuality is expressed and prevents procreation, the gene stays around.

There's a rule of thumb, "one mutation, one death", which implies that no matter how deleterious a mutation is, on average, it will cause one death (or more accurately in this case, one failure to reproduce) when it happens. Roughly speaking, this is because if it's a very mildly deleterious mutation, it will spread quite far through the population before there's enough evolutionary pressure to stamp it out, and if it's a really bad one, it will kill off the first person to have it before it spreads at all. This can be influenced by social factors, as well, i.e. eyesight problems are rectified by our building glasses, but that just reduces evolutionary pressure against bad eyesight, so we're letting it spread its (much lower) fitness penalty throughout the population.

There's an element there that I'm glossing over, which is that in a population, you have to consider the probability of recreating the deleterious mutation, too - for instance, if a trait depends on a combination of a few mutations to be present, then depending on the number and prevalence of those mutated alleles in the population, the stable percentage of people displaying that trait will change.

It may just be the case that for various social reasons, predisposition to homosexuality has not been responsible for enough of a decrease in reproduction to counterbalance the probability of randomly mixing genes in just the right way to recreate it "from scratch." This could be particularly likely if some of the involved genes are useful by themselves in other situations, and homosexuality is hitchhiking on the backs of those beneficial mutations.

Parasites. Parasites frequently manipulate the host to change its behavior. Toxoplasma gondii, for example, is associated with a 6X increase in car crashes among human drivers. Parasites also cause variety to evolve in the host immune system and other body systems, resulting in a variety of oddball genetic variations and autoimmune disorders.

There is also an effect called frequency-dependent selection. Some gene variants are useful if you get one copy of the variant, but harmful if you get two. Evolution multiplies the useful gene in the population to the point where the good effects on reproduction balance the bad. Examples of this include sickle cell anemia (one copy protects against malaria, two copies give crippling sickle cell attacks), and the sphingolipid storage disorders (a small influence causes higher IQ, more influence causes lethal degenerative changes of the brain).

It allows excess parents without having excess children. Assume your objective function is to pass along genetic material that is similar to your own. Depending on your resource constraints of your environment and how close your population is to its carrying capacity, it may be game-theoretically optimal to help raise your sibling's child, rather than produce your own. If your child lowers the resources available per child for all your immediate relatives, you would be better off trying to increase the survival rate of an existing closely-related child instead. Thus, a gene that occasionally produces non-breeders (especially if the chance is modulated by relevant environmental factors) will, when properly tuned, result in a larger number of successful children.

The bigger lesson is, look at the genetic distribution of the population, not necessarily the genetics of the individuals. Humans live in groups and interact with each other, so things that don't make sense for the individual can still work. As an analogy: doctors increase everyone's survival rate, so you want lots of doctors right? Well, no, then no one would make food and we would starve. But that doesn't mean doctors are bad, either. It means you want some percentage of the population to be doctors, and that percentage is neither 0% nor 100%.

No, it's not. By pretty much any reasonable metric, the British Empire has contributed more net good to humanity than any other nation in history.

Plenty of bad, too. But overwhelmingly more good than bad. Much of the good is taken for granted until you realize all the mess they cleaned up that isn't talked about. In a number of their African wars, they were destroying cities that had altars of human sacrifice where the blood was made to keep wet - constant non-stop human sacrifice. I forget the chief's name and Wikipedia isn't helping me, but he claimed credit for over 180,000 sacrifices before losing to the Empire.

The Boers are interesting. I kind of sympathize with them a little philosophically as rough individualists, but they were nasty motherfuckers as well. Brutal slavedrivers and merciless during ambushes in wartime. Again, I've actually got quite a bit of admiration of their good points and they were tough as nails, but they could really be sick bastards sometimes. (I think most of their modern descendants would say that's a fair description, and might even smile at it.)

This is before even getting into all the science, culture, law, engineering, infrastructure, and technology that British culture fostered. Yes, they did more net good than anywhere else in history. That's not even a particularly bold statement to make.

First, up your civility a bit there. The snark is unnecessary and counterproductive to good discussion.

Second, my argument wasn't, "They did some good things too."

It was, "They were overwhelmingly the largest force for good in all of history."

Seriously, check out Heaven's Command. It's pretty balanced and covers every significant battle, controversy, and hypocrisy. And factoring all of that in, the Empire still comes out as the nation that's done more for humanity than anyone else.

Wiki doesn't agree:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Technological_and_e...

>India's per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it had increased to $618 by 1947

I'm not sure whose dollars those are... but it certainly doesn't sound like the Mughal empire ever controlled anything remotely approaching 30% of world GDP. Here's how the British won India, for reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey

750 European soldiers and 2100 sepoys defeating 53000 Indians speaks volumes about the latter's ability to organize.

Hindu culture was not going anywhere, it desperately needed an injection of rationality and a forced demonstration of good government. India is on a very good path now and it owes most of that to the British. The British used raw force to reform Indian culture away from degenerate, irrational religious fatalism toward a progressive, modern approach to life.

Anyway Indian culture today is unrecognizable compared to pre-British India. The most important part of culture is the approach to law, property, government, and individual rights, and these are the fruits of the British Empire in India. Underestimating these crucial factors is very easy now that you are reaping their benefits. India today would look like Somalia if it wasn't for the Empire.

In 19th century India the British really did reform the savages. They ended wife burning, vigilante decapitations, cannibalism, among other savage but accepted cultural norms. They significantly curtailed the systematic corruption, clarified property rights, introduced representative government, paved the way for social mobility, and are really solely responsible for the slow turning away from pernicious Hindu mysticism -- which is the bane of civilization. Hindu mysticism is really the most damaging kind of irrational religiosity on Earth and causes tremendous suffering and poverty.

The Brits were surprisingly generous given their global hegemony. It is easy to argue that the American Empire is more exploitative and uncaring with respect to their colonies: and the American Empire is less powerful today thanks to the liberalizing influence of the British who themselves foresaw independence for every colony, often before the colonies did. The positive effects of Rhodesian foreign policy should not be underestimated.

It's popular to hate Empires but there really is nothing romantic about cannibalism, institutionalized irrationality, rigid caste systems and all the other savage cultural features of many parts of the world before the age of sail. For all the faults of the British, we often forget just how good England and her colonies had life in comparison to the alternatives.

I never once asserted that the man, Genghis Khan, benefited in any way whatsoever from having such a large progeny.

I absolutely agree with you about that, and in fact, the genes that made Genghis Khan reproduce so wildly may have even come from his mother. They may not have been linked to sex at all, and might be expressed equally in his male and female descendants.

None of which changes the conclusion, though, which is that if there are any sex-linkages (either by presence on the Y chromosome or by preferential expression) amongst the genes controlling risk (reproductive risk, especially), then they will tend to accumulate in such a way that the high risk male genes are much more strongly selected for than female ones (which will be mostly neutral if they're not deleterious).

Put another way, the "risk-seeking" phenotype is not the same as the "encourage male offspring to be risk-seeking" phenotype, and while the former is only beneficial to male genes, the latter is beneficial to everyone's. And the end result is that male risk seeking is encouraged in the gene pool in many ways - in fact, what you've suggested is that the social reasons that male risk-seeking is encouraged are actually quite strongly selected for individually, which puts the conclusion on even stronger genetic grounds (as opposed to what comes up often as the more PC theory, that it's just an accident of history that society decided to bring up males that way, not an evolutionary imperative).

The stuff about bonobos is quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. They have a quite different power structure that makes things very unusual (almost inverted, in many ways), and it's very interesting to see that increased reproductive variance there is not linked to dominance, but to keeping a good position within the female hierarchy. It makes very clear the point that while a lot of (human) male traits may be evolved in order to increase reproductive variance, those traits do not necessarily achieve that goal (or any positive goal) in general, but only within the context of our other evolutionary peculiarities. As usual, it's difficult to evaluate anything in a vacuum.

Sleeping with more than one man may decrease a woman's time-spent-not-pregnant by a small factor. But no matter how many women a man is already sleeping with, adding one more will always increase his reproductive success by the same amount. The potential gain due to "cheating" is much higher for a man's genes than for a woman's because he has no downtime.

That has nothing to do with cultural norms, it's just biology.

There are certainly examples in the animal kingdom -- female dominant, where females maximize their genetic 'success' by successfully having children of many males.

Yes, the inverted world scenario could have happened with humans, as it has in a few cases (lemurs, bonobos, and hyenas).

But I think you're misinterpreting why it comes about in those cases. There is no suggestion that it emerges because it in any way increases the probability of a woman getting pregnant; to the contrary, that's the easy part, most researchers think female dominance is more related to ensuring that adequate resources are available to ensure the survival of the mother and offspring, which is a different issue altogether.

In those types of societies, we should (and do!) find that male reproductive risk seeking is more muted, because such risk seeking no longer carries with it significant evolutionary benefit - with females in control of the hierarchy and (limited) resources, and quickly impregnated when they're able, a male maximizes his potential success by staying alive, playing nice, and working to make sure the children survive. There's no contradiction there with what I've suggested: if you change the environmental constraints (social, developmental, and physical), the optimal evolutionary responses to those constraints change, too.

Such a society would be quite different in many ways, and the evolved differences between the sexes would be much smaller (lemurs display very minor sex differences compared to most mammals). But we should not pretend that the very real evolutionary pressures humans evolved in response to are not there just because things worked out the opposite way for a tiny fraction of mammals, and in the absence of a female dominant social structure, male risk seeking tends to have a significant evolutionary payoff. When we see evidence of it in humans, I don't see anything wrong with recognizing the incentives that lead to its expression.

So a better question to ask is "why did that not happen with homo sapiens sapiens?"

To put it bluntly, we can ask the question, but it's trivial to answer: female dominance is such an aberration in the mammalian world that it's probably selected against. 3 known examples out of more than 5000 species is under .1%, small enough that we can assume that in the evolutionary space and ecological habitats that we exist, female dominance has not been an optimal reproductive strategy. Even if it was neutral, we should be seeing more instances due to drift.

That's not a moral value judgment, or a justification, or anything like that - we're not slaves to our genes, we have the ability to overcome our instincts and emotions, and we should do so whenever they lead us astray. I think most reasonable people these days agree that dominance in any form is a primitive trait whose expression we should be trying to eradicate from our society.

But the current trend in some circles is to claim that in humans, most sex differences are purely social constructs, and hence are not influenced in any meaningful way by our genes or evolution. Which is bollocks - genetics and society are highly intertwined in most species, performing a delicate coevolutionary dance where one can't move without the other compensating accordingly, and this is something that any evolutionary biologist sees every day. Like nature vs. nurture, socialization vs. genetics is an argument for the fools, they happen together, and it's supremely naive to argue for one to the exclusion of the other.

It just happens to be that this tendency, coupled with differing social behaviours and expectations, is what has produced the current situation.

So feminism arose because a significant amount of women believed that they did not have the honor and dignity that they deserved. So why did they not have honor and dignity? Had it always been this way in American society? It had not always been this way in American society. But the industrial revolution led to changes in society, and those changes changed the cultural values of American society. Cultural values such as what kind of person is honorable and dignified.

People with outlandish amounts of wealth came to be honorable and dignified. Eccentric/genius/rich/crazy type people became honorable and dignified. It was "cool" to be rich, to own a big oil company, to do ridiculous things with your wealth, to invent cool gadgets (and to a lesser extent, research - Einstein became famous, as did Edison, Tesla, etc).

As American culture shifted its values, people who did not take outlandish risks or were not rich, lost their honor and dignity. The group that was most affected throughout all parts of society were women, who tended not to take risks or behave in outlandish ways, and who tended to be stay-at-home moms and grandmothers.

And when the cultural values changed, not only did women perceive themselves as being "stuck" in less honorable positions because of their gender - but men began to think the same about women. Men also began to think that, "Well, a woman stays in her house all day and cooks and looks after kids and is a wife, well then she must be looked down upon as a second-class citizen because she doesn't get the same honor and dignity and respect."

When all of society - men and women - began to look at women as being in less dignified positions and jobs, not because they were women, but because of what they did (and they did what they did because they were women - they bear children), then women reacted to that and the feminist movement was born.

Unfortunately, the feminist movement has not helped the situation, because society still values the rich, powerful, eccentric, outlandish risk-taking person more than a person who just does his or her job in a quiet but fulfilling manner. As a result, the feminist movement has tended to push women into behaving like men, and women are still not satisfied, and the resulting changes in society have left men feeling unhappy to the point where men feel that they are second-class citizens. Until American societies returns the dignity back to women for being women - not for trying to be like men - this problem will persist.

Do you have any data to support the assertion that everyone that isn't occupying a high-status leadership role within a society is "miserable"?

You're personalizing the argument and then missing the point.

You will find that not all cultures are like this - in many Asian cultures for example, being a mother is a very honorable and glamorous thing to do.

Women usually make up more than half of a society's population, something you agree with yourself. In that case, don't think it highly unlikely that societies in which women are miserable might not survive long? And yet the cultures in which you assume women are miserable have survived, endured, and even thrived, for millennia (I'm not talking about the 50s in America here).

Imagine the consequences if women were truly miserable in these societies: What would happen to the next generation? What would be the consequences of having a mother, grandmother, and aunts, who are utterly miserable? How would the next generation be raised in a setting like this? Every society has men and women, every family has men and women. It would tear families apart, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters. And it would tear societies apart. Any society who went down the path of making women miserable, or men miserable, has not survived because it cannot reproduce and pass on its culture successfully.

His discussion on relative sex drives (sorry, typo) is spurious because, again, he doesn't separate this from cultural factors like what actions we define as being "normal" sex, and how the sexes relate to each other. The Mosuo, for example, does things differently. Instead of monogamy or polygyny, they have two-way polyamory. Young women are given a private place to bring lovers back to. She can bring home as many lovers as she likes, and the men can go to as many women's homes as they are invited to. If she wants, she invites him back, and if he wants, he goes. I remember reading that at one time, it wasn't unusual for a woman to have fifty partners in her lifetime. Women are under no economic or social pressure to invite lots of men over, so to me, it's really odd that this would be common if women didn't enjoy sex. Mosuo women these days have fewer partners, because they have access to a lot of western media and culture. Some girls are now afraid that if they invite over too many boys, they will be considered "slutty", and this is an image problem that the Mosuo as a whole are having. To me, that looks like proof that women are being discouraged from having as much sex as they'd like to have, thanks to social pressures that are inherent in our own culture. Or at least better proof than saying, "it happens, so it's genetic".

By analogy, I would claim that sharks are successful. By the standard above, they clearly are: they've continued to exist and out-competed peer species for millions of years. But I'm making an objective claim only, not a value judgement on whether or not this is good.