dannno
Member
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2007
- Messages
- 65,717
Just curious where you got your time machine from, as you seem quite knowledgeable about ancient human behavior. Have you personally observed the behavior of people who lived 50,000 years ago? You are essentially implying current human behavior and social structure (the relations between the sexes) is the product of natural selection, but this presupposes that ancient behavior is analogous to modern behavior, and that natural selection is the only force that shaped our destinies. When your whole argument rests on something that is not directly observable, that is a problem. You cannot throw these claims out there and expect people to believe them with no evidence. It's not just common sense; it is something that has to be proven if you are to be taken seriously. The question remains, how are you able to prove that tribal social behavior is innate and not the product of their own culture?
You are using a fallacious argument when you take modern behavior, translate it into hunter-gatherer life and assert that the hunter-gatherers' behavior can somehow explain modern behavior, while taking as given the assumption that modern social relations are the product of natural selection. Of course your argument sounds good when you've managed to sneak its conclusion into its method. It's nothing but circular thinking.
Furthermore, even assuming we knew for sure how ancient humans interacted, it is scientifically shoddy to base thinking on analogies. And even if your reasoning were true, why are you being so deterministic? Humans have the capacity to change patterns of social thought, and so even if there were a biological basis for this behavior, it wouldn't consign us to having to tolerate it forever.
Poor argument, for one there is not a lot of evidence that we have evolved very far from our tribal ancestors from a biological standpoint. In fact, there are still people who live in tribes to this day and for the most part their ancestors have always been tribal. Do you think they are that much less evolved?
It took us tens of millions of years to evolve a certain way from what we were before and they are likely traits that females evolved to find sexually attractive from the apes or whatever we evolved from which was about 50 million years before that, and whatever they evolved from probably were attracted to other similar traits as well dating back I'm guessing hundreds of millions of years..
On top of that, since societies became larger, that doesn't mean these traits suddenly became completely obsolete as far as being a determining factor in whether a man could take care of his family. In fact these traits seem to make men successful in business and enterprise and strength has always been a strong attractor which helps with fending off attackers as well as manual labor. Of course these traits also show up in organized crime and gang culture in modern times.
Since we are no longer on the frontier, and while I admit cities can be a dangerous place to live, it seems that life today in many places is a bit safer than it used to be. Plus men and women have a multitude of ways in which they can support a family that do not require these traits, such as a computer programmer. So in many senses, these traits would seem to be less valuable today and don't often make up for the fact that the men who have them tend to treat their women more poorly and are less loyal. That is the complaint many men seem to have these days.
I've also discussed the fact that women can change what they are attracted to with their conscious thoughts extensively throughout this thread. I have altered my own base sexual attractions through life experiences. But that doesn't change what the base sexual attraction is to begin with, how it has the potential to always be able to affect somebody, etc.