Does that mean Lent is over faster, or that there are way more holy days of obligation?
"Compared to the cost of production" is a taboo phrase at the drug companies.
1: Probably the latter, if the Church has anything to say about it, but Mass is only about three minutes long.
Both. Quick Lent, but you'll spend 15 seconds of every minute on your knees.
We're not the only species. When hornet queens lose their fertility, they also stop emitting certain pheremones and the rest of the hive kill her.
I think the point is that we're unique in having the loss of fertility happen while we've still got a lot of lifespan left. Hornet queens, not so much, if the rest of the hive kills them.
I do like the grandma theory of menopause -- that you need two generations of ancestresses working together to support kids.
Look, I've got a strawberry pie to make, potatoes to boil for salad, chicken to marinate in buttermilk for frying, guacamole to make, and ribs to stirfry. Father's Day picnicks don't assemble themselves.
6: Yeah, this from the article is worth a thought:
Any theory of menopause evolution must explain how a woman's apparently counterproductive evolutionary strategy of making fewer babies could actually result in her making more. Evidently, as a woman ages, she can do more to increase the number of people bearing her genes by devoting herself to her existing children, her potential grandchildren, and her other relatives than by producing yet another child.
Realize that there's some of Dawkins' "selfish gene" reasoning going on here. Murky.
Ah, but you know, having gone through the rest of that article, the question remains: why just women (to become menopausal?)
And rendering evolutionary theory in a backwards way, teleologically, can be problematic. I'm not arguing with the article -- it's fascinating.
Realize that there's some of Dawkins' "selfish gene" reasoning going on here. Murky.
Why would that be murky, necessarily?
Presumably menopause saves lives. Once you get to a certain age, you stop being threatened by the burdens of pregnancy.
11: Yes, but why would that be an evolutionary advantage?
Because you would have older people around with accumulated knowledge.
'Cause someone's gotta take care of your baby when you and the mama abandon it. Good thing grandmas are still around.
10: Sifu, I almost deleted that remark. I don't think I can enter into a discussion about what might be wrong with the 'selfish gene' thing at the moment. I'm not sure if that's what you're asking. It's murky because it's plausible on its face, and every conversation I've had with people about it results in, well, murk (and idiocy).
Sorry, lame as hell.
12: Because you can sit around and give advice in a cronely manner. Kids are a total distraction, no one ever get any serious thinking done while they're directly under foot. (Same goes for men smart enough to let others carry the spears and thus survive to be old)
That was what I was asking, yes. If you don't want to get into it, that's fine. It makes a lot of sense to me, but of course neither of us are experts in the field (so far as I know), so we're as likely as not to end up in idiocy ourselves.
9: because 'fathers' can get away with a much lower minimum investment in a child?
Of course, discussions of selfish gene reasoning often turn into discussions of evolutionary psychology, and the limits that it may or may not have as an explanatory discipline, and you think I'm getting into a discussion of that on unfogged? Ha.
I'm guessing it's because it saves lives, but not in the way B is supposing. If you look populations without access to doctors and hospitals, dying during childbirth is quite common. I suspect in primitive circumstances that pregnancy past a certain age is often a death sentence.
How do Muslims deal with Ramadam if they're stationed at the South Pole?
Isn't that exactly what B is saying?
Maybe it is. I was just skimming and saw the "people with more knowledge part."
The "people with more knowledge" thing is an evolutionary justification for it (since it obviously isn't going to result in having more kids), but the basic point is the same, I think.
Isn't the grandma theory old? I read about it years ago in some book whose name I can't remember (it was so long ago).
The linked article is apparently from 1996, so I don't think any of this is necessarily new.
Isn't the grandma theory old?
Sort of. The Grandma Theory released their first CD on Kill Rock Stars just last month to great indie-press acclaim. But nobody listens to them anymore.
I'm waking up, and I'm now leaning towards it not being a special evolutionary trait at all. Humans live a long time. When we get old, our hormone levels drop. For women this means menopause.
You have to wonder how much we really know what human culture was like in the early days of the species. (My guess: not much.) For all we know, once children were no longer breastfed, they were raised entirely by their grandparents.
there is the risk of dying, and teh risk that the child you have when you're old won't get enough care to hav ea good chance to make it, and the resources are diverted from your grandkids.
24: I asked this question of an Iranian who had spent the year in Alaska (where you can have 24 hours of daylight during the summer -- Ramadan is lunar and floats through the year). He said, "There are no Muslims in Alaska."
28: kin selection, which I think is the umbrella theory that the grandmother hypothesis lives under, is fairly old. The grandmother hypothesis, in some form or another, appears to have originated in the Fifties. Some more interesting detail about the permutations in that link.
30: geez things start to get rolling and you stick a Pitchfork in 'em.
It sounds plausible enough. If the older generation is continuing to have children, there's a reasonable chance that having that child late in life kills both the mother and reduces the chance that the child will survive to reproduce, given that children are labor-intensive little things. If the older generation is sterile, then they're free from the risk of childbirth and around to help out their daughters with the new generation. If you imagine two populations, one without menopause and one with, it's plausible to suppose that the latter group is more reproductively fit in the long run, because more of their offspring will succeed.
It's all because human babies come out cute but useless.
the grandmother theory sounds a lot like the gay uncle theory.
They'd sort of work the same way. Same thing to be explained: how could having no (or fewer) offspring confer a survival advantage?
But I think the gay uncle theory's a little bit off given that iirc, the idea of the gay uncle not also having a wife and kids and a boyfriend, but just a boyfriend, is a lot more recent. In other words, it's easy to explain how the gay gene* was passed down; the people had sex and made gay babies. Just like evangelical ministers.
*With all the caveats of how there doesn't seem to be one gene, how human sexuality is complex and a continuum implicit in here.
What the fuck? You are all on crack.
Why don't men undergo menopause, is what I'm saying.
Why don't men undergo menopause, is what I'm saying.
Patriarchy, dood.
If you buy Cala's speculation in 37, and add that men historically haven't done a lot of child rearing, finding it more efficient to spread the seed than tend the offspring, there'd be no advantage to shutting off the spigot.
36: A pitchfork does not tell you the pitch. The tuning fork does that. That's really ironic.
Men aren't generally the primary caregivers, and having a baby poses no physical risk to the man. If that's true, then it makes more sense, from the gene's perspective, to favor a scattershot approach to reproduction: as many kids as possible. There's not nearly as strong of a pressure for a guy's fertility to cease (though it does drop off with age. The fertility, not the penis.)
In a just society there'd be one female producing thousands of babies, a lot of hard-working childless womyn, and a few guys lounging around, doing nothing, and having sex when required.
42: plus, fathering a child is vastly easier on the body - and vastly less likely to result in death - than pregnancy.
I have to say that I think most of these theories are probably wrong, or at least underdescribed, because the same pressures that would lead to menopause would seem to select for, say, unusually healthy 50-year-olds who could bear children and raise them to teenagehood.
Emerson is secretly an ant.
My 46 was calapwned, predictably.
i mean, you're probably basing that on agrarian culture, i'm not sure we know alot about most of human evolutionary timeframe
and 46 in my 47 should have been "44 has lots of assumptions"
fucking numbers
47: such as? Am I incorrect in assuming that a fetus gestates inside a woman's body? Am I ignoring the danger of the newborn baby falling on the father's head and killing him?
51: well, I enjoyed it while it lasted.
I'm inclined to gswift's 31, but I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Why don't men undergo menopause, is what I'm saying.
A fair amount of similarities actually. Both women and men see a drop in sex drive with age, hair loss, men see a drop in fertility, and it's not uncommon for women to have periods without ovulation before they stop menstruating altogether.
55: that's okay, I don't think any of us does.
Right, men see a drop in their fertility, but there's a big difference between a drop and a cessation. You're still producing sperm. So we could ask the same question another way: why is it evolutionarily advantageous for a woman's fertility to cease (rather than, say, move to a convenient once every two months schedule) rather than just diminish?
well the man-shift is to prioritize grandkids over new kids. But if its easy, and very tempting, its there. Having a kid usually requirse a pretty high bar for women to begin with, so there's not really anywhere for their standards to go.
why is it evolutionarily advantageous for a woman's fertility to cease (rather than, say, move to a convenient once every two months schedule) rather than just diminish?
I think it's a mistake to assume that the two should look identical as hormone levels drop. Different systems, different hormones.
60: but this inquiry was to see if there was a reason for each's drop, or if it were kinda random like why we have 5 fingers inseate of 6.
42:
Patriarchy, dood.
Ogged is correct.
Forgive me if I find the whole thing remarkable -- not Ogged's being correct, but that patriarchal patterns should have, might have, according to the theory at hand, determined the evolution of human female menopause!
Let us pause to marvel.
62: and here I thought he was kidding.
Oh, and yeah, this is all really sloppy and uninformed.
Yeah, parsimon, are you saying that you think the human species evolved to be patriarchal? Because that probably is not a direction you want to go in.
Re Merck and the HPV vaccine: am I allowed to say that it's Econ 101? The cost of development is a sunk cost -- nothing that they do at this point can change how much the vaccine cost to develop. They price based on the cost of *production* and the benefit/willingness to pay (as determined in part by regulators -- in this case apparently the CDC). The cost of production mattered earlier when they were making the decision about whether to invest in that particular piece of R&D. They had to make their best guess of the profit from the drug, subject to all the uncertainties of clinical trials, regulator approvals etc., and then see if that justified the investment.
as the local heel, i'll go ahead and say that, and conveniently its what i think.
Some quick Googling suggests that other long lived species like elephants and whales also undergo menopause.
I still say it's just age. I will cut you all down with Occam's razor. Only Ogged will be spared.
67: their payout will determine future drug researchers' calculation about how muhc to invest
69: You know, I've seen articles (including the linked one) saying that other longlived species of animals generally don't undergo menopause -- the linked article notes one species of whale which does as an exception. I was going to say that earlier, but then did some quick googling which came up with some contradictory stuff. I think the facts here are controversial.
69: I'm curious about how long their youth stay dependent, but not having a heck of a lot of luck googling.
I think the facts here are controversial.
Comity!
It just goes to show that evolution is amoral and apolitical, and that trying to draw justifications from it is going to get you in touble.
Facts, bah. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true.
I don't think you need to propose patriarchy particularly, just breastfeeding and the fact that human babies are cute and useless.
Look, gswift, I have no idea whether the theory in the article is right or not, but "it's just age" isn't going to fly when other mammals, including the ones "closest" to us don't have the same patterns, and the other half of the species doesn't go infertile with age. I accept that different hormones work differently, but the question was *why* they should work that way instead of like all the other mammals. Don't cut yourself with that razor.
I was going to say that earlier, but then did some quick googling which came up with some contradictory stuff. I think the facts here are controversial.
It's too hot for strenuous googling. But, gorrilas!
66: Yeah, Sifu, it's not a direction I want to go in.
Didn't you already agree that evolutionary psychology was a minefield? The emergent story from both the linked article and comments here is that women's predominant role in child-raising is an explanatory factor in menopause.
You can explain that in terms of nature, or in terms of cultural conditioning. If you go with the latter, you head toward the patriarchy explanation.
I don't really have a strong intellectual inclination in either direction: women bear the brunt of child-raising for a relatively short period of time (sorry), after which men can share equally. The story goes that they don't. Enter the patriarchy explanation.
Natalie Angier's Woman has a chapter or two on the "why menopause" question.
Isn't the human lifespan in primitive conditions (i.e. evolutionary ones) much shorter than modern lifespans? Do women under those conditions go menopausal earlier in life, or do they usually die before they become infertile? If the latter, then menopause couldn't possibly have come under any selection pressure except in the past millennium or two, max.
It seems plausible to me that menstruation could be sort of like a car engine (sorry) in that if fuel levels drop too low, the engine goes from 1500 RPM to 0 RPM very quickly.
Also, isn't most everything priced by how much it's worth to the end user, rather than how much it costs to make? Unless you purchase the development rather than the end product, that is?
Ah, 76 answers the second half of my 80.
Bow down and worship my magic penis, women!
81: If I may pull an answer out of my ass, I think that only holds in conditions of scarcity, and since intellectual property leads to enforced scarcity, it tends to hold for lots and lots of engineering-type products. But in very competitive commoditized markets (like PC parts) prices stick very close to production costs plus a small margin.
Because of medicine patents, pharmaceuticals have enforced scarcity.
81: This is monopoly pricing regulated by the government.
Don't cut yourself with that razor.
The streets will run with the blood of the unbelievers.
78: I don't think it's necessary for women to be the primary caregivers for this hypothesis to hold water, since a woman who died in childbirth would be reducing the amount of care available to her kin whether the man helped or not, unless we posit that men were basically the sole caregivers, which seems unlikely to me.
But yeah, evolutionary psychology is a minefield. While I think it can plausibly explain various things, I certainly have no opinion on how much explanatory force it is currently able to bring to bear. I tend to be sympathetic to it, because I tend to be sympathetic to the viewpoint that many more of our behaviors than we're willing to admit are subject to post hoc rationalization if they're rationalized at all, but, again, arguing from a position of (mostly) ignorance.
85: that's why there haven't been any innovations in personal computing over the past twenty years, right? Right? Hello? Is this thing on?
80: It's shorter on average, and in some places lower than the average age of menopause. But be careful: "average lifespan being shorter" doesn't mean "everyone drops dead at 40", but usually lots of infant and early childhood death and death in childbirth. If you make it past those hurdles, you stand a reasonable chance of making it to grandma age.
Arguing for gswift's point, it is obviously true that traits which only show up after the age of child-rearing are less well selected for. Nobody's trying to claim that Alzheimers is an evolutionarily valuable trait (at least, as far as I know).
Our primary evolutionary advantage, and it's a big one, is our brains. Which we make the most use of through learned skills and behavior. So it *completely* makes sense that having older people around is important.
Men don't undergo menopause not only b/c childbearing isn't a physical risk for them, but also because they're less valuable, I think, to the group as a whole. I suspect the way patriarchy plays into this is (1) male anxiety and defensiveness (why they do it) and (2) male strength and violence (how they get away with it).
but also because they're less valuable, I think, to the group as a whole.
Big talk now, but just wait until you need a mammoth speared.
92: it certainly wouldn't surprise me if the move to agrarian societies created a tremendous social anxiety in men, who no longer had a clear idea what they might be useful for.
The argument about having older people around I'm less sure about. The ladder effect in human learning means that we can propagate learned skills extremely quickly through generations, even if those skills have recently been learned by the teacher (cf. grad school). Given a somewhat resonable life expectancy (say, 40 or 50 years) it seems like the need for wizened experts would mostly happen around the margins. Also, if what you're saying is true, why wouldn't dementia be more strongly selected against?
I don't think it's "wizened." Women menstruate starting at say 15-17 in conditions where nutrtion's less than ideal. So that means you have two generations by the time you're in your early 30s. If you want to try to convince me that people in their 30s aren't a significant social advantage in terms of accumulated knowledge, you can go ahead and try.
Are you kidding? Agriculture means that part of the social group can grow food while another part of the group goes off to kill other people and take their stuff. If that's not a male role, I don't know what is.
Or: im in ur base, killin ur doods.
Re. the utility of men. Honest to god, the primary advantage men have over women in terms of the group seems to be their expendability: they're good for defense or aggression, b/c if they get killed it's less of a big deal. Sucks for the guys.
Well, plus somebody's got to do all the science and math.
Also, I just learned that the military deliberately and consciously selects for unhealthily high levels of narcissism in combat pilots.
96: so men are important to the group because they can protect it from other men who are trying to prove their own importance to their own social group?
Nice scam we got set up here.
98: Now, now, dear. You did the grocery shopping today.
102: Half of the Unfoggedetariat are lawyers. Same thing, more or less.
You know, now that I think about it, b, a pretty good case could be made from your premises for the kind of intrinsic gender difference Summers talked about: without a defined role, men would be forced to be more creative about ways to prove their value to the community, leading them to be more driven to seek innovation, conquest, technology, etc.
Or they could just rig the game by being bigger and stronger, I suppose. But women are wily!
105: Only if you go on from the premise that men's role anxiety somehow makes them better at math.
Anyway, we're talking about fairly primitive societies in this thread. Given, again, the fact that our primary evolutionary advantage is our brains, it's not that difficult to realize that we're not completely controlled by our evolutionary heritage, y'know.
I thought that women were born with all their eggs (unlike men, who produce sperm as we go) & have few follicles left by the time we're 50 ish & increased risk of birth defects w/ age. I'm not sure there's an *advantage* to that; you'd think healthier eggs longer would be better. But not every conceivable beneficial mutation exists or becomes dominant; evolution is not goal-oriented like that.
If you want to argue for a benefit, human childbirth is unusually dangerous, & human babies are unusually helpless. So
106: Who, me make a joke? Never.
Actually no, it really isn't. If we're gonna play the evo psych game of How People Lived When We Were All Tribal, you gotta suck it up.
106: Ogged she didn't necessarily mean that you personally are useless.
That's probably what she actually meant, though.
Also, of course, Katherine's right: just because something is, doesn't mean it's advantageous.
At what point is it acceptable to kill one's potential life partner for not being by the telephone when he agreed you would?
In that case, if you go back to life on the Evo Veldt, women would have been precious, for carrying children, and otherwise pretty useless. We were hunting with primitive tools, not building the space shuttle, so physical skills would still have been the most important trait for survival. And Sifu is totally right about passing on knowledge; we're talking about a time when the entirely of the knowledge of the tribe could be passed on between the afternoon nap and sundown.
110: Well, what does he actually *do*? I mean, maybe when global warming floods the entire state with a tsunami, he might have an advantage, but until then.
My phone is on, Cala. Also: already a citizen.
107: we shouldn't assume we know how the brain works.
Obviously learned behavior is an important part of human society, but the nature of learning, the role of evolution in brain development, the nature of conscious experience, and the role of the prefrontal cortex in regulating/controlling behavior: none of these very large questions are at all settled.
So, no, we certainly aren't completely controlled by our evolutionary heritage. And we certainly have a great deal of ability to modulate our behavior based on learned and social skills. And I would be the last one to say that you can draw a line from skills that might be useful in a primitive hunter gatherer society to skills that might be useful as a modern day urban professional. And I would be the even-laster one to say that you could begin to make judgements about what a society could or should be like, even if you could draw those lines through time. All that said, there isn't necessarily no there there, when you're talking about evolutionary difference in behavior.
Of course I'm pretty sure you already agree with that, making this a pretty damn half-assed argument. So to spice it up: men would have greater incentive to develop previously unknown skills, such as math, because (with the decline in the importance of hunting) they were left without a defined societal role. Men who were better able to do this would understandably appear to be better mates, and the rest is just sexual selection.
We're bullshitting here, Teo, this is no time to be a gender traitor.
113: Nonsense. There's a lot of evidence that agriculture developed pretty damn early, and certainly agrarian societies tend to kick the ass of the hunter gatherers.
You should include that in your online dating lists. Pros: citizen. Cons: see, there's this blog...
It's always time for gender treason.
In other words, "you're useless. I have the baby. If you're going to sit around, invent the goddamn wheel or something."
of course men aren't important. thats why its so important for women to get the right one: while any girl can turn out a kid, most doods are just spearfodder, only a few are important leaders. That, in turn, is why women have more investment in securing the best man than vice=versa.
Let me help you out, Tweety. You don't have to make the extremely weak claim that men somehow consciously and deliberately evolved greater mathematical capacity to compensate for being mere cannon fodder. All you need to say is that, whatever the relative innate capabilities of the two sexes, if men are more *motivated* to achieve existential worth because they're otherwise looking at being cannon fodder, then they'll go out and build universities.
yeah, i agree with B, and that feels really crazy to me.
Ogged is a citizen? Dobbs may be right.
126: I prefer to make the weak claim, thank you. Otherwise we'd agree again, and like I said, that's boring. Anyhow the weak claim is just the strong claim plus enough time, so then the argument is whether enough time has passed.
"Or, you know, you could use it to invent the goddamn telephone and a watch so you can remember to call the person in control of your green card and your future happiness. Yes, you're allowed to invent calculus first."
128: It's because you're all depressed, and therefore have a realistic world view.
fuck the noise, i'm going to go hit on chix.
Also I never said anything about it being "conscious and deliberate." Men in agrarian societies, not being able to go kill animals and bring them home to great acclaim, would have been less attractive to women who still had the same general criteria for picking a mate ("not totally good for nothing"). The men in those societies who were able to find other ways to seem valuable (killing other men, coming up with new ideas, making some cash) would gain a relative advantage as mates, and over time, the traits they used would be selected for.
You didn't *have* to say conscious and deliberate. It follows from the "role anxiety made men get better at math" argument, and it's silly.
I sure hope an evolutionary biologist never reads this thread.
Shall we send a message to PZ? Do you think that, unlike some people, he reads and responds to his email?
I'm sure it's good for some laughs.
And Sifu is totally right about passing on knowledge; we're talking about a time when the entirely of the knowledge of the tribe could be passed on between the afternoon nap and sundown.
Bullshit!
And be glad I didn't post the other stuff about how you're an idiot if you disrepect the wisdom of the elders, and about how the women have to undergo menopause because the men are apparently too lame to carry on.
pshaw, y'all.
Or, that the human species generally are a bunch of inventive little bastards who find interesting ways to do things, but human mothers, balancing the toddlers on their hips, could only do everything one-handed.
I like making up evo psych arguments. I have a great one about the probable extinction of shivbunnies.
I was kind of hoping PZ had an anonymizing pseudonym and would weigh in (PK Myers?).
Also, 139 gets it. Still, if ignorance stopped us, would we be bloggers?
144: yah it's fun, and super easy. My favorite is explaining away religion as an adaptive trait that allowed for social groups larger than extended-family-size.
Is it science? Well, are you science? Huh? Are you?
If you cut down our arguments, will we not bitch?
There's a lot of evidence that agriculture developed pretty damn early
Relative to the evolution of the species, agriculture was late.
I'm still not buying the Man With Weapon Hunt Meat While Little Lady Cower in Cave scenario, sorry.
149: how about the Man With Weapon Screw Around With Buddies While Little Lady Deal With Eighteen Screaming Brats scenario?
151: I think you mean Man And Buddies Get Selves Killed Doing Stupid Stunts while Lady and Kids Pick Berries and Make Pie.
153: Man Too Smart To Be Killed Before Fed Pie. Man Mastodon Surf AFTER Pie.
Fed Pie? Man Not So Smart, Apparently.
Man Fucking Invent Wheel Already.
Next, Man Invent Axle. Ha Ha. Wheel Easy Part.
No, we're talking pre-agrarian society here. Man doesn't have any motivation to invent the wheel.
Man Too Dumb To Keep Stupid Theories Straight.
Man Invent Cave Painting. Man Doodles.
Woman Yells. Man Hunts Mastodon.
Man Piss On Fire. No Smoke Signals. This Is Why Man Hasn't Called.
Yeah, well, next time you take a camping trip why don't you forage up some flour and refined sugar from the forest floor and keep your prelapsarian pie to yourself.
Man Just Saying Anachronism Part of Ground Rules.
All I need to know about gender relations I learned from Quest For Fire.
Man Invent Cave Painting. Man Doodles Porn.
650-blog-luv, Cala.
Shivbunny is probably heroically saving someone trapped in a snow drift, but I answer my phone.
Flour made from acorns. Sugar made from aphid poop.
If man not so dumb, he know that.
No, he's in Texas with work. Man Heroically Provides for Betrothed But Fails to Remember How Phone Works.
"Man just saying anacronism part of ground rules" is cracking me up, by the way.
Man Throw Rock. Tiger Eats Man. Woman Sighs.
Man Throw Bigger Rock. Tiger Still Eats Man. Woman Invents Wheat.
Man Throw Spear. Man Kills Tiger. Woman Has Moved Into The Cave of the Sensitive Type Who Invented the Plow.
Man Invents Beer.
Now I really want to call blog-luv and see who answers.
Did people tell just-so stories before Kipling? I guess we must have. They just look so silly boiled down to the headline game we have going here.
Also, I think GSwift has it right in 148. We split off from the chimps 5-8 million years ago (that margin of error is something, eh?) and agiculture was widely adopted, what, 10,000 years ago? A little more?
Did people tell just-so stories before Kipling?
Ever read Genesis?
Man Invents Wheel.
Man Invents Beer.
Man Crashes Wheel.
Rich Dumb Woman Crashes Wheel, Too, Invents Jail.
172: Actually I think that's the problem with most ev-psych arguments. Evolution takes time, and humans as farmers haven't been around long enough for decisions about Berry Picking vs. Mammoth Slaying to have really worked itself into the genes.
When you really look at the creation story, say, because you're trying to pick a wedding reading (shivbunny: "everyone picks genesis because all the rest are about sleeping with your sister chastely"), you realize that it does sound like something a grandfather made up to explain to his grandkids.
And this is why your big sister is going to live in that man's house now.
Seems like a lot of people have blog-luv for a number.
It's *totally* an explanation myth, people, this is news to you?
175: I don't think most ev-psych arguments do use agrarian norms, which is why they so often use the "men need skills to hunt" trope, glossing over the fact that we have dramatically incomplete information on what pre-agrarian societies might actually have been like in the aggregate, which is really what you'd probably need to know.
But again, Man Argue From Position of Near Total Ignorance All Day, Pretty Much.
Of course they don't use agrarian norms. Because most evo psych arguments are about rationalizing sexism.
178, precursors: when I was 20 my phone number was HARDCOR.
I suppose "blog luv" is fine, too, but I'm heterosexual.
because you're trying to pick a wedding reading
I was amazed at how narrow the selection is in all of the wedding anthologies, actually. A few well-worn love poems, the usual bits from Corinthians and Ecclesiastes, and one or two tacked-on pieces that are identifiably more modern and "ethnic."
You'd think, if the wedding-industrial complex was going to publish a dozen of these books, there'd be some more diversity.
Use the Song of Songs. It's also cliched, but at least it's pretty.
181: that totally is what I said.
I didn't see the -ism word in there anywhere. Mealy-mouthed.
exbeforelast and I didn't seriously consider marriage, but we did know that we were going to read from "It ain't me, babe" if the day came.
183: It's even more narrow when it's a Catholic wedding. What annoys me is when things are out of context. Fuck 1 Corinthians 13. We're using the Song of Songs because the Church says it's about Christ's love for the Church but I know it's really a story about how a young couple really want to have sex and everyone is happy for them. And her breasts are like twin gazelles.
180: If we're being really picky, Man Has Not Evolved Since 1950s MmmKay.
The Song of Songs is awesome. I think we went with one of the psalms, but I forget which NT reading we used. Probably the water into wine.
Actually come to think of it I think we just didn't have a NT reading, since we weren't doing a mass.
the Church says it's about Christ's love for the Church
?!?!?!?!
190: You're going to have to start making up your own arguments if you ever want to be any good at this.
193: Shhhhhh, they're all trying so hard to stay celibate.
We're using the house built upon a rock one and I forget which non-gospel NT reading we're using but it's the one that isn't Corinthians or submissive wives because who are we kidding. I like the water into wine one except that every wedding I've been that's used that, the priest has tried to say that the passage really isn't about a party, and I think if your first public miracle is wine, you're totally all about the parties.
193: Nuns have to teach it to little kids somehow. It's a metaphor. One where most of the time the man is wandering around asking the old women in the town if he knows where his hot bride disappeared to, you know, the one with the breasts like towers of ivory and eyes of jewels.
Yeah, Corinthians and submissive wives suck.
194 is totally a copout, but Man Being The Bigger Person.
How many people here have actually seen Quest for Fire? Now there's a movie that can undo years of critical thinking in one fell evo-psych swoop.
Man Who Forget To Send Smoke Signal Cut Off.
I saw it. That's where the smart people wear blue mud, right?
203: evo-what? Critical who? That's the movie where Rae Dawn Chong's naked the whole time and doesn't talk, right?
Maybe Man Who Forget To Send Smoke Signal is Man Passed Out Drunk In Titty Bar.
204: Man Invent No Smoking Sign.
Man Better Not Be If Man Likes Balls Attached.
Man Invent Evo Psych
Man Drink Beer, Content
Woman Invent Uppity
Man Worry
So, you guys are bored or what?
The wedding reading ideas at 186 are cringe-making.
If it weren't so late, I'd paste something beautiful here. Okay, here: this is from The Siege (L'Assedio), a Sequence of Poems by Ljuba Merlina Bortolani. translated from the italian.
The series as a whole is difficult, but here's this:
XIII
If Life allows me only to be wise
then I would hold you closely if I could
like faith, pageboy of your playful memories,
and exultant moon, as a step is to the foot.
I have a tango-heart for taming now
in fits, mad froths to set in verse, as long
as it lasts, the enchantment of your leaps, from bough
to tongue, the despair and envy of the throng.
If I've an ancient body of laces and translations,
give me the recollections of your shadowy years,
all that pungency of taking sides with factions,
the shattered horns of times that were so fierce.
And glass and hands and bites in a betrayal
all for your water-forehead: like a child.
That would make a great WTF?? moment for the relatives, I'm sure. This was surprising.
Ljuba Merlina Bortolani was born in Bologna in November 1980. L'Assedio (The Siege) was composed between December 1995 and May 1996, when she was fifteen years old.
Fifteen years old.
I somewhat remember that from reading the series originally. It's a harsh progression of poems; it breaks down, and becomes somewhat unbearable toward the end. Despite the astonishment of her age, she reminds me of Anais Nin. Actually I still have the book here; it's bound appropriately in blood-red cloth.
I presume nothing from it is really appropriate for a wedding reading. Not this either:
VI
I, like a flag unfurled,
famished for your raised eyes.
Gird my head with garlands,
with voices and brittle pomegranates.
Priestess
of cults without mud.
We will have sandalwood beds
and amphorae of beeswax,
tenderly forged
to melt us once more.
And before the moon changes
let me devour
your neck with great bites,
so that it may throb in my breast
every time I notice a ring,
a square, a song, a crop of wind,
every night,
for every body different from yours.
This ties in the whole catholic thing.
re: 139
Man, there's a lot of people talking about stuff they don't know much about. I know this is the modus operandi at Unfogged, and I am as guilty as anyone else, but when a thread overlaps with one's (broadly construed) area of academic 'competence' it's more obvious. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but my area of philosophical competence is in the wide 'philosophy of biology/medicine/science' area.
re: 9
Also, it's not Dawkins' selfish-gene theory. Dawkins' wrote a work popularizing the theory, but the theory doesn't originate with him, and he's not responsible for the science. Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is a fairly polemical, and somewhat simplistic rendition of the main theme in George Williams' (excellent) Adaptation and Natural Selection. Of course, Dawkins' book was very influential as a work of popular science, and much more widely read than Williams' own work.
I do wonder if Williams' goes about saying 'it's not that bastard Dawkins' theory'.
Also, re: the Ramadan thing. In Scotland, in mid-summer, there's only a few hours between sunset and sunrise. When Ramadan falls in that period, it's a bastard for muslims. My understanding is it generally involves eating at midnight, going to bed for a couple of hours (if at all), eating again, then sleeping until morning.
We had one of Robert Herrick's less pornographic poems at our wedding. He was after all an Anglican minister, so we thought it was entirely appropriate.
216.1: hee hee. Where were you earlier?
George Williams' (excellent) Adaptation and Natural Selection.
I haven't read Williams in like 10 years. I should go back and hit that again. Has anyone actually managed to get through all 1400 pages or so of Gould's last book? My dad bought me a copy, but I've only read a bit of it here and there.
I had a Muslim barber in Finland and I asked him how he dealt with the problem of 24 hour day or night. He said you could get permission to follow the sunset and sunrise of a location to the south that actually had them. Me, I thought the idea of a 45 minute fast (the length of the day when I asked him) was just dandy.