5 ms·

Why we f*ck

50 points by rangibaby 14y ago

Glyptodon 14y ago
This was interesting, but I think there's another dimension to it. It's not merely that ag created a property incentive to promote monogamy - there's also a huge change in terms of shared experience and the creation of the idea of class. In a tribe there's very a much a shared culture with shared culture and shared social bonds, while in the modern world there's an endless fractal of subcultures and individualism. And the more educated you are, the smaller the people here share enough of a permutation of culture to feel similar is. I think this somewhat explains why divorce rates are higher for the less educated - having more in common it's easier for there to be widespread understanding and shared culture, which in turn sets a lower bar (or creates a higher probability) that people will be able to functionally bond with each other. Conversely, going to college narrows the pool of people who have enough shared tribal characteristics to be a part of the comfort zone, and it increases even further when people express their tendencies to want relationships with people who share interests/traits/experiences/educational choices. In a tribe every shared the same experiences. Likewise, nearly everyone shares similar K-12 experiences. So within these cohorts there would naturally be a high replacability, which should mean monogamy ought to become less valued. On the other hand, people who go to college and matriculate through to different careers are basically funneling themselves into situations where there are fewer people with enough shared experiences to be a part of the tribe, making the value of an individual relationship increase. TLDR: The less mainstream someone is, the more they should have an incentive to value an individual relationship. Thus the more uniform and cohesive the social group, the less value is likely placed on an individual relationship. Hence we can blame not just property rights, but the fact that civilization and agriculture destroy shared experience compared to hunter/gatherer tribes. This can also explain lower divorce rates among the more educated or uniquely experienced as compared to typical high school graduates.
- pyre 14y ago
  You're assuming that all (or most) divorces are due to basically "finding someone else." Another major factor is the relationship turning sour, specifically due to money issues/troubles (which would be more likely among people with only a high school diploma).
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    I'm not sure if a high school diploma is correlation or causation, but it looks like you're dead on. http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/10/15/the-states-of-marriage-and-divorce/ http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/10/15/the-states-of-marriage...
benaiah 14y ago
How, if "for most of human existence, it was not normal for a man to know which kids were his", would it then follow that, when the concept of private property came about, "[t]he most intuitive arrangement was for a landowner’s offspring to inherit it"? Wouldn't that be totally unintuitive if it was normal to not know lineage? Which begs the question - if his first postulate is true, what caused a total reversal of the situation? The author makes enormous logical leaps with nothing but conjecture (corin_ pointed this out very well in another comment), practically inventing narratives for huge amounts of history with little to no actual evidence to support his suppositions (the concept of property didn't exist until agriculture; primageniture and inheritance came about because they were "intuitive", despite the fact that paternity wasn't normally known; etc.). EDIT: Just as a disclaimer, I ascribe to a Christian viewpoint on history (yes, I'm a young-earth creationist; yes, I've looked extensively at the evidence; no, I don't really want to derail the discussion with an argument about it) and morality, which includes sexual and marital monogamy, so I disagree with pretty much everything in the article. My point here isn't trying to convince anyone of that - I don't think the article stands even on its own premises, and is a terrible mess of conjecture and inconsistency. That's the only point I'm making.
- pavlov 14y ago
  Wouldn't that be totally unintuitive if it was normal to not know lineage? It works if you expand the concept of "offspring" to mean basically "the person(s) that you want to be your inheritors". This is what the Romans did, at least -- it was common for an adopted son to become the principal inheritor. It does make sense that if you have a substantial fortune and influence and you're not really sure about who your genetic children are, then you'd want to pick your heir rather than simply having your children split it up evenly after you're gone. Romans even had the concept of posthumous adoption: Emperor Augustus became Julius Caesar's adopted son only after the latter's famous assassination. In turn Augustus passed his wealth and power on to an adopted son, Tiberius.
  - benaiah 14y ago
    You make good points, and I agree with you, but it doesn't help the author's case any, as his entire point in the whole discussion is an origin story for monogamy - men wanted their biological sons to inherit and thus enforced female monogamy to ensure biological heredity. It doesn't follow at all from his previous conjectures.
srean 14y ago
Bonobos get a alot of attention in these kind of debates. Another family of animals that share a lot with strongly bonded nomadic lifestyle described in the article are dolphins and orcas. Extremely intelligent and social animals and an exclusive group that uses sex recreationally. Many believe that these animals have what we call culture. Different groups eat different things, have different language of whistles, learn different hunting techniques and behave differently, yet have a fairly low branch factor in their genetic lineage. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Understanding-Orca-Culture.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Understanding-O... Quoting the first paragraph: Orcas have evolved complex culture: a suite of behaviors animals learn from one another. They communicate with distinctive calls and whistles. They can live 60 years or more, and they stay in tightknit matrilineal groups led by older females that model specific behaviors to younger animals. Scientists have found increasing evidence that culture shapes what and how orcas eat, what they do for fun, even their choice of mates. Culture, says Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, “may be very important to them.” There was a long HN thread on this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253176 It would be interesting to watch what happens if and when they discover an analogue of agriculture.
codelion 14y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKeh0HsJ:www.raptitude.com/2012/06/why-we-fck/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKe... Cached link
- barbs 14y ago
  That's still taking ages to load for me, but the text-only version loads quickly: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKeh0HsJ:www.raptitude.com/2012/06/why-we-fck/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKe...
Tichy 14y ago
I think he is romanticizing too much. From what I remember reading, women get impregnated inside the body so that males can not be sure who ended up being the father. This evolved because of a battle of the sexes. It is common in the animal world for the new male to kill the offspring of the old male, and not knowing who is the father is a strategy to prevent. So there is no reason to assume that traditional societies just didn't care and loved all children equally. It's just that they might not have another choice. And also this is probably why virginity is so important in many cultures, because it promises to guarantee the man to become the real father. I just read Jared Diamond's latest book and I think he wrote that most wars (in New Guinea) between tribes are about women or pigs - so they do care about possessions (not implying women should be treated as possessions, just making a counterpoint to the article). There also seems to be the concept of marriage in many traditional societies, also kids being promised for marriage for later when they are old enough, and stuff like that. What is probably true is that we are not build for monogamy: both sexes would prefer to "not put all their eggs into one basket" (women want to have kids from multiple fathers, men want to have kids from multiple mothers). On the other hand Nassim Taleb mentioned in "Black Swan" that by assigning one man to one woman and vice versa, the church might have done a lot for peace - before that system, there would have been more men without any mates at all, resulting in jealousy and fighting.
corin_ 14y ago
The article seems to skip between "X therefore Y" and "Y ... Z!!" with little more than conjecture at times. We try to minimize baby-making but we’re still highly interested in sex, and so for humans sex obviously serves another extremely compelling purpose. That purpose is to bring us closer, to cement social bonds. Without arguing which is the correct reason, surely an alternate explanation could be "That purpose is to cause our bodies pleasure".
- simonh 14y ago
  Pleasure is just the carrot evolution uses to make you do what benefits your genes. Pleasure in itself is not a end evolution optimises for.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    Obviously true, but not relevant to what he wrote. When saying "that purpose is" did he mean from a point of why did we evolve like this, or did he mean why do we individuals act like this? If the latter, pleasure is a valid reason. If the former, surely evolution made it pleasurable because it helped create offspring. (Also: the fact that pleasure is there doesn't automatically mean it evolved for genetic benefits. Why do people get pleasure out of class A drugs?)
    - simonh 14y ago
      Sorry, you've read the article and you're genuinely not sure whether he's talking about behavioural evolution?
      - corin_ 14y ago
        As I commented, surely the reason we have evolved to find sex pleasurable is more because it creates offspring than because it "brings us closer" or "creates social bonds".
  - Nursie 14y ago
    No, but it might not have optimised out all the cases where pleasure is not in direct alignment with evolutionary success either.
xenophonf 14y ago
Wasn't there a rebuttal of /Sex at Dawn/ mentioned recently here on Hacker News?
meric 14y ago
[[When the family were driven from the doctor at Kintore 27km to the smaller community of Kwiwikurra, the nomads ritually beat members of their extended families with sticks for not bringing them in from the desert earlier.]] Nomad brought to modern society in 1984. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/lost-tribe-happy-in-modern-world/story-e6frf7l6-1111112932308 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/lost-tribe-happy-i... [[None of the nomads regrets coming in from the desert. "I like this life," Yardi said. "I much prefer it to the old ways." Warlinipirri said: "I wouldn't go back." Melbourne art dealer Kit Ballan, who was in the Alice buying paintings when I met Warlinipirri, said: "We see the nomadic life in the desert as utopian. "But, in reality, it would have been hard beyond our imagining. "Every day would have been dominated by the search for food and water."]] It doesn't look like a nomadic people have that much recreational time - they are constantly searching for food, water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine
- meric 14y ago
  Would have loved an explanation of the down vote.

50 points by rangibaby 14y ago

This was interesting, but I think there's another dimension to it. It's not merely that ag created a property incentive to promote monogamy - there's also a huge change in terms of shared experience and the creation of the idea of class. In a tribe there's very a much a shared culture with shared culture and shared social bonds, while in the modern world there's an endless fractal of subcultures and individualism. And the more educated you are, the smaller the people here share enough of a permutation of culture to feel similar is. I think this somewhat explains why divorce rates are higher for the less educated - having more in common it's easier for there to be widespread understanding and shared culture, which in turn sets a lower bar (or creates a higher probability) that people will be able to functionally bond with each other. Conversely, going to college narrows the pool of people who have enough shared tribal characteristics to be a part of the comfort zone, and it increases even further when people express their tendencies to want relationships with people who share interests/traits/experiences/educational choices. In a tribe every shared the same experiences. Likewise, nearly everyone shares similar K-12 experiences. So within these cohorts there would naturally be a high replacability, which should mean monogamy ought to become less valued. On the other hand, people who go to college and matriculate through to different careers are basically funneling themselves into situations where there are fewer people with enough shared experiences to be a part of the tribe, making the value of an individual relationship increase. TLDR: The less mainstream someone is, the more they should have an incentive to value an individual relationship. Thus the more uniform and cohesive the social group, the less value is likely placed on an individual relationship. Hence we can blame not just property rights, but the fact that civilization and agriculture destroy shared experience compared to hunter/gatherer tribes. This can also explain lower divorce rates among the more educated or uniquely experienced as compared to typical high school graduates.

pyre 14y ago
You're assuming that all (or most) divorces are due to basically "finding someone else." Another major factor is the relationship turning sour, specifically due to money issues/troubles (which would be more likely among people with only a high school diploma).
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  I'm not sure if a high school diploma is correlation or causation, but it looks like you're dead on. http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/10/15/the-states-of-marriage-and-divorce/ http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/10/15/the-states-of-marriage...

benaiah 14y ago

How, if "for most of human existence, it was not normal for a man to know which kids were his", would it then follow that, when the concept of private property came about, "[t]he most intuitive arrangement was for a landowner’s offspring to inherit it"? Wouldn't that be totally unintuitive if it was normal to not know lineage? Which begs the question - if his first postulate is true, what caused a total reversal of the situation? The author makes enormous logical leaps with nothing but conjecture (corin_ pointed this out very well in another comment), practically inventing narratives for huge amounts of history with little to no actual evidence to support his suppositions (the concept of property didn't exist until agriculture; primageniture and inheritance came about because they were "intuitive", despite the fact that paternity wasn't normally known; etc.). EDIT: Just as a disclaimer, I ascribe to a Christian viewpoint on history (yes, I'm a young-earth creationist; yes, I've looked extensively at the evidence; no, I don't really want to derail the discussion with an argument about it) and morality, which includes sexual and marital monogamy, so I disagree with pretty much everything in the article. My point here isn't trying to convince anyone of that - I don't think the article stands even on its own premises, and is a terrible mess of conjecture and inconsistency. That's the only point I'm making.

pavlov 14y ago
Wouldn't that be totally unintuitive if it was normal to not know lineage? It works if you expand the concept of "offspring" to mean basically "the person(s) that you want to be your inheritors". This is what the Romans did, at least -- it was common for an adopted son to become the principal inheritor. It does make sense that if you have a substantial fortune and influence and you're not really sure about who your genetic children are, then you'd want to pick your heir rather than simply having your children split it up evenly after you're gone. Romans even had the concept of posthumous adoption: Emperor Augustus became Julius Caesar's adopted son only after the latter's famous assassination. In turn Augustus passed his wealth and power on to an adopted son, Tiberius.
- benaiah 14y ago
  You make good points, and I agree with you, but it doesn't help the author's case any, as his entire point in the whole discussion is an origin story for monogamy - men wanted their biological sons to inherit and thus enforced female monogamy to ensure biological heredity. It doesn't follow at all from his previous conjectures.

srean 14y ago

Bonobos get a alot of attention in these kind of debates. Another family of animals that share a lot with strongly bonded nomadic lifestyle described in the article are dolphins and orcas. Extremely intelligent and social animals and an exclusive group that uses sex recreationally. Many believe that these animals have what we call culture. Different groups eat different things, have different language of whistles, learn different hunting techniques and behave differently, yet have a fairly low branch factor in their genetic lineage. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Understanding-Orca-Culture.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Understanding-O... Quoting the first paragraph: Orcas have evolved complex culture: a suite of behaviors animals learn from one another. They communicate with distinctive calls and whistles. They can live 60 years or more, and they stay in tightknit matrilineal groups led by older females that model specific behaviors to younger animals. Scientists have found increasing evidence that culture shapes what and how orcas eat, what they do for fun, even their choice of mates. Culture, says Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, “may be very important to them.” There was a long HN thread on this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253176 It would be interesting to watch what happens if and when they discover an analogue of agriculture.

codelion 14y ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKeh0HsJ:www.raptitude.com/2012/06/why-we-fck/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKe... Cached link

barbs 14y ago
That's still taking ages to load for me, but the text-only version loads quickly: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKeh0HsJ:www.raptitude.com/2012/06/why-we-fck/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzeKMKe...

Tichy 14y ago

I think he is romanticizing too much. From what I remember reading, women get impregnated inside the body so that males can not be sure who ended up being the father. This evolved because of a battle of the sexes. It is common in the animal world for the new male to kill the offspring of the old male, and not knowing who is the father is a strategy to prevent. So there is no reason to assume that traditional societies just didn't care and loved all children equally. It's just that they might not have another choice. And also this is probably why virginity is so important in many cultures, because it promises to guarantee the man to become the real father. I just read Jared Diamond's latest book and I think he wrote that most wars (in New Guinea) between tribes are about women or pigs - so they do care about possessions (not implying women should be treated as possessions, just making a counterpoint to the article). There also seems to be the concept of marriage in many traditional societies, also kids being promised for marriage for later when they are old enough, and stuff like that. What is probably true is that we are not build for monogamy: both sexes would prefer to "not put all their eggs into one basket" (women want to have kids from multiple fathers, men want to have kids from multiple mothers). On the other hand Nassim Taleb mentioned in "Black Swan" that by assigning one man to one woman and vice versa, the church might have done a lot for peace - before that system, there would have been more men without any mates at all, resulting in jealousy and fighting.

corin_ 14y ago

The article seems to skip between "X therefore Y" and "Y ... Z!!" with little more than conjecture at times. We try to minimize baby-making but we’re still highly interested in sex, and so for humans sex obviously serves another extremely compelling purpose. That purpose is to bring us closer, to cement social bonds. Without arguing which is the correct reason, surely an alternate explanation could be "That purpose is to cause our bodies pleasure".

simonh 14y ago
Pleasure is just the carrot evolution uses to make you do what benefits your genes. Pleasure in itself is not a end evolution optimises for.
- corin_ 14y ago
  Obviously true, but not relevant to what he wrote. When saying "that purpose is" did he mean from a point of why did we evolve like this, or did he mean why do we individuals act like this? If the latter, pleasure is a valid reason. If the former, surely evolution made it pleasurable because it helped create offspring. (Also: the fact that pleasure is there doesn't automatically mean it evolved for genetic benefits. Why do people get pleasure out of class A drugs?)
  - simonh 14y ago
    Sorry, you've read the article and you're genuinely not sure whether he's talking about behavioural evolution?
    - corin_ 14y ago
      As I commented, surely the reason we have evolved to find sex pleasurable is more because it creates offspring than because it "brings us closer" or "creates social bonds".
- Nursie 14y ago
  No, but it might not have optimised out all the cases where pleasure is not in direct alignment with evolutionary success either.

xenophonf 14y ago

Wasn't there a rebuttal of /Sex at Dawn/ mentioned recently here on Hacker News?

meric 14y ago

[[When the family were driven from the doctor at Kintore 27km to the smaller community of Kwiwikurra, the nomads ritually beat members of their extended families with sticks for not bringing them in from the desert earlier.]] Nomad brought to modern society in 1984. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/lost-tribe-happy-in-modern-world/story-e6frf7l6-1111112932308 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/lost-tribe-happy-i... [[None of the nomads regrets coming in from the desert. "I like this life," Yardi said. "I much prefer it to the old ways." Warlinipirri said: "I wouldn't go back." Melbourne art dealer Kit Ballan, who was in the Alice buying paintings when I met Warlinipirri, said: "We see the nomadic life in the desert as utopian. "But, in reality, it would have been hard beyond our imagining. "Every day would have been dominated by the search for food and water."]] It doesn't look like a nomadic people have that much recreational time - they are constantly searching for food, water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine

meric 14y ago
Would have loved an explanation of the down vote.