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I've got a controversial point of view on this topic. Premise 1. Sexual harassment, as a term, is a relatively modern one. The dominant position of males in mo

by geuis 13y ago

I've got a controversial point of view on this topic. Premise 1. Sexual harassment, as a term, is a relatively modern one. The dominant position of males in most societies has been so for thousands of years, though the extent to what we would identify as abuse now varied(s) from society to society. Premise 2. In modern Western society, and increasingly in other societies influenced by the West, sexual harassment is a sociological behavior that is now considered negative for the most part. Based on these two premises, I argue several positions. First, the behavior identified as sexual harassment stems from some part of genetic influences on cultural behavior. Second, we are not mere genetic automatons and our culture has a huge influence over the expression of behavior in individuals. Third, changes in culture, over long periods of time (centuries) will cause sexual selection preferences that result in mild but significant modifications of genetic predispositions to certain behaviors in the members of a human society. At a high level, the recognition of sexual harassment as a point of contention in modern society is important. It is a sociological phenomenon. If the idea has enough influence to influence the mating behaviors of enough people over a long enough period of time, we will the changes genetically towards individuals who are more biased towards being less aggressive towards women. In the meantime, if this is something we want to see happen more permanently in our species, we must keep up the fight against this crap for a long time. Right now, we have to choose intellectually that its bad to discriminate and harass. And if that's a good evolutionary fit for our survival, then our future generations of offspring will be much kinder and gentler souls by default.

jeremysmyth 13y ago
Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Two reasons: - Firstly, our culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary timescales become entirely irrelevant to it. The various cultural changes since suffragetism, and the various civil rights marches, the legislation that comes after the leading wave of equality but comes before the general public social changes, all of these things have happened since then, at a rate of more than one significant change per generation. This, in evolutionary terms, is an eyeblink. Gender equality is, as a concept in the western world, less than a hundred years old. Four generations is nothing, even in labs that study mutations and evolution in an accelerated way. - Humans have something like 90-95% infant survival now. Evolutionary pressures are substantially less than they are in any other species, and less than at any time in our past. Not only are cultural changes irrelevant to genetic changes at our timescales, but they have even less effect than they would have had if we mutated (and died) more often. So, it's a nice argument, but it has absolutely no merit.

by geuis 13y ago

jeremysmyth 13y ago

Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Two reasons: - Firstly, our culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary timescales become entirely irrelevant to it. The various cultural changes since suffragetism, and the various civil rights marches, the legislation that comes after the leading wave of equality but comes before the general public social changes, all of these things have happened since then, at a rate of more than one significant change per generation. This, in evolutionary terms, is an eyeblink. Gender equality is, as a concept in the western world, less than a hundred years old. Four generations is nothing, even in labs that study mutations and evolution in an accelerated way. - Humans have something like 90-95% infant survival now. Evolutionary pressures are substantially less than they are in any other species, and less than at any time in our past. Not only are cultural changes irrelevant to genetic changes at our timescales, but they have even less effect than they would have had if we mutated (and died) more often. So, it's a nice argument, but it has absolutely no merit.