I hate postmodern feminism. As a man by birth, not by choice, I call shenanigans on the idea of a vast male conspiracy in which I’m hopelessly complicit. The charge that I am conditioned from birth to oppress all of the women I love, all of the women I know, and all of the women on the planet is not one with which I’m likely to acquiesce. The notion that I’m doomed to omni-directional socialization smacks of Christianity’s putrid communicable mind-disease of “Original Sin”. But while Christianity offers potential salvation through authoritarian subjugation of our minds and the rest of our human nature after a life of guilt, postmodern feminism offers nothing more than perpetual guilt and a labryinthian trial of futility that would lead Josef K to rejoice in the relative clarity of his nightmare of Kafka’s prison. Like the magical monotheisms’ strategic defense by placing its rules outside the observable world and beyond the understanding of feeble brains, postmodern feminism holds its truths just on the other side of spectacular society’s aim or grasp. We are all inside the conspiracy, and thus, forever powerless to question its pervasive hold with our tainted minds.

But let’s get to the bad news…

Apparently, I am guilty as charged. I openly view women as different from men… and I like it. What’s worse, I have been known to love women precisely because of their femininity. And I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I have been successful in being smitten by oppressing women to degree that they have appreciated my undying appreciation of said femininity. Thus, I have apparently pulled off the masterstroke of Pavlovian conditioning by convincing women that there is something special different about them worthy of distinction, and that that inherent beauty defect is a point of delineation warranting irrepressible affection and admiration objectification.

Yet despite my actual loathing for postmodern feminism, and tongue-in-cheek embrace of their accusatory program, I consider myself a Darwinian feminist. Let’s be clear… that is a political position of feminist bias influenced by Darwinian science. This is not to be confused with the scientific position of feminist Darwinism, in which scientific hypotheses are formed through the perspective gained by freeing oneself from the scientific community’s irrepressible patriarchy (Vandermassen 2008). I take this position of political bias because since the agricultural revolution, feminists have an indisputable point (generally speaking). One of the first sociopolitical developments of agricultural society was property. Besides land, women were subjected to the forefront of the legal ownership construct. It’s difficult to disentangle the development of agriculture, writing, law, oppression, and theistic religion. This difficulty is explained in their mutually supportive natures (the Matrix beta version?).

In my overlap into the paleosphere, I wonder about the influence of gendered conflagrations of caveman romanticism. I think the first of Melissa McEwan’s posts I ever read was on the question of ‘Sexism and Paleo‘. Though I disagree with a few of the points in that piece, I share a disdain for the popularized caveman stereotype. On one level, I’ve wandered around a lot of wilderness looking for caves, and I can verify that they’re not a reliable strategy for shelter from the elements or protection from predators. Thus, I vote for burying the “caveman” concept along with agricultural dominance hierarchies and the vegetarian myth. On the psychosocial level, I see the caveman image of a clubbed woman being dragged off to be used as a reproduction machine as an overt misogynistic cultural amplification of testosterone-drunk wish-thinking. As a man, I’m also not going to pretend that I can’t imagine where that impulse comes from. If you take that last sentence as a justification, you don’t understand me and should probably stop reading now.

*Much of what follows was influenced by a 4-participant, 5-article throwdown in the “Feminist Forum” feature on the intersection of feminism and Darwinism in a 2008 issue of Sex Roles…  a peer-reviewed, openly feminist leaning journal. The journal is offering free and direct access through December 31, 2010. Rebecca Hannagan wrote the target article which was reponded to by feminists Laurett Liesen, Griet Vandermassen, and Celeste Condit. Hannagan also provides a follow-up on the others’ comments.

“Ignorant” Evolutionary Psychology vs. “Ignorant” Feminism

And thus begins the typical impasse between evolutionary psychology and feminism. Feminists charge evolutionary psychologists with indiscriminate justification of evil, and evolutionary psychologists accuse feminists of misunderstanding that the “job of scientists is to find out how things work, to try to be evenhanded with the evidence, and to present their findings…” (Vandermassen 2008). The project of science is understanding. The project of evolutionary psychology is understanding psychology in the context of evolution. Beware anyone who conflates understanding with justification.

“Evolutionary psychologists’ continued ignorance of feminism and their ongoing failure to recognize the vast contributions by feminist evolutionists is at worst the continuation of male bias, and at best scholarly negligence.” (Liesen 2008)

“[P]reviously considered an “archaic debate” [, genetic determinism], turned out to be a real concern still in the minds of many feminists. As Jonathan Waage and Patricia Gowaty (1997) write in their conclusion, “[t]erminology, politics, and ignorance are, inretrospect, major barriers to the dialectic of feminism and evolutionary biology” (p. 585).” (Vandermassen 2008)

Darwin: More Feminist than the Feminists

Darwin’s world-view was certainly steeped in a world of Victorian ideals. As such, he tended to ethnocentrize, anthropomorphize, and Victorianify a bit too frequently. However, behind the now anachronistic veneer, his wisdom was potent.

“Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most evolutionists for nearly a century after him: female choice in sexual selection. Since females bear the greater parental investment through pregnancy and lactation, they have more to gain from being highly selective about with whom to mate than do males. As a result, certain traits are selected for in males if, over time, females choose to mate with the males that bear those traits more than those who do not.” (Hannagan 2008)

That first sentence could have also read, “Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most feminists for nearly a century after him.” In the concept of sexual selection, we have a solid foundation from which to sweep away all attempts to legitimize gendered patriarchy. In the concept of sexual selection, we have a power structure that, excepting violence, is nearly irrefutable for men. Across the millions of species of the animal kingdom, females exercise ultimate say in selecting with whom to reproduce. The whims of females have given us everything from the peacocks’ tail (Darwin 1972) to the bowerbirds fantastic nests and 12 foot antlers of the Irish elk (Coyne 2009) to our very creativity and intelligence (Miller 2001). Sexual selection is almost universally ignored, and when it is considered, is often misunderstood as a patriarchal mechanism for herding women. Competition between men acts as a fitness cue that aids women in selecting mates (intrasexual sexual selection). Direct displays by men to women also act as fitness cues to aid women in selecting mates (intersexual sexual selection). This isn’t to say that dominance hierarchies don’t exist in various species, but it is necessary to question the assumption that intrasexual selection is a dominance hierarchy rather than a fitness cue. Intersexual selection is always the latter.

The positive implications of sexual selection for a Darwinian feminism are many. Yet ironically, and to the detriment of their program, postmodern feminism has attacked evolutionary biology after missing the point.

Another area that’s often ignored or assigned to the evils of patriarchy is competition between females. It would be naive to assume that sexual selection is unidirectional. It is true that females have the highest degree of choice, but men also gain reproductive advantage by choosing the “best” mate. Intrasexual female competition has serious negative consequences. Stereotypically female behaviors from fashion to makeup to anorexia have been attributed to competition between females (Li, et al. 2010). Interestingly, Li, et al also found this intrasexual competition functioning similarly in homosexual men. Activities motivated by intrasexual female competition have traditionally been prime targets for postmodern feminists to assign to patriarchal power structures. However, it seems that this may be a misguided confusion of intrasexual and intersexual competition.

Men and Women Are Different

That is not a claim or implication that a male brain or a female brain is better, it is a statement of fact. While – Top 5 target of anti-evolutionary psychology deniers – Steven Pinker had already convincingly refuted “blank slate” conflagrations in his 2001 book, “The Blank Slate” (linked below), neuroscience has since been demonstrating differences via fMRI and other brain studies. Sexual dimorphism (differences) in brain development have been observed to be directly influenced by differences in XX vs. XY chromosome factors (that is at the genetic, pre-hormonal level), and by gonadal hormone differences (e.g. testosterone) (Arnold 2004).

“Genes that are found on the sex chromosomes influence sexually dimorphic brain development both by causing sex differences in gonadal secretions and by acting in brain cells themselves to differentiate XX and XY brains. Because it is easier to manipulate hormone levels than the expression of sex chromosome genes, the effects of hormones have been studied much more extensively, and are much better understood, than the direct actions in the brain of sex chromosome genes. Although the differentiating effects of gonadal secretions seem to be dominant, the theories and findings discussed above support the idea that sex differences in neural expression of X and Y genes significantly contribute to sex differences in brain functions and disease.” (Arnold 2004) [emphasis mine]

“Many neurological and psychological diseases vary in incidence or severity between the sexes. Some of these diseases are known to involve X-linked genes. The vulnerability of males to mutations of X-linked genes is an obvious source of sex differences in diseases. However, more subtle variation of the same loci probably accounts for some of the differences in psychological and neural function among populations of males and females.Recent improvements in methods to manipulate and measure gene action will lead to further insights on the role of X and Y genes in brain gender.” (Arnold 2004)

Recent theoretical developments in neuronal plasticity have given the postmodern feminists and other blank-slaters a new angle to make us all the same. Some now claim that the overarching and nefarious social construct causes brains to physically develop gender identities based on patriarchal domination by way of language faculty alteration (Kaiser, et al. 2009). That’s right folks, males are so crafty that we’ve figured out how to physically alter the neuronal structure of women’s minds to do our bidding as hapless automatons. To say that gender bias goes deep is apparently an understatement of mind-bending proportions. Curiously, all such studies seem to recognize, or ignore, sex differences in the brains of all other animal species, but resort to neck-down Darwinism when considering humans. Again, the postmodern feminist position parallels that of religion in its insistence that evil forces corrupt us on unseen levels, and by excluding the human brain as the one thing Darwinian considerations can’t mustn’t be applied to.

Years after Pinker’s work, Hannagan is still comfortable enough about sex differences to say: “Broad personality constructs, such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, are heritable and there are small but consistent differences between men and women on two of the big five personality constructs—extraversion and agreeableness.” (Hannagan 2008b) [emphasis mine]

This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding physical (brain included) and psychological differences.

Against the Caveman Mystique

It’s hard for me to imagine the caveman stereotype existing without the logically flawed, but evolutionarily advantageous, human cognitive availability bias (or heuristic). In short, since we find evidence of humans in many caves, but not out in the open, we tend to assume humans were more often inhabiting caves than out in the open. The art and human remains found in caves are not found there because a majority of our ancestors were “cavemen”. They are found there because caves offer protective value for preservation, and because caves are geographically obvious places to look. Thus, the probability we’ll look in caves multiplied by the probability of evidence being preserved in caves skews cave evidence to secure an artificially elevated place in our consciousness. It’s also the case that human remains are dragged to caves by whatever ate them, or humans died in caves by becoming trapped. All of this is further multiplied by the caveman narrative in culture… it’s easy to picture, and therefore remember, and therefore spreads.

The following excerpt is from a review of the apparently poorly received book, ‘The Caveman Mystique‘ by Martha McCaughey. While it’s directed at the McCaughey’s view of the caveman stereotype, I suggest that it should also be tested against feminist theory.

Perhaps the most curious omission in the book is any discussion of the evolutionary psychological view of the human female. We are repeatedly told the dubious notion that the evolutionary view of the male is that of the stereotypical caveman who drags women off by the hair for sex. But what is the corresponding picture of the female? Evidently McCaughey doesn’t think this is informative. If men are interested in having sex with as many women as possible, what does this say about women? It is a fact of simple arithmetic that the average number of sexual partners must be identical for males and females (assuming a 50-50 sex ratio). So if men have X female partners on average, the average woman must also have X male partners. What does this logic imply about the female side of mating? (McBurney 2009)

Hunter-Gatherers: Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism

The hunter-gatherer stereotype often does no better than the caveman tripe. Rather than the overt “masculinity” of clubbing all women of one’s choosing, it’s replaced by the overt “masculinity” of killing a wily beast and the implied “masculine” domination associated with bestowing such a gift upon the rest of the band. Unfortunately, the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis that was forwarded to explain human cognitive development has been considered inaccurate almost consistently since the 1970s (Hannagan 2008).

In discussing sexual selection above, I argued that there is a fundamental refutation of patriarchy inherent in the Darwinian framework. That itself should sound the death knell for any attempts at misogyny or gendered political dominance. However, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer existence takes that a step further. It is likely that the prevailing form of social arrangement for the bulk of human evolution was social anarchism in the context of small hunter-gatherer bands. It is important not to assume contemporary stereotypes of socialism and anarchy here.

As found by anthropological studies of recent hunter-gatherer bands, hunter-gatherer bands exhibit high levels of communitarian and cooperative behaviors combined with an often explicit rejection of hierarchy. To observe this clearly, we also need to make a distinction between immediate-return hunter-gatherers and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. The immediate vs. delayed distinction refers initially to the timeframe in which they consume hunted and gathered food. With immediate-return bands, we see daily consumption of most food, little storage, and a tendency to an almost perpetually nomadic existence. Delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend to differ in that they are geographically isolated, or have borders imposed upon them by surrounding populations . In this transitional stage between ancestral hunter-gatherer existence and agriculture, we see more evidence of hierarchy, despite a lack of private property relative to modern agrarian cultures (Gray 2009).

Overall, we see a general lack of ownership or conceptions of private-property within hunter-gatherer social arrangements. The division of labor is an economic strategy that benefits both individuals and the group. Value is not necessarily assigned a priori to male or female, or to hunter or gatherer.

In some examples, anthropologists have noted a significant degree of male group control over “marriages”. This is often imposed not by potential suitors, but by the male family members of the woman. This is misleading as it’s often an ethnocentric assignment of our notions of monogamy on cultures which don’t necessarily share the same sexual norms. Even in societies with supposed marriages, females exercise a high degree of mate choice when it comes to actual reproduction:

“Having high status as a good hunter has been shown to raise a man’s reproductive success everywhere the relationship has been investigated, one of the pathways being that it gains him sexual access to more and higher quality women, whether officially or in extra-marital affairs.” (Vandermassen 2008) [emphasis mine]

At first glance, this would seem to refute my comment a couple paragraphs back about non-assignment of value to the hunter role. However, it merely reinforces my qualification that such value is not assigned a priori. Hunters, as a category, do not automatically benefit. Hunters who excel are assigned a higher fitness value and therefore tend to be selected by females to father offspring. This does however, refute the claim that arranged marriages act as true control over women’s reproduction.

Autonomy

In another word, freedom. Why is every sovereign individual (by that I mean every individual) in the 21st century born not as a human, but as a proprietary asset on the balance sheet of a nation-state? Why do all agricultural societies suffer from drastically diminished levels of freedom? Why do geographically and otherwise isolated delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend toward political hierarchy while their immediate-return analogues do not? The atomization of individuals within the supra-organism of culture has been elevated over the autonomy our ancestors were born with, but why?

For 99%+ of human evolution, every able-bodied human has had the option of leaving oppressive regimes. Every individual had the choice to opt out of social games stacked against them. The fact of human migration across the totality of earth is proof that this strategy was employed many times. However, it would have happened more rapidly if remaining in a group was not generally more advantageous for each individual. The ability to round up a group of like-minded individuals to leave was somewhat balanced by the group’s recognition of a general strength in numbers. Call it the invisible hand of exploration, or call it migration, but it acted as a perpetual check on all forms of unwelcome domination. Their complete lack of the geographical and legal boundaries we’re faced with today allowed an entirely different paradigm for human social interaction. This concept is not new. The right to cross all borders to leave oppression is legitimized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it is ignored by every country on earth for reasons beyond the scope of this piece. Further, the concept loses its actual value when there is no more frontier, but only trading one domination hierarchy for the flag of another.

The temptation to form in-groups and out-groups along lines of gender, ethnicity, education, running skills, or other coin flips is a curse of a stone age brain in an information age world. Yielding to such temptations will invariably lead to error. The unbearable lightness of paranoia that accompanies postmodernist cynicism is a direct path to your own distracted energy. You’re all formally invited to ditch the postmodern feminist doomsday machine for a refreshing trip to the history of the Galapagos…

Hey! I finished in under 4,000 words! Is this the part where I get called a misogynist then burned at the altar of Margaret Mead, or… perhaps you have other thoughts? (If you have questions or comments that you think are too far off topic, you can also post ’em in the forum.)

References
Arnold, Arthur P. “Sex chromosomes and brain gender..” Nature reviews. Neuroscience 5, no. 9 (September 2004): 701-8.
Curry, Oliver. “Who’ s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?”. Evolutionary Psychology (2006): 234-247.
Gray, Peter. “Play as a Foundation for Hunter- Gatherer Social Existence s.” The American Journal of Play 1, no. 4 (2009): 476-522.
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Gendered political behavior: A Darwinian feminist approach.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7/8 (2008).
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Genes, Brains and Gendered Behavior: Rethinking Power and Politics in Response to Condit, Liesen, and Vandermassen.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (September 2008): 504-511.
Kaiser, Anelis, Sven Haller, Sigrid Schmitz, and Cordula Nitsch. “On sex/gender related similarities and differences in fMRI language research..” Brain research reviews 61, no. 2 (October 2009): 49-59.
Li, N. P., Smith, A. R., Griskevicius, V., Cason, M. J., & Bryan, A. (2010). Intrasexual competition and eating restriction in heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 365-372.
Liesen, Laurette T. “The Evolution of Gendered Political Behavior: Contributions from Feminist Evolutionists.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (July 2008): 476-481.
McBurney, Donald H. “REVIEW – The Caveman Mystique: Pop Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science.” Sex Roles 62, no. 1-2 (June 2009): 138-140.
Trivers, R.L. . Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (1972) : 136-179. Chicago, IL: Aldine. ISBN 0-435-62157-2
Vandermassen, Griet. “Can Darwinian Feminism Save Female Autonomy and Leadership in Egalitarian Society?.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (August 2008): 482-491.
Waage, J., & Gowaty, P. (1997). Myths of genetic determinism. In P. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections, and frontiers (pp. 585–613). New York: Chapman & Hall.
Walter, Alex. “The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy : Evolutionary Moral Psychology and the Insistence of Brute Facts.” Evolutionary Psychology, no. 1999 (2006): 33-48.
Wilson, David Sloan, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B Clark. “On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology.” Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 669-682.

(and Why She’ll Never Admit It)

So now the questions you’re asking are: “Okay Andrew, if nobody listened to Freud, how did he go on to become the titan of psychology we know him as today? Why have I seen him over and over in the disputed black and white photographs?”

Evolutionary Psychology

Wait… You thought we’ve been talking about Freud? Silly rabbit… Most of Freud’s theories have since been debunked. Let’s not mention his name again please. The mad genius who attempted to destroy the realities of everyone based on his new understanding of human psychology was Charles Darwin. That’s right… He tried to pull off the ultimate and change the entire understanding of humanity… twice. The guy who had already destroyed everyone’s reality by publishing The Origin of Species in 1859, sought to do it again with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. We’ve been watching religion squirm to adapt ever since.

If put to the task, you could roughly sum up Darwin’s famous work in four words: “Survival of the Fittest”. Despite Darwin obliterating the foundations of culture and religion in this work, the idea was adopted rapidly in the scientific community. It was one of those ideas that a scientist could look at, relate experiences to, intuit, and successfully test. It resonated. It clicked. However, it wasn’t good enough for Darwin. Despite shifting paradigms and proving it, he couldn’t get peacock feathers out of his head.

When most people talk about evolution the conversation tends to focus on survival related issues, otherwise known as natural selection. Diagrams of primates hunched over a little less over time are tossed about to illustrate the point. However, this is only one of the two main components Darwin espoused. The other biggie was organisms’ focus on reproduction, otherwise known as sexual selection. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin laid the foundation for explaining sexual selection in a little less than a thousand pages. To him, it was his most important work ever because it explained the formation of the mind. When I say the mind, I’m not talking about why gray matter is gray. I’m talking about the mechanisms in the brain that do the thinking. Darwin tackled the explanation of why a peacock’s feathers came to be in terms of brains evolving to select sexual partners on the basis of sexual fitness rather than the simple natural selection of utilitarian fitness.

One way we might describe Darwin’s (second) masterpiece in just four words is “reproduction of the sexiest.” Sure, the strong survive, but it’s the sexy that reproduce. And yes, those often overlap.

Athlete

So let’s get back to the question posed in the title. Survival of the fittest style natural selection describes why your girlfriend wants to cheat on you with an athlete to a large degree. However, in the strictest sense, it doesn’t explain the thought process involved in choosing to mate with someone with visually recognizable survival cues. Natural selection stops short by basically saying that an unhealthy mate would be dead before they have a chance to reproduce in sufficient numbers. This is where Darwin and sexual selection come in. Brains evolved thought processes to recognize cues for reproductive fitness to allow mate selection to occur on an active evolutionary scale. Your girlfriend wants to cheat on you with an athlete because her brain is evolved to recognize cues that indicate an athlete has favorable advantages in both survival and reproduction. Reproductive selection doesn’t stop at offspring. It also involves the ability to enable the offspring to survive.

The point here isn’t to scientifically prove evolutionary psychology. The point is to introduce you to my new favorite science by answering the question in the title. Because of that, I’ll just go ahead and admit that the athlete in the title was a bit of a red herring. No, I’m not saying that athletes have the personalities of fishes. Stop reading so far between the lines.

Musician

This is where things get less obvious. What do guitars, vocal chords, and standing on a stage a few feet higher than the crowd have do do with natural selection or reproductive fitness?

The lack of an obvious and rational connection between women’s affinity for musicians and any sort of evolutionary benefit makes it easy for guys to pass off passing comments and crushes as innocent flirtation. To compound the matter, these guys really are totally the opposite of what she’s looking for in a relationship. So when you call her on it, she’ll think you’re overreacting and claim that she’s honestly into you and would never even want a relationship with a guy like that. And that’s the sticky part… She’s telling you the truth. However, there are two or three days every month that she’s not going to joke about it.

The answer to the zillion dollar question is the answer that plagued Darwin after releasing The Origin of Species. What about the peacock feathers!? Peacock feathers don’t help them survive. Not only is there no survival benefit, they make it more difficult to survive. They make their owners easier targets for predation. They require the exertion of extra energy to maintain them. Carrying them around requires extra energy. Growing them requires extra energy. All of these things are exactly contrary to natural selection. Darwin was a mess.

As it turns out, the line between a peacock’s feathers and the outlandish hair, clothing, and tattoos of musicians is short and direct. Both are tactics specifically designed to fly a middle finger at natural selection. Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe ostentatious displays of wealth, but didn’t get around to explaining it to its fundamental levels. Just as conspicuous consumption defies tact and reason by displays of wealth merely as demonstrations of financial wealth, peacock feathers defy natural selection by demonstrating the surplus wealth of a bird’s genes. Only the individuals capable of wasting energy on the growth of cumbersome, easily recognizable feathers could afford to taunt the economy required by strict natural selection. The females (the peahens that nobody ever talks about) don’t have flamboyant feathers. They don’t need them. The females use the feathers of the males to select them as mates. The males don’t have a choice. All they have to do is look pretty and be chosen. See, I told you to forget everything you know about culture and society.

With rockstar level musicians, the peacock type of selection works in an external conspicuous consumption level as well. With increased success comes increased wealth that allows for visible displays far beyond the average individual’s capabilities. I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you of this. You tell me… How many seasons of “Celebrity Cribs” have aired so far?

But that’s not the end of the story. If it was, the dude with the rad hair and tattoos making your latte would have a less surly demeanor and a lot longer line out the door. To understand the rest of it, you’re going to have to swallow the pill that Darwin’s contemporaries couldn’t. That was in a different millennium, I think you’re ready.

Darwin didn’t stop at physical traits. He included another affront to religion by surgically removing the necessity for God as a foundation for morality. The rejection of his new theories by science was unfortunate, but predictable. Unlike natural selection, reproductive selection rendered large swaths of other sciences irrelevant by suggesting that our thoughts and behaviors are genetically evolved and optimized to perform tasks related to identifying a myriad of cues relating to reproductive fitness.

One of the biggest ideas to come from this is the concept of social proof. Many species have evolved shortcuts to determining the value of mates through social cues. Just like the peacock’s feathers are a shortcut to determining the reproductive fitness of a bird, the rockstar guitar player’s legions of adoring fans are a shortcut to determining his reproductive fitness via the social realm.

In the 1,600,000 years or so of hominid evolution before recorded history, most human interaction took place in small groups and tribes. Under this social framework, brains evolved based on selections within these groups. Genetic and archeological evidence points to an environment in which fewer males had access to females for reproduction. Before language, the easiest way to know what someone was thinking was to watch their actions. If you were a female and saw that multiple females chose a certain male for sex, it was easier to assume they knew something you didn’t. This is especially important because a female’s investment in the reproductive process is significant. A male can get away with a few minutes of investment, but a woman’s investment is measured in terms of years.

The behavior of selecting males based on the mating habits of other females within the species has been observed and documented in a wide range of species including many non-primates.

The importance here is that these shortcuts are selected by minds. The concept of a mind as a determining component of selection explains the rapid growth and current size of human brains much more convincingly than accidental natural selection. The notion of hard-wired social circuitry is also what makes it tough for social scientists to stomach evolutionary psychology despite evidence.

One of the other factors at play with rockstars is that men giving attention to other men is also a useful cue for selection. In the human evolutionary framework, multiple men consistently giving attention to one man in particular tended to indicate leadership and dominance. Women are even more attracted to rockstars that garner attention from both males and females. Predictably, women are less attracted to rockstars in bands that are primarily followed by only men.

Your girlfriend wants to cheat on you with a musician because he stands out in his personal appearance, displays wealth by external conspicuous consumption, and must truly be great because everyone else thinks he’s great.

There’s one other characteristic that applies to some musicians more than others, but it fits more appropriately in the next section.

Artist

Yes, artists sometimes embody many of the characteristics discussed above. Stop being so technical so we can get back to the stereotypes and generalizations.

The defining characteristic of the artist is the creativity that springs from individuality. This is a more advanced characteristic of sexual selection because it involves the mind selecting others based largely on others’ minds. This sort of selection can rapidly spread through species. Humans do mind-based selection better than any other animal.

Artistic creativity and expression also serves as survival cues in ways similar to those above. Creativity isn’t a direct requirement for reproductive fitness, but an indicator of the reproductive fitness of the individual. Creativity also implies problem solving ability that is helpful in natural selection and the resource sharing dynamics of reproduction.

From another angle, art represents an external reflection of the mind of the artist. While the rockstar seeks to proclaim uniqueness through personal adornment and external displays of wealth, the artist makes a de facto declaration of intellectual uniqueness with each piece of art produced. As we’ll see in the next section, uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness is an underlying them in evolutionary psychology. The mind has adapted selection preferences based on uniqueness cues to proliferate DNA diversity.

The value derived from the assertion of individual difference varies greatly within the realm of the artist. Picasso created an entire category of painting, attracted legions of women, and died with an estate valued in the billions. On the other hand, Bob Ross attempted to show how easy it was for anyone to duplicate the art he produced and his enduring legacy is his hair. The Artist’s allure comes from the implicit assertion that he is creating something nobody else can create.

Your girlfriend wants to cheat on you with an artist because he proves he can produce something no other man is capable of producing.

Me

“How does an average guy like me become the number one lover-man in his particular postal district?” Rob Gordon (played by John Cusack) in “High Fidelity”

If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll no doubt deduce that the only category left for me to boldly insert myself into is that of the guy with the foreign accent. Most of my readers probably have the same accent, in which case that alone is a stretch. The important thing here is that it’s all relative. When I lived in Alaska, I was the kid from Seattle. When I moved to Oregon, I was the kid from Alaska. When I moved back to Seattle, I was the kid from Oregon. When I moved to Austin, I was the guy from Seattle. When I moved to Panama, I was the guy from Seattle again. When I sail into your town, there’s only one certainty… I’ll be the guy that’s new to everyone… If I’m in the right mood that will equate to novelty. Don’t worry, I’m not there to steal your girl.

Differences in accents imply genetic variance through outside groups. This made complete sense in the living conditions of our ancestors. In the small groups of people that people saw every day and even the tribes with upper limits around 150, inbreeding was a problem by default. Any indicator of genetic variance is hugely valuable. Language, eye color, skin color, and hair color all come into play. The specifics aren’t as important as the overall cue of standing out.

The answer to the High Fidelity quote above is difficult to answer correctly and difficult to reproduce. It’s much easier to become the number one lover-man in someone else’s particular postal district.

Your girlfriend wants to cheat on you with me because nomadic strangers represent the ultimate opportunity for genetic diversity.

No offense to Antonio Banderas, but your girlfriend doesn’t have a crush on him for his accent or his looks per se. Her mind is biologically compelled to provide selection preference to men with genes that vary significantly from hers for reproductive success. Don’t feel bad about it… It’s nothing personal… It’s for the children. Unfortunately, they might be someone else’s.

Why She Won’t Tell You About It

I briefly discussed this above, but I’ll recap it again. If you think your girl is amazing and adorable and madly in love with you, she probably is. Her emotional attachment to you and conscious appreciation of you aren’t in question. I mean sure, if there are problems in your relationship, all of these scenarios are much more likely to occur. They’re also much more likely to occur if you’re not attractive.

The things I’m talking about are impulse level reactions. She doesn’t have an evolved, runaway train necessity to cheat on you. However, she is genetically predisposed to not only reproduce, but also to reproduce with the highest quality DNA possessing male she can get her… um… hands… on.

Here’s another potentially related issue (Translation – another rub): The man with the best DNA is not always the same as the man best suited to contribute resources and/or invest time and resources into raising children. These cases can get tricky because in this case, it’s in the best interest of her DNA to reproduce with someone different than the person she’s in a relationship. Yes, this is code for… If she cheats on you, it may be in her best interest for you not to find out.

Your girlfriend won’t tell you she wants to cheat on you because she doesn’t consciously want to cheat on you and/or if she does cheat on you, she still wants to utilize the dependability and resources you provide.

Yes, the “but” that follows “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger,” is sometimes a big one.

So What? Who Cares?

As it pertains to my aims on this site, the implications of environmental psychology (EP) run deep. In this introductory expose on my new-found crush for evolutionary psychology, I picked something that all guys feel and wonder about directly. I asked the question from the man’s perspective in large part because there is no real equivalent to Cosmopoliltian and its ilk for men. Wait… did I just call Cosmo a good thing? That wasn’t my intent. The point is that it’s culturally acceptable for women to have public conversations about guys all day long, but guys are supposed to talk about everything in secret.

Did you know that most murders are committed by men in circumstances surrounding reproductive selection (sex)? As it turns out, murder is also an evolved psychological response to sexual selection. Seriously… this stuff goes deep, involves serious subjects, and connects everything.

The more immediate implications are that morals, culture, and society are artificial layers painted over our true nature. Whether that’s good or bad is a matter of perspective. Lifestyle design is about constructing the life that best allows you to express your best self. If you’re stifled by cultural assumptions, socialization, and a framework of rules based on the brushed on facade of society, your personal lifestyle design project will fail.

I stumbled on EP in research following up my articles about The Bigotry of Nationalism and The Curious Virtuosity of Ignorance. Since then I’ve been reading books on it at the exclusion of almost everything else. That has lead to a zillion little questions that have been rattling around in the bank of my mind being answered and explained. It has seriously re-framed my view of the world. As someone who’s pretty diligent about examining all the options, that wasn’t something I expected.

Related Stuff I’m Working On

I’ve been noticing quite a few other people and even entire genres that draw much of their underlying theories from EP. I’m working on articles about:

• How Neil Strauss, Author of The Game; Erik von Markovik (a.k.a. Mystery), creator/star of VH1’s “The Pickup Artist” and author of The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed; and the rest of the “pickup community” base almost all of their techniques on evolutionary psychology.
• The Steve Pavlina – Evolutionary Psychology connection

In addition, I’m working on pushing evolutionary psychology farther into the applied areas of:

• Branding (expanding understanding of branding concepts I wrote about in [link temporarily deactivated] Forget About Building a Brand. 7 Steps to Building a Religion.
• Sales: The Overdue and Actual Death of Used Car Salesmen Tactics
• New Business Pipeline Strategy
• Website Content Development

If you made it this far you have to be looking for an angle on lifestyle design that’s far from the all too common “5 Ways to Conquer Your Fear of the Dark” style blogs out there. Here’s where to Get Free Updates. Since you probably took the musician section above seriously and now refuse to pay attention to anyone without fans, here’s what some respectable people have said about/to me:

• “Lifestyle designers, entrepreneurs: Follow [Andrew] & read his blog… It’s seriously smart.” -David Walsh of muselife.com
• “I really, really, really like (non-sexually) this guy = @evolvify check Andrew’s blog.” -Derek Johanson (Also listed me in his Favorite Blogs of the Moment)
• “Why you should check this blog out: Andrew livesaboard a sailboat, runs an ad agency and is on a quest to explore moreof planet earth than anyone in history using only human, wind, andsolar power.” -Corbett Barr (from 44 Creative and Adventurous Bloggers You Should Know)
• “My fiance doesn’t want me to hang out with you anymore.” -An Ex-Girlfriend 

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A closer look at the guys »

Stereotypes of sports fans abound. This seems to be a universal. Comics use the stereotypes as common fodder. Sitcoms use the stereotypes as common fodder. It doesn’t really matter which sport it is, there are likely to be stereotypes of the fans. One of the more interesting is the posturing of male fans representing themselves as more masculine than both one another and non-fans. Any rational look at sports fans will realize the act of watching sports is passive, and an abstraction from reality. Shallow arguments can be made about the physical jostling that goes on in stadium seats, but in general, fans get their fix from a seat… and most often, through a screen. Those in seats in the stadium are experiencing sports through one degree of abstraction. Those watching on a screen through two degrees of abstraction. Fantasy football, which makes a fantasy out of a 2nd degree abstraction, is particularly distant.

“The jager- and buffalo-wing-tinged air inside a sports bar settles damply on a sea of rapt bros watching grown men lope across huge expanses of Astroturf, likely muttering “Rabblerabblerabble” as they run. Patrons at such a joint pound their fists, yell a lot, spill beer, sweat, shout and jump and pound chests when something ostensibly good happens on the enormous televisions, watch the commercials with equal interest, and refer to teams whose collective salary could probably fund annual education for all of Sudan’s children as “we.” Sports. Bars. Suck.” [STUFF HIPSTERS HATE]

So what does psychology have to say about the quasi-alpha-male behavior exhibited by fan boys? To do this, we get to subconsciously invoke another sports stereotype: the apelike mentality. Two studies in particular shed some light on fan mentality. First, a study from 1995 showed that some monkeys would rather be rewarded by the opportunity to watch videos of other monkeys than be rewarded with food (Andrews et al. 1995). Another showed that low-status monkeys are willing to pay (using their prized fruit juice as currency) to look at pictures of high-status males. Whereas high-status males won’t look at pictures of low-status males without being paid (Deaner et al. 2005).

Watching Monkey Sports?

Well now… a bunch of males paying to watching other males at the exclusion of other rewards. Hmm… who does that sound like!? Add to that the fact that the players typically don’t pay attention to fans without being paid (not only is this demonstrated by players’ salaries, but in speaking fees, fees for autographs etc.)  and the “fans as monkeys” stereotype is starting to make some sense from an evolutionary perspective. Based on the studies mentioned above, there is no alpha male value being demonstrated by fans.

Taking the logic a bit further, the stereotypes about women’s disdain for their men’s proclivity for fan-boy-itis start to make sense. Women allocate a large portion of mate value based on his status. Therefore, indirect demonstrations of low-status will tend to lower her perception of a man’s value as a partner.

Another interesting component of the psychology of these male sports fans is their internalization of the notion that their fan-ness will somehow transmit the status of the team to them. Moreover, the constant use of “we” in reference to the team, and fan superstition as an expression of irrational belief that they themselves have some influence over the team, is an attempt to signal that they are also somehow worthy of being attributed a share in the success of the team. The successes of the very external team are met with internal personal elation. The failures of the very external team are met with internal personal dejection.

Low-status is the default, majority, and status quo of the human population. As such, what does this do to the collective view of manhood, manliness, et cetera? Could the rise in television and the subsequent increase in 24-7 dedication to fanhood be a cause for the supposed increase in whimpiness of men?

Are you a sports fan? Are you willing to admit it here? Either way, what options are available to communicate actual status and value rather than *cough* aping the status of athletes who live in the same geographical area or go to a school you’ve heard of? Let me hear it…

References

Andrews, M., Bhat, M., & Rosenblum, L. (1995). Acquisition and long-term patterning of joystick selection of food-pellet vs social-video reward by Bonnet Macaques. Learning and Motivation, 26(4), 370-379.

Deaner, R. O., Khera, A. V., & Platt, M. L. (2005). Monkeys pay per view: adaptive valuation of social images by rhesus macaques. Current biology

Despite what Christine O’Donnell might tell you, masturbation exists in other species. Bonobos get all kinds of freaky with it. What’s interesting is that the large brained apes we are have somehow figured out a way to involve psychology in sex and mating. In a sense, human orgasm is somewhat decoupled from the mechanics. If you haven’t figured out the element of imagination or fantasy that’s involved in sex, you’re doing it wrong. But as far as we know, we’re the only species that uses pornography. There’s an interesting scientific article from 2005 that’s often cited as evidence of “monkey porn”. The article does have some fascinating implications, however, it’s not about porn. The reason it’s often mistaken for monkeys indulging in pornography is that male monkeys were willing to pay (using fruit juice as a currency) to look at pictures of females. But the monkeys didn’t mix this viewing with masturbation. It appears that they were examining the photos for visual signs of fertility. That’s important information for evolution, information worth paying for.

It’s also likely that humans are using the same visual cues to make determinations about potential mates in human pornography. However, we don’t think about that when we experience porn. Humans have decoupled the cues for fertility with the concept of fertility. And in humans this makes a lot of sense because unlike the rhesus macaques mentioned in the study, human ovulation is biologically concealed. So humans use the cues for visuals to fecundity (general ability to reproduce). I’ll tackle the evolved concept of beauty and attraction in another article. What’s important to know here is that humans have a very real emotional and visceral response when beauty and attraction are witnessed. And I’ll go on a limb and assume that you get that. But still, that doesn’t answer the question of the existence of pornography. And when are we ever going to get to the part where racism is proved to be arbitrary, in the grand scheme of humanity?

Biased by Nature

The answer to both ultimately lies in the second syllable of “pornography”. Yep… the graph, or visual, part. There’s a concept within sexual selection known as “sensory bias”. Basically, we use the senses we have to make the best determination of things that will increase our chances of survival and reproduction. And to be more correct, we evolved the senses we have to give us the ability to make determinations to help with survival and reproductive success. Vision is great for judging spatial distances advantageous in hunting. It’s beneficial for a zillion other things too. Color vision is great if you’re gathering fruit and need to quickly be able to discern ripeness… especially from a few trees away. For an extreme example, we even have the colloquial phrase “eagle eye” to highlight the visual prowess of birds who conduct hunting surveillance from extreme altitudes.

But all animals don’t have the same biases. In other environments, smell or sonar or sensitivity to the infrared spectrum are more advantageous. Among our many senses, humans have a decidedly visual bias. No, this isn’t fixed. Many studies show that there is an actual heightening (or hightening of awareness) of auditory sensitivity in blind people. But in general, our sensory bias is visual. It’s because of a combination of this sensory bias, big brains, and emotional complexity that porn exists. Without any of them, porn wouldn’t work on us. And yes, hearing porn has similar impacts, but that doesn’t lead us any closer to highlighting the inanity of racism.

Racism

Racism is made possible in humans by our visual sensory bias. Skin pigmentation, and other shapes and colorations are generally irrelevant distinctions in matters not relating to vitamin D and skin cancer. While our modern civilizations pile a variety of deleterious effects because of our skin pigmentation, the differences don’t play a major role in survival or reproduction (caveat: during normal reproductive years). In other words, skin pigmentation is highlighted by the human visual bias. This is similar to the underlying reason firetrucks are painted red (or yellow).

The human sensory bias combines with another group of related human biases to really drive racism into high-gear. Our bias toward grouping, ethnocentricity, and xenophobia cause us to make extreme distinctions by grouping people based on any markers at our disposal. Humans have been shown to form emotional group ties on something as little as a coin flip. This tendency to form groups was a useful decision making heuristic for our distant ancestors. In some instances, it remains so today. However, it fires way too often in individuals living in the relative safety of modern civilization. Seth Godin has tried to make tribalism sound like a good thing in his book Tribes, but that’s ultimately just a conscious attempt to capitalize on an antiquated artifact of evolution that’s largely lost its use in our world.

Racism and pornography both spring wholly from a combination of non-logical biases we all share as humans. We can debate the merits of pornography in terms of human happiness and flourishing, but racism is arbitrary and thus, completely untenable.

Louann Brizendine, M.D. graduated from UC, Berkeley in Neurobiology, Yale University in Medicine and Harvard Medical School in Psychiatry.

She served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School from 1985-88 when she came to join the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. At UCSF, Dr. Brizendine pursues active clinical, teaching, writing and research activities.

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In 1994, Dr. Brizendine founded the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at LPPI, and continues to serve as it’s director. The Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic is a unique psychiatric clinic designed to assess and treat women of all ages experiencing disruption of mood, energy, anxiety, sexual function and well-being due to hormonal influences on the brain. In addition Dr. Brizendine instructs and supervises residents, fellows, and medical students in this Clinic throughout the year helping young doctors learn more about this important area in women’s mental, sexual and physical health. She annually teaches courses to medical students and residents addressing the topics of the brain effects of hormones, mood disorders, anxiety problems and sexual interest changes due to hormones throughout the country. She is an expert on the effects of testosterone on sex drive in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women.

Topics

• History of Studying Sex Differences
• Comparing the Male and Female Brain
• History in the Field
• Differences in Little Boys and Girls
• The Boy Smell
• The Teenage Brain
• The Daddy Brain
• The Emotional Life of Men
• Sex, Love and the Male Brain
• The Mature Male Brain

Q & A

• Differences in Development of Single Men
• Social Construction of Gender
• Individual Differences
• The Gay Brain
• Males Using One Side of Their Brain
• Males Raised by Single Mothers
• Men’s Fear of Dancing
• Changes in the Brain During Pregnancy
• Hearing Differences
• The Brain in Love
• World Studies
• Older Men vs. Younger Men

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