You can pick up a copy of our paper on this page. We call it “The Cooking Hypothesis.” The basic idea can be summarized with these points:

1) Cooking food transformed human ecology. Many potential foods in the environment can’t be consumed by humans (or apes in general) without cooking. But adding cooking to our species-specific technology, we can access those foods effectively transforming our ecology to a much greater extent than the vast majority of evolutionary transitions, especially single-event transitions, have ever done. The total number of calories in the natural environment that become available to an ape that can cook goes up by orders of magnitude.

2) This increase in available calories left a biological signal that is very impressive. Two major changes happened in the hominid body (in early Homo erecuts/ergaster). One is an approximate doubling in body size from an earlier Australopithecine or “Early Homo” ancestor. The other is a reduction in tooth size. Less eating equipment with a body demanding so much more in energy to grow and maintain signals a fundamental change in the food supply. There may be more than one way this could have happened, but so far adding cooking to our technology seems to be the best explanation.

3) Related, this is when we see brain size, relative to body size and in absolute terms, increase. Neural tissue is picky, expensive, and costly. Having a significant increase in brain size may be related to the demands (on the brain) of adding cooking to our behavior in that the size increase is allowed by the extra energy. And, it may be related in that the larger brain may provide the capacity to have this behavior.

4) The actual act of cooking, as a technology, may or may not demand a larger brain. But the process of cooking almost certainly involves central place foraging (bringing all the food back to one place, much of the time, to cook it) and delayed consumption (as opposed to eating the food where you find it). The basic pattern for a chimpanzee-like ancestor is to eat the food where you find it. Bringing food into close proximity to other members of your group virtually guarantees direct competition for food, which makes getting to food to begin with a highly questionable thing to do. In order for cooking to work, the social interactions typical of an ape have to be modified significantly. Cooking demanded, facilitated, and made major changes in social structure “worth it” from the point of view of natural selection.

5) These changes in social structure are probably indicated as well by changes in stone tool technology. Early cookers also were early hand-ax makers, for example. Human ancestors went from making primarily expedient, one time use, very simple stone tools to making tools that required a great deal of investment in time and energy to learn the technology, get good at it, and even for the production of individual tools (including acquisition of better than average raw materials in many cases). Once the tools were made they seem to have been used, often, for long periods of time. It is hard to imagine a chimp-like creature carrying around a tool into which she invested time and energy without it being taken away. This is an important transformation.

6) Less visible but very likely is a change in social system which could be called the rise of proto marriage. Sexual arrangements of a human-like kind are very different than for chimp. The ability to allow others to possess food or invest in more sophisticated technologies may be parallel to the ability to have more or less exclusive sexual contracts among individuals. This is indicated independently in the fossil record by a large decrease in sexual dimorphism in body size. In polygynous species like chimps males are often much larger than females, and this seems to have been the case with pre-Homo erectus/ergaster ancestors. But at the same time the body size increase and tooth size decrease happen, we also see a reduction in sexual dimorphism in body size, strongly indicating a major change in social arrangements. The best two explanations for this may be a shift to a gibbon-like pattern of paired-off monogamous adults living more or less alone, or a human-like pattern of paired-off monogamous adults living in larger social groups.

It is an idea that would have caught on. It would have selected for more nuanced communication, and may thus have facilitated the origin of what we now know of as human language and symbolic processing.

So when you are eating your Thanksgiving dinner this year, most of which will be cooked, look around at the people at the table and, briefly, imagine them to be chimps. Then go back to your meal and try to put all those thoughts aside…

Fixed up and reposted.

Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or sexuality in a human. You have probably heard of the finger-index (not the index-finger) … often called the 2D:4D ratio. The ratio of length of two of your fingers seems to be associated with certain trends; Men with a certain ratio tend to be more athletic and/or more gay, for instance. The mechanism for the finger ratio variation is probably a surge of steroid hormones that enhances growth rate of whatever bones are forming at that time (I simplify somewhat) and if such a surge occurs at a certain time, a slight shift in bone length ratio affecting fingers occurs and because of the timing, a slight change in something else also occurs, something having to do with what will eventually be adult behavior.¹

I am not arguing here for the strength of this association or its meaning, but available evidence shows that there is something going on. To the extent that this particular relationship is true, we see an adult outcome (related to gender, sexuality, or other behavior) being the result of something that is biological and prenatal, but not likely genetic. While the overall pattern of the hormonal environment of a fetus may be broadly determined by genes, variations in the details are just as likely determined by other things. In many contexts, one steroid hormone looks a lot like another, or can convert into another as they float around in the blood supply, so any large surge of steroids could act like sex hormones or growth hormones even if they are merely stress hormones, and there is an exchange of hormones between the mother’s blood supply and that of the fetus. Since the mother’s hormonal environment is heavily influenced by her environment (especially stress hormones), the ultimate cause of steroid hormone-mediated developmental variations in a human is very likely to be strongly environmental, if not entirely environmental, even though it all happens before birth.

Then there is the stuff that happens after birth. Back in the 1980s there was a great deal of attention to what causes gender differences, and several studies were carried out mainly in psychology. This was before the rise of Evolutionary Psychology, so the studies were not necessarily developed within an evolutionary paradigm (probably a negative). On the other hand, they weren’t carried out with the naive assumptions about our evolutionary past often held by Evolutionary Psychologists (probably a positive). Anyway, one study carried out in Australia seems to show that adults in a specific culture (Australian middle class) treated infants very differently depending on their knowledge of the infant’s sex.² For instance, a boy would be moved around more, tossed about a bit, handed boy-specific toys, and so on, while a girl would be held more calmly, not tossed about, hugged more, and handed girl-specific toys. In that study, the “sex” of the infant (boy vs. girl) was “known” to the adult on the basis of obvious clothing choices and pronoun use, and in fact, the infant was always a boy. After months of treatment as one sex or the other, depending on what that treatment consisted of, one could potentially get a gendered difference. Movement, touch, voice, etc. all form part of the environment in which the infant’s neural system, including the infant’s brain, develops. This would make a difference.

These studies should be taken as somewhat limited, as we can’t be sure how many similar studies with different results were completed but not published or discussed widely because the results did not make sense. But, it probably is true that the sociocultural environment readily takes over from the prenatal environment in the shaping of gender in growing individuals.

And so it goes throughout development; At numerous stages along the way, a human is affected by hormones, bathed in gendered behavior, and eventually, starts to observe her or his own environment and act accordingly. One of those studies seemed to show that at about Kindergarten age, boys were more conscious of how they would fit into a group than girls, paying special attention to what other boys were doing before making certain choices. If this was a general pattern in a particular group of people, one might see girls engage in a wider range of available stereotypes while boys restricted themselves to a narrower range. (Although not suggested by the study as far as I know, I can think of a nice post-hoc evolutionary explanation for that, given that humans are probably mostly femal exogenous!)

While it is possible that there is some hidden Jungian subconscious difference between nominal boys and girls resulting in different themes in their behavior (i.e., girls like circles and boys like lines or some such thing), the degree to which kids past a certain age … say six or so … gravitate towards gender specific toys or other objects, or engage in gender specific behaviors, is way too finely tuned to be the product of anything other than high cognitive function. While we know that across cultures, different colors are associated with different genders, within a culture most boys and girls know what the boy vs. girl colors are and to varying degrees express this knowledge as strong preferences, perhaps with boys expressing a narrower range of preferences than girls. Most likely, culturally specific gender preferences for things like toys and clothing are learned early, become deeply ingrained, are unlikely to be genetically determined at any level of detail (if at all) but may be attended to by boys more than girls (maybe that last difference is genetic-ish).

There are many factors that would determine a person’s gender over a lifetime. The above mentioned intra-uterine hormonal conditioning is probably fairly complex, with multiple moments in time when one or another thing might happen, and where one version of the developmental scenario would lead towards one gender orientation than another. After birth there would be more of the same but less hormonal and more cultural, and later on, with puberty, the hormones kick in again, but with a twist: Early conditioning may determine the nature of later hormonal activity by setting up differences in receptor sites or sensitivity, or other aspects of hormone feedback systems.

In speaking of humans it is easy to assume that other animals, who lack the complex and often costly (and therefore presumably ‘important’ in some way) trappings of prolonged development and culture have simpler systems for determining gender. For the most part, I would argue that rodents do in fact have simpler systems of gender than do humans, with the caveat that I’ve just compared an entire order of mammals (and a rather speciose and diverse one at that) with a single species in an entirely different order. But what would you make of a gender-shaping system in rodents that was actually very complex, in which ‘culture’ was the main determinant of, for instance, adult male-ness?

In rats, males get to be males in large part because they have testes that secrete testosterone, which in turn causes other changes. But according to at least one study, the degree to which testes will secrete testosterone is determined by anogentital licking behavior of the mother. This behavior is, in turn, brought on by some sort of cue produced by the newborn male. Without this licking, the testes do not produce much testosterone and andorgenization of the rat does not take place.³

OK, so I was exaggerating slightly when I said that rat “culture” determines adult gender, but prior to hearing this you probably assumed that there was a gene or set of genes that simply coded for which sex the rat would be when it grew up. And yes, you can get some interesting results when the mother rat is replaced with a lab tech and various different variations of the licking thing are tried out. (Using tiny wet paintbrushes.)

And I could go on. But I want to make two points about development and behavior, especially gender. One is that whatever genetic component is working, most aspects of adult behavior and orientation are shaped by non-genetic factors and those genetic factors that may exist come in the form of basic species-specific (but almost certainly gender-differentiated) “drives.” I’ve discussed the importance of drives here, and if you want to read a whole book about the link between drives and everything you do in your life check out Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts (See all Self-Help Books)

The second point is that as something complex (and both personal and social) as gender orientation emerges in a person it must be true that it comes to whatever point it comes to after a series of many turning points. If every single factor is thought of as a simple binary choice (and I use the word “choice” with no reference to human decision making) between two canalized options, then the number of possible outcomes could be thought of as 2ⁿ where ‘n’ is the number of times a binary choice is encountered. So, if there are, say, three hormonal moments in utero, and one more after birth (puberty) and, say, three life stages that have major influences on gender (and I oversimplify) then the number of possible routes a person may take from conception to adulthood would be 2⁷. That is 128. If these different paths lead to mostly different outcomes, wouldn’t there be over 100 “genders” among humans?

The interesting thing about this is that a cursory examination of potential human gender diversity from a purely biological point of view suggests that there are at least dozens of “genders” but the vast majority of cultures define (or even allow) only a few. Perhaps culture, in this case, is more restrictive than biology. Which, to a behavioral biologist, is not much of a shock, though it might be if considered from a broader social science perspective.

So, the next time you are in charge of making a form to collect personal information from people, when you are designing the “gender” question, you might consider something other than a couple of checkboxes. Perhaps a drop-down list. Or, best of all, just have people write a short essay. Make ’em think, that will.

¹Be careful with this idea: While I’m sure there are several aspects of 2D:4D research that are valid and interesting, it is often somewhat over-reported. Also, the numbers are tricky. The measurement is often done on fleshed and living fingers, but should really be done on the bones directly (using X-ray technology, not sacrificing the subject and defleshing them!). And the meaning of this trait is somewhat open to interpretation. I’d be comfortable sorting out males from females in a skeletal population with good preservation of hands but no pelvic remains, but more reluctant to use this for sorting out ethnic groups, gender orientations, or assertiveness levels. For a recent review see Bailey and Hurd, 2005. Finger length ratio (2D:4D) correlates with physical aggression in men but not in women. Biological Psychology. Volume 68, Issue 3, March 2005, Pages 215-222.)

²The specific research to which I refer was shown on a documentary about sex differences; For an exemplar published study on this work see Frisch 1977. Sex Stereotypes and Adult-Infant Play. Society for Research in Child Development. Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 1671-1675

³See this study and references therein: Moore and Morelli, 1979. Mother rats interact differently with male amd female offspring. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, Vol 93(4), Aug 1979, 677-684. doi: 10.1037/h0077599.

Moore, C., & Morelli, G. (1979). Mother rats interact differently with male amd female offspring. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 93 (4), 677-684 DOI: 10.1037/h0077599

I went out with a friend. We were both between relationships, and we both knew somehow that this was a date though it was never called a date. And we had a perfectly good time: Good food, good conversation, good drinks. She drove.

When it came time to go home, she drove me to the urban neighborhood I lived in and parked on the street near my house. As we were saying our good-byes, she enigmatically unhooked her seat belt. I wondered why. Then, I discovered that she wanted the freedom of movement to lean across the console and give me a kiss. It was a good kiss. It was actually a series of good kisses, and it went on for a while.

And suddenly, there was a loud rapping on the window of the car. We stopped kissing and that’s when we noticed that we had steamed up the windows a bit. So I cracked the window on which the rapping had occurred and there was a policeman staring in with his flashlight.

Now, you have to understand, this is two adults in a car in the city, not teenagers at some remote lover’s lookout in the country side on prom night; this was in a neighborhood where the police never wander around on foot, and certainly never bother the local residents in this manner. Yet, there was the steamy window, the uniformed police officer, and the bright flashlight.

“What can I do for you, officer” I said, thinking, “what is this Joker doing?”

“Ah, sorry to bother you,” realizing he was shining the flashlight in my eyes, diverting it, “I was wondering if you saw anyone coming by here. We’re in pursuit of a burglar.”

I listened for a moment.

“I don’t hear the dog,” I said. “There is no way anyone has been by here, but if I see someone, I’ll call.”

It is said that you never forget your first kiss. I think I might have. But THAT kiss, I will never forget not only because it was a very warm expression of closeness with someone I love and all that stuff, but because of the over the top comic relief associated with it. I mean really: A cop, a flashlight, a rap on the window???? GMAB!

Anyway, that is one of my favorite personal kiss stories. The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us, a new book by Sheril Kirshenbaum has a bunch more about kissing, and is a must read for anyone who wants to try out kissing (you may like it) and keep it scientific.

You would think that kissing is pretty basic. A few different animals seem to do it, and we’ve all seen the pictures of chimps kissing. So, humans have always kissed, and it’s a basic feature of our species and we all do it and it’s kind of wet and messy and what else can you really say about it? But if that is what you are thinking, then you need to do two things: a) get more curious and b) remove your Occidento-normative Western Unthinking Cap and learn yourself some perspective.

Kissing is almost a human universal, but not quite. Not all cultures do this. The history of kissing is complex and interesting, to the extent that we know about it. Kissing may or may not be a signal for quality or ability in relation to other activities such as sex. Men and women seem to “use” kissing for different purposes. Science has something to say about the efficacy of lip-enhancing behaviors such as gloss and colorizing. And did you know that men and women do not necessarily like the same kind of kissing, at least in some contexts?

Sheril’s book is a fun read and there is no way you will not find it informative. Gender issues and sexuality is an interest of mine (as an evolutionary biologist) so I know a lot of this stuff, but I learned a great deal reading her book. And, it made me think.

To me, the most interesting take-home message from Sheril’s book is that kissing is both a fundamental, primordial form of communication involving the deepest limbic and visceral functions and the most basic social negotiations foundational to human existence, and something that any one group of human can simply do entirely without. Sheril documents the heterogeneous nature of kissing historically (and by inference prehistorically) and ethnographically, while at the same time demonstrating the nature and mechanics of kissing as an ethological factor in the kind of social space where one might also find cringing or punching or swearing or yelling or fearing or other visceral activities.

At first, this seems highly enigmatic, but need not be so. What is needed is to draw kissing down to some of it’s more basic components. What is kissing made up of that could be done some other way that does not add up to actual kissing?

Bodily closeness, face-to-face closeness, exchange of scent and sebaceous substances and possibly more bodily fluids, and so on … some subset of what any Middle Schooler would call “Totally eeww factor” … is probably found in every human culture, much like fried bread is found in every culture.¹ There is this list of things humans may do to/with each other in the process of negotiating (or at least playing around with) sex, marriage, or some other reproductive activity or social contract, and one way to piece this all together is with the Inuit muzzle rub, or some other activity, or a kiss.

It is also interesting that the kiss has spread over recent time. I wonder if it was very common at times in the past, fell out of favor, and returned, over and over. I am not necessarily being ridiculous when I imagine that the various behavioral accouterments of closeness would be combined, recombined, spread, forgotten, preferred, prohibited, in a kind of Dawkinsonian River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

I recommend the book. I suggest you consider it as a gift for your mate on his or her birthday. Or, to your mate as a Valentine’s Day gift! Since Amanda was born on Valentine’s day, I get to do both at the same time!

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¹Not really. Fried bread is not really found in every culture. See: Every Culture Has a …

Most simply defined, a human universal is a trait, behavior or cultural feature that we find in all human societies. Men are always on average larger than women. All humans see the same exact range of colors because our eyes are the same. The range of emotions experienced by people is the same, and appears in facial expressions and other outward affect, in the same way across all humans.

The term “Human Universal” shows up in Google Ngram (a rather course but very fun data mining tool) as appearing in books in about 1830 but not before, with sporadic occurrences until just after World Word II, when, presumably because of the rise of professionalized anthropology and sociology, it demonstrated a steady increase to the present. This increase is interrupted by what is probably a non-random drop in the mid 1980s followed by a spike I presume to be associated with the publication of Donald Brown’s monograph, “Human Universals.” in 1991. I’m not sure if Ngram’s failure as a data mining tool during the early 2000’s, or if the publication of Steven Pinker’s pro genetic deterministic book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature caused a sudden drop off in the use of the term over the last few years.

From World War II on, the phrases “genetic determinism” and “human universal” have very similar patterns of appearance in books, according to the Ngram viewer, but with the former having been much more popular. And, I mention that phrase here mainly to point out that the two terms are very different.

Now let’s refer back to the aforementioned definition and examples (color vision, male vs. female size, emotions and facial expressions). The first thing to ask is, can exceptions be allowed? Necessarily, yes. Color blindness (or blindness in general) does not obviate the universal biology of eye function. Individuals can be exceptions to any rules. But what about entire cultures or populations of humans that are different? It turns out that the list of emotions one would derive from a careful study of a group of people would be different depending on which culture you look at. Does this mean that emotions are not universals? Well, even though there would be differences, the fact remains that most cultures would be similar, and the few cultures that are different are different in ways that do not overthrow any generalized understanding of emotions, how they work, what they do, and how they function in society. It might be a little like going across the Iron Curtain into the old Soviet Union and looking at cars. The cars would all look just like cars back home and operate in the same way yet none of the models and makes would be familiar to an American from Detroit. Does the relationship between the parts of a hypothetical universal have to be the same everywhere? Hopefully not. On average, men are always larger than women in any sufficiently large and “normal” population, but there is often overlap. However, the absolute size of people in general and the relative size of men vs. women seems to vary across populations, with some having very large difference and others having very small differences.

So, our simple definition of a human universal holds as long as we are willing to allow at least three dimensions of variation or exception: Individuals can be exceptions, there can be some cross cultural variation, and the details can vary in important ways, so long as the universal is defined in a way that allows for it.

But at the same time, even this surfical look at a small number of examples indicates that the concept of a “Human Universal” is not the same as a species-specific genetically determined trait. Such a concept would be like asserting that the way emotions are expressed by humans is as invariant and predictable as the number of bones in an adult human, which we assume is always exactly the same from person to person.

Or is it? Actually, the number of ribs, vertebrae, teeth, and sigmoid bones varies from person to person, even if not counting rare pentadactylism, amputation, or other differences. So if something as basic and “biological” as bone count per person varies, we should be able to handle a widespread human trait as a “human universal” even if East Asian people grin under stress more often than do Englishmen (who scowl when they are happy because they wear hair shirts), or if the number of colors commonly and widely recognized in a given culture varies from three to dozens.

The color example is a classic, and for a good reason. Many groups of people tend to name only a small number of colors, yet they are physically capable of seeing the same colors as anyone else. The Efe Pygmies, for instance, while being experts on their own natural environment and able to identify thousands of species of plants and animals perfectly, only have specific words for red, white or black. They live in the rain forest but don’t have a word for green. Of course, on further inspection, they DO have a word for green, it’s just not distinct. They call green things “leaf colored.” And, they can and do call things “skin colored” or “dirt colored” and so on. In a sense, claiming that they don’t have more than a few colors is like saying that Martha Stewart doesn’t have neutral pastel color paint because these paints happen to be called “Morning Walk” (not a color, but a adverb/verb or adjective/noun), “Ash Bark” (not a color but a tree part), “Feldspar” (not a color but a kind of rock), “Wampum” (not a color but a form of Native American currency), and “Mink” (not a color but a fur bearing animal).

But still, different cultures do have different distinct color name lists, and you can more or less organize cultures by how many colors they have, and when you do this, you find that the cultures with the smallest number of colors tend to have black and white, then black and white and red, then those three and either green or yellow, then all those including green AND yellow, then they add blue, then they add brown, then purple, pink, orange or gray. Eventually, you get to the cultures with the most colors, and there you find colors named after fur bearing animals and verbs.

Color vision is a human universal, but a trivial one. This is like saying that all humans having a head is a human universal. But color naming is also thought of as a human universal to the extent that all cultures follow the above described pattern, even if cultures are very different from each other in this area. Furthermore, the theory goes, this pattern is followed because of the nature of the rods and cones in our eyes. (Read Brown for a more detailed explanation.) And there probably is something to this.

Color naming could be thought of as a pattern of additive complexity, or complexity on demand, shaped by the nature of the physical environment (the way light works and the way the eye works) in which the phenomenon plays out, but the magnitude of the elaboration determined by culture. If we found a culture in which there were only six named colors and none of them were black, white, or red, would we have to disqualify color naming as a universal? Well, if you don’t like the idea of human universals, then you may want to say yes, it’s all or nothing. However, most likely such a culture would have such a naming system for some special and interesting reason.

Which brings us to sex. Or at least, a small digression I’d like to make regarding sex. Human Universal: Most sex that is not auto-erotic is between a man and a woman. Exception: The anonymous culture in New Guinea (sometimes called the “Sambia”) in which men try their hardest to have sex with women as few times as absolutely necessary to reproduce, but otherwise only have oral sex delivered by boys below a certain age. A tiny minority of sex is between men and women. Now, seriously, would the existence of that culture, and it does exist, obviate generalizations about human sexuality? Or, would it make you ask questions about that one particular culture, and perhaps even question the validity of your cultural relativism to some extent? Seriously.

The relative size of men and women is due to developmental differences between men and women and there is a great deal to say about it (which we’ll skip). For our present purposes, it is exemplary of an interesting kind of human universal that demonstrates both the validity of the concept and ways in which the concept becomes unnecessarily constraining in how we think about humans.

Early anthropologists (Mead, Benedict, etc.) made the case that human culture was so flexible that wholesale reversals in sex roles across entire cultures could be found (reversals from the western expected norm, that is). So they found those cultures in the Pacific. However, further study of the cultures in which the women were supposedly doing all the guy stuff and the men were supposedly doing all the girl stuff showed that these early anthropologists were, in the main, wrong: There are no documented sex reversal cultures in the Pacific. Indeed, a close read of Benedict and Mead won’t even find clear cut cases, though the derived literature and popularization of it, and Mead in some public appearances, would give that impression.

It is true, however, that if you measure “maleness” and “femaleness” (as gender spectra) of people in a bunch of different cultures, it is not hard to find one culture where the men are more female than the females of some other culture, or women in one culture that are more male then men of some other culture. And, how “male” vs. “female” actual males and females are may be very divergent by genetic sex, or less different, and some traits may demonstrate vast gender differences and others less, depending on the culture.

But no matter what you do, you will always find that the usual lists of male vs. female distinguishing traits fall in relation to each other the same way in every culture, where men are more male and women are more female, by a little or by a lot, but always with the same polarity. Always. Except for the exceptions, of course, which are actually quite rare.

So there is an overall pattern of gender roles found across cultures that is a human universal, but no one culture can be used to predict the exact pattern for any unknown culture. The patterns of gender roles is probably often shaped by certain features. Ocean fishing cultures, vs. forest horticultural cultures, vs grassland pastoral cultures vs. arid country forager cultures … will probably have internally similar patterns of gender roles (and other social roles). This is because some underlying set of male and female potentials, needs, vulnerabilities, requirements, limitations, etc. plays out in roughly similar ways given similar contexts, economies, externalizes, etc. Add a bit of history and some random chance and you get a complex, mosaic-like mostly post hoc but somewhat predictive pattern of gender role tendencies across the human species. With the usual exceptions.

So the male-female difference demonstrates, messily, the kind of human universal that arises from some pretty basic biological factors (penis or vagina? lactation? paternity anxiety?) when played out across an entire planet of crazy humans.

The emotion example demonstrates something else about human universals. This is the link between some rather well known neurological and endocrine systems, the broader phylogenetic context (humans as mammals, humans as primates, etc.) and the strange tension between the arbitrary nature of human communication (the linguistic) and the non-arbitrary nature of our bodies.

All mammals have limbic systems and endocrine (hormone) systems, and they are pretty similar across the groups that have been studied well. The “emotions” are the output of the limbic systems. Your larynx and pharynx makes your voice, your legs are how you walk, your limbic system does the emotions. At some scale most, perhaps all, mammals have the same basic emotions. There are four of them, and there is a mnemonic to remember what they are: The Four F‘s. Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Sex.

But of course, this is an oversimplification, and there is some neurological and circumstantial evidence that emotions can be very derived, and even entirely new ones present, in some mammals. For instance, in cats the “affective attack” behavior is probably like human rage, but plays out very different. Cats have a “quiet biting” attack emotional state that human hunters and soldiers mimic but that is probably not a separate basic emotion in humans. And when I say “cats have this emotion” what I mean is that you can see them do it in the wild and you can consistent replicate the emotion by inserting a needle in a certain part of the brain and giving it a bit of juice.

So human emotions can be, and should be, understood in the wider pattern of mammalian emotions, though I think a lot of people don’t understand that. It is often assume that emotion are entirely constructed from cultural experience. They are not. But the exact set of emotion that are typically experienced and the way in which they play out can be very much affected by cultural experience. Sexual Jealousy is a human universal … it is widely found and makes biological sense, is linked to visceral effects like other emotions, etc. But how sexual jealousy plays out or even if it is important seems to vary a great deal across cultures. Malu is arguably an emotion that exists only in a certain Indonesian culture, though it is like emotions found elsewhere (overlaps with “shame” and “honor”). And the affective state linked to emotions can vary. The scene in Platoon where a young man is killed because of his smile comes to mind.

Sexual jealousy would be an emotion that in some cases has a very important, adaptive, even central role in culture (in some cultures). The fact that East Asians grin/smile in a way that Westerners may not understand is not a cultural adaptation but rather a product of cultural drive (I assume), and Malu is a highly derived culture-bound form of some more basic emotion that all humans probably experience. But the fact that a genetic analogy works to describe these behaviors, and despite the fact that they are biological (in having their own organ, as it were, the limbic system) does not make these differences genetically determined. Indonesians do not have a gene for malu and French people a gene for sexual jealousy.

Which brings us to the concept of determinism. I used to hang out a lot with a client scientist who was always talking about determinism and how he was amused at the way in which social scientists repelled at the concept. In truth, the social scientists were being repelled at a different concept (that they called determinism) than what my friend Kerry was thinking. But he did make a valid point: When we think about things that matter, there is often a cause, and the structure of cause and effect is a matter of determinism. This is different than predestination. The fact that the overall structure of emotions is determined by genes does not obviate the equally valid fact that the overall structure of emotions is determined by experience. One kind of determinism is not the “correct” one or the more powerful one or the one that matters, though you will hear most people involved in this sort of discussion demanding that it does. And, whether or not something is a human universal is an entirely separate question than the details of what determines it.

Apartment building mice build, when living colonially, a complex warren with a specific engineered pattern of spatial relatioships between individual borrows, looking like tiny apartments in a large housing development. Termintes build incredibly complex systems of air cooled/air heated underground farms and birthing areas. The mice make their apartments by having a single behavior …. just one … that, when they live in a group makes the aprartments form quite incidentally, but I would argue that the making of apartments when living in a group is a “mouse universal” for that species. No termite or even group of termintes has a blueprint for a complex termitary system, but they manage to always make one anyway. The termitaries are universal to the termites, and each species has a species universal pattern of termitary, yet the termitaries … how they look and function … are determined by a handful of very simple (genetically coded) behaviors and context.

Certainly, there are human universals that are entirely non-genetic or that have entirely trivial genetic components. They are difficult to identify because once determinism comes into play in the discussion, everything is viewed by the interlocutors as “obviously genetic” or “clearly constructed.” Not helpful.

Human universals are real and they are important. They are important because figuring out how and why they exist at all reveals how individual humans, groups, and “cultures” function. They tell us about common experiences that may not be as obvious if we don’t recognize the universals, such as how shame, jealousy, malu, honor, and so on reveal the society shaping of what is considered normal. An understanding of human universals can be an exercise in calibration. The entire anthropological experience, with its relativism and its “outside” perspective is roughly equivalent to the observation of human behavior in relation to things that are universals and things that are not.

Kissing is not a human universal yet is built from parts that are. Homicide and rape are human universals yet they happen (usually) because of highly unusual circumstances. In the former, the actual “universal(s)” are unseen to us. Something about bodily fluids, or a drive for closeness, or some feature of risk or trust come together to cause the mushing of lips to serve as a tool for bonding (of many different kinds) in many but not all culture. Who kills or rapes whom and under what circumstances tends to follow very predictable patterns across cultures and contexts (but with very different incidence) but the specific contextual variables that determine this behavior to actually happen are almost always quirky.

So, human universals are real and the concept is useful, yet they are not what many people assume they are … they are not generically determined traits. They never were thought of as either simplistic genetically determined features of human culture or utterly invalid, by any camp in anthropology. The phrase “Human Universal” is a dog whistle only in limited contexts, though it is probably seen as one more widely, which is problematic. And here, by complexifying the concept, I’m not trying to weaken it, nor am I trying to slip it past any perceived PC police. Mainly, like with most of the Falsehoods, I have tried to expose some of the interesting inner workings of the topic at hand. In this sense, the concept of “human universal” is a reasonably useful tool functioning in a way somewhere between pick=axe and well placed dynamite.

Later in life, humans have a longer period of what might be called pre-adolescence than they “should” based on comparisons with related species. Some have characterized this as the insertion of a number of extra years of development. It could also be characterized as a period of time-lengthened development. Neither is perfectly accurate. One way to characterize the human condition for this period is this: From some time several months after birth through about the age of five or six (or more) humans engage in developmental activities not seen (or not as extensive or intensive) in other apes, during which humans learn a number of important things and engage in a number of neural developmental processes.

It is during this period that humans develop their knowledge of the kinship systems they will live with for the rest of their lives. Western populations tend to have poorly developed kinship systems, so this is easy to overlook, but virtually all other human cultures have complex and pragmatically significant kinship systems, and it is easy to observe children becoming aware of them and learning how to engage in them during this time. It is during this time that human children develop gender identity and gender roles appropriate to their society. They may learn class, caste, or ethnic roles as well. They start to learn the basics of the things they will need later in life, and what they learn is based entirely on what their society or culture requires: Being a blacksmith, a forager, a western/professional, whatever.

Most significantly, it is during this period that the child learns to use human language, a trait that is absent from our most closely related species.

Mel Konner, if I recall correctly, suggested the use of the term “childhood” as the period of development in which humans engage that is absent from the apes. (If he did not suggest that, he certainly popularized it with his documentary series called “childhood” and accompanying text.) The word “childhood” existed previously, of course. The term was suggested for use as the technical term referring to the inserted extra five years or so of development. Primates have a juvenile stage followed by the transition to sexual maturity, but humans have a pre-juvenile stage as well. This model can be rather clumsy, but suffice it to say that human young are doing something quantitatively and qualitatively different than ape young.

Primates tend to learn much of their ultimate adult behavior from the other primates with whom they live and by interaction with their natural environment, and this allows for certain things to happen, such as the development of behaviors that would be difficult or impossible to program genetically. This is a trait found widely in mammals and birds, but more so in some groups, including primates. It is even more true of the apes than of other primates, and indeed, apes have long periods of parent (mother) – offspring association, and are observed to engage in long bouts of learning and, remarkably, active teaching. Humans take this ape characteristic to a proverbial “order of magnitude” greater. One result of human hyper-extended and hyper-intensified child-age learning is the ability of human cultures to adapt (specialize) in a wider range of habitat exploitation strategies (lifeways) than otherwise possible. Indeed, the genetically coded behaviors that may well be present in primates (innate fear of certain things, certain aspects of territorial competition, sexual interaction, etc.) are often repressed or re-programmed in humans via culture. An interesting, though trivial, example is Heavy Metal. Heavy metal is a cultural manifestation (a “subculture”?) in which human participants revel in the instantiation of symbols almost all of which represent the repulsive, the dangerous, or the adaptively scary: Blood, predators, spiders, snakes, misplaced umlauts, and sharp things. That which we might reasonably guess would be genetically programmed into our beings is dragged out and made normal. This sort of thing proves that culture is capable of “overriding biology” (though that presumed relationship is often a falsehood) and suggests that human behavior in general may be primarily culturally coded rather than genetically coded. After all, culture is a powerful and rich source of information that can be passed on from generation to generation like genes, but altered in ways not possible with genes. One would expect selection to favor culturally mediated traits over genetically mediated traits.

And that may be our most important adaptation.

This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound” you mean “sounds good unless you listen really hard.”

I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)

Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.

But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….

I want to first provide the argument from bottom up. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll outline why evolving during the Pleistocene made us what we are today, and what some evolved features of our species may be. Later, I’ll deconstruct the argument.

Organisms have genes that vary (the variants are called alleles). Sometimes a variant arises that, when interacting with the environment, confers a negative or positive effect. Those that confer a positive effect with respect to the process of passing on genes to future generations are over-represented (on average) in the next generation while those that confer a negative effect are under-represented. If the strength of this selection is sufficient and random effects do not overpower it, there may be a shift in allele frequencies over time.

That’s evolution.

Some behaviors vary because of underlying genes. The pattern of foraging by fruit fly larva, for example, varies in a way that has been mapped directly to specific base pair differences between alleles for a gene. There are a handful of other gene-behavior links (a handful relative to the total amount of behavior out there to study) but in most cases, the link between the underlying genetics and the resulting behavior is not directly documented, but assumed. This is reasonable. The link between phenotypic variation and the underlying genetic variation is almost always assumed and hardly ever documented directly.

Humans are mammals and thus have internal fertilization, internal gestation, and lactation. Each of these three important features of mammalian reproduction means a striking difference between males and females in the risks and benefits of behavioral practices, and in the very nature of reproductive strategies. Consider the very act of mating. A single copulation may have consequences that are extraordinarily different between a female and a male. A pregnancy followed by nursing and so on is a huge investment for a female, but virtually zero investment for a male. Copulating with the “wrong” mate (i.e., one that is somehow genetically not the best choice) has almost zero consequences for a male, who can simply copulate with some other female. A bad choice in mate for a female, however, may blow a huge percentage of her total reproductive career.

(Pause: In the above paragraph, I was writing about mammals. Voles, for instance. Or aardvarks. You may have been putting humans in there as your mammal of choice, but since the vast majority of mammals are rodents or bats, that may have been a bad idea. Please consider re-reading the paragraph and placing a wild, non-domestic ‘typical’ mammal in there as the fill-in organism, just in case your assumption that I was talking specifically about you was influencing your thinking on this.)

It is not at all unreasonable to expect that any mammal, including humans, would evolve such that there are male-female differences in things like risk-taking behavior, mate-preference, child-care proclivities, etc.

In particular, and this is very important, humans are the result of evolution over two million years or so of the Pleistocene, during which time our ancestors lived in a social setting that is represented today by the likes of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of southern Africa, who were intensively studied during the 1960s in part to learn about what the lifeways of our ancestors may have been like.

Furthermore, it has been proposed that the behavioral tendencies of humans are often fairly specifically hard wired protocols. We have the ability to do certain things because our brains are really a set of many different organs, including a set of cognitive structures called “modules” which were shaped by natural selection over these millions of Pleistocene years, a time that was pretty much similar from generation to generation, among people living in Ju/’hoansi Bushman like groups in the tropics and subtropics of Africa.

These modules provide the ability to be very good at certain things. When these modules are tested or challenged in modern-day humans living in the West, we see that we are still good at doing some of the things that we did back in the Pleistocene but no longer need to do today, and we often show poor performance when it comes to modern, western, industrialized, non hunter-gatherer or non-Pleistocene problems or contexts. Just as our hand eye coordination evolved to facilitate the use of tools, our brainy bits evolved to detect certain kinds of cheaters but not others, have a taste for rare but not common nutrients, and so on. Most importantly relative to the current discussion, males have a module that facilitates promiscuous sexual behavior and females have a module (probably the female version of the same module, according to the theory) that makes them relatively prudish and careful about sexual relationships. Males have abilities to orient things in time and space in order to better shoot the antelope with the spear, while women have the ability to remember details of things in space in order to better find and select the proper plant foods. And so on. Thus, males show off, fight other males, and practice hunting by playing hockey, baseball, and football, or at least, watching the games and knowing every detail of the statistics, while females … shop and stuff.

It’s a nice theory and there have been a lot of studies supporting the basic idea as well as a number of specifics. However, there are some problems.

Let’s start with the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene is, among recent geological time periods, considered to be the most variable in terms of climate change, and thus, overall ecology, habitat distributions, etc. There is no expectation that any given population making up part of a species like humans or their close relatives would have had any long term consistency in natural environment. Indeed, the post-Pleistocene life of the horticulturalist, buffering their food supply by growing crops, is probably more consistent over time than any period in the Pleistocene, with respect to basic ecology. Furthermore, when we look at foragers across Africa today, and at the archaeology which tells us something about their past, we see a huge amount of variation in habitats and adaptations to habitats. Humans have lived in very arid environments and very wet environments, coastal and inland, riverine and woodland, grassland and forest. Post-Pleistocene food producing human groups tended to avoid several of these habitats and have lived in a much narrower range of contexts.

One might argue (and this is the usual argument) that it is really the social setting in which humans lived, not the habitat, that was consistent over two million years, thus the Pleistocene as a variable time period argument goes out the window. But I should point something out about that counterargument: It wasn’t ever made until people like me (mainly me, in fact) started arguing, mainly at conferences, that the Pleistocene varied too much to be thought of as a stable habitat in which certain behaviors would evolve and get “stuck.” You see, part of the Pleistocene argument is that it was a long time compared to the subsequent Holocene (two million vs. 10,000 year) so we are essentially Pleistocene creatures. But when it was pointed out to evolutionary psychologists that the Pleistocene varied tremendously compared to the Holocene, the “oh, it’s the social argument” was raised to salvage the idea.

But that doesn’t work. We know that habitat determines social structure in humans, with technology as a major factor. Foragers vary a tremendous amount in their behaviors, depending in large part on the ecology in which they live. Forager group size, often considered to be an important intermediate variable between ecology and social structure, varies tremendously with habitat. There are even foragers with stratified societies and slavery, and there are foragers who live in such small isolated groups that they need special cultural conventions to get together now and then in order to socialize, find mates, and so on.

There is also variation in important social norms beyond that which can be explained easily by ecology. For instance, it is probably fairly rare for an Efe Pygmy woman’s offspring to have been fathered by anyone other than that woman’s husband at the time of birth (though with serial monogamy a woman may have different children fathered by different men). In contrast, the Ache and other foragers of the Amazon seem to pay little attention to who is the father of whom, and it is common for a woman to have children fathered by several different men other than her long-term husband. These are very, fundamentally, even dramatically different social systems, found in tropical rain forest foragers. Efe Pygmy men compared to Baka Pygme men spend dramatically different amounts of time caring for their own children. Add to these examples the diversity that must arise in groups living across a range of different habitats, and we pretty much have destroyed the argument of one social environment in which we evolved for two million years. If the basis of the modern evolutionary psychology argument is falsified, the rest of the argument may be … well, weak at best.

When this argument … that the social Pleistocene was a weak idea … was proposed, the counter argument was this: Sure, the social environment changed, but there are still some basic things that are always the same: Predators and the need to mate being key.

Fine. So now, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), which this thing … this time period … is called is “Predators and mating.” How do we distinguish, then, between evolution in humans vs. evolution in mammals, or even tetrapods, or for that matter, organisms, in general?

We don’t.

Then, consider the foragers used as exemplars in the studies done today in evolutionary psychology. A disturbing trend has emerged over the last five or ten years: The use of groups that are not foragers as though they were foragers. For some reason, it is very common today to see evolutionary psychologists claim that the homicide rate and level of violence among Pleistocene foragers was very high. There is, however no evidence whatsoever to support this. When we look at the evidence that is being adduced, we find that several groups of food growers, horticulturalists such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon, have somehow been included in the sample of “foragers.” I can’t decide if this is ignorance (the researchers have no clue what they are doing), intellectual dishonesty (the researchers need violent ancestor so they cook the data) or merely a tradition of indifference (the researchers use some data they got somewhere that someone else used, so they use it uncritically).

The Yanomamo and other groups like them do indeed have high rates of violence and homicide. It has been effectively argued that this violence arises because thy have horticulture. The thing that makes them different from foragers in terms of habitat and ecology also makes them different from other groups in terms of behavior.

Then there is the argument about the modules. Let’s assume that the research that shows how modules seem to work and what they seem to “look like” functionally is good. The fact that humans are running around with modules today does not mean that these modules are genetically programmed. It is very possible that module-like structures in our neocortex arise during development, de novo, in each of us, and that these modules are similar across groups (but perhaps different sometimes by gender) because of overall similar developmental trajectories. The cases of modules failing, say, to detect cheating if the cheating is modern (non-Pleistocene, if you will) in context is unimpressive. In one famous study, people were shown to be very good at detecting cheaters when the cheater was someone possibly lying about their age to get a drink in a bar, but very poor at detecting cheaters when the cheater was a file folder in an esoteric filing system that may or may not have been filed correctly. In other words, when comparing actual social cheating to a glitch in a filing system, humans were pretty good at the social cheating part but not so good at the arbitrary artificial strange filings system. We are not impressed.

There are dozens of reported gender differences, with piles of research demonstrating them. But when we look more closely, we often see that the either a) the methodology of the research sucks or b) the gender difference, while likely real, changes, goes away, or even reverses as times change, suggesting that the difference is (was) cultural.

I’m sure there are gender differences. Part of the reason I think that is an inappropriate argument: I think there are gender differences in behavior because there must be. Such an argument is not evidential and does not lead us to a legitimate conclusion. Rather, it leads us to a set of valid hypotheses, if done right. However, I am utterly unconvinced that most gender differences are hard wired. There are probably some. Testosterone poising of neural tissue (indirectly) during development probably accounts for the fact that there are almost no male simultaneous translators. The neural ability to do this difficult thing is retains in some females but lost in almost all males during puberty. That is not genes coding for neural connections, but it is genes coding for different endocrine systems which then, through a series of negative and positive feedback systems, cause hormonally mediated changes in the body (including the brain).

Perhaps hormones make men like sports and women like shoes. But if so, it is not very consistent. My wife has three pairs of shoes and one purse. I have two pairs of shoes and four laptop bags. My brother-in-law knows more about sports than anyone in my wife’s sports-oriented family. But his new wife knows twice as much as he does, even though no one in Andrew’s family has quite admitted this out loud yet. I can track my own interest in both baseball and football as a function of a female mate or friend who had such an interest, with my involvement being a way to socialize and get along. I find sports interesting enough to pay attention and to enjoy it, but if I want to know what is going on, I have to ask the female I’m watching the sport with (often, but not always, my wife). Yes, I guess I’m following my true genetic nature: I’m somewhat promiscuous as to whom I watch the game with.

Sex differences are probably real and probably important, but they may not be hard wired as often as people think they are, or hard wired in the manner people think. We would expect a species like humans, born with this big blank brain and subjected to many extra years of learning as children, to develop these differences as a function of culture rather than genes. That, to me, is the most likely null model. I’m not sure I would attribute a priori much likelihood to a genes-up model of human behavior. How the heck would that work, anyway?

If you enjoyed this, or even, if it made you mad, you might want to check out these two posts:

• The natural basis for gender inequality
• Women are smarter than men (well, duh!)

This post is part of the Falsehoods II series, which are also explored on “Everything you know is sort of wrong” on Skeptically Speaking, with Desiree Schell.

And, please do feel free to tweet, digg, redit, stumble, etc. this post by using the buttons below!!!!

We talk to author Christopher Ryan about his new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. We’ll discuss the most recent science and theories, and how social norms compare to our biological impulses.

This Friday. Details here. I may have to read this book.

(Added: See THIS write up of the original research)

But a twin study showed that when one twin claimed whether or not to have a g-spot, the other twin did not make the same claim at the frequency one would expect if the g-spot was the expression of a genetic trait with straight forward Mendelian inheritance.

Therefore, the scientists conclude, the g-spot does not exist. At all.

How can this be? How can 56 percent of the women in a study claim that they have one, but there simply isn’t one?

There are several possibilities, including:

1) There is no g-spot and these 900 or so women only think they have one. But they don’t.

2) The g-spot is not a simple Mendelian genetic trait, but rather, exists because of some combination of genetics and environment. This is a family blog so we won’t discuss what is meant here by “environment.”

3) The g-spot is a thing … trying to be not specific here about what it is … that is real, but does not exist in any way because of genetics.

What do you think?

My source is this press report, hat tip to Virgil Samms, who noted that perhaps it is just that twins don’t have g-spots.

I should also mention that in the years between 2009 and 2014 it is possible that the term “mail order brides” has been legitimately problematized. I don’t know that it has, it just seems like it must have been. For example, Wikipedia says “The term “mail-order bride” is both criticized by owners (and customers) of international marriage agencies and used by them as an easily recognizable term.[2] It has been pointed out that there is a discrepancy between how international adoptions are regarded (“saving a child”) and how international marriages are regarded (“buying a wife”).” citing Lilith, Ryiah (2000–2001), Buying a Wife but Saving a Child: A Deconstruction of Popular Rhetoric and Legal Analysis of Mail-Order Brides and Intercountry Adoptions 9, Buff. Women’s L.J., p. 225F Schaeffer-Grabiel (2005), When the mail-order bride industry shifted from using a magazine. If you have any comments on that please leave them below.

Original Post, Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny:

Seymour had a mail order bride and he was very proud. Seymour was a night watchman that I got to know because I was forever lurking around at night, passing through alarmed doors and making a nuisance of myself and, usually, keeping just one step ahead of Seymour, who’s main objective in life was to find a reason to throw me out of the building. The one time he actually had the drop on me, found me without ID, with no instructions that people would be working late in the lab, on a weekend that people were not supposed to be in the building because of work being done on the fire alarm system, he made his move and told me to get out or I’d be arrested.

I had no choice.

I engaged in a conversation with Seymour, which no one had ever done before, and after a half hour he went way forgetting that his main goal in life was to throw me out of the building. But in the mean time, I learned about his mail order bride. From Korea.

I’ve noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been running ads for hot Russian mail order brides. These ads are rather funny on the surface; They seem to be parodies of such things that they represent. But if you click on one (and I certainly did … expecting to end up at The Onion) one learns that this is the real thing. These are real ads for real Russian women who really want to marry you. If you are Seymour.

I’ve told you before that I mostly avoid commenting on the advertisers for Scienceblogs.com. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. One of the most evil corporations on the planet is one of our sponsors, and no one ever seems to notice or complain. My blog is editorially independent (as are all the other scienceblogs.com blogs) and I am free, if I choose, to blog against the big evil corporation, and in fact, have done so to a limited extent.

At first, I found it rather shocking that none of my fellow Sblings seem to be blogging about the mail order bride ads. Then I realized that they must all be using ad blockers.

For my part, as you may have noticed, almost everything I encounter lately seems to remind me of a story from the Congo. (I wonder why that is?) So I can tell you a little about hypergyny in the Congo.

Let’s get two things straight:

1) Mail order brides are participating in hypergyny. Hypergyny is where females (gynos) marry “up” (hyper).

2) You will see the term “hypergamy” used and that is simply incorrect. There can be no such thing as hypergamy as a practice because that means everybody marries up. How would that work? The term is “hypergyny.”¹

Hypergyny can occur in a lot of different cultural systems, and in fact wherever there is a) differential wealth and b) males tend to control big hunks of that wealth and the associated power (and no, it is NOT all about power … wealth and power are historically interchangeable enough that we should be cautious about making such distinctions) there will be hypergyny because there will be women who either choose it or are forced into it. In this form, and exploiting the ongoing conversations about rape, hypergyny can be understood by reference to the sexual interactions between allied forces liberating Europe from the Nazis and the local women. In Italy, Allied men tended to rape the women. In France, the women seemed happy to sleep with the men. For food. The difference? Well, lots of things were different, but to oversimplify somewhat, there was a big difference in how much people were starving at that particular moment between Italy and France.

Hypergyny is sleeping with the man over a longer term. For food and everything.

The most benign form of hypergyny of which I am aware (not counting mail order brides …. I’m not sure where I want to put that phenomenon on any scale of severity) is that found among the Efe Pygmies (and other Pygmies) in Central Africa.

Here, there are two integrated but distinct cultural entities: Villagers and Foragers. The Villagers are not Efe. They may be Bantu or Central Sudanic speakers (where I worked, they were Central Sudanic Lese). Villagers are farmers who often hunt, Efe are both foragers and farm laborers. The fact that there are material overlaps between the cultures does not make these cultures overlapping in all ways, or hard to distinguish, or flexible in membership. They are as solidly different as any caste might be.

The rules: Any Villager man and woman can marry. Any Forager man and woman can marry. Any man may have more than one wife.

A Villager woman can never marry a Forager man, but a Forager woman may marry a Villager man.

Often, but by no means always, the Forager woman who marries a Villager man is a second (or maybe even third) wife of that man, in a polygynous marriage.

If a Forager woman marries a Villager man, they live in the village as villagers. The woman takes on the cultural trappings of the village much more than other Forager women do. The children are Villagers. If the woman leaves her husband and goes back to the forest, she can not take the children with her. They remain as villagers.

The women can decide to do this or not. Their decision is usually a matter of personal lifestyle preference. The forest means freedoms not available in the village and you get to go camping all the time, and there are rich cultural traditions that live mainly in the forest, and that is where your family is. In the villages, you get a roof that will hardly ever leak.

One of the effects of this system is that men among the Foragers marry on average quite late owing to the a shortage of women.

In this way, there is a slow and steady gene flow from Forager groups to Villager groups, which led me to propose some years ago the Gene Stealing hypothesis. The relationship I describe here occurs in many different places and times. It seems to occur more often in tropical regions, and it seems to occur virtually all the time where the indigenous group (in this case the Forager) is hypergynous to the invading group (in this case the Villagers, who moved into the area hundreds of years ago).

The invading group is not adapted to local disease to the extent that the indigenous group is. But they can ensure that among their children there will be an elevated rate of such adaptation, by coming up with this pattern. This works much better than just killing off the locals or driving them out. You take their genes but keep them distinct as a locally adapted specialist group.

Indeed, there is evidence that something like this may have happened in the middle east with the Natufian culture, and I’ve wondered about the relationship between Modern Humans and Neanderthals in this regard.

I know, I know, that is a long way from pictures of Hot Russian Babes that may or may not be in the right sidebar.

Or maybe not….

______________________-
¹There is a way in which hypergamy, which is widely used much to my annoyance, makes sense: If you have hypergyny and hyperandry, then the two together could be hypergamy, much like polyandry and polygyny are polygamy. But that is not what is going on with these terms.