Evolution and rape

I think gunga actually has the right idea on this one. In the jungles of Brazil and Indonesia, there are still people living in stone-age conditions. My understanding of the anthropological evidence is that they do live in small, family-sized groups, as you say. But inter-group warfare is pretty common among them. It's common enough that 'stone-age' people get killed in it at a greater percentage than 'modern' city-dwellers people do in their societies' warfare and crime taken together. I don't know about rape specifically. But my default guess would be that it, too, happens a lot in the inter-group warfare in those jungles, and did happen a lot in our own, stone-age past.

No he wasn't, because there is no such thing as "evolutionist precepts". Evolution is a scientific theory of how the world is, not an ethical theory of how it ought to be.

And how is that going for you, Romeo?

You gotta put yourself into the evolutionite's mindset to grasp how this thing about rape as an evolutionary strategy and winning genetic program works.

Not too well mate because I only seem to meet an assortment of shallow divorced airheads, nuts, sluts, slags and bags who don't want love and friendship, they only want some mug who they can take for every penny he's got. They're the only sort left for me because all the little angels are in happy marriages with a doting hub..
So my search for a real woman goes on-

"A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value.
She brings him good, not harm,
all the days of her life.
She opens her arms to the poor
and extends her hands to the needy.
She is clothed with strength and dignity;
she can laugh at the days to come.
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised"
(from Proverbs 31)

Somebody like an older version of Becky will do..

My younger sister was a timid little thing, so when she married a Hell's Angel 40 years ago our parents were shocked!
He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, gambled like there was no tomorrow, never washed his long greasy hair or took a shower or changed his jeans and leather jacket.
Obviously, his neanderthal image appealed to my sister and his male pheremones must have set her hormones racing like crazy!
She had a couple of his babies but after about 3 years the "hormone high" must have worn off and she began hating his guts and nagging him nonstop, and they eventually divorced.
The moral?- A lot of women like rough tough neanderthals, they just can't help it!

PS- He was a popular guy in the neighbourhood, friendly with a great sense of humour and everybody liked him including me.
Ive never drank or smoked so he once jokingly said to me "Huh, you're not a man if you don't drink and smoke!"
He died of cancer a few years ago aged 65, but I'm still around..

What you see in that youtube video is the evolutionite ideal...

You wish.

Bullshit. Evolution helps define the historical trends of customs and habits of the members of a population.

Coercive sexual dominance is common among most all of the pongids except for bonobos. Its not unknown among bonobos , its just uncommon.

I don't argue against that. Jared Diamond makes the same claim about the people of PNG. But all of these people are agricultural. Their population levels have been attained because of the exploitation of agriculture. This was not true among humans until about 10,000 ybp, when humans began practicing agriculture. Prior to that, population levels were so low that it would be doubtful that human groups had much contact. Two geneticists have Harvard have published a study which they say shows that 30,000 ybp, the human population of the entire planet was no more than 10,000 individuals, and may have been as few as 1000. Under those circumstances, i doubt that there was much time for warfare, the more so as, without agriculture, they needed to devote all of the energies and time to gathering and storing food.

BTW, hast ever seen what Neanderthals actually looked like, i.e. Danny Vendramini's reconstructions??

No, not all of them. Hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist in Indonesia, in South America, and in Africa. The data I have seen on the casualties in inter-tribal warfare came from some of the South American hunter-gatherer societies. (I couldn't find the paper with a quick Google search, and I'm too lazy to do an exhaustive search right now.)


. . . or to stealing it from their neighbors --- providing a motive for warfare on both sides of the attempted theft.

In PNG, many of the tribes Diamond studied are referred to as stone age hunter-gatherers, and yet they cultivate plots of yams, and then migrate to hunt and gather, returning to their yam plots at harvest time. Much of their conflict is therefore territorial. I have read the same about South American tribes. I cannot address the Indonesian tribes. They all benefit from the effects of industrial societies on the environment, even if their particular corner of the world is not industrialized. They also have dogs, and in some cases pigs--their ancestors 30,000 years ago did not have those resources. When Cook arrived at what we call New Zealand, the Maori were living in the stone age, but they had a relatively dense population, largely because they had yams, dogs and pigs. I don't think valid comparisons can be made between our world and the world of 30,000 years ago.

But my point also hinges heavily on population density. Taking the upper end estimates for human populations 30,000 years ago, before the Harvard study, which put the human population of the planet at 20,000 to 25,000 individuals, and being generous for the sake of argument, that's 10,000 on the Eurasian land mass. Divide the area of the Eurasian land mass by two to account for glaciation, and you still get a figure of one human for every 2000 square kilometers. A band of 25 people would have a range of 50,000 square kilometers. It's not as though there would have been any friction due to population density.

For rape to have had an evolutionary value, it would have had to dramatically conferred a reproductive advantage. In the accounts we have from the middle east thousands of years ago, yes, they would kill off all the men and rape the women. But if a woman were impregnated, what would be her odds of survival and carrying that child to term? What would have been the odds of the child surviving? Their society would have been in ruins, just about anything of value would have been carried off, and there would no longer have been enough people to raise the crops, or to hunt and gather.

I not only will point out again that they're working without a statistical net, but that their scenario is implausible.

This misrepresents the result of their work. Rather they conclude that AT SOME UNKOWN POINT BETWEEN something like -100,000 and -30,000 (from memory) a bottleneck in human population occurred, during which the total population dropped to no more than 10000. That bottleneck period could have been very short.

That doesn't alter that the population density was much, much less than it was after the practices of agriculture and pastoralism began about 10,000 ybp, which was my point. Now it's time for you to trot out your silly killer ape thesis, right?

EDIT" The population density calculation i used was based on the upper end figure for human population, and i used the estimates which were in common use before the Harvard study came out. Your objection does not address my post.

Of course rape has an evolutionary value. Sex has an evolutionary value. Rape is, by definition, a type of sex. It is involuntary sex , but it is still sex.

You seem to be envisioning one type of rape that depends on war. There are many different forms of involuntary sex that don't involve war. Many cultures have customs that involve giving away young girls into marriage.

In hunter-gatherer societies, child rearing was done by the community. A powerful man could force himself on a woman. The child would still be well-cared for (infact the child of rape by a powerful man may be better cared for).

It is possible that these societies wouldn't consider such arrangements to be rape, but by the modern definition it sure would be.

If you want further proof that rape has evolutionary value, look at the other primates. The largest male will force himself on whatever female he chooses.. often against the females will.

Clearly this has evolutionary value.

Nah mate, but I should imagine they had skulls that looked a lot like this mofo called 'Cattedown Man'-



Him and his mates used to hang in caves in this cliff face in Plymouth half a mile from where i live, i've probably got their DNA in me somewhere-

You're ignoring that the reproductive advantage referred to is passing on one's genes. This group has not shown that there is a "rape gene," nor that cultural practices in prehistoric times involved either casual or institutionalized rape--however you care to define it. Your speculations are just that, speculations. Without hard evidence, there is no reason to assume that this thesis is correct. I'm not saying it's incorrect, i'm just saying not proven. By the way, your post is full of ipse dixit pronouncements for which you do not provide a shred ov evidence. Which is to say, you're arguing for argument's sake.

I agree that humanity almost went extinct at one time, and that the human population on this planet plunged to some four- or five-digit number during this near-extinction. (Most sources I've read put the time of this extinction 80,000 years ago, not 30,000.) And I agree that this near-extinction is reflected in a remarkable dearth of genetic variation among humans today. (The worldwide variation among humans is smaller than the typical variation among chimps on one plot of African forest.)

That being said, I think you have succumbed to some wrong intuitions about what that means. In particular, the genetic evidence does not mean that humanity spent a whole lot of time going through this low-population bottleneck. Also, it does not mean that the average human family lived in a neighborhood with only a few other human families in it.

Just to illustrate the point with a concrete example, let's say humanity's near-extinction was caused by a plague. This could have crunched the human population to almost nothing within a generation or less. The 10,000 survivors could have been a lucky minority who developed a resistance just in time before a total collapse. Breeding from those survivors, the human population would then have recovered within a few dozen generations --- a blink of evolution's eye. And humanity wouldn't have spent much time at all in this bottleneck. For what it's worth, most sources I've read attribute this population bottleneck to one catastrophic die-off, not to a steady state.

Now to your intuition about population density. You may know that at one time in recent American history, a lethal fungus made the population of American Elm trees collapse to a ridiculously low number. After this collapse, the American Elm's population density across the American continent was even more ridiculously low. Nevertheless, the few American Elms who did survive often had plenty of other American Elms around them. That's because they survived in small, isolated niches such as Central Park, New York City, where the fungus could not reach them. Within Central Park, the American-elm population did not change at all.

Hence, it would be a fallacy for an ecologist to conclude that, since the population density of American Elms across the continent was so low, the average American elm must have lived in a neighborhood devoid of other American elms. I respectfully submit that you are succumbing to the same fallacy about the human population 80,000 years ago (or 30,000, as your source would have it). Even at a world population of only 10,000 humans, the average human family could still have lived in a neighborhood with plenty of other human families in it.

We have very scant evidence to back any precise number, but to me the propagation of sapiens throughout the globe during that period is an indication that there was a population pressure and competition for hunting / gathering grounds. Also, such competition is common in other mammal species, and documented in modern hunter-gatherers.