A primatologist looks at 4chan and reddit, and sees something familiar:
Light from the monitors cast lurid shadows upon their pallid, staring faces as their right hands pumped rhythmically up and down over the F5 key to reload their screens. “I can’t refresh fast enough,” one commenter typed ecstatically, while another announced, “This is the best night of my life!” Many of the men in this online forum attempted to outdo one another by bragging about how many times they had “fapped” that night—a euphemism for masturbation. They went to great lengths to assert their masculinity by insisting how often they had jerked off in front of a screen being watched by other men. Like baboons sitting with their legs spread wide so that passing males could witness their small red phalluses, there was a mixture of sex and status involved in this public display.
Just like baboons, who are aggressive and patriarchal. It causes a kind of despair, unfortunately — is this just human nature, something society is going to be cursed with forever? Are we males afflicted with this wretched Y chromosome that pushes us towards these embarrassing displays? I can’t imagine thinking that bragging about how many times I’ve masturbated would be a good display of my manliness, but these people seem to find their masculinity reaffirmed by hanging out in almost all-male groups and belittling women while boasting about the inability of their personal appeal to keep up with their sex drive. It’s got to be the testosterone, right? They can’t help themselves!
Are humans, like baboons, fixed in their biological natures?
No, it turns out. Even baboons don’t rigidly adhere to the stereotypes, and baboon culture can change rapidly.
Baboons live in a highly patriarchal society in which high-ranking males dominate those males who are subordinate to them. Of all primates, baboons are notorious for the aggressive behavior that males display toward females, and they have been known to viciously attack any who reject their sexual advances. Since male baboons are about twice the size of females and have 2-inch-long canines that they use to eviscerate their opponents, they would seem to justify the assumption that “might is right” in the natural world. But nature is not monolithic. Within every population, whether we are looking at baboons or humans, there is a range of variation in traits. Some individuals are highly aggressive and seek dominance, whereas others are more content to socialize with their peers. These traits become enhanced or reduced based on the environment in which the population lives.
In the early 1980s, a group of olive baboons known as “Forest Troop” underwent a unique natural experiment. The territory of their neighbors, “Garbage Dump Troop,” overlapped with that of a tourist lodge. The Garbage Dump Troop had access to the leftover meat that had been discarded into the lodge’s dump. The most aggressive males from Forest Troop began invading their neighbors’ territory to access the meat for themselves. Soon afterward, tuberculosis ravaged the baboons from both troops who had been feeding at the garbage dump. Because it was only the most aggressive males of Forest Troop that died out, the results were twofold: Less aggressive males were more common in the population, and the female-to-male ratio had now doubled.
The social consequences were startling. According to Stanford University primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who documented the event and followed the troop for the next 20 years, the brutal hierarchy that was common among male baboons disappeared, and the amount of affiliative behaviors—such as males and females grooming one another—increased markedly. What was most surprising was what followed over the intervening years. Males always migrate to other troops at puberty, and new immigrant males to the Forest Troop adopted the local culture that they encountered. Even though none of the original population is alive today, this highly cooperative baboon society remains intact. As Sapolsky wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.”
Something similar has been found in human societies today. According to a study published this year in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences by Daniel Kruger, Maryanne Fisher, and Paula Wright, there are dramatic differences between societies based on the relative culture of patriarchy. The authors examined demographic data from the World Health Organization, United Nations, CIA World Factbook, and Encyclopedia of World Cultures and found a strong association between female empowerment and the level of early mortality among both women and men. In highly patriarchal societies, men control resources and female sexuality. The outcome of this is that there are increased levels of competition between males that result in higher rates of early death. But when female empowerment is increased, this highly unequal environment is relaxed and aggression against others is reduced. Ultimately, patriarchy hurts men as well as women.
So there’s hope! We just have to infect 4chan and reddit with a virulent strain of tuberculosis, and kill off all the hyper-stupid males.
No, wait, that was the proximate cause in the baboon troop, but there are other methods — like by promoting greater participation by women to increase the female-to-male ratio in benign ways. I think, though, that the existing hyper-stupid males are flourishing in their current environment of excessive sexual display, and are resenting the current invasion of assertive women and more cooperative men, and are conscious that flaunting their machismo by bragging about masturbating to that audience will just make them look pathetic and weak, and so we’re seeing a lot of pushback.
Don’t stop laughing at them, though, and don’t stop resisting them. We can be Forest Troop.
I hadn’t even noticed until it was pointed out in the comments. Forest Troop Baboons. The acronym works for me.
Bah. I’m sure I could outfap these buggers, but a connoisseur and gentleman doesn’t brag or childishly compete like that. It’s the difference between going to a frat party to drink until the blackout sets in and sitting by the chimney sipping a fine whiskey.
Would that make us part of F Troop?
But don’t you understand?! Men are disposable, therefore feminism is wrong and bad and evil and smells of fish! I don’t care that men are only disposable because of the intense competition caused by patriarchal societies – it is bad, therefore we shouldn’t fix it!
I can logic. I can logic good!
I love me some reclaiming. #ForestTroopBaboons
It’s too perfect, this must be a set-up! /s
(Proud to be an FTB. :D)
Brilliant.
Who could figure out that “baboons” could actually turn to be a positive epithet? They seem smarter than a certain chunk of humanity too.
Forbidden Snowflake, good one!
Yeah. I was just getting ready to start using “baboon!” instead of “Neanderthal!” whenever I feel the urge to call a hyper-stuid dood a name (it’s been pointed out to me it’s really unfair to Neanderthals), and then the FTB development ruined it. Damn.
I think this is important to understand, specially since there is a pervasive cultural perception of what constitutes “male nature” (i fucking hate sentences like “this is what men do” and its many variations). Most of it is purely cultural and what is biological is not absolute and can be modified by culture.
And yes, a thousand times yes, never stop laughing at them, never stop showing contempt for their pathetic little show. They’ll stop displaying if the audience is not interested.
Well, to be fair, what else could the redditers use as measurement?
The number of women they had consensual sex with? Even They must fear the ridicule
The number of sexual assaults they committed and got away with? Cops might start getting an interest and bring meatspace consequences to their little haven
Their physical fitness? Ha-Ha-Ha
Their professional and financial successes? Ha-Ha-Ha again
The number of times they had risked bodily arm in the name of the greater good? Unless this study happened in the Fire-Fighters-letting-off-steam-off-duty subreddit, I doubt the number would be higher than zero.
So Circle-jerking it is. Don’t throw the stones at people who merely suffer from a lack of options.
/sarcasm
And therefore a lower number of men who reach full adulthood, thus diminishing both competition among the “patriarchs” and the risk of seeing the youglings rising up against their elder since their busy killing each others in their perverse competition among peers.
Of course, there’s something else that isn’t mentioned here: highly patriarchal societies are also highly dynastic societies: the successful patriarchs, not wanting to lose their legitimate offsprings to the harsh competition they had to suffer through always end up establishing systems designed to reduce the risks taken by their sons and eventually you end up with aristocratic systems where the plebeian young men do not even fight each others for a place at the top of the hierarchy but merely for the scraps, at best for the “privilege” of becoming the valued lackeys of the fat, decadent baboons descended from the original alpha males and with luck the right to mate with one of their daughters and grant upper-class membership to their own offsprings.
Problem is, baboon has been for a long time a racist insult, so it make backfire on you (says the guy who just used baboon in his previous post…)
@11
Do you see the problems with your jokingly suggested measurements?
How do I get a Forest Troop Baboons tee shirt?
You want to see a more harmonious, less aggressive country with more female empowerment? Then what the USA needs is a war. A real WAR. A true bloodletting. Something that will cull a couple of million idle, vicious, testosterone fueled, sexist, excess males from the population. Draft all these 4chan and reddit trolls and put them in uniform and send them to fight a real enemy. Not these pathetic Third World types armed with AK-47s we enjoy splatting on a regular basis. Could be the Russians. They’re itching for a fight. Whoa, you say? The Russians? Are you a crazy fuck or what? They know how to fight. They’ve got real weapons. And nukes. Yep, that’s what I’m saying. Drop the pretense. Make no mistake, the USA is a militaristic, hyper-nationalistic, aggressive, war loving nation that refuses to look in the mirror and see itself for what it truly is. But it’s cowardly at the same time. (Why aren’t the marines in the Ukraine?) All of these MRA guys jerking off in front of their screens and bashing women at the same time are a perfect metaphor for the USA. Violent cowards. Thinking they’re going to change on their own is nonsense. You can’t reason with them. You can’t shame them. Look at those two baboon troops. TB may have been the best thing that ever happened to them. Contrary to what the Z-movies may say, there is no plague on the horizon that will do for us what TB did for the baboons. War may be our only hope.
Strangely, in the midst of all of the topless, bottomless and clueless pictures of women (and some of men) on Reddit, there is also a subreddit dedicated to not masturbating. (/r/nofap)
TB is on the way back. There are already strains of TB which are resistant to all available treatments. Welcome to the post-antibiotic world.
robertfoster #15
Yep. Nothing advances social justice like a good bout of wholesale murder, amiright?
Even the ones who don’t happen to be US citizens?
I dunno. Or maybe you answered your own stupid question. Maybe because squaring up to a country with the nukes you mentioned, might cause the sort of escalation none of us want to see?
Your cynicism is duly noted. As is your stupidity, callousness and inability to form paragraph-breaks. Thank you for sharing.
laurentweppe @ 11
robertfoster @ 15
To say these comments are problematic would be a gross understatement. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just lump my responses to the both of you into a single handy list.
1) PUA and others who brag about the number of women they’ve had sex with are quite common on Reddit, as anyone familiar with Reddit knows. This is a shitty thing to brag about and we do ourselves no favors by even pretending otherwise and lending legitimacy to this point of view. And people who aren’t having sex aren’t worthy of mocking.
2) I submit the Reddit ‘ask a rapist’ thread. Again, we do ourselves no favors by even pretending this is okay to brag about.
3) There are a number of subreddits dedicated to fitness. Those who engage in them are in no way better or worse people than those who don’t. People who aren’t fit aren’t worthy of mocking.
4) Lots of professionally and financially successful people are on Reddit. Last I checked, even a few celebrities were on there. This isn’t worthy of bragging and those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged don’t deserve to be mocked.
5) There are many Redditors who’ve been involved in the armed forces, police, fire department, etc and have indeed “risked bodily harm in the name of [what they believe to be] the greater good.” Those who have not done this don’t deserve to be mocked.
6) People dying isn’t an appropriate suggestion and PZ addressed this right up there in his OP. This is especially true when we consider that much of these cultural problems are coming from the top of our hierarchy and it’s the people on the bottom who are most likely to die in a war.
Of Course: I wouldn’t have chosen these otherwise.
TB is one option, as noted by the big Poopyhead. However, a more peaceful, and dare I say, equitable, solution would be a large scale male swap.
So, which countries would like to sign up for the rotation? I think we could get a mix of guys from various more progressive countries to help civilize the locals, and they could help civilize the ones we send over there.
The interesting question to me, though, is then: Doesn’t the state of the culture/civilization take on the equivalence of a genetic trait? Is there a way to guarantee the outcome we would like?
I think we could all but guarantee the outcome, but it would take a lot of other infrastructure, support, and resources. In the US, it would be harder to accomplish because so much of the wealth/power/control is in the hands of so few.
So what we need is a good case of TB in the government, and then swap lots of the male population with more civilized nations?
robertfoster @ 15
In World War II, the US lost approximately 418,000 people (Source). The country’s population was about 140 million (Source). The post-war period from 1945-1960 was marked by a rigidly patriarchal society, repression of advancement on most civil rights issues including race and gender, and the start of the Cold War including massive build up of military resources and continued development of one of the most destructive weapons ever created. Past evidence suggests a massive, resource-consuming war does not generate the outcome you predict.
PS the single most deadly war the US has ever had, the Civil War, killed an estimated 750,000 (Source). A bit short of a million.
Robert,
Even if anyone anywhere believed it’s acceptable to cull men in order to change the culture, there are billions of people living in countries other than the US, 50+ percent of them women, who will suffer immensely if what you’re prescribing from the safety of your keyboard (a world war) came to pass. I live in Easter Europe, and having to entertain the thought of the Ukraine crisis escalating into a war (which I do daily) is terrifying enough. Please stop trying to make a US foreign policy pet peeve you need an excuse to bring up be about feminism.
laurentweppe,
While I understand your frustration with these men, there’s nothing wrong with not being fit, rich or “a stud” who keeps count of how many women he’s had sex with. (Not being such a stud is in fact commendable.)
Because of us here suddenly sharing an acronym with a lovely baboon community, I wouldn’t use it. I had no idea it’s supposed to be a racist insult though. (Non-native speaker.) Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
:-)
Um. “The Gate To Women’s Country” isn’t a how-to manual. My take on is was that it was an example of the “Unreliable Narrator” trope and the social system that had been created would never be able to achieve its intended goals. (Because the root cause of the problems was sociopathy, not violence as such – and the system was set up to encourage sociopathy in the ruling class.)
Anyway, civilians get killed in wartime. I see that you’ve thoughtfully volunteered the Ukraine as the site for your war, in order to protect the US population. But maybe the Ukrainians would prefer to have the war fought on US soil. Don’t they get a vote?
The 4chan-and-reddit problem would go away if their parents/spouses did a better job of monitoring their internet usage. Fixing that would solve 90% of the problem. The NSA already has all the information that’s needed, it’s just a matter of getting it distributed to the right people.
Forget the US, there are much better examples of your point. In Europe west of the Iron Curtain, where the body count was much higher, the society not only stayed rigidly patriarchal, but kept becoming more conservative till the mid-1960s, followed by a sudden heel-face turn in 1968 (France almost had a literal revolution).
I guess it makes sense: the Nazis were seen as a wild experiment, and the war as the natural consequence of wild experiments. No wonder that “No experiments!” was the winning campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer.
The Mellow Monkey @19
Did you mean that people who aren’t having sex are so pathetic they’re not worth mocking? Or that they don’t deserve to be mocked?
drst @ 27
Since the alternate wording I use in that very same comment is “don’t deserve to be mocked”, what do you think?
Am I missing the joke here, or does the author think that?
Because no one is bragging. They are saying, I appreciate the content is this thread, and possibly please post more of same.
Robert ’15
By conflating cowardice with prudence you seem to be just as stupidly macho as the culture you want to destroy.
I love it. Forest Troop needs to become a global movement. I want to see it everywhere! Be #ForestTroopBaboons!
The Mellow Monkey @ 28
That was why I asked.
Retreat and reverse to victory!
It’s also worth noting just how fast the baboon culture transformation was, and how it seemed to be a permanent change (for whatever ‘permanent’ means in this context).
For whatever reason, people have this idea that things can’t change (Status Quo Bias?). You see it a lot in politics (Pff they’re all corrupt. How you going to change that?) but also with various forms of discrimination. The fact is that culture can change and it can change quickly, and it often does. Within a single generation. Faster now than ever before. Strangely enough, I hear this even today even though we’ve lived through the growth of the internet and the massive shift of gay rights activism.
The bias toward the status quo is nothing more than resignation and fatalism.
If the baboons lived in a Forest of Goo. It would be the GooF Troop.
laurentweppe @ 12:
You haven’t been paying attention. It was several years ago now that Franc Hoggle and pals designated everyone at FTB to be a baboon. *shrug*
drst @ 27:
They don’t deserve to be mocked. And you might want to lose that whole “oh, pathetic” business, too. A lot of people who don’t have sex aren’t pathetic, and it’s a rather sad judgement on how you view people.
Men have always valued themselves according to how other men see them. Thank patriarchal values of masculinity for that one. Also, men have been doing this kind of thing for…ever, it’s not all new because computers. Emblazoning functioned as the same sort of competition, back in the 15th century.
Well, this quickly turned into a shit flinging fest. PZ was speaking about baboons, hmm?
Thanks to those who pointed out the offending comments.
Gotta love Forest Troop.
However, I must say that the comparison of fapping Reddit users to displaying baboons challenges the spandex.
Until I see or hear about the regularization of the public display of genitals by human males (instead of fapping anonymously online), I will view this comparison as more of an analogy than a homology.
Interesting piece regardless.
FWIW, the site that PZ links to says that the author of the piece “has a master’s in evolutionary anthropology and is finishing a Ph.D. in the history of science.” Calling him a “primatologist” may or may not be accurate (he does cite one though). Again, FWIW.
– Sapolsky, “A Primate’s Memoir”, the story before so many of the baboons died. Pretty heartbreaking at the end: good to know at least something good came out of that…
Seconded for the T-shirts.
Delft:
Yes. A Primate’s Memoir was an excellent book, recommended highly.
I strongly suspect that something similar is ultimately responsible for the difference between chimps and bonobos.
I do not know if it is just me or not but I do not react to some of the more extreme statements/suggestions I read or hear here . I see them as being extreme to the point of absurdity on purpose. I have heard before the idea that a great way to really stimulate the economy and bring about some real prosperity would be a real big war Ala WWII they were serious suggestions at one time, so I can see that some people might make similar suggestions and be taken seriously and not just being absurd.
The really interesting thing about the story was how selective the epidemic was. The exposure was mostly the more aggressive individuals which then changed the nature of the remaining groups dynamics and behavior.
Of the possible plague epidemics I am aware of there is not much of a chance of so close of a behavior connection. Modern warfare is also not very selective.
uncle frogy
Snidely W @ 38:
No, it doesn’t. If you have a good grounding in the concept of masculinity, and how it has changed throughout the ages, becoming increasingly toxic, it’s not challenging at all. Throughout the twists and turns of masculinity, life in the homosocial sphere hasn’t changed all that much.
Iyeska @ 36
Um, I was not calling anyone pathetic. I was asking The Mellow Monkey for clarification on a previous post because I was slightly concerned zie was the one saying “people who don’t have sex are pathetic.” And I asked the question specifically because that statement did not seem in keeping with the rest of The Mellow Monkey’s comment, but the wording used had me confused and, ironically, I didn’t want to jump to a wrong conclusion based on a misinterpretation.
drst:
Okay. I didn’t have any problem with the clarity of TMM’s post, and anyone even slightly familiar with TMM would know that there would never be a pronouncement of “people who don’t have sex are pathetic.” I think perhaps you were misreading. Anyroad, I trust it’s clear now.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, drst. I could have worded that better.
I really need to find the study that was tracking grooming and non-sex non-fighting interactions in baboons. The researcher noticed a sub-group of adult males that were not the classic “alpha”, and not “betas” trying to become alphas.
This group never challenged the alpha for dominance, but were rarely picked on by the betas … a glare and a fluff of the mane were often all it took to make a beta lose interest in a fight, and these males rarely lost a fight if they got into one. (I don’t remember if they helped each other or not in fights). They seldom had confrontations with each other. They got groomed more, shared more food and interacted more with the young than the supposed rulers of the troop.
When the troop was under attack from a predator, the alpha and beta males were out in front, noisily being leopard bait. This group of males was behind the alpha/beta attackers, between the predator and the rest of the troop, as the last ditch defenders of the females and babies.
If something wiped out most of all of the alpha and beta males of a troop, this group would be the dominant group, with their well-established relationships based on not dominating and non-aggression. Any incoming male would have to conform or get chased off, because the nice-guy baboons were capable fighters, just not interested in wasting their time on fights when there was food to share and manes to be groomed.
Of course, part of the reason for the serious regression post-WWII was almost certainly pushback to Rosie the Riveter: a lot of women ended up doing factory jobs while so many of the men were at the front. When the war ended and the men got back home, those ‘uppity’ women had to be kicked out of their jobs so the men could have jobs again. And when many of the women who had got their first real taste of self-sufficiency complained, that just made them even more ‘uppity’ and they had to be stomped on harder.
Iyeska @ 45 – Well, being somewhat new to commenting here, I don’t have much to go on but the actual words in a comment. But since I also didn’t want to be rude, I asked for clarification.
The Mellow Monkey @ 46 – Thanks. I completely agreed with the point you were making, btw. Just got a little thrown by the wording.
bryanfeir @48
To an extent, yes, although my understanding is that the post-war drop in the number of women who worked was not as large as people think. There’s also a mythologizing of the early Cold War era’s gender rigidity as portrayed in media (“Leave it to Beaver” et al) compared to the reality on the ground (many women, especially poor women or women who were minorities, have always worked outside the home, and plenty of white upper and middle class women did work in the 1950s, and people were still having sex outside of marriage). IIRC some of the repression in the 1950s was not just about WWII but also the disruptions of the 1930s and the impact of the Depression on the social order – the “Happy Homemaker” ideal as Friedan dubbed it wasn’t just about stifling Rosie the Riveter, but also about the Flapper, the working girls of the 20s and 30s and women actively participating in labor and social causes during the Depression. However it’s been a while since I kept up with the research on this subject.
drst@22, 50, David Marjanović@26,
I’d need to be convinced that the 1945-60 period was more conservative in relation to race and gender than the 1920-40 period, or 1900-1914. What it certainly saw, in both the USA and western Europe, was huge economic and social gains for the less well-off, as wages rose, the welfare state and publicly funded education (and in western Europe, health care) were greatly extended, and tax rates on the rich were high. I’ve just started Thomas Piketti’s Capital in the 21st Century; I think an important part of his argument is that WWI and WWII disrupted the natural tendency of capitalism toward ever-increasing inequality, because the state needed the willing participation of all classes in the national effort, and so had to make extensive concessions to the “lower orders”. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen these concessions progressively retracted. Of course, war is wholly unacceptable as a means of reducing either macho attitudes and male violence, or socio-economic inequality. Could the need for all to pull together to combat climate change and other environmental perils be a substitute?
This article represent exactly the sort of “benefit” that I got from looking at 4chan, some knowledge about how and why shitty people do what they do. It was exactly like watching a bunch of primates and trying to understand them, while also like being unable to stop watching the aftermath of a plane crash or other disaster. Whatever else that site has on it simply is not worth the opportunity that it provides for organization and camaraderie among people with sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies.
I love the Forest Troop Baboon label. When I first saw people using SJW as a term they tried to say it was all about people who were wrong or too extreme in how they fought for social justice. But I never saw the term used in any other way than as a means of totally avoiding whatever the the SJW was talking about. Every tool I can take away from people like this is another tool they lack to have power over the preventing communication.
Symbolic thought is a much bigger part of human psychology than in baboons.
SYMBOLIC public display of genitals is pretty common throughout history. The giant codpieces of Tudor times. Those fancy curls on the tips of medieval shoes. Ties. Obelisks. The Washington Monument. You name it, it’s been done, somewhere, by someone.
Apparently we have other cultural memes we can leverage to combat violence. It turns out that ISIS fighters are running from female soldiers because they won’t go to heaven if killed by one. http://nypost.com/2014/09/19/isis-fighters-terrified-of-being-killed-by-female-troops/
Clearly, then, the solution to our problem is to fill the Rift with tainted meat.
#notactuallyadvocatinggenocide
Iyéska, mal omnifarious &
Amphiox:
To refine my remarks a bit:
I was being a bit pedantic about the specific biologic/evolutionary point as to whether the behaviors of the two groups were analogous or homologous. I trust that you are familiar with the distinction.
Analogies can be instructive and enlightening and thus can have value. You both make accurate points with which I can agree, but they do not contradict the (narrow) point that I was making.
I have a bit less hope for the species. I think something a bit more fundamental needs to change to “fix” humans. (I’ve yet to be convinced we’re fine, biologically, just the way we are.)
My wishful thinking detector is bleeping.
You asserted that it was analogous. My example supports the idea that it is indeed homologous.
Nick Gotts @51 – I was speaking of the disruption caused by the World Wars and the Depression to the social order that you mention, which fueled a backlash of conformity and conservatism in US culture following WWII. Also women finally won the vote after nearly a century of battle in 1920, started going to college and working outside the home in record numbers (upper and middle class women at least) through the 1930s, and of course joined the war effort in the 1940s. So compared to the 1950s when there were very few major advances culturally or legally for women, yes, I would say the gender roles in the 1950s were more conservative and static than the previous decades of the 20th century.
Sorry for the misunderstanding – I just meant that the 1945–67 period showed a trend towards becoming more conservative, seen most strikingly and most linearly (that I know of!) in Austrian election results, where the conservatives got well over 50 % of the vote in 1966 and proceeded to form a government alone, without the usual coalition partner (the Socialists). The next elections were in 1970, and by then it had all collapsed, so the Socialists were able to form a minority government alone, called new elections in ’71, won bigtime and ruled alone and unopposed for 10 years. There’s also an edition from the early or middle 60s (I forgot) of the English pronunciation dictionary originally founded by Daniel Jones; it describes young members of the upper class shifting their pronunciations even farther away from those of the middle class than their parents, and projects this trend linearly into the future – nowadays U-RP is pretty much a thing of the past, isn’t it? I’ll try to find a link this weekend.
Absolutely.
I’ll hope so.
I won’t put such silliness beyond them, but I can’t see how it would follow from any interpretation of Islam either; more evidence would be great.
Amphiox:
I don’t see how your comments support homology.
You describe the uniqueness of a human trait (phallic symbolism), so then how could it be a homologous trait if only one of the two species has it? (a genetically inherited trait, a shared inheritance from a common ancestor). Baboons don’t do phallic symbolism. Nor do the great apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons), where you would expect to see some evidence of it if it were homologous.
Moreover, you would have a hard time demonstrating that human phallic symbolism is even an inherited trait. While it is quite common across cultures, it is hardly universal, and it’s expression is highly variable. A socio-cultural trait to be sure. A genetic, inherited trait? Not so much.
drst
Seriously. Women aren’t just white and cis. Even if you know that, don’t just say women when mean a specific subset because too many think “women means white and black means men”. It’s a huge eraser thing. Considering how white feminists continue to fail other women oppressed on different oppression axises, we need to be really careful with wording. Make it clear who you’re specifically speaking about because too many think white cis women winning the vote and working outside the home means all women because those women are the ones that counts and feminism is all about them.
Er, my editing note was cut out there. Sorry. The additions in bold in #63 are mine.
No, Snidely @62, that is not what I described in my post.
I pointed out the genital display as a means of exerting dominance is shared by all primates (I don’t know why you’re fixating on such a limited understanding of inherited either – no one knows if genital display in baboons and other primates is heritable either, and no one even brought it up until you just did).
Humans happen to use symbolism as the tool for manifesting these displays. And that association is due to nothing more than the fact that EVERYTHING humans do is wrapped up in symbolic thought. The behavior of displaying itself is not unique to humans in any way shape of form.
Amphiox:
“genital display … is shared by all primates”
Nope. ‘T ain’t.”
“[the heritability of] genital display in baboons and other primates … no one even brought it up until you just did”
1. It was implied (even if only for amusement,) in the OP at top, by the comparison of verbose fappers and displaying baboons.
2. I didn’t just mention it. I’ve mentioned it in each of my posts by the use of the words “homology” & “homologous”.
(And as I specified above, I am referring to biological homology, and not some “cultural homology”, if anybody uses that phrase).
3. You mentioned it yourself when you claimed that “it is indeed homologous”. How are you defining the word?
I completely agree with your last paragraph, and nothing I have said disagrees with it.
ah, Sapolsky’s Parable.
A fascinating and illuminating study/story to be sure.
But it’s also a case study in confirmation bias. People react so strongly and positively to the story simply because they perceive it as confirming something they desparately want to believe about humans, viz., that all sociosexual behavior is purely cultural and almost instantly changable (for the better, of course) by mere force of collective will.
Claims about the ‘permanence’ of the social transition are way premature. It is remarkeable that it lasted over multiple generations, but as far as I can tell Sapolsky’s data run for only 20 years. All of the publicity about the story occurred back in 2004, and I cannot find any morte recent updates (if anyone else can, please link; thanks!), Twenty years is nothing in ecological time, let alone evolutionary time. Seems very likely that all it would take is the immigration of one or two especially aggressive males and it would be back to square one. It may well have happened already.
Another point: How do the benevolent and mellow males raised in this troop do when they have to switch troops at puberty? My guess is they get their benevolent mellow asses kicked pretty hard and enjoy relatively poor reproductive success. If their personalities have genetic underpinnings this would strongly select against any possibility of dissemination of the new system.
And of course this is one of, what, thousands of troops of olive baboons, all of which continue to operate? Evolutionarily a drop in a bucket.
But a cool story nevertheless.
…in the traditional and time-honored brutal fashion?