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Caius -> RE: Genes Say Some Are Part Neanderthal (5/10/2010 6:07:25 AM)
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Well, you bring up a lot to respond to there, so let's see if I can't keep my ducks in a row for you. And since the subject matter seems to be intriguing to you, this time I'm going to mention some titles of some excellent materials in the relevant fields, just in case you are inclined to read into them further. Each of them is at least partly written for a broad audience but hefty enough to serve as a good primer to the kind of subject matter we are discussing here.
The first thing to note, which I'm sure you appreciate already, is that the picture I painted of the courting process was exaggerated a little for a humourous punch. But I think int he presence of that lite humour you went too far in your assumptions of just how exaggerated that scenario is. The fact of the matter is, yes, the most effective and common mating strategy (for us as with very nearly every significantly social species in the macroscopic world) is to try to be a 'Casanova'; that is to say, to attempt to attract mates through displays (social or otherwise) of good genetic stock. You may have seen me state previously in this thread, in the context of dismissing the idea that Homo sapiens acquired the trait from Neanderthals, that rape has probably been part of human inheritance since the beginning, being as it is not at all uncommon amongst mammalian species. But the counter-balance to that is that within most of those species, rape is still uncommon. Let me reiterate that point so it is clear -- it happens in a wide array of species, but it is statistically uncommon compared to mutually-approached mating. This is true mostly of primates as well, though there is a notable exception - the orangutan, in which recent research has suggested nearly 50% of births are the result of rapes committed by males who have suppressed their secondary sexual characteristics (that is, stayed in a kind of elongated puberty) because of the nearby presence of a dominant male and are thus unable to attract mates. Still, this is an extremely rare mating strategy for a species.
To explain why this is so, we need to explore some basics of evolutionary theory that unfortunately don't get as much exposure as the concept of 'survival of the fittest'. See, Darwin was even more ahead of his time than he gets credit for. He saw early on that his work On the Origin of Species would undoubtedly be used to make the claim for the inherent superiority of one ethnicity over others, or to even go so far as to claim that modern humanity was composed of multiple species. He knew this wasn't so and though he originally shied away from the subject matter in Origins for fear that prejudice could ruin him, he later became convinced that he had to do something to keep his legacy from being hijacked by racists, pro-slavery forces and other groups he loathed (noteworthy is the fact that the man who created the concept of eugenics was none other than Darwin's own cousin, Francis Galton!) and 12 years after the publication of his now more famous work he published another work more than twice its length: On the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this monumental work*, Darwin proposed a second process working in conjunction with natural selection in determining the genetic fate of species. He called this force 'sexual selection' and claimed that it, and not his own concept of natural selection (which was only just then barely beginning to crawl out from under the weight of the public outrage that had initially greeted it), was nearly solely responsible for the development of such varied phenotypes (the differing superficial characteristics that we associate with races) within humanity, just as it had done in countless other species which we now know for a certainty to be genetically almost identical despite quite varied looks. What is sexual selection exactly? Well, like natural selection, it's quite complex in the particulars and yet easy to sum up: its the effect of choice (especially on the part of females) of sexual partners from amongst competing potential mates upon the resulting future generations of a species.
It's impossible to treat sexual selection with any worthy detail here without making this post fifty times longer than I can reasonably make it, but suffice it to say that it's role in the course a species takes cannot be understated. Descent of Man of man is also noteworthy for arguably being the birthpoint of what we now call Evolutionary Psychology, a field that has only in the last couple of decades begun to be explored with the vigour it deserves. EP is the discipline of trying to deduce why evolution forced the human mind into what it is today, to try to understand the impetuses, mindsets, beliefs, emotions, and behaviours of modern man (some of which seem so counter-intuitive to us today) by exploring how these traits could have been evolutionarily advantageous to us in the primitive circumstances in which Homo sapiens spent as much as 98% of its history so far within.** It's a field that has a lot to say about why developed as we did as sexual creatures (Freud considered Descent of Man to be one of the ten most significant works ever written) and it also frequently implies that much of what has caused men and women to drift apart psychology (to whatever small or great extent they have; this is very much up for debate) derives from our respective mating strategies when we were still hunter-gatherers (i.e. the elaborate machinations involved in choosing a mate, winning them over, keeping them vs. dumping them; basically all the hoops our genes make us jump through in their quest to be replicated and to survive into future generations).
It is also in this context that we begin to see why rape is not a very big component in the mating strategies of most socially advanced species. Sexual selection should not be viewed as a competitor to natural selection. Rather the two work in tandem for the most part and together select for more viable offspring with higher chances of survival. Sexual selection allows for each partner to choose (sometimes consciously, but probably more frequently through instinctual attraction) healthier partners with traits more likely to lead to surviving offspring. For example, too take a look at just two of billions of examples from Evolutionary Psychology -- studies have consistently shown that persons of both sexes are more likely to find members of the opposite sex attractive if they have neatly symmetrical and also if they have more average features comparable to the broader population they live in and both of these are indicators of good mating potential because they suggest a decreased risk of genetic disorders or illness. So just as natural selection leads to the survival of more well-adapted species, sexual selection selects for (typically) more viable offspring from the prospective of one unique set of genetic code (a human...or a puffer fish or a peacock). It also goes a long way to explaining why natural selection caused rape to be such a deeply traumatic event for a woman even on occasions when physical harm is minimal; her genes want to couple with genes that give them a good chance at survival and rape robs them of that opportunity. Ergo they typically want the female mind to be averse to this possibility, to put it mildly.
Now, returning to the crux of the matter, we have seen that rape is rare and mate-courting the norm and explored some of the reasons why, but there's another factor that makes our Neander-man Grogg more likely to be a suitor than a sexual predator: opportunity. I won't go into too much detail on this because I've already discussed it in some detail in an above post, but I'll summarize here: conflicts between primitive peoples and primates in general tend to take the shape of small turf wars on the outskirts of main territories where the stomping-grounds of two groups overlap. They rarely would have resulted in more than a couple of deaths almost never in the destruction of one group that was so complete that the the victors could just claim some women like chattel. In this respect your vision of our hunter-gatherer forefathers imagines them to be more like us than all evidence suggests they were. A more likely scenario is a Homo sapiens band dissolving from lack of resources or some of its female members wandering/being run off to bring population size to a more reasonable level and her finding her way to a group of Neanderthals and thinking "Well, this guy is no beauty, but I haven't eaten in nine days and those are leopard prints, so...." If it fits better with your estimation of a primal, brutal proto-man, maybe she came for the food and ended up part of the harem before she realized it.
Regardless, I would caution against trying to fit the scenario too closely with "bride abductions," a product of a more 'advanced' age. Consider a couple of things. First, as you yourself said, much from those stories is anecdotal. For example, with the Native American example, I don't want to trivialize anyone's oral tradition, but let's just say that this is the last kind of source material any empiricist wants to deal in. What's more, even the best of oral traditions only maintain any degree of accuracy for a few generations and the Native Americans by this point would already have been drastically changed from their pre-contact nature. The most warlike of Native peoples, those most known for raids of the nature you describe, only shifted to this way of life with the introduction of the horse, a non-native of the Americas (though a paleolithic giant version did exist but was never domesticated) . Well, the most warlike in North America anyway; South America is a different story, but they had full-blown trans-continental empires, brutal human sacrifice and cannibalism so if a woman was abducted there, forced bride was really one of the more lucky outcomes. Returning to North America, even before European arrival, much of the Native American population was already incorporated into many various cultures far more advanced than the ancient hunter-gatherers we are talking about.*** Compare these with the Native Americans of, say, California, who still were mostly Hunter-Gatherers by the time of European arrival and so isolated (because the cornucopia that was California had never forced them to adopt agriculture and thus allow for the development of larger populations) that literally hundreds of completely unrelated language families could be found, the most linguistic diversity found just about anywhere on the planet in near-modern times. I happen to think that most of the other bride-napping stories are probably exaggerated for sensationalistic effect, but to whatever extent they are real, they are unlikely to have strong parallels in human prehistory, for the reasons detailed above.
So, in short: yes Casanovas. Really.
Edited to add: Re-reading your post I think I need to answer some of your questions/points a little more directly. The reason I think the situation in the post contact Americas would be so different from that found in most of prehistory is that the Native Americans were actually, by comparison, far more advanced and had larger population sizes. Some of this is addressed above of course, but felt I hadn't answered the question directly and when I wrote the above I had forgotten that you had already seemed to concede the post contact changes and don't want to pain you ignorant of a point your post clearly displayed knowledge of. On another point, regarding the bride-capture story you were told, there's always the possibility he was pulling your leg; my experiences with members of ethnictities that have been greatly reduced in numbers but whose culture has taken on a certain bizarre life in popular representation is that they sometimes like to have a little fun with others outside said culture, even good friends, and after a lifetime of relating stories of their culture sometimes have an amazing knack for figuring out exactly what you want to hear. Probably not what was going on there, admittedly, but always a possibility. Lastly...Montana, really? Come on, you ought to know better than to compare the goings-on in that bizarre realm with anything that happens in this dimension. ;)
*And 130 years after its initial publication you can still hardly do better than this book for understanding the subject matter it first unveiled, so it's amongst the books I recommend you read first in an approach to the the study of the evolution of the human character, both physically and mentally. Just be aware that even in condensed formats it tends to weigh in at over 700 pages.
** For a beginning introduction to Evolutionary Psychology, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent How the Mind Works. Pretentious title, I know, but I'll be damned if he doesn't make the best effort to live up to it. His more recent The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is also a great work along many of the same themes with an added emphasis on inatism.
*** A must-read for anyone looking to understand mankind's development from hunter-gatherers into our modern incarnation of the species is Jared Diamond's increasingly (and worthily) famous Guns, Germs and Steel. In it Diamond sets forth to prove that certain races reached technological heights faster than others simply because of good fortune in their geographic location, not because of any inherent genetic superiority. His The Third Chimpanzee is just as good a read and even more relevant to our current discussion.
And, for Moonhead
quote:
ORIGINAL: Moonhead
Hang on, is there any genetic evidence suggesting that the recessive gene that causes Downs' Syndrome is a neanderthal holdout, or are you just basing this on a few illustrations of neanderthals with prothagonous jaws and sloping foreheads?
No, there is no factual basis (or even really much of anything that makes any sort of sense) in anything he said.
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