Yeah, yeah. I know the name has been "evolutionary psychology" for fifteen years or so, at least since Robert Wright's very useful book The Moral Animal, which I felt compelled to read twice.
But I've been interested in this stuff too long to be calling it anything other than what it was when first coined by E.O. Wilson in the 1970s.
A Charlotte Allen Weekly Standard column is interesting stuff.
HT: Luke Ford
But I've been interested in this stuff too long to be calling it anything other than what it was when first coined by E.O. Wilson in the 1970s.
A Charlotte Allen Weekly Standard column is interesting stuff.
Are you monogamous? I am. Being faithful to one's wife is a laudable goal, to be sure. But the culture pulls at me not to be. I wish women would employ more modesty. As a curious note, my life is so monastic that the occasion for sin on the most regular basis--not porn on the web--is tightly covered female behinds at church. Policing my eyes takes an effort of will I'm not always inclined to employ. Harumph!Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous--but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy--marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up--is a more accurate description of women's natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy--one spouse for one person at one time--may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular.
HT: Luke Ford
Leave a comment