Today, a little Evo Psych Pop Quiz for you all!
5 of the following 6 statements are actual quotes from a 2007 article in the open access peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology. Can you spot the quote that isn’t from the article?
- “The section on intra-vaginal anti-cuckoldry tactics focuses on sperm competition, providing fascinating descriptions of the semen-displacement hypothesis (Gallup Jr. and Burch) and the psychobiology of semen (Burch and Gallup Jr.).”
- “[I]ntra-vaginal battles demand men to become aroused to situations that are actually unpleasant for them, for instance the suspicion of their partner’s infidelity.”
- “This section also includes discussions of the interesting notions that … women should not be motivated to have sex with their main partner right after an extra-pair copulation because of the possibility of sperm displacement (the penis appears to be shaped to do just that), [and] that a man may manipulate a woman’s mood via semen content (Rice, 1996, has experimentally shown something similar in fruit flies) … .”
- “One of the mating strategies examined as an early prevention method is violence against women within partnered relationships.”
- “Despite this scrutiny, a man can still gain from deliberately ejaculating in front of his partner from time to time. Choosing each occasion carefully so as to display a good ejaculation can be a powerful way to advertise his continuing good health.”
- “Affirmative feedback did not increase men’s likelihood to allocate resources to self-morphed images, but men were significantly less likely to allocate resources to self morphed images when told the morphed image did not resemble them … . “
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Answer: Number 5 is the ringer! But, lacking confidence in my own ability to come up with something as convincingly batty as the quotes from the real article, I cheated a little here, borrowing this quote from a real Evo Psych book — Sperm Wars, by Robin Baker, a popular title from a major publisher recommended on countless Pickup Artist and “Red Pill” reading lists. It’s a truly bizarre and often quite disturbing read. (If you have a bit of Google-fu you should be able to locate a pdf of it online with no trouble.)
And speaking of pdfs, if you want tp read the article in Evo Psych I got most of these quotes from, a book review by Kelly D. Suschinsky and Martin L. Lalumière titled The View From the Cuckold, you can find a pdf of it here. See, I really didn’t just make it up!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw a fit about it; I must have just misunderstood what Cassandra was saying. I’ve just had to explain to so many people that psych is a science, andthat bringing up the fact that it wasn’t scientific when Freud was doing it is like saying that biology wasn’t a science because we used to think that rotting meat magically formed maggots. So yeah, sorry for the hair-trigger, there.
Anyways, I don’t think sperm is any grosser than any other bodily excretion, but it’s still a weird viscous fluid that doesn’t have superpowers, and I really would generally prefer it not get on me, because that shit’s itchy when it dries. I certainly wouldn’t regard it as liquid gold.
(Also there’s a pretty good short story over here if you’re into the combination of witches and dudes who complain about the “friend-zone”…)
“I’m not just picking on the guys here, any worship of bodily fluids always strikes me as a bit puzzling. Also, why only the sexualized body fluids”
WAG: Probably some kind of fertility superstition, which will ensure good fertility and a good harvest., and it’s not just the sexualized fluids, just look at blood it it’s significance in religious rites, such as the Christian cult.
Hmm, I seem to have screwed up that link. I suspect a case of the missing end-quote.
Or it just doesn’t want to work. Here, I’ll just drop the url in.
http://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/magic-and-wizardry/jenn-reese/gather-your-bones
My favorite is when dudes try to persuade women to enjoy being bathed in their sperm by arguing that it’s good for the skin/makes your hair nice and shiny/cures depression. Um, no, it’s a bodily fluid. The only useful thing it does is help make babies.
As a kid I found the whole transubstantiation thing so morbid. Like, OK, so I don’t believe in Jesus, but if in theory he was real why would I want to eat and drink bits of him? Cannibalism AND vampirism, yay.
I’m reminded of that Cooking with Semen book.
I’m now trying to imagine the public response to a “Cooking with Menstrual Blood” book, and how different it would be.
There’s no real misogyny any more, huh, MRA dudes?
“so I don’t believe in Jesus, but if in theory he was real why would I want to eat and drink bits of him? Cannibalism AND vampirism”
’cause it’s in the gospel or the soul is in the blood or it’s a test of your ability to suspend you disbelief or..
Never understood what consubstantiation and Real Presence really meant and what should have believed in, but just ate the wafer anyways.
“Cooking with Menstrual Blood”
I’ve seen some say it can be used as love spell (just mix some drops of that in something and give to him to him to eat. Then he will fall madly in love with you) (some in the probably not so serious occult things)
Next up – get someone to inadvertently consume the contents of the tissue you just used to blow your nose, and they will find themselves strangely drawn to the idea of either giving you a job or lending you money. It’s SnotMagic.
“I can’t believe it’s SnotMagic!”
@dustydeste, I must be dense, but I didn’t understand that story. What did the ending mean?
And still I’m not sure EvoPsych is 100% BS . It might have something to contribute on the origins of language, religion and some of the phobias such as agoraphobia or claustrophobia.
How so, talacaris? Like Cassandra said, early peoples weren’t the best record keepers.
@talacaris
Except that the really exciting advances in those areas are being done by sociologists, anthropologists… and by and large evopsych seems to actively exclude crossover with those areas.
PZ Myers is an excellent read on those areas. He’s a biologist specializing in evolutionary development–good ol’ evo-devo–giving him a bird’s-eye view of what a proper evo-psych discipline would look like.
Evo-psych work that doesn’t even bother to ask the question ‘is this trait I observe true across all human cultures’ is not worth the paper it’s printed on… Because plasticity is EVERYTHING to us.
@MordsithJ – It’s left a bit ambiguous, but I think it’s well-implied that they’re each going to get what they’ve got coming: the lady’s going to get a great wedding and happy life, and some dire bad shit’s going to go down for Mr. Friendzone. Personally I think he’s going to get eaten, because there’s a bit of Baba Yaga that gets referenced at the beginning and she’s got a bit of a thing for eating dudes, if I remember correctly. Plus she says to put out extra food for the kitties; it makes me think he ain’t coming back.
See, the thing I can’t get over whenever Evo-Psych comes up is, what on earth is it that makes this particular group of humans so intensely, obsessively eager to “prove” that human beings are nothing more than genetically-programmed bio-robots?
I mean, in some sense, you could describe ants that way. . . but an ant has a brain the size of a poppy seed. (A really smart ant, that is.)
Why would humans waste so many hours, so many $20 words and so much bandwidth arguing that the vast array of cultures, civilizations, minds, hearts and souls of human beings don’t matter at all, because Genetic Programming/Natural Selection? Is it some kind of species self-hatred?
I just don’t understand.
just guessing, there are some studies on chimps and their language abilities. Also there is the possibility to date genes used in speech production, maybe some comparison with other Homo species and what can be inferred of their culture, tracing common structures occuring in diverse languages
I don’t mean to be harping too much on this, but some of you guys seem to have a big misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology is. I’m a big critic of a lot of it myself, but if you think 99% of the working psychologists who use evolutionary principles and theories in their work wouldn’t be horrified by Manosphere whackjobs, then you’ve got an incredibly skewed sense of how it works.
For example, right now my fiance, a cognitive neuroscientist, is devising a study trying to isolate whether anger and disgust are neurologically distinct, and down the line, that can show mechanisms for different ways of reacting in social situations, including moral ones.
But here’s the thing: If anger and disgust ARE neurologically distinct, then the only explanation for that is evolutionary processes. I mean, or God. But other than that, she HAS to go to evolutionary psych, because it’s the only theory that provides a context for why disgust in person A and in person B are the same thing.
Without evolutionary psychology (again, or God), there’s no way to develop hypotheses like that. Discrete emotional states CAN’T automatically inspire discrete reactions and behaviors across the entire population outside that framework.
Thanks, I guess it didn’t seem too clear in the story that the guy was in the friendzone, it sounded to me like he had had an actual relationship with the woman. On the second read-through it became clearer.
@BigKitty
Well, sometimes knowing about our cognitive biases (for example) gives us a roadmap to fighting them.
It’s like, hey, people have minds that like to group things into in-group and out-group, and not necessarily side with the out-group. So be mindful that you aren’t Othering people, and don’t pick a group of oppressed people to scapegoat! Even though it’s really easy!
Same with EvoPsych. Like, do we have instinctive fears? If so, how does bad reporting tap into and focus those fears?
also I probably just revealed that I misunderstand her current project, oh well.
It’s not that evolutionary psych couldn’t be useful/scientific. It’s that, as generally practiced currently, it’s not. Also that, beyond being bad science, it’s used in stupid ways to prop up problematic social constructions.
Basically, it’s not the intersection of evolution and psychology that is the problem; it’s the field that’s called “evolutionary psychology.”
BigKitty: Part of it is the unfortunate, fallacious reasoning of the beloved NeoAtheist community, who view evolution as this amazing, wonderful tool for proving that religion sucks. I’ve noticed that people like this often assume the main purpose of being religious is cloaking yourself in feel-good lies that create meaning where there is none. So, they assume something that DOESN’T make you feel good, and which implies there is NO meaning must certainly be true, because it’s the opposite of all that religious stuff that isn’t true! There are some big names in psych who just love to talk about how free will doesn’t exist, and it smells very much like that kind of motivation.
The more charitable explanation is that we need evolutionary psychology to do any psychology at all, because if we didn’t have it, then we couldn’t assign functionality to anything. We could say “snuggling raises levels of oxytocin” and “oxytocin makes people feel warmth for someone nearby.” But, we couldn’t go that extra step and say “the reason hugging increases oxytocin is because it makes people feel closer to their loved ones, which increases the desire to work on their behalf.” That requires evopsych.