what a great article . . .
Two random thoughts.
1. The early adaptive environment:
> Proponents of EP are
>quick to emphasize that human nature was crafted by natural selection to
>solve the problems of life on the African savanna 1.8 million years ago
The main mechanism of Darwinian natural selection is extinction. There is very sketchy and poor evidence for extinctions of human populations in prehistoric times. There is, however, very good and clear information about extinctions of human poulations in the last three hundred years (basically, wherever white people have gone). Why don't the sociobiologists study this evidence?
*****************
2. May and December/studs and slags reasoning:
>In the EP view, males are likely to be promiscuous because it is
>advantageous to spread their sperm far and wide. Females, on the other
>hand, are programmed to be more selective: Their eggs are more precious
>than male sperm, and they are strapped into months of gestation and
>suckling after conception.
My "understanding difficult science things" credentials are probably in the upper quartile of this list. I've had my head round Ricardian trade, advanced derivatives pricing, the Feynman-Kac theorem, and the relative merits of Fourier transforms and Monte Carlo analysis. But I cannot understand for the life of me how Darwinian evolution would select such contrary traits for males and females of the same species.
**************
>three cheers for Richard Lewontin,
>Yoshie
And a few more from me.
dd
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