Mating Habits Among Humans
In one of his best TAC columns, Fred Reed took issue with the kind of contrived story telling engaged in by many of the practitioners of so-called “evolutionary psychology,” including one fellow, whom Reed came across, who’d just written an article expanding on the subject of why guys like the girls with big knockers. It’s all about the reproductive strategic signalling, you see: “[M]en like big-breasted women because big ones sag at an early age, warning that the gal is too old to have healthy progeny.”
Reed’s response:
This is wonderfully silly. If big hooters discourage further reproduction, the evolutionary benefit to the woman would seem exiguous, and big boobs ought to vanish.
An assumption underlying most discussions of the subject is that mating is entirely physical. The man takes the woman with the biggest breasts and bluest eyes. Perhaps this could be demonstrated with water buffalo. It isn’t what I see among people.
Sociobiology has been one of the more groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting scientific specialities of the past half-century. But, alas, like most every successful intellectual movement—American conservatism, for instance—it was destined to become a racket. And now mediocre minds grasp for tenure by essentially doing science backwards: they start with a cool new theory they’re sure must be true (or at least that’s what all their colleagues are sayin’) and then yarn and yarn until they’re able prove how the attraction of big tits is all about a theory of reproductive strategies that seems better suited to explaining the dating life of rodents. These are hypotheses of love and sex made by people with little experience in the subject.
Of course, scientific theories have always revealed just as much about the man in the lab coat as they have about objective reality. Take, for instance, the quarrel between Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, one of the great academic debates of the past 50 years. As an outside observer to things scientific, I definitely come down on the side of Dawkins. Yes, I know, most Takimag readers don’t want to take Dawkins’s side on anything, and to the extent that the author of The God Delusion argues, along with Christopher Hitchens, that “religion poisons everything,” I’m with you. However, vis-à-vis Stephen J. Gould’s version of evolution, Dawkins’s work is positively life affirming.
In a useful essay, Tim Flannery boils down the debate to two competing scenarios of who reproduces and what gets passed down. First, there’s Gould’s account of the survival of the individual being best suited to its environs.
Suppose that a wondrously optimal fish, a marvel of hydrodynamic perfection, lives in a pond. This species has been honed by millennia of conventional Darwinian selection, based on fierce competition, to this optimal organismic [individual] state.
Another species of fish—the middling species—ekes out a marginal existence in the same pond. The gills don’t work as well, but their structure varies greatly among organisms. In particular, a few members of the species can breathe in quite stagnant and muddy waters.
Organismic selection favors the optimal fish, a proud creature who has lorded it over all brethren, especially the middling fish, for ages untold. But now the pond dries up, and only a few shallow, muddy pools remain. The optimal fish becomes extinct. The middling species persists because a few of its members can survive in the muddy residua. (Next decade, the deep, well-aerated waters may return, but the optimal fish no longer exists to reestablish its domination).
Yuck!—Gould’s vision of the triumph of the most mediocre is truly depressing. Only a leftist would ever come up with such a conception of the world, and it’s no surprise that Gould was a die-hard egalitarian and leveller, and throughout his career was rivalled only by Richard Lewontin as the chief enforcer of academic PC (see Chapter 6 of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate for more details.)
And then there’s Dawkins’s version:
Pressure’ from choosy females drove the evolution of male pheasants’ sumptuous feathers. What this means is that a gene for a beautiful feather is especially likely to find itself riding a sperm into a female’s body.
Poetic!—not only is this a vision in which evolution leads to the propagation of greater beauty—as opposed to the victory of the “middling” bottom feeder—but Dawkins’s “choosy females” get us closer to the kinds of vain, irrational, sometime narcissistic, sometime capricious reasons why men and women pick out mates. One doesn’t become captive to an all-consuming violent love for another simply because her non-sagging breasts indicate she has a functioning uterus. Nor does a man develop a passion for female breasts because they act as a good reproductive signifier. Even the pheasants, it seems, choose a mate based on his ruffling of feathers colourful, sumptuous, and divine.
Returning to Gould’s paean to mediocrity, one could point out that the Harvard Don, in many ways, overestimates the importance of survival. Only on rare occasions does a mammal concern himself with merely surviving—and then only when he faces the immediate prospect of perishing, such as when the middling fish’s pond dries up or Dawkins’s pheasant flies into a patch of quick sand. Throughout the rest of its life, all creatures great and small are driven towards flourishing, towards triumphing—expressed by the wild, bone-crushing collisions during the mating ritual of the mountain ram, or even by your average beaver, who builds the elaborate architecture of his damm so as to house his clan. The human animal is the most distanced of all from any mere “survival instinct,” as man is actually very willing to sacrifice life itself for the gods, glory, or a cause—look at the great religious leaders and martyrs, the great explorers, the great warriors.
There is much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in sociobiology.
Besides, judging from the psychological studies that have been making news recently, the latest academic fad is to publish a 30-page white paper on what everyone already knows and has knownn for centuries—science that makes you go “duh!” Take, for instance, the University of Glasgow study proving that “beer goggles” are for real. Yes, it seems that women actually do look more beddable when you’re really drunk. The same scientists are also theorizing that tomorrow the sun might rise in the east. This work, which I’m sure was tax-payer funded, contributes about as much new knowledge as the The Onion article about how “fat cells have been linked to depression.”
Then there’s the slightly more complicated and intriguing University of Lausanne paper on how taking The Pill might actually lead young women to chose poor mates. It seems that there are these “aromatic molecules” produced by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which are involved with immune response or some such thing. Anyway, a man and a woman with different MHC smells actually make a better match, and are, apparently, more likely to remain faithful to one another and thus raise a proper family. It’s naturally to gravitate to someone with a different aroma, and indeed, these MHC hormones might just be that “j’ne sais quoi” that leads to inexplicable allure. When girls are on The Pill, however, they become attracted to a MHC aroma much like their own—leading to bad partner choices and relationships of cheating and divorce.
This study must give some solace to that guy (you all know him, maybe you are him) who walks into the local bar and sees “Julie,” that pretty girl from his workplace who’d be perfect for him, but who’s on the arm some obnoxious buffoon with tattoos and a criminal record. The Pill’s to blame, The Pill’s to blame. Of course, the study also seems to prove that deep down, or at least on some MHC hormonal level, the beautiful Julie and her horrible brute are one and the same.
I doubt many young researchers could secure tenure at a major university by publishing on how birth control might, just maybe, have something to do with the declining birthrates in the U.S. and on the continent… Or as John Zmirak remarked to me yesterday, “The Pill probably isn’t a sinister plot to destroy the peoples of America and Europe, but would it look any different if it were!?!
I’d like to see a major study on the possible connection between birth control and the fact that so many 20- and 30-somethings go to bars with the explicit objective of meeting new guys, but then spend the whole evening incessantly chatting with their roommates and then dancing blithely in an impenetrable circle of all girls! How this functions as a “reproductive strategy” is beyond me, and why so many modern girls act like this will probably forever remain a scientific mystery.
Comments
Wasn’t it someone like Saul Alinsky a few decades ago who said that a sociologist will take at least a year and spend hundreds of thousands to learn what could be gotten from a bartender or cabbie in a few minutes for $10? As for women with ample apples being desirable only whilst young and unsagged, perhaps the perpetrator of this theory is trying to rationalize his own fixation.
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and of course, all paleo cons who are dismayed at the use of the pill would never allow themselves to benefit from their mate or mates using it. after all, it makes them choose the wrong smelling person.
what do mediocre leftists say about ass men?
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Lester:
Don’t ask.
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A man interviewing three women for a business position posed each a question. You find a large pile of money in the street and no one sees you. What do you do?
The first said she would turn the money into the police, the second said she would spend it, but the third said she would invest the money and when she had made a decent profit, turn the original money to the police. Which of the three got the job?
The one with the biggest breasts of course.
I think that is what I got out of this article.
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Perhaps the West should solve their declining birth rate dilemma by again criminalizing abortion and the pill. One wonders why Putin and the Russians with perhaps the most critical situation have not done this.
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“The one with the biggest breasts of course.
I think that is what I got out of this article.”
That’s just the same simplification that Reed is doing. I doubt anyone argues that breasts are the sole determinant of anything. But I don’t think we can legitimately argue that they aren’t a factor. They are. And fortunately, more and more, they are less relevant by the day. We’re evolving in more ways than one.
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They may be big, but how many pencils can each one retain?
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It’s not only nice breast, but a girl has to have a nice face and the correct ratio between waist and hips. Of course she can’t be stupid. If you look around you’ll find that good looking woman are almost always smart. Natural blonds are among the smartest.
The problem with most women though is that at eighteen they reach their psychical and intellectual peak. After that the law of gravity causing their charms to sink is paralleled by the Belts Law of Women Implosion. Their incessant concern with themselves turns them into a dark hole of narcissisms and they sink into some form of feminist idiocy. It’s all we can do to stop them from ruining everything they come into contact with.
Women’s voting is the major cause of America’s suicidal course. The women who wanted to vote wanted to it so they could place a certain organ of man into a vice and tighten it. Or if that were not possible to do to every man what Jesse Jackson wants to do to Obama.
The test of a good woman is that she leaves politics to her husband.
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Yes, there is the “nice body, shame about the face” school to consider.
And Vonnegut who said “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.”
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Richard,
I think I can help you with this:
“I’d like to see a major study on the possible connection between birth control and the fact that so many 20- and 30-somethings go to bars with the explicit objective of meeting new guys, but then spend the whole evening incessantly chatting with their roommates and then dancing blithely in an impenetrable circle of all girls! How this functions as a “reproductive strategy” is beyond me, and why so many modern girls act like this will probably forever remain a scientific mystery.”
After 10 years of clubbing et al, I found out. Most girls are not out to get a date, especially the hot-looking ones (they already have boy-friends). Most girls just want to have a good time with their friends, instead of worshipping some average guy they cannot get to know in a loud, crowded, sweaty, dark place anyway. And the guys come on to them are usually only interested in a good night of steamy sex. Even if they tried that twice or so, normal girls get enough of that after twice or so.
Sure, if you’ve got the bucks or look like Brad Pitt, you’ll do great anyway, but most of us don’t look like Pitt, nor are we millionaire yet at bachelor age.
So, just date your girl next door, take her to the movie or dinner. You know, like those good old fifties.
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Could it be that there is a much simpler reason than “MHC genes” that women on the pill are less likely to pick a good husband? Maybe women on the pill are more able to be promiscuous, and thus are more likely to end up in sexual relationship with men they wouldn’t have dated otherwise. Sexual relationships have a natural tendency to evolve into something more, so the higher failure rate of “pill marriages”, may just be the result of more relationships initiated solely on the basis of immediate sexual attraction, rather than a more complete attraction.
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As for the girls in the bar dancing in the impenetrable circles, maybe it is just their evolutionary instinct kicking in to tell them that a dance club is not the best place to meet a good mate.
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“As for the girls in the bar dancing in the impenetrable circles, maybe it is just their evolutionary instinct kicking in to tell them that a dance club is not the best place to meet a good mate.”
Nah, they’re just guarding/dancing around their handbags…
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Maciano,
Thanks for the advice, but don’t worry, I’ve never dated anyone I’ve met at a club; indeed, I currently live quite close to one of the biggest singles, dancing joints in the country, the Clarendon Ballroom, and have never gone inside. I do, however, find that, deep down, most of the supposed “cool kids” are scared little girls--desperately seeking a decent guy and yet seemingly doing everything in their power to make sure they don’t find one. I avoid this people.
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A woman’s breasts are her feathers… or at least one of them.
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Two of them, actually.
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dave- that may be but for myself, I don’t spend much time up there.
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Italic text
“...Why so many modern girls act like this will probably forever remain a scientific mystery.”
Maybe because since birth they’ve been filled will toxic prattle about how men of their own kind are indelibly evil ravishers of women and children, oppressors of all peoples beaded and colored, and persecutors of all ideas peace-loving and egalitarian? Maybe they’ve been so indoctinated to hate anyone who looks like themselves they’re… confused, inarticulately embittered, angry. Maybe they only release they have is pouring their contempt on targets so designated as deserving their sanctimonious, misdirected wrath.
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Or as John Zmirak remarked to me yesterday, “The Pill probably isn’t a sinister plot to destroy the peoples of America and Europe, but would it look any different if it were!?!
There are also people who say the Pill was meant to wipe out the Third World.
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It’s interesting that you would use a photo of steamy Brigitte Bardot in an article discussing the male preference for ample bust lines. Ms. Bardot was almost chastely endowed in comparison to this age of Pert on Steroids Breast Implants. She is the entire package, brains, stunning face, gams to die for and a way to sashay that could not be beat.
After all, what exactly is not to like about ALL OF IT?
Short , tall, dark, light, pert, ample, it is all about the ancient art of Feminine Wiles. One might ogle the terrain but the Eyes have it.
I hope this article marks a subtle shift in Taki content because it’s a damned sight better than Atavistic Eschatology or Fodder for the Jew-Baiter. Taki, after all, being the ragazzo raconteur he is should share this elevated connoussieurship with the readership.
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america is ass obsessed. the proof is we watch keeping up with the kardashians, one of the most pointless shows ever, in great numbers.
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It’s been a while since I read Dawkin’s THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Indeed a fascinating tale worth reading.
Dawkin is indeed a raconteur extraordinaire, and much of what he says is plausible and believable…
However, nothing he wrote convinced me that tossing a handful of dirt about and waiting long enough would give rise to the human spirit.
Dawkin’s logic is especially wanting when he bemoans the answer to the question as to who created God, when he himself fumbles on the question as to how did life begin.
Applying Occam’s razor I think the GOD theory has it. Other theories require too much blind faith and arm waving.
H.F. Wolff
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P.S.: I love a NICE set of boobs as much as anybody; but a beautiful mind and a warm & friendly disposition are “until death do us part”.
H.F. Wolff
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Symmetry is mother Nature’s math and so the right proportions usually signal not only beauty but health. In other words there is a standard for these kinds of things or they wouldn’t exist, which they do. *Taste of personal nature among a healthy member/s themselves of the male gender (as opposed to say a pervert) will account for variations in perception but only as a matter of degrees of difference within the context of mother Nature’s standard itself. Kkknockers that are too big excuse me was I stuttttering-?-won’t be attractive to the healthy male if they exceed the context of the standard. While some like’em bigger or less big within the degrees of difference permitted by the symmetrical standard and thus the context for beauty and health. It’s dhaaaat (oops)simple...stutttttering again. I’m the strong silent typse as my best strategy. The Greeks were correct there is the standard although it also accounts for acceptable degrees of difference within itself. Thus Plato was wrong in positing then there must be a patonic ‘rack’ or chair against which all other racks or chairs are measured and found wanting. Not so, there is only mother Nature’s standard which within itself contains acceptable degrees of difference or variation in signaling beauty & healllllth. oops.
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Jeff w
Score another for Aristotle!
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p.s. to my post directly above. As for the picture of Brigitte featured she looks edible which is perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid a woman in that regard--metaphorically speaking of course. i’m not cannnnnnibal thank Goddd. women like my stuttering in the right places it’s kind of like a vibrattttor. I kid.
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Years ago I studied sociobiology, and despite having a good laugh at articles like Peter Blau’s sociobiological analysis of a love affair, decided that it is mostly bunk. What I have noticed is that much of its theorizing acts like Monday morning quarterbacking. A phenomenon is observed, and then various evolutionary advantages and disadvantages are proposed as explanations. How might these speculations be falsified? Not readily in most cases. Genetic explanations of causality seem to often have a bit of the flavor of Flip Wilson’s “the Devil made me do it” in them. My own experiences of survival in potentially fatal circumstances have led me to believe that most of the notions concerning survival of the fittest are at best a tautology, and at worse, horse manure. My survival in most cases was most likely luck (for you secularists) or Divine Providence (for the more enlightened) and had little to do with fitness or logical reasoning. Romantic attraction probably owes more to a sort of psychic resonance than hair color, high cheek bones, or bra cup size.
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If this were true, after millions of years, there would be no small breasted women, yet there is.
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Get into the Game man. All this stuff can be learned very easily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Method
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The needs of women in the last 50 years have changed vs the needs prior. For centuries the priorities were: 1. Security. 2. Children. 3. Love. 4. Sex. The two highest priorities “were” provided by the “Husband Requirement”, leaving the last two priorities to the woman’s descression and gift of deceit.........Now that women have been “self-empowered” to control all four aspects of their priorities without social backlash, they have repositioned themselves to manage their own security, children, love, and sex life. (The basics are still to get between a woman and something that she want’s!).......Enjoy the moment, and get out of harms way.
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Do you want to meet a chick? Go to church.
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roho, your post above points toward the end of monogamy which was a Greek invention and a good one in TIME and time goes on… a woman has always wanted and always will companionship and community. I agree with your 4 priorities - security, children, love, sex. She has re-positioned herself ONLY because once the first two are met she then wants her man to be a woman (i.e. companionship/love) except when she needs him to be a man (protection/sex.) A female’s first love like a man’s is a female the mother. Then mother Nature has her grow out of it toward the male (a father). The male stays with his first love a female (unless somehow having a homosexual gene-?-or whatever it is that sends him on his journey toward males instead.) It’s why it’s much, much easier for a woman to allow herself to be bi-sexual, than it is for a male...unless again in each case it is *extreme. Cultural programming or nurture plays a big role in all of this when it is a near twin of mother Nature herself (which all lasting or traditional cultures MUST be.) In polygamous societies wherein women *expect to be one of a number of wives over time, there is usually no bond *stronger (except toward the good husband) than among women who love the same man. He is loyal to them and does not go outside of this form of marriage (for sex) and they are loyal to each other and to him. She NO LONGER needs him to be the impossible, another woman for her companionship, she has it as well as help from her sister wives in spades. And ALL of the kids are cared for as well in this community, and within the larger polygamous community. What a woman ‘wants’ so to speak is contextual and that context is always inevitably a mix of the conceptual (i.e. cultural) and what mother Nature requires of her and us a creatures. We are conceptual creatures. The Bible kows that. In *fact not even the New Testament proscribes polygamy nor does it endorse monogamy...That is purely secular culture if secular means juxtapositioned with the Bible. Of course we are all creatures of HABIT as well...and so when brought up in one culture (one form of ‘believing’ at the concpetual level) it is a tad painful to have to adjust to anything else unless mother Nature one way or another rubs our faces in it.
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“A man with experience is never at the mercy of a man with a theory.”
I have 55 years of bachelorhood, and have never dated a woman over the age of 27........Academia gives “woman” far more credit than she deserves regarding both the humanity of mankind, nor it’s morality. “Basheba” of the old testament is “classic woman” moving on in her ambitions at the expense of King David’s relationship with GOD............For all that say, “But I’m different and truely loved!”, I say, “Lose your job, and lose your wife!”, unless she knows a wealthy man that can control his emotions and not disrupt her family?........Ha-Ha.
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roho we ought to have a toast - what’s that line - ‘solid food & strong drink, that’s my
theory.’ I probably, like yourself, am never ‘bitter’ about woman as millions of years of
‘gathering’ for the nest, as we were farther out there in harm’s way hunting (i.e. food/wealth) can’t
be countervened by any conceptual framework or belief system. One ought to indicate, that
by saying yes we are conceptual-creatures i.e. write it - conceptual*CREATURES, like an iceberg and
its massive underbelly also has it tip. To her credit though voman is more intricately
familiar with the emotional realm hers & his and this does account for *some of her
perceived deception, when more expert in that area she simply has ascertained his feelings
would be hurt or he’s not yet ready for what he merely ‘thinks’ he is. etc. Also in this
monogamy culture she also has to always be paranoid about ‘holding’ a man. Because after
all if another is “in” it’s not just another who’s in - she then is “out,” in this bizarre
secular culture of monogamy. What on Earth were the Greeks thinking???? I love’em for much
of the rest of it, but for that?! Yuk. Taki, your small assignment for today is to Fix
that, you’re Greek, it’s on you. (humor ... & not really.) Should you fail we naturally
will disavow all knowledge of your actions. HUH? ‘I didn’t know, honey.’
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I am 5’11” tall and have always attracted lots of attention from men-especially men shorter than I am. Any theories on this, guys?
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Susan Menchey: perhaps the guys want to be eye to nipple. you’re my dream if you’re also a bread-winner! Am I yours? See the guys would say ‘no’ and so feel-like really that’s the hyprocrisy. Get it? Be honest. If we can’t be that in anonymous virtual reality, where can we ‘be.’ Susan, I lovingly await your
reply with both in hands, my own and a vibrator. That way it’s always win-win. This could be the beginning of a fine romance?
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Sue - you’re not a boy named Sue are you? If not I see I have a competitor as a suitor in W.F. H., directly above. Please also reply (honestly - if you’re capable of it even in cyber and/or to even, yourself) which style ‘all things considered’ you preferred in post, mine or the despicable, ‘his’. It’s not my dream to be one of many
men, rather a singular man with possibly, if necessary a number of women… unless you’re the exception to the rule which proves it - and forever sufficient. I wasn’t breast-fed so eye to nipple(s) is good for me. Is any of this working for you? Author’s note: guys, my experience is she won’t reply it’s too honest. So her ‘research’ suddenly becomes ‘private.’
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Paul s,
No competition from me; the lady is all yours.
I’ve been happily married for over 34 years.
H.F. Wolff
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Wolff did she teach you to wag your tail. Thanks though for the reply, you exist. Now with baited breath lest’s see what sue or susan has to ‘say’… 5’11” that means we could probably chow-down together with *equal ferocity and she not get too fat?
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Nice site.
Thanks, webmaster.
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