• mindlesscrollyparrot
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    3 months ago

    Add observations of male mammals killing their rival’s offspring and note how we see this in modern men.

    No, we don’t see this. Men do not routinely kill their rivals’ offspring and, if they did, the mother would want them locked up.

    Most of your logic implicitly assumes that males and females pair up. The game theory is quite different otherwise. What makes you think that our ancestors 100,000 years ago did this, when you’re explicitly comparing them to mammal species that don’t?

    You succeeded at line 1, I’ll give you that.

    • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, this is some evolutionary psychology shit. A subject that is pure bullshit, we simply do not know enough about a biological history, or how the brain developed, and works, to truly, accurately, ascribe psychological phenomenon directly to evolutionary considerations.

      • mindlesscrollyparrot
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        3 months ago

        The lack of evidence is one thing, but his argument contradicts itself.

        He says that:

        • the heavy investment that women make in their offspring means that they go to great lengths to make sure that their partners are committed
        • we observe modern men killing their (the women’s) offspring in the expectation that those women will turn around and have children with them instead.

        Apparently, the women failed to select fathers who would stick around to defend their offspring, and they’re happy to mate with men who kill the children that they have invested so much in. This strategy is clearly bad, so evolution would select against it.