Some counterevidence for human sociobiology

I do appreciate your post; see Yvain's comment below for my response. It prompted me to re-read the famous letter Against Sociobiology from 1975. Points to note:

• Several of the lynchpins of this letter are based on dogmas that we now look back on as having been upheld for purely ideological reasons. The opening paragraphs criticizing ideas that behaviors could be genetically-biased as "absurd" are one example. The claim that animal behavior can't teach us about human behavior is another. The revisionist pre-history story they allude to which rejects the idea that hunter-gatherers had sexually-defined roles is another.

• The motivation for the letter, and its main arguing point, is not about truth, but about EO Wilson's alleged reactionary motives.

• They associated Wilson with the Nazis in the second paragraph.

• Recall that this letter is the very best argument ever made against sociobiology, by the most prestigious biologists (including Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin), which most later arguments cite as authoritative.

• This letter was written by a group that met regularly for over a month to compose it, in a room very near E.O. Wilson's office. No one ever told him about it until after it was published. If the authors of the letter had any interest in truth, they would have walked down the hall, shown him the letter, and said, "What do you say to this?"

I have the impression that 1970 marked the onset of a new dark age in science, after which ideology played a much larger role in the selection of ideas.

Voted up because I like the attitude you show in your first two paragraphs.

However I think that you misunderstand the claims that you argue against.

Men have lower chances of having any kids than women

The obeservation underlying this is that that the average person has three times as many female as male ancestors. But every child has one male and one female parent. So the average male ancestor of now living people must have three times as many decendants as the average female ditto.

This might be because genocides were carried out by killing all men in a population, so that the women were forced to marry the conquerors. Or because two thirds of males that were born in some era were killed as children. Or because there was a tradition were some men killed other men's children, so that the surviving children had fewer fathers than the children that were born.

But in any case there was something going on that is not caught by your statistics. And the simplest (and nicest) explanation is probably that women got to choose who they had sex with, and some men were more attractive than others.

So why does your statistics say differently? I see two explanations off the top of my head. 1) Marriage, or in other words rationing of partners. Today each man marries one woman, and then other women are expected to marry another man and have at least one child with their husband. 2) Contraception, people have fewer children when they don't want children nowadays.

Also, I expect that if that study would talk about biological fathers rather than social fathers you would get different results.

Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

• Rich and rational people have as many children as they want, not as many as they would have had in the past.
• See above about marriage. When many women could have the same man without being shamed more attractive men would have more children relative to others. Rich men are ceteris paribus more attractive than others, and that difference was probably bigger when normalcy for both men and women were on the limit of starvation
• The "poverty line" is not really relevant in an evolutionary context. Being "above the poverty line" in America today means being inconceivably wealthy in the terms that were normal 200 years or more ago. Genetically we have not changed much in a couple of centuries.
• Wealth in the modern sense is not really relevant either. The kind of property that would count in your survey has not been around long enough to make any significant changes to the human genome.

Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

Is this really a widely held belief? It seems to me that the actual claim made here is simply that rich men have higher sexual market value on average.

Number of children is not a good proxy for sexual market value, especially since reproduction and sex are now only weakly related.

If I wanted to test sociobiology as a theory with these statistics, I'd be much more interested in the numbers for hunter-gatherer tribes. In particular, I expect the invention of birth control has driven these numbers well away from what sociobiology would predict.

I guess these are a test of whether sociobiology can be applied willy-nilly to make predictions about every facet of our own society, but I hope people don't think it's that easy.

One thing that seems to get left out of sociobiological discussions is arranged marriages. Some fraction of our history/genes isn't about people choosing their own partners.

There seems to be a boost in children among the richest.

I thought the higher death rate of men would show up in the data.

It should be noted that human beings are an unusually infertile species.

An important consideration is that our society has a very strong taboo against polygyny.

I wouldn't have assigned much of a prior probability to either of those common sociobiological beliefs, myself. It would hardly surprise me if they were both complete nonsense.

So what do you mean when you say that these beliefs are "standard" or "widely held?" Obviously, I am not a representative sample of the population, so I may have no opinion on a widely held belief. But I'm not aware of strong evidence that these beliefs are widely held, or at any rate are more widely held than the evidence would warrant.

Or, with tongue firmly in cheek, I claim that I'm presenting counterevidence for the common belief that [insert proposition here] is a common belief...

"Even in their forties, men were less likely than women to have a child and more likely to have fewer children. "At age 50, almost 20% of men are childless. The estimate for women is about 13%.""

• http://www.overpopulation.org/archivesJan-Apr2003.html

I estimate that while most of my beliefs are true (otherwise I wouldn't believe them in the first place),

The former doesn't follow from the latter: it could be the case that each of your beliefs are your best guess, but you still give them a probability less than .5 if they contain more than a single bit of information.

Could you link to more specific things than the whole report? I think the first bullet point is supposed to link here.

I posted this earlier. Relatively trivial interventions can skew results away from what evolutionary psychology might predict...

• Men have lower chances of having any kids than women

• Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

Um, I think those were true in the ancestral environment. They're not necessarily true today because of birth control, condoms, and all sorts of other stuff.

Those claims are about ancestral environments, not ones with modern contraception, wealth, and education.

With respect to men and women having children, recall that men have shorter lifespans with much early death from high-risk strategies (industrial accidents from more dangerous jobs, death by violence, etc, etc). Old men are those who were not killed off by those strategies, and tend to be relatively high-status (high status is associated with longer life, not to mention that married men live longer).