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Sex at dawn : the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Hot Thirst No. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Hot Noble Judgment by L. Ryan by L. Hot Patient Zero by L. Hot Into The Darkness by L. Hot The Depth of Darkness by L. Hot The 10th Cycle by J. But why do I care about this? Well, I happen to believe that ignorance in various forms is one of the chief architects of suffering and destructive failure in the human species.
Of course I myself still remain ignorant about lots of stuff — as well as making errors in judgment about lots of other stuff — so this diatribe is by no means meant to elevate my perspective to a singularly true or correct viewpoint. I am a simmer, too. In this spirit, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the authors of Sex at Dawn for providing such splendid material to dissect, and also to the friends and acquaintances who enthusiastically recommended this book to me.
It does help to have a sense of humor about these things. So what are the highfalutin information analysis standards I wish to promote? And where did they come from? I have no scientific training, after all. I was accepted into Hampshire College in , but when I brought the first tuition bill to my father, he took one look at it and burst out laughing. Subsequent attempts to study philosophy and drama at the University of Washington after a year of living and working in the state to achieve residency were met with a frustrating inability to remain poor enough for Pell Grants while still feeding and housing myself.
I also think the large, impersonal classes some exceeded students , the dearth of passion in the professors teaching level courses, and the preoccupation of my fellow students with elevating grades and obtaining degrees over actual learning, all conspired to disillusion me about higher education.
So instead of railing against the goads, I dropped out of school and held a series of information technology jobs at the University. I did this mainly so I could still be near its libraries and stimulating atmosphere, while continuing my own research in various disciplines. But the main point here is that any critical thinking skills I now have are probably the result of chumming around with thoughtful, intelligent and frequently well-educated friends, coworkers, lovers and family members during my lifetime.
They helped me see the error of my own simfulness, and I am indebted to them for their once-and-future tutelage. Now on to the those pesky criticisms…. Overconfidence: Drawing hard and fast conclusions instead of what should be soft and malleable ones. Rigidity: Cramming square data into a round hypothesis, instead of revising the hypothesis to suit the data.
Denial: Allowing the blind spot of bias to become blindness to all contrasting information. Insulation: Dismissing or ignoring alternative explanations for the same data without thoughtfully or thoroughly considering them.
Reduction: Evaluating any event, interaction or correlation in isolation, rather than in relationship with the entire system in which it takes place. Conformance: Allowing prevailing attitudes, assumptions and beliefs of peers, values sub-culture, philosophical tribe, etc. The overarching thesis of Sex at Dawn is that instability and dysfunction within modern monogamous relationships is a result of a cultural disruption of natural, biological sexual appetites and behaviors.
The problem, however, is that very little of the evidence presented in the book supports this conclusion, and the smidgeon of useful data is undermined by faulty assumptions. The most prolific sim of the book — one committed in nearly every chapter — is the sim of insulation.
Insulation: There are other explanations for this biology. For example, humans are the only primates whose nose protrudes substantially beyond their mouth. Thus anthropological biologists like Gillian Bentley have described one evolutionary advantage of pendulous breasts as keeping babies from suffocating. Bentley has been talking about this idea of comfort feeding for over a decade, additionally citing examples of cultures where female breasts are not sexualized to support her notions.
But is this alternative explanation evaluated in Sex at Dawn? This, the book explains, resulted in an end to centuries of equal female status, egalitarian sharing of all resources in a community, and open sexual relationships with lots of different partners in groups of hunter- gatherers. Other research suggests that each culture, region or time period presents varied and unpredictable reasons for elevation or reduction in female social status see Artemova.
Does Sex at Dawn consider these alternate explanations for variable female status? Not even passingly, for again there is no mention of them. Insulation: Anyone who has spent time around young children knows that possessiveness and jealousy are deeply reflexive responses in many if not most kids. To claim that a two-year-old has somehow been inculcated with agrarian paternity concerns regardless of whether they were raised in a commune, by a single parent, or by a couple in a sexually open marriage is…well, you get the picture.
Insulation: Yes, this could be one explanation for human biology. But there could be many others as well. For example, what if human biology reflects differences in overall sexual behavior patterns? Like the Bonobo whose males also have relatively large genitalia , we have sex a lot more frequently, and in a much larger variety of positions, than other primates do. In fact, humans spend more time overall having sex more than any other species.
Sex at Dawn, even while enumerating some of these behavioral differences, refuses to entertain they might account for the variations in human biology, and instead relies on them to bolster its thesis. The evolutionary advantages of encouraging procreation in everyone within hearing distance of such vocalizations seem obvious to me — the arousal benefits the species, not necessarily the individual who is vocalizing.
And because valid alternate viewpoints are so lacking in Sex at Dawn, the credibility of its conclusions are for me at least severely eroded. The sim of insulation is of course an excessive occurrence throughout our modern culture, especially in mass media.
There is no room for any other explanation than the obvious but unproven one.
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