[Futurework] Re: It's sex-security actually (wasRe: Sex, of course!)

[Ed Weick]

Keith, you do seem to have a thing about hunters and gatherers: "The hunter-gatherer male wants sex with as many females as possible and high testerone levels have co-evolved with high status. The female wants security in order to raise her offspring safely so she will aim to consort with the most accomplished male."  You make them sound like Conan the Barbarian.   I've worked with hunters-gatherers in northern Canada, and it really isn't like that.  The ones I know are really quite monogamous, and by their own ancient traditions.  There would have been hell to pay if, in there small communities, every guy was trying to have sex with every girl.  There undoubtedly was experimentation, as in our societies, and there may even have been wife exchanges, but the overall objective was to keep the peace for the sake of group cohesiveness.  Testostrone had to be kept firmly in line.   As for status, that was obtained through doing things that were useful to the survival of the group, like being a good hunter or medicine person.  Good hunters, or whatever, never really prided themselves on being what they were.  Nor did they expect glorification.  They just did what they did and helped others do it too. Ed     ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: Ed Weick Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 2:58 AM Subject: It's sex-security actually (wasRe: Sex, of course!) Ed, At 21:20 08/10/2003 -0400, you wrote: There are many ways of feeling worthily human.  Irish monks used to live in little beehive huts on remote islands.  Southeast Asian monks felt they had attained the ultimate when they broke their begging bowls.  Those may be extremes, but I would be willing to bet that a considerable part of the mainstream population does not want a lot of wealth and status - enough perhaps to make themselve feel valid in society, but surely not as much as Onassis.  And, yes, people do want sex, but more than that, they was secure relationships with others of the same or opposite sex. I was being provocative in saying that sex is at the bottom of it all. It's better described as sex-security. The hunter-gatherer male wants sex with as many females as possible and high testerone levels have co-evolved with high status. The female wants security in order to raise her offspring safely so she will aim to consort with the most accomplished male. There are, of course, other more general behaviours, such as social bonding, a sense of fairness, etc that have also co-evolved in order to hold the group together. The economic systems that have developed since about 12,000BC have well-nigh wrenched the above apart in a sort of mechanical way -- the community has been largely destroyed in every developed country, the family is under great stress also. But I believe that the primal instinctual behaviours will re-assert themselves in due course in new types of social institutions -- much nearer in sructure to our hunter-gatherer groups of old than to the large hierarchical nation-wide systems that we have today.  Keith Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>