Re: The Savage Solution
Dan said: Most data suggests that it is mostly environmental. Indeed, my wife knows of no studies that indicate a genetic link. She has not worked in the field for about 10 years, so it is possible that there has been a recent study we don't know about, but its still likely she would have heard. Is she aware of any studies that looked for a genetic link and failed to find one? I know next to nothing about social science, but the impression I get from Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ is that until recently almost all studies tried looked for correlations between the home environment and future behaviour, but this clearly isn't good enough to find the causes of the behaviour. For example, finding that there is a correlation between growing up in an abusive home and becoming abusive tells us absolutely nothing about whether being abused causes future abuse unless we separate out environmental and genetic effects by studying identical twins growing up together or apart (or whatever). Rich ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
- Original Message - From: Richard Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2004 8:15 AM Subject: Re: The Savage Solution Dan said: Most data suggests that it is mostly environmental. Indeed, my wife knows of no studies that indicate a genetic link. She has not worked in the field for about 10 years, so it is possible that there has been a recent study we don't know about, but its still likely she would have heard. Is she aware of any studies that looked for a genetic link and failed to find one? I know next to nothing about social science, but the impression I get from Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ is that until recently almost all studies tried looked for correlations between the home environment and future behaviour, but this clearly isn't good enough to find the causes of the behaviour. For example, finding that there is a correlation between growing up in an abusive home and becoming abusive tells us absolutely nothing about whether being abused causes future abuse unless we separate out environmental and genetic effects by studying identical twins growing up together or apart (or whatever). Rich That's a separate question from the one I'm considering: being abused. With women being abused, we can look for likelihood of entering an abusive relationship based separately on the environment and on genetics. If it were genetic, for example, we would see no difference between a child born to an abusive father who was out of the picture before he abused him/her and one who grew up in a home where he/she was regularly abused. To the best of my knowledge, these questions have been asked with null results. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
At 11:06 PM 21/05/04 -0500, you wrote: - Original Message - From: Keith Henson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 9:22 PM Subject: Re: The Savage Solution Now I can't see *any* logic for battering behavior for either the man or the woman to be selected--any more than susceptibility to addictive drugs is selected. Damaging the mother of your children is not an effective way to pass on genes. Further, battering women is rare in the hunter gatherer societies that have been studied. (Others are almost always within earshot and intervene before damage is done.) That really isn't all that clear. We know that studies of our own culture has drastically underestimated the frequency of battered women and abused children until very recently. Since it is shameful for the person being battered, it is often hidden. We also know that investigations the result of anthropological studies need to be taken with a grain of salt (e.g. coming of age in Samoa). We also know that nomadic societies that can be considered as pre-agricultural often treat women as property. So, I don't think we can draw many conclusions. This was direct observation by people who lived for long periods of time with them. So the default assumption is that battering behavior on both sides is a side effect of other things that were selected. Capture of women in hunter gatherer societies was probably the gene selection filter. Those that reoriented toward their captors often became ancestors, those who did not did not become breakfast.. Perhaps 10% of your ancestors were captives. While this is understandable generalizing, it is not emperically based. Quite a few reasonable sounding things turn out false, once a systematic study is done. The ten percent number is from genealogy studies in the few remaining primitives. Actually, it has only been about 3 or 4 centuries since capture brides were a tradition in the UK. The argument for where the abuser side came from is something I only recently figured out: If humans respond to capture and abuse by bonding, then the trait to abuse captives is likely to have also been selected. The argument isn't as obvious as the survival link with capture-bonding. But it figures that in a world where 10% of an average tribe's females were captured, those who had the genes for an instinct for the brutal behavior needed to capture and turn on the capture-bonding trait in the captives left more descendents than those without it. Of course, battered wife is an arrested or recirculating (trapped) version of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in the human wild state was a one time event, applied to captives for about the time hazing is today. My understanding from ancient literature is that slaves were taken in battle and everyone knew what the place of slaves was. Indeed, while the Iraquois were not strictly hunter-gatherer (they did farm), they were a society that had slaves. Your description is not consistent with what I've read about their practices. They were *far* advanced, clear to the chiefdom stated of political advancement. That is way beyond the kind of hunter gatherer environment in which people lived when the vast majority of our evolutionary selection happened. What I am saying is that it took political and military technology to maintain salves that the most primitive people just didn't have. But even granting the possibility that primitives took slaves, the ability to socially reorient when captured give them the chance to be ancestors (females anyway--male slaves probably didn't have much opportunity to reproduce). So the trait to reorient would still be favored by selection. Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her? Probably not. Certainly true. One looks at her home environment. If there is abuse in that environment, she is much more likely to enter into an abusive relationsip. You could argue that it's genetic, but there are considerable amounts of data that indicate that this type of behavior is learned...as detailed below. Almost any time there is a genetic element, there is a possibility of learning to shape it up better. Still, to the extent that the capture-bonding trait is evoked by abuse, it should be an a widely shared psychological feature of humans. But you have a good point. Even if a high fraction of women would react much the same way to abusive treatment, the only ones who are subject to it is those who pick a guy who does in fact abuse. Being willing to accept such dudes as partners probably is learned. Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship? Unfortunately no. The ones that I would think would apply if your theory were correct (getting out of the environment and having one's own source of income) have not been found
Bullying and Battering (was: The Savage Solution)
Keith Henson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snippage Of course, battered wife is an arrested or recirculating (trapped) version of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in the human wild state was a one time event, applied to captives for about the time hazing is today. There is a bit of a precursor to this trait in chimpanzees. Males are fairly brutal at first to females they take out of the group into remote areas during consortships. I would not say female chimpanzees bond with males who take them on consortships, but they do quit trying to escape after a few beatings. Also in baboons, where males regularly smack the females about. An intriguing paper reports on how this behavior was greatly diminished in a baboon troop whose alpha males were killed off by tuberculosis; now males tend to fight others of their own rank, and indulge in more mutual grooming: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/13BABO.html?ex=1085284800en=2cc8aafc0e63c9b1ei=5070 (our login/password: brinl/brinl) http://makeashorterlink.com/?T27513D58 Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine. Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate... ...researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit. Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe... ...The researchers were able to compare the behavior and physiology of the contemporary Forest Troop primates to two control groups: a similar-size baboon congregation living nearby, called the Talek Troop, and the Forest Troop itself from 1979 through 1982, the era that might be called Before Alpha Die-off, or B.A.D... ...But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group, said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. It's an attitude that's being transmitted... ...Jerkiness or worse certainly seems to be a job description for ordinary male baboons. The average young male, after wheedling his way into a new troop at around age 7, spends his prime years seeking to fang his way up the hierarchy; and once he's gained some status, he devotes many a leisure hour to whimsical displays of power at scant personal cost. He harasses and attacks females, which weigh half his hundred pounds and lack his thumb-thick canines, or he terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot retaliate. Dr. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who wrote the 1985 book Sex and Friendship in Baboons, said that the females in the troop she studied received a serious bite from a male annually, maybe losing a strip of flesh or part of an ear in the process. As they age and lose their strength, however, males may calm down and adopt a new approach to group living, affiliating with females so devotedly that they keep their reproductive opportunities going even as their ranking in the male hierarchy plunges. For their part, female baboons, which live up to 25 years compared with the male's 18 inherit their rank in the gynocracy from their mothers and so spend less time fighting for dominance. They do,
Re: The Savage Solution
- Original Message - From: Keith Henson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 9:22 PM Subject: Re: The Savage Solution Now I can't see *any* logic for battering behavior for either the man or the woman to be selected--any more than susceptibility to addictive drugs is selected. Damaging the mother of your children is not an effective way to pass on genes. Further, battering women is rare in the hunter gatherer societies that have been studied. (Others are almost always within earshot and intervene before damage is done.) That really isn't all that clear. We know that studies of our own culture has drastically underestimated the frequency of battered women and abused children until very recently. Since it is shameful for the person being battered, it is often hidden. We also know that investigations the result of anthropological studies need to be taken with a grain of salt (e.g. coming of age in Samoa). We also know that nomadic societies that can be considered as pre-agricultural often treat women as property. So, I don't think we can draw many conclusions. So the default assumption is that battering behavior on both sides is a side effect of other things that were selected. Capture of women in hunter gatherer societies was probably the gene selection filter. Those that reoriented toward their captors often became ancestors, those who did not did not become breakfast.. Perhaps 10% of your ancestors were captives. While this is understandable generalizing, it is not emperically based. Quite a few reasonable sounding things turn out false, once a systematic study is done. The argument for where the abuser side came from is something I only recently figured out: If humans respond to capture and abuse by bonding, then the trait to abuse captives is likely to have also been selected. The argument isn't as obvious as the survival link with capture-bonding. But it figures that in a world where 10% of an average tribe's females were captured, those who had the genes for an instinct for the brutal behavior needed to capture and turn on the capture-bonding trait in the captives left more descendents than those without it. Of course, battered wife is an arrested or recirculating (trapped) version of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in the human wild state was a one time event, applied to captives for about the time hazing is today. My understanding from ancient literature is that slaves were taken in battle and everyone knew what the place of slaves was. Indeed, while the Iraquois were not strictly hunter-gatherer (they did farm), they were a society that had slaves. Your description is not consistent with what I've read about their practices. Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her? Probably not. Certainly true. One looks at her home environment. If there is abuse in that environment, she is much more likely to enter into an abusive relationsip. You could argue that it's genetic, but there are considerable amounts of data that indicate that this type of behavior is learned...as detailed below. Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship? Unfortunately no. The ones that I would think would apply if your theory were correct (getting out of the environment and having one's own source of income) have not been found to apply. It is possible that explaining the evolved psychology of what is going on to both parties might help in some case. I remember explaining another psychological mechanism, drug like attention rewards, to an ex-scientologist. He reported later that understanding (or at least having a plausible explanation) for what had screwed up his life and that of his children was a great relief and stopped his nightmares cold. Humans *can* invoke higher order rational mental mechanisms to change their behaviors and sometimes do. It helps if they understand the reason for washing hands. (To invoke Dr. Semmelweis.) Is a battered woman more or less likely to be abusive to her children? From first pass theory, neither more or less. There is no particular reason for the psychological mechanisms involved to be conjoined. An abused women is definitely more likely to abuse her children than a woman who has not been abused. The best way that has been seen to reduce the abuse is to teach the woman how to take care of herself. To the extent considerable extent that the mechanisms are genetic, children of wife batterers are statistically more likely to be abuse themselves, even if raised away from their biological parents. Most data suggests that it is mostly environmental. Indeed, my wife knows of no studies that indicate a genetic link. She has not worked in the field for about 10 years, so it is possible that there has been
Re: The Savage Solution
At 03:35 PM 19/05/04 -0500, you wrote: --===0026721408== http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_seetheforest_archive.html#10 8499378391336322 From Right Hook, Michael Savage the other day: (Savage says he has 6 million listeners, so take this seriously): subquote 'I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. snip Unfortunately, this turns out to be expected from evolutionary psychology considerations. Rather than repeat it here, put xenophobic memes in a search engine for the concepts. Part of the problem is trapping. Jay Forester discussed something related over 30 years ago, where slums are places where it is very hard to find work, but people are trapped there because it is the only place they can afford without work. I discussed trapping in terms of what killed most of the corn farmers in the American Southwests. Falling income per capita is the closest modern match to running out of game and berries that turned on wars between hunter gatherer tribes for our remote ancestors. What I now see is a feedback loop where looming privation causes xenophobic memes--like Michael Savage is spreading--to become more common in the meme pool. The war interferes with income generation--making privation worse--which makes war memes do better. Right now we are so dependant on oil that a massive supply disruption over a planting season or two would kill millions, perhaps many hundreds of million--even in the western world. The loop has positive feedback until economic disruptions kill or starve a substantial fraction of the waring populations and the income per capita turns up. It could take a *long* time, the Southwest Natives started into this mode about 1260 and the few remaining tribes were still going at each other when the Spanish showed up hundreds of years later. The Easter Islanders are thought to have killed each other for a few generations to reduce their population to about 5% of the peak. I have been such a free speech supporter that I became a refugee because of it. But I see a case for yanking the mikes in such cases. The effects from these from these people are indirect, but a lot of people will die from the causal chains linked to these active xenophobic meme spreaders. Shutting these mike jocks up isn't going to cure the problem though. There needs to be strong efforts taken to reduce the birth rates everywhere. Second, oil must be replaced as an energy source. I was involved with one of the few that are potentially large enough, solar power satellites, back in the mid to late 70s. Given the current power structure, I don't know what would be harder to put over, female empowerment/reducing the birth rate or displacing oil as an energy source. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
Keith said: Unfortunately, this turns out to be expected from evolutionary psychology considerations. Rather than repeat it here, put xenophobic memes in a search engine for the concepts. Isn't evolutionary psychology about *genes* for behaviours common to all humans (as compared to behavioural genetics, which is about differences in behaviour linked to differences in genes) and not memes for behaviour? Is your view that memes for xenophobia thrive in the environment of human brains because such brains have evolved to think xenophobically? Or are you using evolutionary psychology to mean the theory of memetics? It seems to me that the way we approach these problems depends strongly how much situations depend on differences in memes rather than differences in genes. Rich GCU Genuinely Interested ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
At 02:05 AM 20/05/04 -0700, you wrote: Keith said: Unfortunately, this turns out to be expected from evolutionary psychology considerations. Rather than repeat it here, put xenophobic memes in a search engine for the concepts. Isn't evolutionary psychology about *genes* for behaviours common to all humans The genes and behaviors don't have to be common to *all* humans, just under selection pressure that makes the genes and the behavior they influence more common. Walking and talking are not universal traits (though darn close). They were certainly under selection since our very remote ancestors did neither. (as compared to behavioural genetics, which is about differences in behaviour linked to differences in genes) and not memes for behaviour? True, but there is no reason not to have genes predisposing to learning memes. Being good at learning memes can promote the survival of your genes. Is your view that memes for xenophobia thrive in the environment of human brains because such brains have evolved to think xenophobically? Memes for xenophobia thrive in an environment of human brains *conditionally.* Human brains effectively have a gain setting for circulating (and believing) xenophobic memes. This gain setting differs from one person to another, but the population average gets turned up depending on environmental conditions. Looming privation is the term I use to describe the main environmental influence on this setting. This makes sense because the build up of xenophobic memes is part of the mechanism that led (after a delay) to hunter gatherer tribes attacking another tribe when they were facing hard times (i.e., starvation) as a consequence of population build up or a drop in the carrying capacity of their environment. Attacking another tribe in good times is stupid. Genes favoring stupid behavior don't last long. Genes become more common that favor hunter gatherers spending their efforts hunting game, gathering berries and raising kids. But when the alternative is the whole tribe starving to death or going on the warpath and trying to take the resources of the tribe next door, genes favoring *that* behavior become more common. Who knows how many conditionally expressed psychological traits humans have? Mothers bond with their infants depending on chemical switches (their brains are soaked with oxytocin during birth). Capture-bonding or Stockholm Syndrome is switched on by being captured and fear. Zimbardo's prison experiments at Stanford are best explained as being an expression of the evolved counter part to Stockholm Syndrome. I.e., we have a psychological mechanism to mistreat captive to induce fear leading to capture-bonding. That trait is conditionally switched on by the mere presence of captives. Or are you using evolutionary psychology to mean the theory of memetics? No. Memetics just isn't a big enough sandbox for this kind of thinking. It seems to me that the way we approach these problems depends strongly how much situations depend on differences in memes rather than differences in genes. Differences in memes and the feedback on human genes is where culture (and large human populations) came from. Someone on another list pointed me to this excellent paper: The mimetic transition: a simulation study of the evolution of learning by imitation. Higgs PG. Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2000 Jul 7; 267(1450): 1355-61 http://pmbrowser.info/pmdisplay.cgi?issn=09628452uids=10972132 But when it comes to wars, the details of the particular memes that sync up one tribe or nation to attack another are not important. Any xenophobic meme or set of them in a general class will do. As can be seen in a very recent example, in leading up to a war people/leaders will seize on any reason and elaborated it to justify an attack. When the Easter Islanders were facing ecological collapse they split into waring camps based on long ears vs short ears. (The whole population was closely related--founding population of perhaps 20 people). They went at each other for generations till the peak population of 20,000 was reduced to perhaps 1000, and the ecosystem started to recover somewhat. Then, with enough to eat, war mode switched off. It is a dire and depressing business to realize that genes optimized in the stone age to cope with periodic privation of hunter gatherers are now pulling strings attached to nukes. Keith Henson PS. It is almost as bad to realize that 1) there are not many people who can understand these arguments, 2) the arguments depend on understanding *evolution*, 3) the solutions take decades, 4) . . . . . 5) . . . .. Rich GCU Genuinely Interested ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
- Original Message - From: Keith Henson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 8:11 AM Subject: Re: The Savage Solution Who knows how many conditionally expressed psychological traits humans have? Mothers bond with their infants depending on chemical switches (their brains are soaked with oxytocin during birth). Capture-bonding or Stockholm Syndrome is switched on by being captured and fear. Zimbardo's prison experiments at Stanford are best explained as being an expression of the evolved counter part to Stockholm Syndrome. I.e., we have a psychological mechanism to mistreat captive to induce fear leading to capture-bonding. That trait is conditionally switched on by the mere presence of captives. The problem I have with evolutionary psychology is that it is an a posterori general explaination. So, I thought I might deal with this by asking some questions about an area that can be explained by arguements similar to that you have given above: Battered women. My wife has worked years with battered women, and has written her master's thesis in that area. So, I am at least moderately familiar with this area, and have a resource for getting more information. So, let me ask some general questions: Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her? Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship? Is a battered woman more or less likely to be abusive to her children? I would very much appreciate a discussion that starts with evolutionary psychology and then shows how the predictions can be deduced from the basic premises. Dan M. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
Dan said: The problem I have with evolutionary psychology is that it is an a posterori general explaination. The problem I have with evolutionary psychology and memetics (especially in combination) is that I often find it hard to see what the theory being proposed actually is. This is especially true of the latter - I find it difficult to see how much of any given memetic discussion is just a fairly simple explanation clothed in a language of memes and feedback loops and so forth, how much depends on specific properties of given memes in non-obvious ways, and how much of the explanation really hinges on human psychology itself rather than the memes in question. I don't get the same problem when reading and thinking about the genetics or evolution of non-psychological traits or even of behavioural traits in sociobiology and ethology. I will certainly think about Keith's messages on the subject more when I have some free time! Rich ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Savage Solution
At 09:26 AM 20/05/04 -0500, Dan Minette wrote: snip The problem I have with evolutionary psychology is that it is an a posterori general explaination. So, I thought I might deal with this by asking some questions about an area that can be explained by arguements similar to that you have given above: Battered women. My wife has worked years with battered women, and has written her master's thesis in that area. So, I am at least moderately familiar with this area, and have a resource for getting more information. Excellent! So, let me ask some general questions: Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her? Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship? Is a battered woman more or less likely to be abusive to her children? I would very much appreciate a discussion that starts with evolutionary psychology and then shows how the predictions can be deduced from the basic premises. First, EP (and for that matter evolutionary biology generally) states that features of a species (including behaviors) are either the result of direct selection for the feature or a side effect of something that was selected. Now I can't see *any* logic for battering behavior for either the man or the woman to be selected--any more than susceptibility to addictive drugs is selected. Damaging the mother of your children is not an effective way to pass on genes. Further, battering women is rare in the hunter gatherer societies that have been studied. (Others are almost always within earshot and intervene before damage is done.) So the default assumption is that battering behavior on both sides is a side effect of other things that were selected. Capture of women in hunter gatherer societies was probably the gene selection filter. Those that reoriented toward their captors often became ancestors, those who did not did not become breakfast.. Perhaps 10% of your ancestors were captives. The argument for where the abuser side came from is something I only recently figured out: If humans respond to capture and abuse by bonding, then the trait to abuse captives is likely to have also been selected. The argument isn't as obvious as the survival link with capture-bonding. But it figures that in a world where 10% of an average tribe's females were captured, those who had the genes for an instinct for the brutal behavior needed to capture and turn on the capture-bonding trait in the captives left more descendents than those without it. And, like the capture-bonding trait, over a long enough time the trait to induce capture-bonding would become nearly universal. I.e., it would be triggered in response to the conditions needed to turn it on. I suspect that's the evolutionary origin of the trait expressed by the guards in Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. http://www.prisonexp.org/ The trait to be brutal gets automatically switched on by the mere presence of captives. I am open to a name for the trait to induce capture-bonding (Or we could use the acronym TTICB.) Of course, battered wife is an arrested or recirculating (trapped) version of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in the human wild state was a one time event, applied to captives for about the time hazing is today. There is a bit of a precursor to this trait in chimpanzees. Males are fairly brutal at first to females they take out of the group into remote areas during consortships. I would not say female chimpanzees bond with males who take them on consortships, but they do quit trying to escape after a few beatings. Back to your questions: Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her? Probably not. Since the ability to respond to capture bonding was so strongly selected for so long, the trait is probably close to universal--and not just in human females, captured males exhibit the same bonding trait to captors. Since the mechanism is in the same class as drug addiction, theory would predict that high intelligence does not protect against being in a battered relationship any more than it protects against drugs. Theory *does* predict that battered women will rationalize the heck out of their situation, but we already knew that. Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship? Unfortunately no. It is possible that explaining the evolved psychology of what is going on to both parties might help in some case. I remember explaining another psychological mechanism, drug like attention rewards, to an ex-scientologist. He reported later that understanding (or at least having a plausible explanation) for what had screwed up his life and that of his children was a great relief and stopped his nightmares cold. Humans *can* invoke higher order rational mental mechanisms to
The Savage Solution
http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_seetheforest_archive.html#10 8499378391336322 From Right Hook, Michael Savage the other day: (Savage says he has 6 million listeners, so take this seriously): subquote 'I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour[s] -- a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them ... Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes ... They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail.' The next day Savage added that Arabs were 'racist, fascist bigots,' and purported to speak for a majority of Americans regarding the war. He offered several all-American solutions to our problems in the Middle East. 'Right now, even people sitting on the fence would like George Bush to drop a nuclear weapon on an Arab country. They don't even care which one it would be. I can guarantee you -- I don't need to go to Mr. Schmuck [pollster John] Zogby and ask him his opinion ... The most -- I tell you right now -- the largest percentage of Americans would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on a major Arab capital. They don't even care which one... 'I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.' /subquote Do you think Arabs know that many right-wing Americans are talking like this? Do you think THIS is the real unspoken message that the Right wants out there? Sure, Savage is a wingnut, but he's not the only one talking like this by a long shot. Enough of them are talking like this, and our government sure is acting like it's their thinking... Sometimes I think the best way to understand the messages the Right is putting out there is to learn what their target audiences are hearing. Do you think Bush is going to renounce this kind of talk and apologize for it? Fat chance. - As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. - Voltaire ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
