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 to apply.
That's actually supportive of the battered women situation being an activation of the primitive capture-bonding coping mechanism. When this trait evolved, there wasn't any way to get out of the environment of the tribe that had captured you--unless your own tribe managed to capture you back. Staying in the social protection of the tribe that had captured you was a better deal for your genes than dealing with large predators on you own--so it should be expected that getting women out of the environment might well make them more anxious. Right response for when it evolved, it is just in the wrong environment now.
And "own source of income" just didn't exist. So it is not surprising that cues that logically *should* help women out of the battered situation don't have a lot of effect because the capture-bonding response was shaped to a situation far different from the modern one.
Now, the capture-bonding response in humans is *not* a finely tuned, gene based behavior mechanism like you see in Sphex http://www.fact-index.com/s/sp/sphex.html. Along with other gene based psychological mechanisms (such as mother-infant bonding) it is mediated by flooding the brain with chemicals in response to the capture situation of fear, threats, and small acts of kindness.
If you want to give women the power to leave such relations, what *might* be effective would be to figure out what chemicals their brains are releasing to maintain them in that state and give them blockers for those chemicals. I suspect that people on blockers for the brain reward chemicals that mediate bonding to cults would be almost immune to being sucked into cults. In the same way, if the chemical state induced by capture could be blocked, the women could probably get out of the relations.
On the other hand, the psychological trait to induce capture-bonding (TTIBC) is itself probably invoked by some witches brew of neurochemicals set off by environmental cues. Something tripped the "guards" in the Stanford prison experiment to abuse the "prisoners." http://www.prisonexp.org/ Figuring out what chemicals are involved and then treating the partners who are doing the beating with blockers for *those* chemicals might be an even better approach. (Assuming the goal is to stop the abuse and not just to get the women out of the relationship.)
A third--and probably politically incorrect--method would be to capture the abused women and have them bond with a surrogate for a short time.
> 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.
I can't account for this. Abusing your own kids has got to be a side effect of something else since that's not the kind of thing that would evolve.
> 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 a recent study we don't know about, but its still likely she would have heard.
A study would be interesting.
We do have clear, strong indications of environmental effects. For example, people who were abused in day care, foster parents, etc. have a greater likelihood of being abused. A sexual abuser does not have to be a blood relative to affect the behavior of a survivor. etc.
Actually, there is a very easy genetic explanation for all this. Its that humans are genetically favored to be adaptive and to learn from their environment. Alas, that has no predictive value for what lessons will be learned.
I agree that we have genes that favor learning. and that we can learn the wrong things. The conditionally switched on psychological mechanisms that are involved in mother-infant bonding, capture-bonding, and "looming privation" wars are the kinds of behavior that are really important for genetic (if not personal) survival, and mechanisms to learn them are lacking.
Keith Henson
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