In most societies where marriage customs are documented, some men are allowed to take many wives. Only the wealthiest and most powerful men, mind you, get to marry multiply. And their sexual despotism leaves many men unable to find a wife, and to take that stake in society that comes with having a family of their own.
I’ve written before about the unhappy consequences for societies where too many menare unable to compete on the mating market. In my recent book, I considered the relationships between evolution and marriage norms, and especially the causes and consequences of polygyny. Which is why I’m excited about a new review paper with a disarmingly simple title: “The puzzle of monogamous marriage.”
The three authors, Joseph Heinrich, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson are all established heavyweights in teasing apart the complex interactions between evolution, economics and cultural and social processes. The result, in this case, is an impressive review.
Their review explains why – at the level of societies – monogamous marriage norms have been so successful. Even though 85 percent of documented societies allow polygyny (one man marrying many women) and a very small number allow polyandrous marriage (one woman takes several husbands), societies that only sanction monogamous marriages have thrived. Moves toward institutionalised monogamy have been tied to the ascendancy of ancient Greece and Rome. And religiously-sanctioned monogamy preceded the rise of European democracy.
Heinrich, Boyd and Richerson argue that “the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects – promoting success in inter-group competition.”
If you needed any more evidence that atheism is on the upswing, last week’s Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne was apparently a rollicking success. I was otherwise engaged, but would have loved the chance to hear some of the most provocative thinkers of our time. Despite this progress and their much-better-than-average behaviour, atheists continue to suffer the [...]
First published in The Conversation 10 April 2011 We might expect dramatic sex ratio fluctuations when a whole population experiences extreme food shortages. Teeejayy People often ask me whether natural selection continues to operate on modern humans in industrialised societies, even though technology has liberated so many from hunger and early death. My answer is [...]
First published Friday 30 March 2012 in The Conversation as part of Natural History of the Present. My UNSW colleague Bill Sherwin just sent me a cautionary email. He’s part of an international team that studies the bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay, Western Australia. Over the years their research has changed many people’s minds about dolphins – [...]
At the start of the concluding chapter in Gad Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (review coming soon), Saad quotes Kenrick and Simpson as follows:
Nisbett introduced the series [on evolution and social cognition at the University of Michigan] by saying that he once thought every psychology department would need to hire an evolutionary psychologist, but he had changed his mind. Instead, Nisbett predicted that evolutionary theory will come to play the same role in psychology as it currently assumes in biology: “Not every psychologist will be an evolutionary psychologist, but every psychologist will be aware of the perspective and will have to address its explanations and constraints in his or her own work” (Nisbett, 1995, personal communication).
I have similar thoughts about biology in economics. If, in 20 years time, there is a small but active research field at the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology, I will be disappointed. Rather, all economists should have the tools to assess whether evolutionary biology is relevant to their work. A unit or two in biology and evolutionary theory should form the basis of early economics education. Only then will economists have the required tools at their disposal.
In 1970 I was fond of saying, “Twenty years from now you will not be able to walk down the hall of any social science department without hearing people say. ‘I wonder why natural selection favours that’. It is now thirty years later (42 as of this posting) and you can walk down the halls of most social science departments without fear you will ever hear the words ‘natural selection’.”
To be fair to both psychology and economics, Trivers than goes on to explain how biology and other fields (like psychology and economics) are unified disciplines able to respond to new data and altered empirical and theoretic perspectives. But the long time it has taken for evolution to take effect in other areas of social science such as sociology and social anthropology, and to some extent psychology, should act as a warning.
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*A quote which is, here, presented fourth-hand (This column(Jason Collins(Gad Saad(Kenrick & Simpson(Nisbett)))))
Here is my first-ever column for The Conversation – published 27 March 2012. As part of a column I have decided to call “Natural History of the Present” – it will be ideas and news about research that illustrates the relevance of evolution and ecology in understanding modern life and society.
Once the 'Stones made rock 'n' roll. Now they re-enact it.
In a century chock-full of cultural innovation, from communism to televangelism and from Rubik’s cube to airline travel, few 20th Century peacetime developments influenced the world as profoundly as rock music. That’s because, as I have argued before, “Nothing short of the opium of the masses, religion, which shares with rock so many ritual similarities, even approaches rock music for cultural expression of raw human biology”.
I’ve written before about the biology of what makes rock so compelling, but today I want to throw out some wild assertions as a half-baked attempt to answer the persistent and probably unanswerable question:
Is rock dead?
For me, the most compelling evidence in favour of the affirmative is a decade-oldvideo of a leather-clad Britney Spears dry-humping a motorcycle to a mechanically sanitized version of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”. It’s the antithesis of the Arrows’ 1975 original or über-rocker Joan Jett’s 1981 version. The one my friends and I played on the bus home from school until our cassette batteries ran flat.
I’ll show some vulnerability here and say I’ve plenty of sympathy for Ms Spears. But if she loves Rock ‘n’ Roll as much as the lyrics profess, she’s got a necrophilic irony in how she shows it.
Britney wasn’t the first pop royal to don rock affectations, only to find herself bereft of any real garments. Michael Jackson made an entire career of exactly that; a backbeat rhythm here, an Eddie van Halen solo there, and everywhere a messy pastiche of drivel that would make any postmodernist proud.
But as the psychiatrist Robert Jesse Stoller famously said, “Kitsch is the corpse that’s left after art has lost its anger”. Rock may exude a certain joi de vivre, but for me its defining emotion is the compulsion to rage against the machine. And Britney and Michael Jackson never showed that particular anger in their music.
For some time I’ve been forming the opinion that rappers have become the true guardians of rock’s anger. The story of 50 Cent , the poor orphan who detoured through juvenile correction and a very-nearly fatal shooting on his way to megastardom, sums up the ethos that rap has wrested from rock. His first album title, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, says it all.
Two weeks ago I was reminded by a most unlikely act that rappers have inherited the anger that once belonged to rock. Cape Town’s greatest cultural export, Die Antwoord, brought their unique brand of Zef rap-rave to Sydney’s Enmore theatre. And Dr Michael Kasumovic dragged me there to behold it.
If you haven’t yet experienced Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er rapping to DJ Hi-Tek’s ‘next level’ beats, then you certainly haven’t experienced anything like it. Consider them a translation of US ‘Gangsta’ rap personas into existing Afrikaans idiom and you’d still be less than halfway there. more… »
Johannesburg-based folks who are interested in science, evolution, sex, music, diet, family life or popular culture (and who isn’t) might wish to attend this event to celebrate the launch of the South African edition of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern Worldpublished in South Arica by UCT Press.
The event is hosted by my good friend Professor Graham Alexander, the Wits University School of Animal, Plant and Environment Sciences and Wits Alumni. It is wonderful to be returning to my alma mater to give what I hope will be an interesting and enjoyable public lecture. The event is open to the public, and I guarantee that the talk will be aimed at entertaining the general non-fiction reader (rather than being an academic seminar). Look at the RSVP details on the invitation below.
Invitation to the Johannesburg Launch of Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll
Reading oversimplified science stories is stressful business. Michael Clesle
There’s this gene that about half of all people carry. It’s a pretty nasty gene – it massively increases the risk of the carrier being a murderer or a murder victim, going to jail or dying in an accident. And a new paper in Bioessays – by Prince Henry’s Institute researchers Joohyung Lee and Vincent R. Harley – suggests this gene might be responsible for an aggressive response to sudden stresses.
That could explain the bit about murder, accidents and jail.
Despite all the bad press this gene gets, it isn’t all bad. Carriers have the same number of children as non-carriers. And the biggest winners in our evolutionary history – the people who have left the most descendants – have all been carriers.
The gene is called SRY – short for “sex-determining region on the Y chromosome”. It’s the crucial genetic instruction that triggers an embryo to develop into a male. Without SRY, the embryo becomes a girl.
New findings about the way SRY works might explain the differences in how men and women respond to stress. These findings might also explain why men are more susceptible than women to Parkinson’s Disease, schizophrenia and autism.
Running on adrenaline
The hormone epinephrine achieved fame and brand-name recognition as adrenaline. Everyone from weekend warriors to elite BASE jumpers (is there any other kind?) professes its near-magical capacity to elicit superhuman feats of strength and speed. When the chips are down and the boys need to give 110%, that old adrenaline rush kicks in.
Not only does that adrenaline rush cause many of us to speak in seamless cliché, it prepares us to fight or to flee from whatever threatens us. And that rush actually comes by way not only of adrenaline, but two other hormones in the catecholamine group: norepinephrine and dopamine.
For some decades, the catecholamine-mediated fight-or-flight response was considered the dominant human response to stress. But most detailed studies were done on men. As psychologist Shelley E. Taylor and colleagues from the University of California (Los Angeles) first proposed in a 2000 study, women’s fight-or-flight response isn’t nearly as strong. more… »
If you are in North American and want to have a copy delivered to you by launch day (13 March), then can I suggest Amazon.com who seem to have a very good price at the moment.
Nothing says "Everlasting Love" more than a globally televised Kardashian wedding. Check out Slide 6.
Introduction (From the Huffington Post piece)
Evolution by natural selection is a deeply fascinating subject. According to the philosopher Daniel Dennett, it is also ‘the most important idea anybody ever had.’
This very simple process fashioned almost every aspect of the living world; from human consciousness to the mould that grows on your bread.
Yet few adults, and fewer politicians, recognize how important evolution is. The number of wonderful books on evolution at your local bookstore may be growing, but it is easily outstripped by dubious or even harmful self-help manuals, dating advice, astrology, diet books and management babble.
Throughout the history of medicine, most progress came from improved understanding of how we get infections, diseases and other mental and physical afflictions. But medicine can become even better when we understand why we get sick, and why our bodies, including our minds, respond to infections and stress in the ways that they do. The new field of Darwinian Medicine illuminates the origins of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and the causes of obesity, depression and schizophrenia.
Important evolutionary insights go well beyond medicine. Evolution is useful anywhere living organisms are involved, such as agriculture, fisheries, biotechnology, conservation, and carbon accounting. Most of all, evolution can teach us much about what it means to be alive, and why people do what they do. Another new field, evolutionary psychology, could be the most important development in understanding human behavior since Herr Professor Freud cracked open his note book and asked for the first time ‘So, tell me about your childhood.’
In my new book Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World (University of New Hampshire Press), I aim to provide an entertaining glimpse of the world through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist. I research animal and human evolution in order to understand both human history and the lives people lead today.
The following slides provide a few highlights from the book, tidbits showing how an evolutionary perspective can give useful and interesting insights into familiar issues and problems.
Testosterone - the 'bad boy' hormone - influences how we collaborate
We evolutionary biologists over-enthuse at times about the competitive nature of selection. Observing animals in the wild often compels one to agree with the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes that for most of history human life was “nasty, brutish and short”.
But Hobbes didn’t give people the credit they deserve. People in all societies work together to achieve more, collectively, than the sum of their individual efforts. Now, evolutionary biologists and economists are revealing, together, the basis of collaboration and the egocentricity that undermines some teams.
University academics love to prescribe group projects. Students should get used to working in teams, we reason, because that’s how most of the workforce operates. Students – at least the hardest-working ones – suspect we prescribe group assignments to cut down on marking. They feel their conscientiousness and effort gets exploited by the more selfish, less organised or simply less engaged students. more… »
Mating Chinese mantis (Tenodera aridifolia), with the female A shorter version of this article first appeared in in the act of devouring the male.
A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax publications on 14 February 2012 under the headline “The true course of love was never about profit“.
Valentine’s day. What’s not to love about overpriced roses, overbooked restaurants and overstuffed soft toys? It’s the day we render the most multifaceted and untameable of human passions as flat and commercialised as a Kardashian marriage.
Okay, so I’m not so hot on Valentine’s day. Perhaps that’s not surprising for a scientist who studies sexual conflict, the intriguing but somewhat depressing idea that male and female evolutionary interests can never, exactly, coincide.
Early evolutionists took a typically Victorian view of sex: hasty, prudish and patriotic. Lie back and think of England. Do it for the Queen, the Empire, or the perpetuation of the species. Even today our nature documentaries talk about animal sex as though it were a benign tea-party. But sex in the animal world is far messier, more complicated and infinitely more interesting than most people realise.
Some female spiders and insects take a notoriously oral approach to sex – dismembering and consuming the hapless little male. Seed beetle penises resemble tools of mediaeval torture that inflict internal damage on the female. The female’s pain is the male’s evolutionary gain as the unwholesome experience dissuades her from mating again with another male. Anywhere you turn in the animal world, what’s good for the goose is seldom also good for the gander.
Human coupling and relationships, too, seethe with conflict. We disagree over when to start having sex, how often to have it, and how quickly to fall asleep afterwards. Couples differ on when to have children, how many to have, and who is going to get up in the night when the screaming starts. Economists model the simmering tensions about who does what household jobs, how much money the family needs and how to spend it. And many couples play chicken over whether to stay together, who is going to leave first, and who will take the children.
If all of this is too dark and unfamiliar to you, that is because only a small fraction of these ever-present conflicts breach the surface of our conscious awareness; most relationships feel happy most of the time. But the conflict between our interests, even within the most loving couples, means that people only manage to get together and raise children courtesy of a most remarkable evolutionary adaptation: romantic love.
Tina Turner called it a second-hand emotion, but according to anthropologist and author Helen Fisher it isn’t even an emotion at all: “It’s a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain.” Love is so many-splendoured because it does so many jobs. At least six different hormones signal to several dozen different tissues and organs at various times in our romantic lives, arousing us to crave sex, attracting us to healthy and high quality mates, bonding us to our beloved, and all the time helping us to thwart the conflict between us and focus on our common interests – including the difficult business of raising a healthy child. more… »
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means that Sex Lab researchers get their annual airing to talk all things sex and attractiveness. Rob Brooks had a great chat with linda Mottram on 702 ABC Sydney yesterday morning, and they have very kindly posted an audio file of the interview.
Rob also appeared on Triple J’s “Hack” – you might want to go to their site and download the show for Monday 13 February.
Humans are incredibly successful collaborators, but we all know from experience that some people work better in teams than others. Anybody who has sought or given a reference for an employee knows that the ability to work collaboratively is probably the most sought-after property in most job searches. And being able to work collaboratively requires an ability to put aside one’s own narrow ambition in order to ensure the best outcome for the group or team.
For some time, researchers have suggested that the bad-boy of human hormones – testosterone – reduces an individual’s tendency to be a good collaborator. Testosterone has a great many functions, but many of them involve motivating us to dominate others or at least compete against them. The link between testosterone and cooperation may be because testosterone diminishes and individual’s motivation or ability to collaborate, but it might just as easily come through other effects that testosterone has on motivation and performance in domains only slightly related to collaboration.
Which is why I enjoyed a paper recently published online by Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series B. (Testosterone disrupts human collaboration by increasing egocentric choices, by Nicholas D. Wright and colleagues at University College London, London School of Economics and Aarhus University, Denmark.
By administering testosterone to some subjects, and a placebo to others, and then tracking the effect of collaboration on a problem-solving task, they showed that testosterone markedly reduced subjects’ collaborative performance. That happened because, according to the authors,
“testosterone engendered more egocentric choices, manifest in an overweighting of one’s own relative to others’ judgements during joint decision-making.”
We often think only of men when considering the effects of testosterone on behaviour, but many of the functions of testosterone are shared in women. All the subjects in this study were women. It’s hard, when thinking about hormones and behaviour not to slip into stereotypes, but the tendency of the testosterone-supplemented women to overweight their own judgments and discount those of their collaborators sounds awfully familiar.
Could this seething throng of German soccer fans be the audience at a male lek?
I’m always excited when scientists try to explain large, complex areas of human endeavour in evolutionary terms. I’m doubly excited when those areas are infused with cultural, social and economic influences because there is no danger of getting into the tired old business of separating evolved genes from the various forms of nurture. In Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll, I tried to take this kind of approach – especially with rock music.
Today’s version of the journal Evolutionary Psychology contains an intriguing paper about the evolution of sport. American biologist Michael P. Lombardo argues that “sport has evolved to function like a non-human mating display arena, commonly called a lek, like those found in birds such as the sage grouse of the western USA.”
Lombardo argues, however, that athletic contests allow men to show off their physical prowess and behaviours important in both cooperation and conflict. The key here is that men are displaying to other men, much more than they are displaying to women.
I don’t know that I buy into all of the arguments, and I am certain that, like rock music and other big cultural phenomena, there are many evolutionary functions that all find some expression in sport. Any explanation of sport will have to explain the roles of sportswomen and female spectators too. But it’s an interesting idea and one well worth studying further. Perhaps the NSW Waratahs might wish to grant me a season pass so I can study the issue more closely?
I am also planning to be in the USA in mid-June and in South Africa in late June and early July to publicise the book in those countries. More details coming up on possible talks in those places.
The Week magazine rated Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll one of its two best non-fiction books of 2011. Here is what they had to say:
“This is a sublime piece of popular science,” said Bruce Elder in The Sydney Morning Herald. Professor Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist at the University of NSW, shows how evolution can explain key issues of the 21st Century. “The results are invariably illuminating and controversial.” And effortlessly entertaining, said Heather Catchpole in Cosmos magazine. Brooks’s tour of evolutionary biology is quite a ride, and he is refreshingly unapologetic in his support for science over religion.
Boney M. Who grew very wealthy from inflicting serious shopping-mall related damage.
Thanks to the sentimental Charles Dickens and the fabulous Dr Seuss, we have words in English for those who dare to question any facet of the Christmas spirit: Scrooges and Grinches. Childish name-calling seems the only defence against those of us who dodge hall-decking and dissent from artificial Yuletide cheer.
Well, this year I’m reclaiming those rights. Consider me Professor Scrooge McGrinch.
There is plenty to loathe about Christmas; from the tedious rounds of workplace parties, to the obscene garbage we buy as gifts, to the cynical attempts by Christians to hijack the whole fiesta for their own religious ends. I’m happy to put up with greedy, materialistic kids, and with months of family intrigue over whether we are going full-turkey or cold-seafood this year (inevitably it’s a bit of both). I even laugh when discount warehouse staff intrude into traffic, like Johannesburg hijackers, offering a seven-metre inflatable Santa for $29.95. But one feature of Christmas automatically induces a month-long migraine: carols.
Once, when I was 18, I took a trip on Vancouver’s ”Carols Boat”, a two-hour-long harbour trip that cemented two rules by which I have since lived: never attend a social occasion on a boat (you can’t get off), and never go carolling. I survived because the wintry beauty of Vancouver’s light-bedecked mansions more than compensated for the carols rasping through the boat’s speakers. The carolers on my boat lost conviction after about 15 minutes.
We all know somebody like Dick: a bloke who rates himself for no apparent reason and who optimistically reckons every woman – especially every attractive woman – is interested in him.
Most of us have met somebody like Sally too; a woman oblivious to her own attractiveness who seems to have Dicks orbiting her like ponderous moons around a particularly sunny planet.
Sure, Dick and Sally are blunt stereotypes, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also real people. In fact, it’s people just like Dick and Sally that are the focus of a new study by University of Texas researchers.
As any adolescent could tell you, negotiating sexual interest is a real minefield. Fail to recognise those flickering sparks and the only thing you’ll be kissing is the back of your hand. But over-interpret a small gesture or kind word and you could make a massive fool of yourself.
These problems of over- or under-estimating another’s sexual or romantic interest are not confined to teenagers. Experiments by evolutionary psychologists have, for some time, been showing us what we always suspected: men tend to think women are more interested than they really are.
The reasons can be found in Error Management Theory, a body of ideas developed by evolutionary psychologists, Martie Haselton and David Buss. Basically, in an ambiguous situation, the costs of playing it safe are not the same as the costs of throwing caution to the wind.
Most of us, when we hear a rustling in the grass, tend to tread carefully in order to avoid a potentially deadly confrontation with a snake. Our caution might slow us up more often than is necessary, but that is much better than being bitten by a venomous serpent. Throughout history, a tendency to overestimate the danger of snakebite kept our ancestors safe. Meanwhile, folks who underestimated the peril died, as did their carefree genes.
In much the same way, Haselton and Buss argued that men and women have, throughout history, suffered different costs of over-estimating or under-estimating sexual interest. Guys who were too cautious missed out on chances to mate. Men who overestimated women’s interest suffered no more than embarrassment, but they never died wondering.
These are the men from whom we mostly descend.
A woman’s evolutionary fitness depends less on the number of sexual partners she has than a man’s does. Deterring unwanted suitors and choosing the best among those on offer have always been the main challenges for our female ancestors. Women who weren’t cautious enough could end up pregnant to the wrong kind of guy.
This kind of “men are over-keen, women are over-cautious” message often attracts heat for merely reinforcing old, oppressive, stereotypes. But evolutionary psychology is at its best when it reveals where those stereotypes come from, and why not everybody conforms.
Perilloux, Easton and Buss set out to measure the differences between how individual men and women over- or under-estimate sexual interest from members of the opposite sex. To do so, they set up “speed-meetings” where every woman met each of five men for a short time, and every man met each of five women.
The subjects provided a lot of information about themselves, rated the attractiveness of each person they met, and estimated the sexual interest shown by each person they met.
As expected, the men tended to overestimate how interested each woman was, and the women tended to underestimate how interested each man was. The effect was so strong, it reminded me of comedian Larry Miller’s quip:
“If women knew – if they even had the slightest idea – of what men were thinking, they’d never stop slapping us.”
Men’s mistakes, it turns out, aren’t some simplistic curse of the Y-chromosome. Men who report being keen for a brief fling tended to overestimate women’s sexual interest. So did men who rated themselves – and especially their bodies – as attractive. But the men that women actually were attracted to tended to underestimate these women’s interest.
The errors that men made depended, too, on the woman’s attractiveness. The more attractive she was to him, the greater the chance he would overestimate her interest.
The study revealed less about which women were most likely to underestimate men’s interest. Women interested in or open to a short fling were neither more nor less likely to underestimate mens’ interest. Unfortunately the paper doesn’t say if women’s attractiveness tends to predict whether they are more or less likely to misperceive the level of interest from men. Information of this type would certainly be fascinating.
Evolutionary biology is revealing ever more about the complex push and pull between cooperation and conflict at the heart of our sexual relationships. Psychology is starting to show that we have an enormous capacity to deceive ourselves – all the better to manipulate and lie to others.
I am sure we will soon see clever experiments that ask whether women underestimate their own levels of sexual interest, lying to themselves in order to better deceive the men who orbit them. Likewise, do men deceive themselves into thinking they are keener, or smarter, or better looking than they really are in order to make more convincing suitors?
Like many of you, I’ve been doing a bit of Christmas shopping. I forgot how depressing the obnoxious crowds, the artless carols and the sheer tedium of shops tends to get me down. But worst of all, there seems to be plenty of crap and not much of substance out there for folks wanting to give a thoughtful gift. Which is why I’m here to remind you that Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll would make a wonderful gift for anybody who is a) literate and b) curious about our world. That’s a pretty big target market.
If you want to buy a friend or loved one a copy, then here are some of your options:
If you can make it in to UNSW, I have a few copies to sell at RRP. The good part is I can sign these copies for you. Contact me via the book’s Facebook page – and make sure you “Like” the page to keep getting updates.
If you live in north America, you may find options 2-5 not open to you. That’s because University press of New England is publishing S,G & R in March 2012. Visit their website or Amazon.com for the chance to pre-order.
In the mean time, good luck with your shopping. Watch this space for my latest rant about Christmas carols and the death of art – due out in the next couple of days.
Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has shaped the modern world will be published as a hardcover and ebook in North America in March 2012. They have recently posted the details and the cover image on their website. The details are also becoming available on Amazon.com and I imagine pre-orders will soon be possible.
If you are not in North America, or desperate to get a copy before March, I still recommend you buy the Australian version, available from these suppliers.
Camping peers into the future. Admits he's not very good at it.
Harold Camping is back in the news, but for partly the right reasons. If you’ve blocked the sheer banal stupidity from your mind, you might recall that Camping was the American preacher who predicted that the world would end on May 21st.
Camping had previously made a similar prediction, based on pseudonumeric bible babble that the world would end on some unremarkable date in 1994, but this time he was pretty sure. So sure, in fact, that his fervent preaching had divided families and cause many people to completely discount their futures with an all-or-nothing bet on the rapture coming. According to Camping, believing in the May 21 rapture was a prerequisite to being saved by God.
After the 21st of May came and went unremarkably, I suggested the only dignified thing for Harold Camping to do would be to admit he was wrong and to devote himself tirelessly to helping those he had led astray to rebuild their lives and relationships. Instead, Camping behaved far more predictably. He modified his prediction, saying that the rapture had quietly begun and that it would end in the much-anticipated apocalypse on October 21st.
Happily for those of us who stopped believing in soothsayers, the tooth fairy and power balance bracelets some time ago, and who rather like it here on earth, Camping is just one of a long line of bullshit artists who have consigned themselves to the ignimony.
But I do want to say something in Camping’s favour. more… »
Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll:
How evolution has shaped the modern world.
Published in Australia and New Zealand in June 2011 by NewSouth Books. To be published in March 2012 in North America by University Press of New England.
This is the webpage for Rob Brooks, his research group, and his forthcoming book. It is where Rob and his colleagues write about evolution in the modern world. Rob is Professor of Evolution and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at UNSW, Sydney.
In most societies where marriage customs are documented, some men are allowed to take many wives. Only the wealthiest and most powerful men, mind you, get to marry multiply. And their sexual despotism leaves many men unable to find a wife, and to take that stake in society that comes with having a family of their own.
