the psychological case for Evolution

God in heaven! How do you people all manage to post so regularly — don’t you have to work? Straggler’s already said some of what I’ve written here, but I spent so long writing this the other day that I feel obliged to post it anyway. As Perdition points out, not all of them do. I remember watching a programme about basic personality types in children once, which claimed (a bit optimistically, in my opinion) that you could divide infants into two basic personality types from a very early age by jumping at them in a scary mask and saying boo. The babies were then classed as intorverts or extroverts based on whether they cried or giggled.The structure of the test (or at least the way it was presented) may be a bit dubious, but the point is that there was variation in the way the children responded — they didn’t have one standard, instinctive fear response.To be clear, I don’t disagree with your general point — that our evolutionary history leaves us with tendencies to act and think in certain ways, some of which may be counterproductive to a healthy and happy life in the 21st century. I just think you have to be very careful about oversimplifying it. Humans are very adaptable behaviourally, which I think is one of the main reasons we’ve come to dominate the planet like we have, and they aren’t just constrained by the requirements of life on the African Savannah. Most of our brain’s wiring is done after we’re born in response to the stimuli we encounter in our lives, so I don’t think we have an exact selection of scary shapes (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!) stored in our minds from birth.The nature of the fear response might be a product of our evolutionary history that’s not always appropriate for modern life. An adrenalin rush, the urge to flee and increased oxygen supply to your muscles may be all well and good when someone’s coming at you with a knife, but it’s hardly appropriate for a job interview. I agree that monogamy has arisen many times without the need for religious instruction to get us there, I’m just not so sure we can say monogamy is the primitive condition for humanity. Chimpanzees and bonobos are both about as far as you can get from monogamous! I don’t know if it’s so helpful to look to them to discover our ancestral state, though. 6 million years separates us from the chimpanzees, and just by looking at the variety of ways things are done in human societies it clearly takes a lot less time than that for mating patterns to change. I think the mating patterns of humans and our ancestors would have varied wildly depending on the ecological and cultural constraints of the time. Nevertheless, If monogamy gets a majority vote it’s a very slim minority, and there’s good evidence that polygyny has been common throughout human history as well.The ethnographic atlas compiled by Patrick Gray is an attempt to compile data on social organisation in 1231 different societies, past and present. Here are the counts for monogamy and polygamy:Monogamous: 186Monogamous with occasional polygyny: 453Polygynous: 588Polyandrous: 4I had started to write an account of why I think monogamy is more widespread nowadays, but I’m having difficulty expressing it well. I thought I’d post what I’ve written so far before the thread moves any further.