A reader wrote quite a while ago a rejoinder concerning my earlier comment on male behaviors, and I’ve been too busy to read it:
The ‘default’ rate of aggression is subject to many variables – personal temperament, cultural expectations, upbringing, prevailing and local economic conditions, to name a few.
It’s undoubtedly influenced by the presence/absence of civilization, and how a given culture defines civilized behavior.
Culture can moderate aggression, but even that varies with economic conditions, even within economic classes in the same culture.
There’s also a lot of variance within a given culture at different times. Changes in tolerance for domestic abuse within the U.S. in the past half-century is one example.
In mating terms, there will be temperamental variance in populations. Some will seek to spread seed as wide and far as possible, ala Genghis Khan, an evolutionary strategy that is inevitably paired with aggression.
I would predict men employed in aggressive occupations – military, law enforcement, football – will also have higher rape rates. That’s not to say it’s a conscious strategy, but in evolutionary terms it’s a self-reinforcing one.
Men who are temperamentally nurturing pursue a different strategy, by focusing on fewer offspring and maximizing their potential, and will reflect lower rape rates.
This isn’t a strict binary, of course – some men are capable of being both aggressive and nurturing, and that is reflected in adultery rates.
Ultimately the strategies that work best from an evolutionary standpoint are the ones that get perpetrated, and the most effective strategies vary with prevailing conditions.
Up to the last paragraph I agree with little comment. However, in the last one I think there’s some room for disagreement, or more accurately, elaboration. I think the problem is the definition of “work best” – what does the author mean, or even better, what does this mean in global abstract terms?
If those which seem to work best result in the rape of women, what does this mean for human culture? Will the currently comprehensive versions go away as the consciousness of women, periodically assaulted and sometimes extinguished, folds up and goes away? Or are males violently subordinated? (See A WORLD BETWEEN, by Norman Spinrad, for a random association event.)
I can see the readers point that, by definition, the best reproductive strategies survive for reuse. However, I am not yet convinced of the tacit point that self-conscious intelligence is a successful survival strategy; and whether our successors evolve into less intelligent beings, or less individualistic, or whatever, the entire plasticity of this process over time tends to make me wonder about the stability of reproduction strategies over time as well. Of course, I merely speculate; I have no data to back this up.
