There must be violence against women

For men, it begins with abandoning the marital bed, by opting to sleep elsewhere in the house. After this, they may discuss the matter with any respected person for the husband's or the wife's family, who could be in a position to advise the wife. If this also does not work, then the husband yields to beating the wife slightly. They do this because of a misunderstanding in the Quran, as the word says Darban, which is commonly understood today as beating. However, in Classic Arabic it means to set examples or to announce and proclaim. The more accurate meaning of this last one is that the husband finally has to set forth, to make a clear statement or proclamation, and if these measures fail, then divorce is preferable.

Similarly, wives may take actions such as abandoning the marital bed, following by leaving the husband's home for that of their parents, brothers or any other relatives. They may do this more than once, but if such action fails, they may not continue to live with their husband and via their relatives, they may request a divorce.

See, ladies? It's not about "beating women," it's about the man being dominant, as Allah dictates! Feel better now?

In this manner, the same culture that once was civilized while Europe was bogged down in the Dark Ages continues to engage in pointless and barbaric theological quibbling while destroying what's left of its ancient art (including its dance).

From the article:

"Will it be a better society once we see wives, mothers, sisters and daughters going from one police station and one court to another, complaining against their husbands, fathers, brothers and even sons?"

It will be a better society when disgusting bronze-age laws justifying violence against women are finally abolished.

...Advocating the philosophy of the insane.

PZ said: But no culture is perfect and every culture has some ugly relics creeping about in the basement; in this case, the mistreatment of women is one such horrid little vestige of a barbaric society.

Mistreatment of women only? The fact is that the entirety of Islam is a horrid vestige of barbarism.

"Dear readers - especially women - don't think that I hate or am against women; rather, I simply mean to preserve the morals and principles with which Islam has honored us."

So what he's saying is "Don't think that I hate women just because I hate women"...makes sense to me.

I don't know why the "Human Rights" organizations want to get involved. Women aren't fully human after all.

Their bodies make great currency, though.

OK, I just need a shower after typing that.

I'm just amazed that the author admits that the beatings are due to a mistranslation of the Qu'ran, but hey, it's okay to proceed and slightly beat the wife.

*boggles*

There's a difference between knowing that this sort of behaviour is propagated and SEEING somebody actively defending it. (But then I shouldn't be so shocked, considering that here in the US, we have Mike Huckabee telling women to be "submissive". The degree is not too far removed.)

"According to them, women should complain to the courts about any type of violence against them. Likewise, should fathers and brothers complain to police if their daughters or sisters violate moral, Islamic or social norms?"

Violation a social or moral norm is the business of the courts if, and only if, that norm has been made law. So, it makes sense to involve the courts if someone assaults you, but not if they violate some perceived 'norm' which the law has not seen fit to legislate on. He seems to be ignoring this entirely, suggesting that courts are equally applicable to every circumstance: if it's inappropriate to go to a court over someone wearing immodest dress, it must be inappropriate to do so over theft, murder, or assault.

For men, it begins with abandoning the marital bed,

Whoa! He lost me right at the first step. Talk about your unreasonable approaches. Is there no end to the lunacy these guys will undertake?

That last bit is legitimate -- of course there is a fear that outsiders will destroy one's culture, especially the valuable, useful, loved parts of one's historical tradition, so there is a natural tendency to bunker up and defend everything with equal zealotry.

Really? This fear is more legitimate than fearing women's sexuality? To me they are both fear of otherness/unknown on the part of the patriarchy. If your kids want to pick up parts of another culture and abandon yours, sorry, that's how the world works. I can understand being afraid of that, but I wouldn't call it more legitimate than other fears that are based in lack of control over other people's behavior.

Sounds like Promise Keepers to me.

Sounds like Promise Keepers to me.

Couple of my uncles were in that.
*shudder*

It's like they're a different species, it really is. Unfortunately, they're (mostly) not, which is depressing.

I tried domestic violence once. I hit the fridge.

It's vaguely unsettling to realise that, if you stripped the Islam-specific language out of this article, it's only about 60 years out of date in North American culture. In North America, they used to call the exact same thing "home correction." Different idiom, same bullshit patriarchal meaning.

The significance of which statement is to tell all these "Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages" types not to get too up on themselves, because by that criterion, the Middle Ages ended around 1965 hereabouts. (At least in Islamic cultures in the actual, [post-Islamic] Middle Ages, women could get divorces, albeit not easily.)

I'm with Danley, this would fit right in with the "family values" crowd.

So his argument can be summarized as:
"Don't judge moderate misogynist wife-beaters by the actions of the extreme misogynist wife-beaters."

Ok, got it. You're a trogolodyte.

the Middle Ages ended around 1965 hereabouts.

1965? Don't be ridiculous. Everyone knows that that Middle Ages ended when "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" hit the charts in '64.

Horrible, horrible.

"I simply mean to preserve the morals and principles with which Islam has honored us."

Because clearly, that's more important than personal dignity. Allah forbid any personal autonomy is allowed.

Islam needs to change. I'd far prefer it just vanish, but it definitely needs to change.

Cultural relativism has long been used to justify any and all "traditional" cultural practices, no matter how inhumane and embedded in relations of domination and exploitation.

Edge.org: What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_3.html#taylor

Timothy Taylor, archaeologist, University of Bradford:

"Relativism

Where once I would have striven to see Incan child sacrifice 'in their terms', I am increasingly committed to seeing it in ours. Where once I would have directed attention to understanding a past cosmology of equal validity to my own, I now feel the urgency to go beyond a culturally-attuned explanation and reveal cold sadism, deployed as a means of social control by a burgeoning imperial power.

In Cambridge at the end of the 70s, I began to be inculcated with the idea that understanding the internal logic and value system of a past culture was the best way to do archaeology and anthropology. The challenge was to achieve this through sensitivity to context, classification and symbolism. ...

But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable? Relativism self-consciously divests itself of a series of anthropocentric and anachronistic skins -- modern, white, western, male-focused, individualist, scientific (or 'scientistic') -- to say that the recognition of such value-concepts is radically unstable, the 'objective' outsider opinion a worthless myth.

My colleague Andy Wilson and our team have recently examined the hair of sacrificed children found on some of the high peaks of the Andes. Contrary to historic chronicles that claim that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honour that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring, diachronic isotopic analyses along the scalp hairs of victims indicate that it was peasant children, who, twelve months before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet to make them acceptable offerings. Thus we see past the self-serving accounts of those of the indigenous elite who survived on into Spanish rule. We now understand that the central command in Cuzco engineered the high-visibility sacrifice of children drawn from newly subject populations. And we can guess that this was a means to social control during the massive, 'shock & awe' style imperial expansion southwards into what became Argentina.

But the relativists demur from this understanding, and have painted us as culturally insensitive, ignorant scientists (the last label a clear pejorative). For them, our isotope work is informative only as it reveals 'the inner fantasy life of, mostly, Euro-American archaeologists, who can't possibly access the inner cognitive/cultural life of those Others.' The capital 'O' is significant. Here we have what the journalist Julie Burchill mordantly unpacked as 'the ever-estimable Other' -- the albatross that post-Enlightenment and, more importantly, post-colonial scholarship must wear round its neck as a sign of penance.

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as 'the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.' By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of 'the Other', relativism steps away from logic into incoherence."

Similarly, wives may take actions such as abandoning the marital bed

Lost me right there, too. ;-)

When is the human race going to abandon the martial bed?

Sounded like the Islamic Bill O' Reilly

"But no culture is perfect and every culture has some ugly relics creeping about in the basement; in this case, the mistreatment of women is one such horrid little vestige of a barbaric society."

In this case, in that case, in a all cases. Name *one* sociecty that doesn't have this particular creature in its basement.

"Sounded like the Islamic Bill O' Reilly"

Excellent! I can even hear his outraged cries about the War On Fatwas... while being caught on tape talking dirty to his camel.

"Sounded like the Islamic Bill O' Reilly"

And falafel would make a bit more sense than it does for an Irish boy from New York, at least for one that's surprised black folks know "how to act" in a restaurant.

""And falafel would make a bit more sense than it does for an Irish boy from New York, at least for one that's surprised black folks know "how to act" in a restaurant.""

I always loved how Bill tried to play his response down, but let's face it, his reaction was little different from one who might have been surprised by getting full service from well-mannered Aardvarks ...

moral, Islamic or social norms

On the bright side, it's nice that the author recognizes how separate these three things are.

Okay, I'm sure he really doesn't...but at least this one phrase implies the difference.

Mistreatment of women only? The fact is that the entirety of Islam is a horrid vestige of barbarism.

Posted by: Ric | January 4, 2008 11:04 AM

Nothing like flexing one's unthinking, blind belief in one's cultural superiority with the commonly ignorant and intolerant "Islam is all bad" to prove the point... Thanks.

Islam isn't all bad. Not all Muslims are bad. No matter how much you denigrate and dehumanize them.

It's vaguely unsettling to realise that, if you stripped the Islam-specific language out of this article, it's only about 60 years out of date in North American culture. In North America, they used to call the exact same thing "home correction." Different idiom, same bullshit patriarchal meaning.

...

Posted by: Interrobang | January 4, 2008 11:28 AM

Sixty years ago? How about James Dobson? How about Promise Keepers? How about the leadership of the Southern Baptists? They're their today. Beat your kids. Beat your wife. Raper her if you feel like it. You're the head of the house and it's their duty to submit.

Personally, I don't think we have much to say about what the fucktards in Islam do when they use their moldy book to justify their behavior. After all, the same crap is still endemic to huge swaths of our own country.

I found it interesting to compare this article with the article "The Queen of Oranges" in the same issue of the Yemen Times. It seems that progress is possible, though all of this sort of progress should have all been made long ago. Here's a link to the Queen of Oranges article: http://tinyurl.com/2cnkmk

Women should bone up on their kitchen skills, such as putting a razor edge on a knife blade. Then, the first time her father or brother gets high-handed with her, she will act meek and wait for the bastard to be stupid enough to sleep under her roof after he's raised his hand to her.

Since their behavior shames her, she can see these as honor killings, right?

"Will it be a better society once we see wives, mothers, sisters and daughters going from one police station and one court to another, complaining against their husbands, fathers, brothers and even sons?"

Um, yeah?

Actually there was some good advice there.

As the proverb goes, "If the speaker is mad, the listener should be mindful." This proverb is good advice for every man and woman not only to keep their ears open, but also to avoid the misleading propaganda of such organizations, whose surface aims hide other destructive ones...

I think there may be several evolved reasons for violence against women. In these cases it is mostly perpetrated by her male relatives. I suspect that they include violence during pregnancy causing low birth weight and so reducing the chances of cephalopelvic disproportion (certainly fatal for the fetus, likely fatal for the mother during evolutionary time). Her male relatives have a motivation to maximize her total reproductive capacity by preventing her death during childbirth even at the expense of the current fetus she might be carrying (her current husband has more motivation to protect this specific pregnancy, even at the cost of future ones where he might no be her mate).

Another reason might be to trigger the epigenetic pathways that mediate the cycle of violence to "program" the developing fetus to better cope with a violent environment.

Note, "evolved" does not mean the same as "good", or "desirable". Evolution would work to minimize the sum of deaths due to cephalopelvic disproportion and deaths due to honor killings. If killing 1% of women for "honor", saves 5% of women from cephalopelvic disproportion, it is a fabulously successful evolved "feature", reducing deaths by 4%.

I discuss some of these things in my blog on infanticide and acute psychosis.

I wonder how the author of the piece would react if I told him that I found his moral behaviour unacceptable and so I was going to slap him around a bit but it OK because there was an angel who dictated a book to some guy in a cave 1400 years ago and in there it said that I should do it. Seems OK to me!

Their bodies make great currency, though.

Not fungible enough, and it's difficult to make change.

There is an alternative to women traipsing from police station to police station and court to court. That would be women going to one police station, and a few high profile cases where the book was thrown at domestic abusers. In this case, I think legal codes have to lead social change.

The wise COLUGO (#19) has touched a sensitive area of self-examination amongst scholars. "Cultural relativism" is a useful tool that offends cultural our authoritarians, on one hand, because it exposes the cruelties of "cultural truths" accepted in more than antique examples. On the other hand some scholars seem to accept the tool as "truth". This happens because there is a feeling of guilt for the actions of our ancestors with regard to bringing "salvation" to so many indigenous cultures in a prescription that rarely worked without many fatalities.
The tool of analysis works & we can now doubt ourselves while we remind US that those past are dead. The "cowboy" prescription of killing for righteousness needs the same cultural analysis. Living culture reform can come from within if it is motivated from a humane motive. Rabbi Wise diddit.

""Personally, I don't think we have much to say about what the fucktards in Islam do when they use their moldy book to justify their behavior. After all, the same crap is still endemic to huge swaths of our own country."""

Bullshit...

Yes, in a free country there are going to be many people with contradictory ideas on what is moral and what is not. The fact is, despite your pretending not to see the obvious, is that we do not endorse such crap as a society. For example, there are people who believe in having sex with children that live in the US. No one would claim this is an endorsement for such a view. Just as with child-molesters, many nutbag right-wing religious folk do believe in crazy shit, but that does not mean we let them get away with it. If a woman went to the police and said her husband beat her and forced her to have sex with him, that man would be arrested in a heart beat and jailed. Here is the key freakin' differences guy. Can you grasp this?

Moses writes:
Islam isn't all bad.

Sure, it is. Unless I missed something, someplace, it's a bunch of religious nutbaggery some whackjob made up in an attempt to justify some worldly power. It's just as bad as any of the other religious absurdity people poison their brains with.

Put another way - any theoretical benefits that islam might have would be equally achievable without it. So, like all religion: "who needs it?*"

mjr.
---
(*Other than suckers who like getting ripped off, pushed around, and have their heads filled with bullsh*t)

Its not just Islam that advocates hitting women :-
The Bible is God's inerrant Word and
we will honor it as literal and valid for all time.

The wife is to submit to her husband,
and the husband is to love the wife.

CDD is practiced between a man and a woman.

In CDD, the husband has authority to spank the wife.
The wife does not have authority to spank her husband.

http://www.christiandomesticdiscipline.com/Home.html
Remeber folks "slap yo bitch up"

I figured out pretty quickly that this was written by a Muslim. It reminded me a lot of the "justification" a Muslim gave me a few months ago justifying the Islamic practice of killing Muslim apostates. By the way, this article was in the Yemen Times. I recall a poll done in Yemen a few years ago - approximately *half* of all Muslim clerics in Yemen believed death was the proper punishment for Muslim apostates.

http://www.christiandomesticdiscipline.com/Home.html

PZ- i would love to see your take on this little gem- found through greta christina's post on the skeptics circle last nite. i was digging around her posts and came upon this- and wanted to puke.

There are a lot of people out there who will do anything to put women in their place in the name of religion.

yuck

Sixty years ago? How about James Dobson? How about Promise Keepers? How about the leadership of the Southern Baptists? They're their today. Beat your kids. Beat your wife. Raper her if you feel like it. You're the head of the house and it's their duty to submit.

I think the point that was being made was that it was outlawed ~60 years ago, not that it wasn't still practiced.

nutbag right-wing religious folk do believe in crazy shit, but that does not mean we let them get away with it.

oh?

seems like they "get away with it" quite a lot.

or have you missed every battle fought in the culture war of late?

Chris Comer comes to mind as a very recent example. there are literally thousands of examples of "nubtbags getting away with it" if you go back over the last couple of decades.

Huckleberry just won the rethuglican caucus in Iowa.

or, use the war as another example.

all the poll data show that most americans support us getting our asses out of there, and yet, we're still there.

sure, other countries can look at that poll data and think that most americans want this to stop, but there's that old addage:

actions speak louder than words.

frankly, i don't see how you can make the conclusion you did, if you try to view the US from an outside perspective.

If a woman went to the police and said her husband beat her and forced her to have sex with him, that man would be arrested in a heart beat and jailed.

this entirely depends on the state and county you happen to be in, unfortunately.

most domestic violence cases go unreported. do you know why?

I rather think you have a far rosier view of the current sociology of the US than is warranted.

this entirely depends on the state and county you happen to be in, unfortunately.

It can even depend upon which officer.

I used to work in the DV field. Let's be honest, in general, American institutions deal with the situation far better today than they did 40 years ago. While there are still serious issues, for the most part, we no longer institutionalize violence against women as a property crime against her owner. That's worth something.

It can even depend upon which officer.

indeed.

it's just easier to show variability by state/county than by individual.

While there are still serious issues, for the most part, we no longer institutionalize violence against women as a property crime against her owner.

true, from most legal standpoints, but we all know that "institutionalize" means different things to different people.

many still hold their [local] church as the highest authority.

I agree, that similarly to racism, domestic violence issues have made progress (especially, as you mention, over the last few decades), but we certainly are a long way away from saying the US is "cured" of such things.

Yup. It depends. "Marital rape" is still considered an oxymoronic fiction in some areas.

I agree, that similarly to racism, domestic violence issues have made progress (especially, as you mention, over the last few decades), but we certainly are a long way away from saying the US is "cured" of such things.

I would never make such a claim, particularly as someone who teaches the sociology of both race and gender.

I would never make such a claim

not saying you did, just to be clear.

Culago,

Excellent post. As PZ's remark "That last bit is legitimate -- of course there is a fear that outsiders will destroy one's culture..." demonstrates there is a rich vein of cultural relativism running through post-modernist thought.

Culture is nothing sacred, or at least it shouldn't be. It is just a set of behaviors and customs practiced in a population. Even if those behaviors are completely benign or even beneficial they deserve no special insulation from interactions, and hence modification or elimination, with competing behaviors and customs of other populations.

Just as languages are being "lost" so to will idiosyncratic or redundant cultural practices as advances in communication and travel bring about greater and more frequent contact between previously isolated populations.

The arbiters of these changes will be the individuals of each population. Artificial and compulsory impediments used to preserve static cultural artifacts should be condemned as acts of coercion.

It is just a set of behaviors and customs practiced in a population. Even if those behaviors are completely benign or even beneficial they deserve no special insulation from interactions, and hence modification or elimination, with competing behaviors and customs of other populations.

Meh :) "Resistance is futile." I beg to fdiffer.

Here is a fine example of a father reacting badly to his daughter's behavior. This occurred in a suburb south of Chicago within the last week.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/721685,oakfire10108.article

Have to love "family values".

Fathers are responsible for their daughters' behavior, but human rights organizations deny this too. Brothers also should take action regarding their sisters' behavior, especially if their parents are too old or dead. If a daughter or sister makes a mistake - especially a moral one - that negatively affects the entire family and its reputation, what's the solution by such organizations?

Wrong. Fathers and brothers are responsible for their own behavior, and no one else's.

Daughters and sisters are responsible for THEIR own behavior, and no one else CAN be truly responsible. I guess it's just typical of religion that you have to force your own viewpoints, morality and behavior on others, rather than just taking care of an being responsible for your own behavior.

I still see no legit examples have been given that shows the US as a society endorsing the beating, rape, and murdering of women for religious and/or moral reasons. Instead some posters have pointed to where individuals have done stupid things that show no signs of large support by society in general, and claim this is the same as what we see in Islamic countries where it is socially accepted as the norm when a woman, "acts in an immoral manner."

Please show me where there is a woman, or women crying out to be saved in the US from religious oppressors, who are harming her/them (rape, beating, and so on) and he cries are going unanswered?

Please show me where there is a woman, or women crying out to be saved in the US from religious oppressors, who are harming her/them (rape, beating, and so on) and he cries are going unanswered?

you could always try looking at the statistics estimating the amount of unreported domestic violence in the US, before concluding there isn't any.

here's a starting place for you:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/07/sources.html

domestic violence in this country is still a HUGE problem, and by saying "society doesn't support it" you really do have to be entirely specific.

your point glosses over the reality, is what I'm saying.

...more:

http://www.abanet.org/domviol/statistics.html

Ichthyic...

Where the hell is your response? You gave examples of hidden violence where we, as a people, are actively trying to fight, despite the walls that slow such down. My girlfriend manages a store, and one of her employees was having trouble with her abusive boyfriend. Everything was done to try and help the girl, including banning the boyfriend from the store, and even calling in the police. They took his guns away, and offered her all sorts of support. In the end the girl turned on my girlfriend claiming, despite earlier requests for assistance, that she should mind her own business. A few weeks later, her boyfriend killed her.

These situations are extremely complex but have NOTHING to do with the subject we are discussing at all. The fact that you see the two as the same freakin' amazes me..

You have shown NOTHING of what I asked for, and have so missed the point by giving these as examples that it makes me wonder, do you have an extra chromosome that we should know about?

Ric: The fact is that the entirety of Islam is a horrid vestige of barbarism.

I wouldn't say that. During the Dark Ages Islam helped preserved old knowledge and even advance science. Who do you think invented algebra? (Which I'm sure will be used by math-phobes to justify attacking the whole religion). Their food isn't too bad either. I'd rather have turkish than italian any day.

""I wouldn't say that. During the Dark Ages Islam helped preserved old knowledge and even advance science. Who do you think invented algebra? (Which I'm sure will be used by math-phobes to justify attacking the whole religion). Their food isn't too bad either. I'd rather have turkish than italian any day.""

You are referring to the Islam of Old, not the one that won out in the battle for control. The science, religious-tolerance version was actively suppressed and we were left with what we have now...

despite the walls that slow such down

walls like the very acceptance of such violence in many communities throughout the US. just because the people you personally know fight against it doesn't mean that all do, by any means.

the same issue could be said of creationism in the US, for that matter.

over 60% apparently still hold essentially a YEC viewpoint, or sympathize with it.

it doesn't do to sweep it under the rug with a generalization that "america doesn't support" something, when it runs rampant.

actions louder than words?

that you could miss such a point "freakin' amazes me."

The incidence world-wide is discussed in this paper

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/…

It is not small, and in no way is it limited to Muslim countries.

You are referring to the Islam of Old

i am dubious of your understanding of the "Islam of Old", having now seen you use such a term, frankly.

"walls like the very acceptance of such violence in many communities throughout the US."

Bullshit claims not backed by anything. There is no signs that society is accepting anything. If a woman wants to get out, and it is known, society backs her getting out and backs her rights to do so. Show where this is not the case, and not by simply claiming that violence exists, which we all know,...

Next, "Islam of Old" refers to the days when Islam was probably the most tolerant religion in the world, and was filled with reason as a way to interpret the world around us. This version of the religion was actively attack by other aspects of Islam, and the reason-science version did not win...

Lago, it isn't a "bug", it is a "feature". A major cause of death for women over evolutionary time was cephalopelvic disproportion. Having a boyfriend who is abusive and causes low birth weight is a "feature". A feature that might save her life.

Having the crap beat out of you is a trivial price to pay for living through a first pregnancy. Dying isn't a trivial price, but during evolutionary times, boyfriends didn't have guns.

Over evolutionary time the average woman had 2 children survive and reproduce. No more, and no less. If more had survived then the population would have reached levels we know didn't happen. If fewer, then humans would have gone extinct. How many pregnancies would a woman go through over her lifetime? Surviving a first pregnancy where everything gets streached out and she gets used to being pregnant might be a reason why young women tend to pick guys that are complete jerks and put up with being abused.

Similarly, if a new mother finds herself in metabolic stress such that she can't sustain lactation, what does she need to do? She needs to shed metabolic load. Over evolutionary time, the only way to accomplish that was via infanticide. If her boyfriend would do it for her, then evolution can allow her to be a better mother, division of labor and all that, he could be the "bad guy". Of course in that case she needs to pick a guy who will do these things for her, beat the crap out of her while she is pregnant, and then will have a lower threshold for killing her child if times become too difficult for her to survive.

I discuss a lot of this in my blog on the physiology of acute psychosis and infanticide.

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2007/08/low-nitric-oxide-acute-psychosis…

Extreme misogyny, male control over the sexuality of female relatives, sometimes female infanticide, and other horrors like female genital mutilation and forced prostitution is normative in many "traditional" societies throughout the world - Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, China, Melanesia, the Buddhist world (Thailand...) etc. This is true to varying degrees - and the more traditional/reactionary the more true - in virtually all pastoralist and sedentary agricultural based societies and their successors.

Only in the post-Enlightenment West - with its succession of social and political revolutions, civil rights and feminist movements - is the situation different and is female control over their own reproduction, gender parity at least an idealized norm and mostly enshrined in law, and "traditional" practices such as violent wife abuse is widely negatively socially sanctioned.

True, there are serious problems in contemporary Western society - sexualization and pressure on girls and women, body image, pornography. But the Western gender parity ideal - not yet fully realized of course - is still preferable to the superficial and phony patriarchal piety overlaying widespread prostitution, exploitation, and horrendous abuse of women that typifies much of the nonwestern world.

Even in some parts of Western Europe they are decades behind the US on sexual harassment policy.

The reactionary, theocratic patriarchal mentality associated with rural areas of the US Bible belt is the norm in much of the "traditional" (nonwestern) world, except often in far worse manifestations. In that sense, the ideals of the post-Enlightenment West are worth emulating. Because these are not really Western ideals, but universal human yearnings - to be free and equal.

Lago,

The most obvious answer would be in the communities of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. This meets all your criteria.

I don't believe the conviction of Jeffs has stopped the abuse. The trial was the first significant response to the problem in many decades.

I hope no-one argues that because many of the women have come to accept the abuse such that they would not make a complaint, that that makes it ok.

I don't know what the solution might be. If there were only a few involved, taking away the children might have worked, but it would have been difficult for many reasons.

The claims of freedom of religion have trumped the protection of the childrens' civil rights, along with those of most of the adults. Girls learn only to cook, clean, sew and submit. Boys work for slave wages and most of them will be kicked out with nothing to their name, not even an education or social skills. The Patriarch may reassign wives to other, more loyal men if he becomes displeased with someone.

daedalus2u:

it isn't a "bug", it is a "feature". A major cause of death for women over evolutionary time was cephalopelvic disproportion. Having a boyfriend who is abusive and causes low birth weight is a "feature". A feature that might save her life.

You have got to be kidding me -- a "Just So" sociobiological story to justify domestic violence? What is your evidence? Do you have anything apart from vague speculation? What was the prevalence of death from cephalopelvic disproportion in "evolutionary time"? What is the death rate for women from domestic violence? What is the relative fitness advantage for the male (since he's the one you're presuming has evolved this behaviour) to attempt to cause low birthweight by violently attacking his partner and risking her death, as opposed to a) simply abandoning the partner and her clear overall biological risk (since I presume a woman is prone to having large birthweight kids), or b) risking the birth without intervention?

This is why it is so hard to take evolutionary psychology seriously -- it is rife with this kind of wildly speculative bullshit justifying distasteful behaviours.

daedalus2u , call me when you're a real scientist who does real science.

... is normative in many "traditional" societies .... Only in the post-Enlightenment West ... is the situation different ....

Modal error.

Surviving a first pregnancy where everything gets streached out and she gets used to being pregnant might be a reason why young women tend to pick guys that are complete jerks and put up with being abused.

And you might be talking out of your ass.

Alverant asked:

Who do you think invented algebra?

The Babylonians!

Some jackass wrote:

Cultural relativism has long been used to justify any and all "traditional" cultural practices, no matter how inhumane and embedded in relations of domination and exploitation.

And yet in this case the justification is coming from inside the culture and no one outside is defending these practices.

""Lago,
The most obvious answer would be in the communities of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. This meets all your criteria.""

No they do not fit. Should they? Yes, but they do not.

I have seen too many interviews with the women from those towns to think they are all being held against their wills. May there be women in there that want to leave? Sure, but unless they tell us, or express that they do in some way when asked, we can't do crap. Do we suspect? Sure we do. Despite this, when we go in an ask them if they are OK, and take them aside, and so on, and tell them we can get them out yaddah yaddah yaddah, what is it we usually get for answers? I think you know,

Are there some that do get out and say they were being held to do things against their wills while living there? Yep, you bet. Do we say, "Oh sorry, but you need to go back because you are the property of that town or cult?" Of course we do not. We go in, as you know and have stated above, and arrest the people suspected of being involved in any such repression...

In short, you have not shown in ANY way that we, as a society, are endorsing the the suppression of women's rights. You are only showing it is a complex issue when finding the line between cultism (well, religion in general), and brainwashing. The rights of a person, even to live in stupid ways, is protected...

Daedalus2u:

Keep going, would you? I'm almost there...

Seriously, do you have any evidence to back this up? And most specifically...

Surviving a first pregnancy where everything gets streached out and she gets used to being pregnant might be a reason why young women tend to pick guys that are complete jerks and put up with being abused.

Do you have any evidence to offer that the present socioeconomic and cultural explanations for the tendency of a subset of young women (is it really just young women? Any evidence there?) to make very bad relationship choices, in our culture (how prevalent is it in others?) is less satisfactory than your borderline Rube Goldberg evo-psych speculation?

Just found this little gem:

Another reason might be to trigger the epigenetic pathways that mediate the cycle of violence to "program" the developing fetus to better cope with a violent environment.

...are you actually contending that the "cycle of violence" is a result of some kind of biological effect and not of learning by example (possibly coupled to a greater genetic susceptibility to substance abuse and other mental illnesses)?

Keep going, would you? I'm almost there...

And From the people who brought you Libertarian Troll Bingo too. They nailed them both.

I have to note that by Lago's apparent standards for an abusive misogynist society, those reviled Muslim countries don't meet the requirements either.

The "cycle of violence" has to be via a "biological effect", even if it is "just" learning. All learning is via "biological effects". Virtually every organ in the body is known to be programmed in utero, including the liver, heart, vasculature, kidney, pancreas, endocrine system. Is it a reasonable default position to assume that the most important organ, the brain, is not programmed in utero? No, that is an unreasonable default position. The brain is probably the organ that is most programmed in utero but that programming is difficult to appreciate because is it mostly tied up in neuroanatomy.

No doubt the "cycle of violence" is affected by genes. MAOA1 happens to be a good candidate. It happens to be on the X chromosome and so is sex linked. Why is a gene associated with violence sex linked?

Data on the incidence of cephalopelvic disproportion during evolutionary times is sparse. Can we assume it never happened? No, we can't. Is a reasonable default position that it occurred at similar rates to what is observed today? Yes.

In the absence of c-sections, the death rate for women giving birth is about 1 per thousand births.

http://www.haloscan.com/tb/atuteur/7918653900624858944/

If a woman has 15 pregnancies over her reproductive life, that is about a 1.5% chance of dying giving birth. If she dies, who takes care of any small children she has? In the "wild" what is the instance of fostering of orphan infants and children in other primates?

It is well known that abuse during pregnancy causes low birth weight.

If "something" in utero reduces the size of a fetus at term, that "something" would reduce the incidence of cephalopelvic disproportion, and in the absence of C-sections would reduce deaths due to cephalopelvic disproportion.

It isn't "present socioeconomic factors" that lead to violence against women, if you look at the article I linked to earlier, violence against women is a problem in virtually every society that was looked at. Usually it is worse in rural areas than in urban areas.

It isn't just males that benefit. Having the crap beat out of you and surviving a pregnancy is better than not having the crap beat out of you and dying giving birth.

I am not defending violence against women as a good thing, I am trying to point out that it is complicated, and there are evolved reasons for men to abuse women they are involved with, and for women to seek out men who will abuse them.

Lago, how do you explain the incident you mention where a young women was both frightened and attracted to her violent boyfriend? What physiological process was compelling her to be attracted to someone she was afraid of?

When a trait is common in a population, a likely explanation is that it has been selected for. Violence against women is very common. We should not reject (in the absence of data) the hypothesis that it is an evolved feature simply because we find that notion distasteful or incredulous.

When you are poor and all you have is pride, or a version of it, you defend that little bit of status to the death, usually others'.

If a daughter or sister makes a mistake - especially a moral one - that negatively affects the entire family and its reputation, what's the solution by such organizations?

Ah, a prescription for how to handle moral mistakes from the morally stunted. My two year old could tell him the solution for his problem - "use your words" and "walk away".

""I have to note that by Lago's apparent standards for an abusive misogynist society, those reviled Muslim countries don't meet the requirements either.""

Actually, yes they do, as they defend the position, as PZ is pointing out above, and allow for publicly the actions we are discussing. Woman gets abused by men, and the courts say, "well, she had it coming?" That is Exactly what we are talking about.

"Lago, how do you explain the incident you mention where a young women was both frightened and attracted to her violent boyfriend? What physiological process was compelling her to be attracted to someone she was afraid of?"

First of all, violence from male elephant seals, and or bulls, that fight for females can easily allow for the trampling off offspring. The idea that females may be attracted to males that display such behavior does not mean getting a punch in the face was selected for as well. The idea is a total non-sequitur.

Secondly the crazy idea that, just because something happens, it must have been selected for, is almost identical to creationism's, "Special Creation." Evolutionary processes are imperfect as there is a constant state of trying to select what will survive in an ever changing environment from ONLY what you already got, not from what would be best. Organisms are also formed into breeding clines in which selective pressures vary over great distances, yet gene flow is still present. This also takes away from local selective abilities to maximize selective pressures as genes from other regions where the selective pressures are different are always flowing in.

Think of it like this: " Malaria happens."

Now, if we are breeding with people that are in a high malaria environment, we are going to have an influence of a heterozygotic population that is so due to local pressures there that need not be here as well. If we broke off the gene flow between, selection would act in such a way as to have a differing end result as compared to when there is flow in between.

In other words, selection only works the best it can with what is there so as to derive from this generation those that allow for another generation. Perfection is not the issue, and if a few pups get sat on and crushed, or new born calves get trampled, it does not matter, as long as the sum of the selective events equals out to the survival of the population as a whole by way of reproductive success.

Human males may also show numerous traits associated with testosterone such as aggression. Could women be attracted to such traits? Sure, why not? This does not mean that, if a male, under certain environmental pressures and stressors ends up becoming so violent as to harm the female or their offspring, that such behavior was selected for. If there is a conflict between a woman, who has attached herself to a particular male, and that same said male to the point where that woman gets killed, well guess what? Her behavior was just selected against...not for...

Males with no offspring don't "lose" anything if infants are killed in the struggle to get females. That saves them the effort of later killing those infants (who they did not sire) if they are successful so the females ovulate sooner.

I have looked in the literature and was unable to find any references to non-human species where the male would violently abuse a female while pregnant with that male's fetus. I suspect the reason is that cephalopelvic disproportion is a fairly recent (and uniquely human) evolutionary event, where the large advantage of a large brain at birth justifies and balances significant maternal mortality.

I don't disagree with any of your points. I don't disagree that women who are killed by their boyfriends have been selected out. I don't disagree that in many instances violence against women is detrimental to reproduction both by males and females. The question I have is, why in the face of such an obvious detriment to reproduction has violence against women survived over evolutionary time and become essentially universal in humans?

Maybe because it is linked to other male traits, but why do women put up with it unless it helps them too? A linkage hypothesis would suggest that violence against females is on some level inseparable from other desirable male traits. If so, then we should see that in other species too. I didn't find any such reports in the literature. It may still occur, but it isn't as common as it is in humans.

Actually, yes they do, as they defend the position, as PZ is pointing out above, and allow for publicly the actions we are discussing. Woman gets abused by men, and the courts say, "well, she had it coming?" That is Exactly what we are talking about.

That wasn't one of your previous requirements. Though if you add it, then western societies quite often meet it as well. The only difference at all is degree and homogeneity.

D said: "That wasn't one of your previous requirements. ."

You have either, not read my posts, or you simply did not understand them whatsoever...

D also claims: "Though if you add it, then western societies quite often meet it as well. The only difference at all is degree and homogeneity""

As I asked, show me where this is happening in the US, as I asked, and do not simply show that violence and oppression exists. No one is disagrees that people attempt all the time to repress one another. The key is showing where women's repression is backed by society in the US.

Not ONE example has been shown in here...

" in the US, we have Mike Huckabee telling women to be "submissive". "

That's not what he says to Mistress Helga when he's in his leather straps and mask, I'd bet..

Seriously, that guy's the next person I expect to read about getting caught buying crank from a rent-boy.

-jcr

If you have previously referred to courts upholding the abuse, then I did indeed miss it. I'm not sure where the difficulty is here. Are you trying to consider the US as a homogenous society and thus are discounting the many groups that fit all the criteria you lay out, such as the polygamist cult? If not, I'm really don't see how it can be claimed that the oppression of women by many groups in the US is in any significant way not as bad as in an average Muslim society.

The key is showing where women's repression is backed by society in the US.

Um, all over the place. If you specifically mean the places that society, which is not the same as government, condones the beating of women, then it is still prevalent in many places. Of course, if you mean something closer to "where can you go that the police and/or friends of a woman will try to stop her from being abused." Then I imagine there are still a few places that fulfill that as well.

I suppose what you really mean is that no one has written an editorial such as this in a major newspaper that you know of.

Hindu and Sikh women in the UK: suicide by train
Jan. 5, 2008(CBS)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/04/london/main3673877.shtml

"There's a stretch of track near Southall where express trains roar past at 100 miles an hour. It is where a third of all suicides-by-train occur in Britain, and many of those who kill themselves here are Indian women who feel it's the only way out.

In 2006, eighty Southall women threw themselves in front of trains. ...

"Asian women's suicide is linked to abuse within their families," the advocacy group Southall Black Sisters says bluntly. ...

...(W)riter and advice columnist Kailash Puri ... says some mothers-in-law actually push the wife into suicide to snare a further dowry from the next wife."

I like to hit, I like to spank, I love to give her hair a yank.

(I really need to give myself a wank.)

Oh look at the wonders god has wrought, look at the reddening of that spot.

(I think I'm getting very hot.)

The bruise that sits upon the skin, is there because she dared to sin.

(Thank god for domestic discipline.)

Youve really got to be a man, and get that women under hand.

(But pornography- it should be banned.)

I'm giving her the gift of love, ordained by god watching from above.

(How about legislating that dear gov.)

These women just don't know their place- just don't hit her in the face.

(My instincts now are just so base.)

And when your finished, when your done, have sex with her and have some fun.

(Dear god I think I'm going to come.)

daedalus2u,
How dare you evoke evolution to make such speculative, unsupported, misogynistic claims to support your misogynistic views!
Your claims about oversized babies are inaccurate. The high incidence of maternal death during childbirth was/is from hemorrage, NOT from disproportional size of the females pelvic region to the infants head or overall size.
Besides domestic violence is not by any means a prevalent cause of low birth weight infants. That is a claim that you need to verify by looking at reliable sources. I'll give you a start. Look up complications during pregnancy in the textbook:Current Diagnosis & Treatment Obstetrics & Gynecology, 10th edition by Alan H. DeCherney and Lauren Nathan. That should help bridge the gap in your knowledge deficit of ob/gyn. It is highly irresponsible to make such speculations about a field of knowledge you seem to know nothing about.
On the point of evolution and why the practice still survives. The concept of evolution is competition, mating and propagation of genes. If indeed domestic violence is an evolutionary mechanism, it should not lead to a net loss of lives and therefore loss of that particular gene pool. Also domestic violence is not growing, if anything it is facing significant challenge even in the muslim countries. Have you heard the word feminism? Which countries are having the best economic, social and health care institutions right now? The scandanavians. They also happen to be the countries with lower domestic violence and more gender equality.
I am outraged at the irresponsibility you display in propagating a very unwarranted, unresearched and unsupported idea in todays world where you can EASILY obtain information from very credible sources.
So, before you refer anyone else to your erroneous ideas in your blogs, please,please, do us all a favor and educate yourself on the information that is so easily available to you. Both sides win when you do this because you educate yourself and your ignorance does not influence others

When is the human race going to abandon the martial bed?

zosky, what about my hypothesis is misogynistic? In no way, shape or form am I condoning violence against women or saying it is a good thing or something that should be practiced or condoned or tolerated. I never have and I never will hit any woman that I am involved with, or any person unless it is in dire self-defense. Violence against women should not be tolerated, but it should be understood. If there are evolved mechanisms that lead to violence against women, the only way they can be dealt with is by understanding them.

I don't doubt that the largest cause of death was hemorrhage. What does that have to do with deaths from cephalopelvic disproportion? Nothing. You need to check your references. Physical abuse during pregnancy is strongly associated with low birth weight.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedi…

In this study, LBW was defined as birth weight below 2.5 kg. The odds ratio was 1.4 (95% limits 1.1 to 1.8). Standard guidelines for routine C-section due to macrosomic infants include considering elective C-section for estimated birth weight exceeding 5 kg or 4.5 kg in a mother with diabetes. Other things are associated with low birth weight too. Physical abuse during pregnancy doesn't need to be the leading cause of low birth weight for it to cause it, which it does.

What I cited was for maternal death in the absence of C-sections. C-sections don't prevent or treat hemorrhage. C-sections do prevent maternal deaths from cephalopelvic disproportion. The maternal death rate in the absence of C-sections is about 1 per 1,000 births. I don't know what the death rate from violence against women is, I presume that it is less than that. What ever it is, it is too high. The 1 per 1,000 births is in regions where access to C-sections is non-existant. Usually those are the places where violence against women is most prevalent. The best way to prevent deaths due to cephalopelvic disproportion is via good prenatal care and access to C-sections. C-sections with anesthesia and under sterile conditions have only been available for the past century or so.

So what is your explanation of violence against women? That males are assholes? Isn't that misandronistic? So why do women tolerate violent men? Why does OJ have no difficulty finding a girlfriend?

There are many unfortunate traits of humans that were once reproductive features and so presumably were selected for including rape, infanticide, and murder. Pretending they are something that cannot be understood isn't going to make them go away, any more than pretending they are something ordained by God, or pretending that our ancestors never did such things.

daedalus2u, I am not going to list my credentials but I do have some knowledge of human behavioral ecology and prenatal programming. Your hypothesis is ludicrous on its face and lacking in merit, completely failing even the most preliminary assessment of evolutionary plausibility. This is not about the validity of evolutionary psychology, the naturalistic fallacy, Tinbergian analysis or anything else. It's simply a bad - implausible, illogical, ill-considered - hypothesis that doesn't deserve any further consideration. I don't want to waste any more of my time explaining why.

For men, it begins with abandoning the marital bed, by opting to sleep elsewhere in the house.

How many long-suffering wives are thinking please don't fling me in dat brier patch?

The authors picked eight out of 14 studies, did a meta-analysis, and then basically admitted that there were design flaws in their study.

Fucking hell I hate the whole idea of meta-analysis studies. First- you get to cherry pick the studies, then you get to make up your study parameters, then you get to toss it off as OH IT MIGHT BE WRONG_OOOPS!!!! And then all the people who are idiots just believe whatever you say and never check it out and disseminate really bad information on chain emails.

Maybe a little oversimplified, but yeah...

Daedalus2u:

If your argument and its premises were true we would expect to observe the following:

1) there would be no statistically significant difference in rates of domestic abuse as adults between children raised in abusive homes and children born in abusive homes, taken away by CPS or the like at a young age, and raised in healthy foster homes.
2) similarly, children with nonviolent biological parents, raised by abusive foster or stepparents, would have a much lower rate of abusive behavior as adults than children raised by abusive biological parents.
3) the alleged behavior by young women of preferentially seeking abusive partners early in life would be far more common than it actually is, would be common in other cultures (is there any evidence that this is the case), and would not be strongly correlated with dysfunctional relationships (including nonviolent) with parents and/or substance abuse.
4) domestic violence would not be strongly correlated with low socioeconomic status and substance abuse.
5) (in response to your earlier point, which you seem to have abandoned), physical abuse of women of childbearing age by biological family members would be more common than physical abuse by their sexual partners.
6) physical abuse of women incapable of childbearing (preteens or post-menopausal women) would be extremely uncommon.
7) rates of physical abuse would increase consistently and markedly in response to reasonable suspicion of (or confirmation of) pregnancy.
8) physical abuse of men by women would probably not exist.
9) rates of domestic violence would not be correlated with conservative religiosity (they are, and the same is true of sexual abuse) or other cultural factors supported of such behavior (does anyone claim that domestic violence is not far more prevalent in societies where it is considered socially acceptable and does not carry significant legal penalties?)

Etc. What evidence do you have that any of these are either true or not what we would expect, despite the logical implications?

anon 6:10, huh? so in the absence of a perfect study assume the opposite of what an imperfect study shows? There are plenty of plausible physiological reasons why violent abuse during pregnancy would lead to low birth weight.

Colugo, do you have any facts and/or logic to back up your (empty and non-verifiable) "expert" claims? A handful of adjectives saying how bad you think it is doesn't constitute an explanation to me. But if that is all you can come up with, then yes it is a waste of your time to bother.

Oh,

10) the rates of survival of pregnancy by women who were abused by their partners would be measurably and significantly higher in societies where C-sections were not common (is there any indication that this is the case?)
11) submitting to abuse by partners (not attempting to press charges or escape, telling friends and relatives to butt out, etc.) would not be correlated with dysfunctional family background or history of substance abuse.
12) there would be a marked decline in rates of domestic violence following a woman's first successful pregnancy.

Incidentally, even if we accept your argument that a selective explanation is plausible, what present observations can you point to that, in your opinion, are better explained by your model explains better than the prevalent theories?

daedalus2u:

Are you familiar with David Haig's work on genomic imprinting and fetal growth?

Argh, can't believe I missed this one:

13) counseling and therapy would be almost completely ineffective in reforming abusers.

Abuse MAY be part of a complex interaction of factors that contribute to LBW

__________________

May May May May May..... important word here.

And in the presence of a bunch of science freaks, i might note that causation and correlation are not equals.

So- Daedelus dude------ you need to read what you write about.

And you need to note that biological science and sociological science are not equal. Not not not not not......

What I am saying dear D Dude is that this is not very scientific. First, they cherry picked, then they spun then they let themselves off the hook. Are the people doing the studies doctors, nurses, scientists, sociologists, psychologists..... Who do they work for? Why are they doing the study? What will be the benefit of their study?

How do we take what seems to be a sociological view and then turn it into our pet theory on some aspect of evolutionary biology?

And- well honestly- READ THE FREAKING paper- all of it and see how many outs there are in the thing.

I think you picked poorly when you quoted this. I think that you ought to look up the pros and cons of meta analysis studies. Maybe see how bias can creep in, or how people can make anything fit their theory if they so choose.

And remember these are REAL women who are having things happen to them and they don't give a shit if it confers any evolutionary advantage. They, and/or the people who love them just want the shitkickin to stop.

You need to get out more and meet real people I think.

And remember these are REAL women who are having things happen to them and they don't give a shit if it confers any evolutionary advantage. They, and/or the people who love them just want the shitkickin to stop.

You need to get out more and meet real people I think.

Daedalus2u has stated that he's aware of this and is not condoning (either in the dictionary sense or the commonly understood sense) domestic violence. While his eagerness to posit such a poorly reasoned and ill-supported argument makes me wonder, I have yet to find a smoking gun that he was lying when he claimed this.

I see that yesterday that commenters #38 and #40 mentioned Christian Domestic Discipline already, but I wanted to put a link to Possummomma's take on this website, she is right on target on her evaluation:

http://possummomma.blogspot.com/2007/07/christian-domestic-discipline.h…

Still missing in action:

1. Big Foot

2. Nessie

3. Any case evidence for societal support in the US of the repression of a woman's rights today

4. Grammatically correct rap music

Azkyroth

1. No. The presence of a genetic tendency does not mean that that genetic tendency is not modified by epigenetic mechanisms. If the violence against a woman is partly to lead to epigenetic programming of a fetus in utero (to better cope with hard times), we would expect that the violence would be greater during a pregnancy occurring during "hard times", which tends to be what is observed. There may also be greater violence during good times, so as to prevent cephalopelvic disproportion. The net of these two effects may be a level of violence that is independent of socioeconomic status, or goes up, or goes down. If this is a trait due to multiple genes (likely because it is complex), then it may not have a simple relationship to socioeconomic status, or to anything.

2. Perhaps, however there have been twin studies that do support a genetic influence on intimate partner violence.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16007739?ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSy…

(I have only read the abstract of this)

The penetrance of the phenotype need not be 100% for genetics to be involved. There are many genetic traits without 100% penetrance. Identical twins can be discordant for traits that are thought to be highly genetic.

3. Dysfunctional parental relationships may be one (of many) mechanism(s) by which individuals are programmed to seek violent partners. A major determinant of being a victim of domestic violence is observing violence between parents.

http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/ccp714741.pdf

Choosing a partner with a temperament like the opposite gender parent (including a tendency toward violence) may be part of what selects for violence against women. It is like the peacock's tail. The reason peacocks have a big tail is because peahens like it. If women picked men who would be violent toward them because they are like their violent dad, then violence towards women gets selected for.

Violence against young women is a lot higher than against older women. See figure 9 in the reference listed in item 7 below. It is roughly twice as high in 15-24 than in 25-34 age group.

4. No, it would be correlated. Low socioeconomic status is a stressor, abuse is a method to mitigate the effects of stress via epigenetic programming of infants in utero to better cope with stress. Substance abuse may also correlate because substance abuse is a (poor) coping mechanism for stress too. If the two coping responses are independent, then they would correlate with socioeconomic status.

5. Abuse of women by their male relatives is more common than abuse by partner. Honor killings are done by male family members, not the spouse and not by unrelated males. The example earlier in the thread of the Indian man who killed his daughter and child because she married and had a child with a lower caste man is a timely example.

6. Not at all. Ovulation in humans is cryptic, as is early pregnancy. A woman's reproductive status is not easily determined by looking at her. An evolved linkage need not be so precise. For epigenetic programming, the first trimester is likely the most important because that is when differentiation is occurring and when the gross anatomy of the major neuronal structures is formed. Abuse in late pregnancy would likely be more to prevent cephalopelvic disproportion by triggering early labor.

Abuse of non-reproducing women has no direct evolutionary impact (via her descendents because she has none) so evolution would be neutral with respect to it. However, abuse of a non-reproducing woman may affect the reproductive success of others as an "example" via fear and anxiety. Only if abuse of women who reproduce increases the reproductive success of either victims or perpetrators or both do genes contributing to abuse of women become more common.

A man who is observed abusing a woman may be a more desirable mate because a woman may (unconsciously) reason that if she dies in childbirth, he would be able to prevail on his next wife (by abusing her) to take care of the first wife's children as their stepmother.

7. Rates of physical abuse do increase during pregnancy. The data on this is mixed. The rate of abuse is considerably higher for younger women, who also tend to have a higher pregnancy rate. In this

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6874/4/S1/S22

Figure 2, there is a citation where 20% of women reported their first instance of abuse was while pregnant.

But abuse need not be so precise to have effects.

8. Not necessarily. The linkage need not be so precise. Because men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, violence against men by women will have less effect. Violence by a woman against a man may be a mechanism by which she can goad him into abusing her.

9. Huh? Because religions favor it, it can't be an evolved trait? Religions will adopt any trait as ordained by their God or Gods if it serves maintaining the power of the self-proclaimed religious people who assert it. In the Bible, Moses orders the Israelites to slaughter male children and non-virgins. Numbers 31:17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. 18 But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.

Infanticide is observed in a lot of animal species. Presumably it evolved there. Maybe Moses thought up the idea first, but I suspect that humans had been practicing it long before Moses said it was a good idea.

I think that any behavior is going to be more common in societies that think it is socially acceptable. I don't see how that relates to whether a trait has a genetic component or not.

I left a big post, but it had a bunch of links, so PZ has to approve it.

All I am saying is "may" too. That is what a hypothesis is. May, may, may. Behavior is really really complex. Nothing about it is simple. But that doesn't mean there are no heritible genetic effects involved.

I agree I do need to get out and meet real people.

For me, what I think supports the idea the best is honor killing by male relatives and abuse by a partner during a pregnancy with his fetus. If violence against women was only detrimental to her reproductive success, evolution should have highly selected against these behaviors over evolutionary time. It didn't. Why is that?

If I had something better to do on a Saturday night do you think I would be posting here?

Another thing is that I was unable to find anything in the literature about other species where a male would abuse a female pregnant with his fetus. I think that makes the link to humans specific to large brains and cephalopelvic disproportion. Also stress lowers NO levels and low NO causes neuronal hyperplasia and bigger brains. This has been observed in rodents with uterine stress.

I said it before and I'll say it again.... authoritarian ideologies (e.g. most religions) are a symbiotic meme for the propagation of the unappealing.

In other species where females have more control over mate choice, they usually pick the nicer males.

If it weren't for these religions instructing women to marry and "obey" out of fear, tyrannical jerks might be bred out of existence.

Actually, the best way to prevent true cepahlopelvic disproportion (which is exceedingly rare) is to raise the status of women and girls such that they receive adequate nutrition to build wide pelvises. Statistics about presumed rates of "CPD" gathered from modern societies are non-enlighting in this argument because "CPD" is a common excuse diagnosis used by obstetricians who are either a) tired of attending a long labor, b) want the extra income a c-section generates, or c) fear a malpractice suit. During a normal, physiological labor (woman upright, laboring in private, hydrated and fed, and not under the influence of drugs), CPD is extremely rare and even rarer as a cause of maternal death. Stuck shoulders are more common, but if unresolved, which is also rare, almost always usually cause only fetal death. Places and times that have high infant and maternal mortality are universally places and times in which women are malnourished during their own childhoods and/or during pregnancy. And that does include the modern US, where the standard American diet is insufficiently nutritious to produce optimal childhood development or sustain an optimal pregnancy. Finally, there is no evidence that lower birth weight infants are easier to birth, regardless of head size. To the contrary, actually, because the uterus is less full, it must contract harder and has less mass to work against (think of the difference in effort you use when squeezing a full tube of toothpaste versus a mostly empty one).

latorquemada:

That makes perfect sense, and thanks. Intuitively I kind of figured that his argument didn't make sense from an medical point of view either, but being fairly ignorant of obstetrics I decided it'd be better not to speculate. x.x

Let me see if I can see what is going on above...

First, one takes say, "a plant"... from its natural environment and places it in a foreign soil it did not evolve in.

Next, we give it enough nutrition and support to germinate despite all of the abnormal conditions.

Then we count up all the negative responses from the plant and make claim they were "pre-selected for"

Finally we try and explain the original selective sources for these oddities even though there is no evidence these reactions took place in natural conditions on a regular basis.

Am I with you so far daed?

Does the word, "Plasticity" mean a freakin' thing to evolutionary psychologists?

The experience of millennia of dog breeding has produced many different breeds, many with quite characteristic behavioral traits. This demonstrates incontrovertibly that in dogs, behavior has a large genetic component. In the face of that data, the default hypothesis that there is little or no genetic effect on behavior in humans is unreasonable.

Lago, how did that "plasticity" originate, get selected for and get maintained in the plant genome unless it was selected for at some point in that plants evolutionary history? Unless you are suggesting some Intelligent Designer put it there?

If a trait increases reproductive success, then evolution will amplify that trait until too much of that trait decreases reproductive success. There are no other evolutionary endpoints. That may be exactly what we are seeing now in violence against women, a trait that may have had some reproductive success in "the wild", but now is completely negative. Unfortunately complex traits are difficult to understand and difficult to purge from a genome because there are mechanisms that cause individuals exhibiting such traits to be perceived as desirable mates.

Why do abused women tolerate abuse from their partner? Because they "love" him. Because of some unreasoned physiological attachment process which they have no conscious ability to control. She will "love" him, even if he beats the crap out of her and almost kills her. To me, that sure looks like the dysfunctional end of an evolved trait. Being attached to a partner is good because it makes for a stable relationship for children. Being attached to a partner who is so abusive he will ultimately kill you is bad, but that kind of attachment is an unavoidable byproduct of strong attachments. Some of those attachments will be dysfunctional. What evolution has maximized is the positive reproductive effects of attachment. That is the sum of positive effects from good attachments minus the negative effects of bad attachments.

I've heard of towns where wives of cops who called for help in domestic violence situations got no help, only a lecture on how stressful their husband's work is and how she should not provoke him. So right there, there's a situation in the US where a woman can't get help from the authorities when she's being abused.

Furthermore, even when the laws on the books are used in her favor, a long jail sentence isn't very common. Men have been known to look up the woman after release and force her back into the relationship by threatening her children. (Had a 14 year old boy here in Sacramento shoot his mother's abuser when the guy had done all that, and ended up beating her again and saying he would kill her. The DA decided not to prosecute as the mother and child apparently had enough evidence to back their version of events and the public outcry was strongly in favor of the boy).

Women are also most likely to be killed when leaving or shortly after having left their abuser. As they have challenged his ownership of her, the man is left with killing her as the final means of control. Many women, especially those with children, decide to put up with beating and rape rather than leave their children without a protector.

Sure, officially, our society supports the woman's right to leave. But the shelters always have more clients than they can quite handle, the justice system is shaky in terms of results, and protection is hard to provide.

Also, re: the theory that "getting beat up is better for you than dying in pregnancy".

You are talking about pre-medical times. She loses teeth, she's going to have trouble eating. Her leg is injured, she can't keep up when the tribe moved. She has her arm dislocated, how the hell does she take care of herself when the hyenas come to check out the camp?

No, it would be FUCKING STUPID for a woman to "get the crap beat out of her" for medical reasons. If the chance of dying in childbirth is 1 in 1000, you can't seriously think that a hunter whaling on a woman is going to have a smaller chance of injuring her to the point of crippling her? What about breaking her skin, and the possibility of a serious infection?

You have won stupidest theory of the year award.

You have won stupidest theory of the year award.

That ain't no theory. It's just a little uninformed speculation. A theory is something much bigger.

Samantha, read the whole thread. Not every woman who got beat up died from the beating. Even today, most battered women don't die from their injuries.

Many women are not attracted to "nice guys". They are only attracted to guys who treat them like shit.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nice+guy

So are you saying that such women are "FUCKING STUPID" to use your words?

latorquemada, what evidence is there that in "the wild" over evolutionary time that humans did have what you call "proper nutrition"? People a few hundred years ago were a lot smaller than they are now. The standard explanation is nutrition. Birth has always been a very high risk situation for humans. It still is today. It is a complete myth and false idea that "natural" birth is somehow safe. It isn't. There is a very good blog which discusses a lot of the disinformation put out there on "natural birth".

http://homebirthdebate.blogspot.com/

Small babies can get stuck, it is more likely that large babies will get stuck. Above a certain estimated birth weight, it is standard practice to do a C-section. Is "every" C-section under those circumstances absolutely necessary? Probably not, but by the time you find out if a C-section is "absolutely necessary", it is too late and the baby may well die. Of course in "the wild", they didn't have the option of C-sections, so babies that were too big to be born, whether it is from cephalopelvic disproportion or from shoulders, or from what ever was going to die.

Over evolutionary time, there has always been high infant mortality. The average woman had on average 2 children survive and reproduce. All the others died, or she died before she could have more. In the absence of birth control how many times would a woman get pregnant? All but 2 of those pregnancies didn't make it to adulthood. What killed them is unknown, but that they died and didn't reproduce is absolutely clear.

Anything that increased that average above 2 would be selected for. Something that increases the average to 2.1 becomes essentially universal in the population in 10,000 years. A heart beat in evolutionary time.

daed,...you have no clue what plasticity is, do you? Do you have any biological training at all, or are you just making all this shit up as we go on?

Let me try this another way:

Dogs did not evolve to hump our legs, did they? They still try and do this despite no selective advantage. It is a misplaced reaction. Their environment has changed and they are not adapted totally to this new environment so behavior gets confused. There is no freakin' selective advantage...

Next, males of many species show aggression for numerous reasons. Place a human male in new environment he does not know how to deal with, and his aggression may be misguided just like a misguided dog humping your leg.

In the end, just as humping in dogs may have been selected for does not mean the humping of your leg was also selected for and/or has a history of selective value for dogs, male aggression can also be misplaced in ways that have no historical selective value.

*sigh* will someone with the time and energy please explain to Daedalus2u, who has apparently never known a psychologically healthy woman, what the cultural stereotype about "nice guys" actually means? (Hint: the overwhelming majority of women who were not raised in a cultural environment where abuse was condoned, or in otherwise dysfunctional families, while they rarely have much respect for passive-aggressive, manipulative narcissists, will not put up with being physically abused).

Lago, can you find one example of a non primate species where males abusing females pregnant with their fetus is common?

Yes, no "true" psychologically healthy woman will put up with being abused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

Any that do are obviously unhealthy and so their experiences can be discounted and we can blame them for allowing themselves to be vitims.

Daed, when you have social groups who fight for a hierarchy there will always be abuse, and that abuse is certainly not restricted to a male over female interaction. We see "abuse" as you call it, in dogs, bovines, elephant seals etc... between all aspects of these group members, including males abusing females, and males abusing young as well as offspring abusing other offspring, females abusing other females, pregnant or not, and so on...

The key is that there is a balance between any level of mortality due to such strife, and the amount of offspring that is produced. To then go and say such strife was selected for to reduce offspring, or some other backwards idea, is simply putting the carriage in front of the horse...

1) that bears no relation to what I said and 2) those that do put up with abuse are almost invariably found to be psychologically unhealthy for other reasons. Seriously. You act like you've never had a female friend in your life and you've been getting all your information about how the opposite sex thinks from prime time television.

daedalus2u, in case it isn't obvious yet, your hypothesis is unnecessarily convoluted. If high birth weight was maladaptive, why was it selected for in the first place and then needed to be "adjusted" by adaptations for female abuse and acceptance of abuse by females? Why were humans unable of evolving a lower birth weight in non-abuse situations?

Anything that increased that average above 2 would be selected for. Something that increases the average to 2.1 becomes essentially universal in the population in 10,000 years. A heart beat in evolutionary time.

You can't assume that low birth weight babies have a higher survival rate to adulthood. Any decrease in mortality from birth complications might be offset by a higher risk of infant mortality for LBW babies (and there is a lot of evidence for the latter even today; how much more in prehistoric environments?).

I agree we see in many social species what we would call abuse were it to happen in humans. In virtually every case that I am aware of, the perpetrator achieves a reproductive benefit as a consequence of the behavior we would call abuse were it to happen in humans.

It is understandable in terms of evolution how such reproductively advantageous behaviors could be selected for.

I have looked and have seen no reported instances of males abusing females pregnant with their fetus other than in humans.

It is understandable in terms of evolution how such reproductively disadvantageous behavior would not be selected for.

You suggest that males abusing females pregnant with their fetus in humans is just a random instance of that type of abuse being linked to random male aggression, and that the lack of such behavior being selected against is a random quirk of the particular evolution trajectory that humans have taken.

That hypothesis may be correct. I don't think that is the only interpretation that is compatible with the data such as we have it today. I think the data is also compatible with a hypothesis that there is a genetic component to violence against women, and that in the evolutionary past such a genetic component lead to reproductive advantages such that it was selected for. I don't think the data is such that either hypothesis can be ruled out.

I think we agree that in the present violence against women is detrimental and should not be tolerated. It should not be tolerated even if it is advantageous (which I don't think it is).

I think the only difference in how we would try and prevent violence against women is that I would put somewhat more emphasis on women being mindful of who they pick to be the father of their children, and to not pick someone who is or might be physically abusive. A way I have describe this is for a woman to pick as a mate someone she would like her (as yet unborn) daughter to marry. I think this is what older women tend to do, which is why the incidence of violence against women tends to decrease as they get older.

daedalus2u' speculation is a multi-field failure: it fails immediately no matter what theoretical approach or discipline is applied to it. It fails even using the most genetically determinist, adaptationist reasoning. Or any other kind of perspective.

Can anyone see how this bit of evidence - like so many of the objections brought up by above commenters - invalidates daedalus2u's musings?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/health/14preg.html?pagewanted=2

"Scientists do not fully understand this process, known as genomic imprinting. They suspect that it is made possible by chemical handles called methyl groups that are attached to units of DNA. Some handles may turn off genes in sperm and egg cells. The genes then remain shut off after a sperm fertilizes an egg.

Only a few of these genes have been carefully studied to understand how they work. But the evidence so far is consistent with Dr. Haig's theory. One of the most striking examples is a gene called insulin growth factor 2 (Igf2). Produced only in fetal cells, it stimulates rapid growth. Normally, only the father's copy is active. To understand the gene's function, scientists disabled the father's copy in the placenta of fetal mice. The mice were born weighing 40 percent below average. Perhaps the mother's copy of Igf2 is silent because turning it off helps slow the growth of a fetus.

On the other hand, mice carry another gene called Igf2r that interferes with the growth-spurring activity of Igf2. This may be another maternal defense gene. In the case of Igf2r, it is the father's gene that is silent, perhaps as a way for fathers to speed up the growth of their offspring. If the mother's copy of this second gene is disabled, mouse pups are born 125 percent heavier than average.

A number of other imprinted genes speed and slow the growth of fetuses in a similar fashion, providing more support for Dr. Haig's theory. And in recent years, some medical disorders in humans have been tied to these imprinted genes. Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, for example, causes children to grow oversize organs that are prone to developing tumors. Some cases of the disorder have been tied to a mutation that replaces a mother's silent copy of Igf2 with an extra copy of the father's.

"Both of the copies come from the father, and you get double the amount of Igf2, " said Dr. Haig. The extra Igf2 appeared to cause a fetus to grow too quickly, leading to the syndrome."

windy, high birth weight is adaptive because it allows for a large brain. The massively large brain that humans have is the major evolutionary change that humans have experienced in the past several million years. The advantages of a large brain are gigantic, but they come at a cost, a cost in terms of cephalopelvic disproportion, as female pelvises evolve to allow for the ever larger brains that confer all the cognitive advantages of being human.

With C-sections now, brain size at birth is not limited by female pelvises.

You are absolutely right, LBW babies do have a disadvantage. But it is not as great as the disadvantage of being stillborn, or of your mother dying because you are too big. If you are LBW and die, but your mother lives, maybe your future sibling (who you share half your genes with, as much as any child you might have) will survive instead. Dying and having a future sibling live is infinitely better than dying and taking your mother with you so you have no siblings.

Males abusing females is the result of males gaining the upper hand with regard to mate selection. Females with a more passive nature, that don't fight back or leave, are the ones more likely to reproduce in this situation. They are coerced more by fear and domination than by having a real choice in the matter. OTOH true evolutionary outcome of female choice in social species can be observed in the spotted hyena (their anatomy makes it impossible to be forced into mating). The females prefer the males who have better social skills.

windy, high birth weight is adaptive because it allows for a large brain. The massively large brain that humans have is the major evolutionary change that humans have experienced in the past several million years. The advantages of a large brain are gigantic, but they come at a cost, a cost in terms of cephalopelvic disproportion, as female pelvises evolve to allow for the ever larger brains that confer all the cognitive advantages of being human.

Yes, we know this, but you seem not to have realized the implications. It means that large size of infants at birth has been selected for despite the slightly increased risk of prenatal mortality. Therefore you can't assume that a behaviour that resulted in a lower birth weight would be selected for, because you would then lose whatever benefits caused large birth weight to be selected for in the first place!

You are absolutely right, LBW babies do have a disadvantage. But it is not as great as the disadvantage of being stillborn, or of your mother dying because you are too big.

Not for the individual but you are making the wrong comparison. You need to compare the total lifetime fitness of non-abused vs abused mothers. You have presented no evidence that the fitness of the latter is higher as a group.

I'm going to toss an irrelevant two cents in...the Arabs made the first steps in algebraic geometry. They described some tricks for manipulating numbers. Algebra as manipulation of grammars by formal rules, which is what any mathematician today would recognize, was invented by the Italians.

Azkyroth, I have known a number of women, some healthy, some not so healthy. The essence of being "psychologically healthy" is to survive in the circumstances that you find yourself in. In an intolerably abusive situation, the psychologically healthy person does the best that they can and survives. That may be to leave the situation, it may be to adapt to it. Being able to tolerate abuse and survive is part of the "plasticity" that Lago seems to attribute everything to.

So during evolutionary time only "pychologically healthy" women survived and reproduced? Who is the more "psychologically healthy", the woman who tolerates abuse and raises 2 children to adulthood, or the woman who leaves one abusive mate for another who then kills those chilidren himself?

The term "psychologically healthy" denotes life goals and achievements which depends on circumstances. Knowing how to survive an abusive relationship is a useful life skill. If that is the only life skill you have, you may not know how to deal with a non-abusive relationship. Growing up in an abusive family of origin may not prepare you to live in a non-abusive relationship. It doesn't "feel right".

I won't label a woman as psychologically unhealthy for doing what she has to do to survive and protect her children. I think the ability of women to leave abusive relationships is better than it has ever been. It is still no where close to being good enough.

windy, you are right, I haven't shown any such data. I don't think that it is possible to get such data today, certainly not in any ethical way. You need to remember that in the absence of birth control, women would become pregnant their entire reproductive lives. Lactating would reduce their fertility, but either they would be pregnant, lactating or about to become pregnant. From the time they hit puberty until they either died or went through menopause. That could easily be 15 pregnancies. Of which (on average) only 2 survived and reproduced. If 13 of 15 are going to die, it doesn't much matter what they die of, provided the risk and injury to the mother is low so she can have another pregnancy. During "hard times", a premature birth of a LBW that dies may be "better" than a large term infant that kills the mother, or tears her uterus.

Any pregnancy that leads to cephalopelvic disproportion is likely fatal. The tendency is for later babies to be bigger than earlier babies. Abuse during pregnancy might be a way of "fine-tuning" the size of the infant at birth depending on other circumstances. If a male had multiple females, a larger infant at birth might be a better risk because the other females could help during labor, and if the mother died, might foster the infant if it lived. If a male had multiple females, any female abuse by him would likely be divided among them. They might gang up on him and prevent him from being abusive to any of them. Polygamy isn't allowed now, so comparisons like that are not possible.

windy, you are right, I haven't shown any such data. I don't think that it is possible to get such data today, certainly not in any ethical way.

All you would need to get started is data on abused vs non abused women, birth weight of each child, and the number of grandchildren they had.

During "hard times", a premature birth of a LBW that dies may be "better" than a large term infant that kills the mother, or tears her uterus.

This is just handwaving. It is just as (or more) plausible that during hard times a larger infant will survive better. You have not explained WHY a birth weight that was "too high" was selected for in the first place and then needed abuse to reduce it. And no, you can't answer "large brains" if you want to keep the hypothesis that the babies of abused mothers do better with slightly smaller brains.

In fact, at least before the advent of extremely high sugar/refined carb diets which can cause *abnormally* high birth weight, being larger at birth confers absolute advantage both as an infant and later in life.

Second, we cannot go back and look at "wild" people's nutritional status, but we do still have (or have recent record of) very primitive hunter-gatherer people in low population, relatively pristine environments prior to the importation of foreign diseases and foodstuffs. These people, who eat traditional, non-refined, high-nutrient foods really do have very little trouble in childbirth and pregnancy. (Infant mortality after birth may still be high due to cultural factors, infant feeding practices, accidents, animal/insect attack, and infanticide.) As soon as grain (or other carbohydrate-intensive) agriculture is introduced, the stature and health of the people, especially the women, declines because of the lower nutritional value of starchy foods. Because humans are phenomenally tough and adaptable, however, the population increases because a greater quantity of food is available more consistently, thus allowing for a greater number of less healthy people.

Third, simply because the medical industry sections women "automatically" for large babies does not mean the practice is scientifically sound or produces the best outcomes. Obstetrics is driven almost entirely by received wisdom and fear of lawsuits. Almost every obstetric intervention, practice, and technology in use today was introduced by doctors and promulgated through tradition -- when held up to the light of academic study almost none prove to actually improve outcomes.

Finally, Dr. Amy Tuteur of homebirthdebate is well known for being an inveterate troll whose grasp of scientific concepts and statistics is appallingly weak. Like most opponents of natural birth, her only criteria for obstetric "success" is production of a live mother and baby after birth, regardless of the condition of either participant. Her arguments are specious, misleading, poorly researched, and inhumane. I've gone way off topic now, I'm sure, but you might want to understand the complex topic of birth more fully before you hitch your horse to her wagon.

And one more thing. I suppose it is possible for CPD to cause maternal death, but this is phenomenally unlikely even among very primitive people. Even quite primitive people had the understanding and capability of killing the fetus, crushing its skull and extracting it to save the life of the mother.

More to the point, it is not the *violence* they perpetrate against women that makes "bad boys" more attractive. It's their higher testosterone level. The violence is secondary to that trait. Women don't seek out men who will beat them up, they seek out men with high testosterone who can protect them and their offspring during the childbearing/rearing period when they are less able to defend themselves. Statistically speaking, it's just as plausible an argument that these mens' violent behavior protected the women and their offspring from other men MORE often than they killed or maimed the women in question. Thus, the risk was justified and the tendency towards violence propagated.

latorquemada, as a parent, I completely share Dr Amy Tuteur's criteria for "success", a live mother and infant. Everything else is so far down on my list of priorities that they don't even register let alone take precedence. People are free to have other priorities. I do not understand such people and don't think I have any common ground to relate to them with.

I have carefully looked at her website, the sources of data she uses and the methods by which she evaluates that data, and I agree with them, which is why I recommend her website. The only way you could say "Her arguments are specious, misleading, poorly researched, and inhumane." is if you do not understand them and are projecting.

Your notions of nutrition are incorrect. Badly. You would do well to read some standard scientific materials, textbooks, journal articles and the like. PubMed is a good resource. There are lots of free articles in the older literature which are completely adequate for information on nutrition.

You know, I scope this site because of its downright intelligent author.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said about those who are posting in the comments section.
Come ON people! You're supposed to be college level students! Can't you tell a troll when you read one?
daedalus2u is not a real person! It is the name of a troll whose sole purpose is to MOCK YOU and discredit evolution itself.
This troll is using all the classic xian 'logic' of carrying 'evilution' to its extreme.
The biology is wrong, the psychology is pure shit, the misogyny is blatant, and the 'evolution' is so convoluted it SHOULD have clued you in!
And yet you all have wasted your very precious time letting this obvious fraud get to you.

Once more, students: daedalus2u is a troll. Hate to be condescending, but claiming that beating women is a trait that MUST have evolutionary validity SHOULD have tipped you stellar thinkers off.
PZ is well known. The more literate mouth breathers are assigned to troll here to do what they can to muck it all up. They will use poor studies that 'sound good', they will use the terms of science and they will claim they 'don't support' the findings, they're just 'reporting them.' (downright big-hearted of them, eh?) In the meantime, the just plain stupid claim that woman beating is an evolutionary advantage gets thrown around enough times that it begins to be treated with the same respect real ideas do.
And so the id'rs, the creationists, the flat-earthers, etc, will, when arguing against evolution, be able to pull up this hatefull shit that "evolutionists believe woman beating is an evolutionary advantage," thus making rational thinkers look as whacko as xians.
Let daedalus2u rant his outright lies to his fellow xians. You all have better things to do than to let this scummy little troll crap his filthy shit on your site.

Logician babbled,

"but claiming that beating women is a trait that MUST have evolutionary validity SHOULD have tipped you stellar thinkers off. "

Hate to inform you of this, but evil Xians are not trying to eat you pillow at night. There are many people out there that say stupid things, and they do not need to be part of some great Xian conspiracy to say them..

Statistically speaking, it's just as plausible an argument that these mens' violent behavior protected the women and their offspring from other men MORE often than they killed or maimed the women in question. Thus, the risk was justified and the tendency towards violence propagated.

A parallel might be baboon communities. Dominant males are known to bully females, but their aggressive behavior also conferred an advantage to the troop by fending off predators.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KctkoADNnEc

I'd say that in humans, this is more often seen in cultures where male-on-male violence is also a greater part of life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRW8g5ATzvY

In more civilized cultures, women have greater freedom to choose and are more inclined to select men who demonstrate traits proven to be successful in a more civilized environment.

Edge.org: What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_3.html#taylor

Timothy Taylor, archaeologist, University of Bradford:

I read this through several times, and I cannot understand why it was quoted as if it had any merit.

It basically boils down to "I and my coauthor got a rough ride for a potentially empirically specious article and wholly unjustified extrapolation, and so I'm turning my back on foundational and normative principles in my current field of research so that I can justify still holding onto my conclusions."

If this were an evolutionary biologist embracing intelligent design because somebody didn't accept his overextrapolated ideas about tumorigenesis or some other issue, would anyone bother to quote it except to hold it up to ridicule?

For one thing, while I have not read his paper, the description of the methodology of just looking at isotopes of the hair of sacrificial victims for malnutrition sent warning bells off in my head. Was it compared against a range of other hair samples? Was there a feast-and-famine situation which affected the upper classes of Inca society? What can these isotopes actually reliably tell us about malnutrition--is the methodology itself flawed? Even if the isotope data says what they claim it says, how do they distinguish between recently captured Native children on the outskirts of the Incan empire and Incan peasant children with a long-standing history within the Incan empire?

I suspect that if he had good answers for these questions, they would have been provided in the article. Instead, he chose to make a sweeping claim about relativism based on his recent dustup over research which may very well be insufficient and invalid in the first place.

Logician, I am no troll. It isn't Xians who carry evolution to its logical extreme, it is evolution itself. The only endpoint in evolution is survival and reproduction. If a trait increases survival and reproduction, evolution will increase that trait until more of the trait doesn't increase survival and reproduction (in the limit). This is what is expected, this is what is observed, this is what our default hypothesis should be.

The classic example is the peacock's tail. The reason peacocks have a big tail (and the only reason) is because peahens like it. Predators of peacocks like it too. It slows peacocks down and makes them easier to catch. The reason peacocks don't have a tail a mile long is because they couldn't survive with one that big. As much as peahens might like a peacock with a tail a mile long, a peacock can't have a tail a mile long because his physiology won't support it, and every predator in the forest would have already caught him when his tail was only 100 yards long.

Every trait that has evolved (which means every trait) is a balance between positive and negative survival aspects of that trait. Many traits skew the reproductive advantage between individuals and those traits are prefered by individuals who acrue more advantage from those traits than those who acrue less (or who actually lose). Adoption of a trait that (seemingly) decreases reproduction is anomolous and may be more complex than it appears at first glance.

A father killing his daughter makes no sense from an evolutionary standpoint except as the dysfunctional tail end of a trait that does make sense. Maybe it is the tail end of high testosterone induced aggression. But in that case we would expect to see murders of sons too, and even more murders of non-family members by those who perpetrate honor killings. That is not reported. Is it not reported because it doesn't happen or because such murders are so common they are not newsworthy?

windy, all that matters is a woman's total reproductive success. The survival of any individual infant doesn't matter, only the sum total over her entire reproductive life. Larger babies will do better, provided they are not so large that they kill the mother.

If there are not enough resources in her household to support another infant and she is pregnant, she is better off having one that is stillborn. One that is stillborn at a LBW. Trying to keep more alive than there are resources for may result in all of them dying. That is what happened to Andrea Yates. She didn't have the "resources" to maintain her five children, so she became psychotic and killed them. In the "wild", Andrea Yates would likely have gotten pregnant again.

I agree it does look like hand waving. But there is no data on what conditions were like for human ancestors living in the wild 1 or 2 million years ago. In the absence of data it is hard to be precise. It is hard to be precise in any direction. We do know that on average only 2 infants survived. What the others died of and under what circumstances is unknown. That they died is certain. What circumstances increased survival is unknown. What we do know is that it is only those who successfully reproduced that have descendents today. The only way we can infer what circumstances increased survival is by what humans are like today. When there are many full genome sequences such that we can begin to understand what genes were useful where and when, perhaps we will know more.

In good times big infants will survive provided they are not so big that they kill the mother in which case they die and all the older children die too. Some moderate BW infants survive, the ones that don't, the next pregnancy of their mother is delayed as long as they are alive. LBW infants don't survive, but the mother gets pregnant again quickly.

In moderate times some big infants survive, some don't, a few moderate survive a few don't. The next pregnancy is delayed as long as they are alive. LBW don't survive but the mother gets pregnant again quickly.

In hard times, a few big infants survive, most don't. The next pregnancy is delayed as long as they are alive. Moderate and LWB infants don't survive and the mom gets pregnant again quickly.

In really hard times no infants survive. Big infants take more maternal resources and delay the next pregnancy longer than LBW infants. A pregnancy with a big fetus takes resources that could otherwise go to other children (not infants). Some children die.

Depending on the resources available, the mother's health, the presence of other children and the timing of new resource availability, the "optimum" pregnancy could be a LBW infant that is stillborn so the mother can get pregnant again quickly. If she is pregnant with a malnourished LBW fetus and conditions suddenly get hugely better, the "optimum" reproductive choice might be to miscarry and get pregnant again quickly so a large well nourished fetus can be carried to term as a large infant.

If conditions fluctuated a lot, instances like this would be more common and reproductive factors to compensate for them would be selected for.

I appreciate that this seems like hand-waving, but the conditions are unknown but likely to have been quite variable and subject to lots of different things. Add to this child deaths due to disease, predators, alpha male infanticide, and other things and it gets quite complicated. Probably too complicated to disprove a number of hypotheses. Does that make hypotheses that there is insufficient data to disprove "not even wrong"? I don't think so. The hypothesis that there is no teapot in orbit between the Earth and Mars is not disprovable. Does that make it "not even wrong"? No, it doesn't.

"latorquemada, as a parent, I completely share Dr Amy Tuteur's criteria for "success", a live mother and infant. Everything else is so far down on my list of priorities that they don't even register let alone take precedence. People are free to have other priorities. I do not understand such people and don't think I have any common ground to relate to them with."

As a woman who has given birth to three babies, I beg to differ. The argument that the only thing that matters is a live mother and baby immediately after birth is besides being entirely insensitive to the human experience, plain poor public health policy. Imagine if you were a farmer and you managed your cattle such that you maximized only the number of live cows and calves let's say 1 week postpartum, giving no regard to the long term health of either cow or calf. You would immediately see a decline in the health of your herd and thus the quality of your milk and meat. In the long term, your herd would also shrink because the long term survival and reproductive success of your herd would decline. The same obtains in humans -- we are merely apes in pants. Saying that the only thing that matters is a live mother and baby, even if maimed or damaged, is akin to saying "We had to burn the village to save it."

"Your notions of nutrition are incorrect. Badly. You would do well to read some standard scientific materials, textbooks, journal articles and the like. PubMed is a good resource. There are lots of free articles in the older literature which are completely adequate for information on nutrition."

Sir, you know neither me nor the depth of my understanding of nutrition. Simply because something is the current, prevailing, "standard" view hardly makes it de facto correct. I have read widely and deeply in the literature of nutrition both "standard" and "alternative." In addition, I followed the current "standard" nutritional advice (which is a recent fad) slavishly for 10 years and literally nearly killed myself. I've recovered my health in the last 5 years due to my willingness to open my mind and investigate other possibilities, many of which turn out to be nothing more than ancient knowledge that has been forgotten in the rush to embrace new theories.

The scientific method is a beautiful and powerful tool, but it suffers from an inability to deal with multi-variant problems in an elegant fashion. Both nutrition and birth involve complex ecosystems of innumerable variables, some of which vary widely among individuals and some of which vary in the same individual depending on circumstance and environment. The typical kinds of single (or few) variable studies that are typical of standard science do not necessarily shed much light on the complex overall functioning of systems.

And you're right, I know there is no point arguing with deadalus2u -- troll or no troll, he is a true believer in his method and priesthood, and true believers can never be reasoned with because their minds are closed.

latorqemada, what you are doing is pure projection. You have no idea of my background. You can look at my blog and see some of the things I am working on, and how I have written them up. Your analogies are not compelling, they are quite flawed. You "say" your techniques result in better "health". Do you have some evidence to back it up? Could you link to a citation where pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers have been shown to have better health and easier pregnancies, and where that superior health is explained by diet?

You obviously have an agenda, and don't have the facts to back it up. You call Dr Amy Tuteur a troll because you can't refute what she says with facts or logic. Hmm, trolls that reliably analyze, quote and link to the scientific literature? If that is your idea of what a troll is, then yes, that is exactly the kind of troll that I am. I am not working in areas that are as cut and dry as is Dr Amy Tuteur, so the chains of logic that I come up with are not always as easy to follow as hers are. But they are there.

I don't make a distinction between "standard" and "alternative" literature. For me the distinction is between "reliable" and "unreliable" literature. I don't bother with the unreliable literature because it is unreliable. That makes it not worth reading.

Telling the difference between reliable and unreliable literature is difficult. Many scientists can't do it except in their field of expertise, so they default to only reading peer reviewed literature which tends to be more reliable because it has been vetted by one or more other scientists knowledgeable in that field. Non scientists have an even more difficult time. Usually most data in papers is ok. Usually it is only interpretations that are unreliable. A paper that has an unreliable interpretation may still have reliable data that can be useful.

Unless you are quite expert in a field, it is very difficult to tell if a particular paper is reliable or unreliable. Sometimes even experts get it wrong. They can get it wrong in both ways. Millikan was an expert in physics who for decades thought Einstein's photoelectric effect was unreliable even though the data Millikan generated "proved" it to virtually everyone else.

You say the scientific method has an "inability to deal with multi-variant problems in an elegant fashion." OK, so what method are you using instead? Cherry pick from a handful of reliable and unreliable sources and come up with an "answer" that best suits your predetermined agenda? If that technique works better for you, you are free to adopt it. But don't expect the rest of us to. Don't expect us to agree that your method is an acceptable substitute for using facts and logic via the scientific method.

Actually, I do have an idea of your background, because before we even started this argument, I DID grant you the respect of going to your blog. I read a great deal of your thoughts on NO and found it very interesting. I am NOT qualified to judge whether it's a pile of shit or not, because I don't know enough about it. But I did think it was mighty interesting and were I the parent of an autistic child, I would certainly consider *trying* some of your ideas because the ideas were compelling.

What's my "proof" of better health? That's just a stupid question. I'm not sick any more, that's what. By any standards of conventional medicine (blood tests, ability to function, resistance to disease) I'm in the bloom of health, where 5 years ago I was sick as a dog and getting sicker, despite doing everything Science with a big "S" suggested was best. I suppose you're welcome to claim my astonishing recovery was due to nothing I changed and was pure happenstance. I accept that there is a small possibility that's true, but I doubt it enough to continue doing the things that seem to be keeping me well.

Next, if you imagine birth is "cut and dried," you are deluded. It does not surprise me that you would view a "women's topic" as simplistic and unworthy of your attention. I *am* an expert in the topic of birth, but my credentials would not impress you any more than yours do me. As you might note above I found what you had to SAY on your blog impressive and compelling, whereas you apparently do not find ideas as interesting as their provenance. You readily admit that many scientists/scientific papers get things wrong, yet you state that only the mainstream scientific view is "reliable." So mainstream scientists sometimes get it wrong, but everyone else's ideas are beneath notice? That is the hallmark of a True Beleiver. I'm pretty sure your NO theory is nowhere in the "mainstream scientific literature" and is/is going to be roundly denounced as the thoughts of a crackpot no matter HOW thoroughly you footnote it. Any idea that upsets the apple cart is always derided. In fact, you have a quote to this effect on your very own blog. But I guess since you have the proper credentials, you're entitled to speculate, right?

I *could* refute Amy on her terms, but it's tilting at windmills and a total waste of my time. I'm not a scientist, I haven't the temperament for it, but to posit that I "cannot" is nothing but an attack on my intelligence. I *have* read many of the papers she refers to and there are plenty of instances where either her math or her interpretation is questionable. Many other much more reputable scientists than she in the field of birth also differ dramatically from Amy in their interpretations of the same studies. As for having an agenda, hers is 100 feet tall -- there's not much hope of finding unbiased analysis on her site.

My method? Read and listen widely. Experiment. Be open to new ideas. Be aware that what applies to any one situation is unlikely to be universal. Be aware that no one method of inquiry produces absolute truth. Know that what we "know" pales next to what we don't. Remember always that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Were I "cherry picking ideas to fit my predetermined agenda," I wouldn't understand a tenth of the things I think today -- I'm as happy to skewer my own sacred cows as the next guy's.

When I said birth was "cut and dry", what that means is that there isn't any real controversy over the safety of home birth vs. birth at a hospital. There are some interventions that are not available at home that are available at a hospital, the lack of those interventions can lead to maternal and/or fetal death, the need for those interventions is not predictable with sufficient time for them to be obtained in a home birth or via transfer. Therefore homebirth has higher inherent risks than birth at a hospital. Every large well done study is going to show that. The only way a study won't show that if it is small or poorly done and the results are an artifact of it being small or poorly done.

The only way homebirth could be as safe as a hospital birth is if all pregnant women who needed interventions only available at a hospital were screened out of homebirth. Since the technology to do that is not available, homebirth cannot be as safe as a hospital birth.

This is not "rocket science". It doesn't take a PhD in statistics to figure this out. The only people who don't agree with it are denialists with a belief system not based on facts or logic.

Yes, Dr. Amy does have an agenda, an agenda I share, trying to prevent infants and mothers from dying during childbirth. I happen to think that is a good agenda to have. I think having the agenda of wanting prospective mothers to "feel good" about whatever choices they have made even when those choices lead directly to the death of their fetus is not a good agenda. It breaks my heart when infants are stillborn because their mothers were lied to and given a false sense of security about home birth. That kind of karma is not something I want to have.

I didn't say only mainstream science is reliable. I didn't say all mainstream science is reliable. Mainstream science is vastly more reliable than what is called the "alternate literature". You can't point to mainstream science that says homebirth is as safe as hospital birth because it isn't. The margin of error is much smaller than the difference in safety. There is no scientific controversy in it. It is just like ID and evolution. There is no controversy.

Again, your definition of "safety" is so restrictive as to be laughable. Even the most "damning" studies, the margin of difference between infant mortality in hospital and out is very small. There are several large studies, notably ones from the UK and the Netherlands that show that homebirth and hospital birth are very close to equivalently safe in terms of neonatal mortality. Simply because Dr. Amy chooses to massage the data in those studies one way and in her favorite studies another is irrelevant. To my knowledge, none of the studies take into account the factor of heroic measures taken at hospitals which improve neonatal "survival" rates, but produce severely compromised infants who die shortly later. Nor do any of the studies that show a *small* advantage to hospital birth in terms of immediate neonatal survival address the vastly increased long and short term maternal and neonatal morbidity associated with hospital births.

The fact is that there has NEVER been a study comparing physiologically normal childbirth to hospital birth or midwife attended birth, which is often almost as dysfunctional as obstetric birth. Long before anyone began to study childbirth in a rigorous way, physiologically normal childbirth had been almost completely abolished the Western world. Thus, all we have are a bunch of studies comparing one physiologically suboptimal method of childbirth to another -- no wonder no one's outcomes are what we think they could be. Do some women need a c-section? Of course -- let's be generous and go with the WHO definition of 5-10% optimum (rates under 4% are obtained by many conscientious practitioners). That necessity does not justify disrupting the process for every single one of the other 90-95% so severely that almost every mother and infant suffers some short or long term injury, and many times so seriously that c-section *is* now required. It's one way to build a business, I guess.

This from you: "I think having the agenda of wanting prospective mothers to "feel good" about whatever choices they have made even when those choices lead directly to the death of their fetus is not a good agenda." can just as reasonably be restated as "I think having the agenda of wanting prospective mothers to "feel good" about whatever choices they have made even when those choices lead directly to the injury or death of their fetus and/or themselves is not a good agenda." This is the position of the obstetric industry.

I am 99.9999% sure that you have never seen a physiologic childbirth or a physiologically-born, unharmed infant, so there is no way you can claim to adequately understand the difference in the quality of the outcomes. I am 99% sure that you could not, without a significant period of further study, even explain the physiological and psychological process of normal childbirth, the way the two are intertwined, or the many reasons why interventions and disturbances of any kind are detrimental to the success of the process. It's interesting that much of your NO research focuses on the fight-or-flight physiology, yet you believe childbirth is best performed under those physiological conditions. Anyone who has disturbed a laboring cat knows that's not true.

Regardless, there's no chance you'll hear anything I'm saying, but if you consider yourself a serious scientist, then you have a responsibility to fully understand the process you advocate disrupting as a matter of "safety" and the real, lasting consequences of disrupting it. Reputable scientists who have written eloquently on the process of normal birth and the immediate postpartum period include Michael Odent, Frederic Leboyer, and Henci Goer.

Those "small" differences are all in one direction. Mortality is higher in homebirths. Each of those "small" differences represents a real person who is dead who might not have died had standard interventions been available.

Homebirth woo is woo that kills real people. That is a fact. When that fact can't be denied, the facts are distorted (as you have done) by modifying the definition of "safety". By claiming the differences are due to "heroic measures" of infants that are better off dead. You are lying when you say that hospital birth leads to higher infant mortality later in life. If you are not lying, then you should be able to cite the source of the "facts" that you claim you are reporting. I have a very open mind and am willing to listen to such facts. I am not willing to listen to lies being falsely put out as facts.

Do you have any data that childbirth was ever the benign natural process you claim you are trying to recreate? No, that is simply a made-up idea similar to the noble savage myth. Because there is no record that anyone died in childbirth 10,000 years ago, there must have been no deaths?

No amount of anxiety reducing feel good practices can transport a baby that is too big through a pelvis that is too small. Such babies can only be delivered alive via C-section.

If there was some data, a few facts, or some logic to suggest a plausible theory by which homebirth might be safer it would be worth listening to. There isn't any. You haven't presented any. No one has presented any. Bringing up anecdotes of good outcomes when the "problem" is the rare adverse event is disingenuous and completely bogus. That is the exact same "logic" used by people who don't wear seatbelts. Every time you don't have an accident, wearing a seatbelt is superfluous. Every time you do have an accident it isn't. Every time there are no adverse events in a birth, a home birth is perfectly safe. Every time there is an adverse event it isn't. Every time there is an adverse event, you will claim is "well, that was not a true physiologically normal birth". That is known as the No True Scotsman fallacy. Can you predict who will have a "physiologically normal birth" ahead of time? No you can't.

A woman may choose a birth process with a higher risk for her infant being stillborn, if she derives a psychological ego boost from the process. People do risky things all the time, sky diving, rock climbing, recreational drugs, or in the topic of this thread, stay with a man who violently abuses her. If a woman wants to do homebirth as an extreme sport, that is her decision. But I find it unacceptable for people to push naïve women into homebirth by lying to them (as you are doing) about the real risks. I see that the same as lying to women that being beaten by their mate is a good thing.

There was a case where a woman blogged about her pregnancy and her plans for a home birth. Everything seemed ok despite no prenatal care (because she was young and healthy), but the baby died because it couldn't get out fast enough. The type of adverse event that is easily prevented in a hospital setting by doing a C-section. What was most upsetting to me was how other people were then lying to her telling her she had done the right thing that her baby would likely have died in a hospital, that there was nothing she could have done. The fact is, she made a bad decision (listen to people who were lying to her about how safe home birth is), she decided to have a home birth, and her baby died as a consequence. Someone may feel that a dead baby at a home birth is better than a live baby at a hospital birth, but that is not something that I can understand.

This is such an important topic! I'm glad to see that people raising awareness about this issue. Here is what I just wrote on the topic... http://fube.ca/2008/02/violence_against_women_in_war.html Let me know what you think!

You have won stupidest theory of the year award.

That ain't no theory. It's just a little uninformed speculation. A theory is something much bigger.

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