What's your view of evolutionary origins of MA?

[InfinityChild]

Why does there have to be one? Do we need to be evolutionary “valid” to deserve basic human rights? Whats the evolutionary reason for gay men? Or a piss kink? Or dendrophillia? Or having a race fetish?

This is true, but figuring out the why in things is very human

[PinkPawn]

The other theory is that pedophilia is an even better way to ensure paternity. If you start having sex with a girl before she is fertile, then continue to have sex with her when she becomes fertile, that's an even more surer way to ensure paternity then staring to have sex with her at puberty. Basically it's a way to make certain that you are the first to have sex with her when she become fertile.

The evidence for this is that a lot of pedophiles tell me that they stay attracted to a child until a much older age then if they met the kid at that older age. So if they meet a kid at 7, they might stay attracted to the kid till they are 13. But if they just met the kid at 11 the kid would be too old.

This would be consistent with the idea that pedophilia is a way to ensure that you are the absolute first to have sex with a girl when she becomes fertile.

Of course, all of this is a bit academic. Evolution is a bitch. It wants you to have sex with as many fertile woman as possible, by force if necessary. And if somebody is in your way, evolution is happy to kill them. It's not a great place to look for your ethics.

I once heard an evolutionary biologist on a podcast, discussing sex and relationships. While I didn't agree with all the woman had to say, she said that basically men want to be rich in order to get as many women as possible; they are attempting to hoard women. Further to that point, many will hoard children-- if not for immediate consummation then for blocking competitors. It makes some sense. Those polygamous Mormon fundamentalists basically trade young girls like livestock, with the prophet getting first choice and then handing them out to political cronies. They also kick out boys to prevent further competition

Then again, this doesn't strike me as pedophilia-- it seems focused on control and coercion rather than love and mutual attraction. I also question whether this is strictly evolutionary. I guess the urge to do it is, but it seems to happen mostly in coercive systems and contexts. If there was, say, a Navajo tribe where one guy was trying to hoard all the pussy, surely he'd have been murdered (a quick search revealed some polygamy/polygyny in Navajo customs, but that's not necessarily the same thing as hoarding)

[John_Doe]

I have two theories to offer here.

The first is that pedophilia is just hebephilia gone too far. Developmental neurology is an imperfect mechanism, and in the same way that sometimes the brain development fucks up and gives a man the sexual orientation intended for a woman (homosexuality), sometimes it fucks up and goes to far with the minor attraction into pedophilia.

The problem with this is that pedophilia appears to be a sticking point of it's own. If it was a matter of a spectrum gone too far, then we would expect more people with a mildly pedophilic orientation. Yet there seem to be two distinct sticking points in minor attraction at hebephilia and pedophilia.

The other theory is that pedophilia is an even better way to ensure paternity. If you start having sex with a girl before she is fertile, then continue to have sex with her when she becomes fertile, that's an even more surer way to ensure paternity then staring to have sex with her at puberty. Basically it's a way to make certain that you are the first to have sex with her when she become fertile.

The evidence for this is that a lot of pedophiles tell me that they stay attracted to a child until a much older age then if they met the kid at that older age. So if they meet a kid at 7, they might stay attracted to the kid till they are 13. But if they just met the kid at 11 the kid would be too old.

This would be consistent with the idea that pedophilia is a way to ensure that you are the absolute first to have sex with a girl when she becomes fertile.

Of course, all of this is a bit academic. Evolution is a bitch. It wants you to have sex with as many fertile woman as possible, by force if necessary. And if somebody is in your way, evolution is happy to kill them. It's not a great place to look for your ethics.

This is what has always made sense to me (pedophilia being a preference for younger partners taken too far and gays more or less having the reproductive instincts 'intended' for the opposite sex), even though 'evolutionary psychology' is probably always speculative, there's not necessarily any empirical evidence for a 'theory' just because it's internally logical (and there's nothing empirical about psychology to begin with/in general, if we're talking about the scientific study of consciousness and not observable behavior and even the latter will, in practice, be about interpreting behavior instead of just predicting it from a purely sensory observation standpoint, especially or at least if we're talking about human beings. I'm only interested in ethology at all insofar as it can help to inform common sense assumptions about non-human animal consciousness but those assumptions aren't ultimately scientific, I wish we would scrap the idea that consciousness is of scientific interest once and for all).

I don't understand why you think that the 'spectrum gone too far' theory would imply more people having a mildly pedophilic orientation (and I'm not sure if by 'mildly pedophilic' you mean being mildly attracted to prepubescent children, having a weak preference for them or what) but it might be that average people are more 'pedophilic' than we'd assume.

I'm being a broken record (I've mentioned this in other threads) but I think that, on paper, we should expect the conventional standard of attractiveness to be girls who are 17-24 (not necessarily 17 but the point of full sexual maturation, which is normally around two years after menarche which is considered delayed if it hasn't occurred by 15, leaving aside medically precocious puberty a girl can be fully sexually mature as early as 12 but if a girl isn't fully sexually mature by 17 it's not for age-related reasons; there would be some medical abnormality involved) since that's when they are most fertile and most likely to have a healthy pregnancy for both mother and child, and maybe 18-24 for men (although sperm quality apparently peaks at 30 and starts to decline at 35. People sometimes downplay how important the father's health is when it come to genetic disorders/medical conditions in the child or even the mother's health during pregnancy possibly, I can't remember. Your best chance at a very healthy pregnancy is when you and your partner are under 35, if not 25). My absolute fantasy ideal might be around 12-15 but there isn't a significant difference between 14-year-old girls and women in their late 30s for me, all factors considered a 35-year-old woman was or could have been healthier-looking at 15 but the difference is 'unnecessary' for me (looking as though you are in your early teens would be a 'bonus' for me, if it made a difference at all, and sometimes aging makes a woman look more interesting to me). It's not until after 40 that my attraction to women tends to wane but I can think of a few middle-aged women off the top of my head who are very attractive to me (Marissa Tomei in The First Purge was 53 when that movie came out and she looked as though she were in her 30s, to me). 12 is when I generally start to find girls very attractive, the average 12-year-old does not look underdeveloped to me, but 14 might be the age when I'm not going to be un-attracted to a girl for age-related reasons (medical abnormalities aside, a 14-year-old girl should be at Tanner stage 3 at least). I hope I never develop a strong preference for teenage girls, the mere possibility of that scared me at one point, considering how out of reach they are (even more so than women in their 20s and 30s) and how taboo a relationship with one would be, I'm also rarely exposed to them unless I'm watching a children's show.

I've experienced a lot of scary mid-life despair and grief this year (I'm turning 40 in January), mostly because aging (on top of being conventionally unattractive in so many ways already) cements my permanently and eternally having no access to desirable girls/women in their teens, twenties and thirties but also because of the normative age roles that come with being a 'middle-aged' man and how 'society' allows you to express yourself when you get older (whether it's reading middle-grade fiction or even being attracted to people in their early 20s; as a couple of examples, not that I'm comfortable admitting my attraction to women in general but I can't stomach the idea of reprimanding people for who they're attracted to. It de-values their happiness and it's immoral, it's not ever bad to find the prospect of intimacy with someone pleasurable; even if there are practical reasons to avoid acting on your attraction, you can be attracted to someone and value their happiness simultaneously. I know there are people who don't care if 40-year-olds read Harry Potter, or act silly and playful, or admit to having a crush on some college student, etc. and I guess I'm just emotionally fixating on the ones who criticize 'age-inappropriate' behavior that doesn't necessarily cause harm or deprive anyone of happiness), and I guess it's related to my semi-obsession with puberty, menopause and fertility in relation to aging.

[Harlan]

I'm sure you'll be familiar with the view that pedophilia is evolutionarily advantageous because it makes reproduction happen as quickly as possible. However, strictly speaking this can explain hebephilia, but not actual pedophilia (i.e. attraction to pre-pubescents). For a while I was of the view that pedophilia was a spandrel (i.e. an evolutionary byproduct of other structures, a coincidence).

It seems to me that the mechanism is based not on reproduction, but on survival, which ensures prosperity through reproduction (for heteros) and creation (for homos and pedos). A loving person is better able to care and impart knowledge, facilitating better adaptation. Both homos and pedos are similar in that they can become better parents/guardians/partners for abandoned children and help them socialize. The key is not sex, but care and love (which can be expressed through sex). Growing up, adults either reproduce and take care of their children or create and taking care of abandoned children.

[CantChainTheSpirit]

I've heard a few theories over the years.

One is that there's a widely accepted theory that some characteristics provide an advantage as long as it's only a minority or usually around 10%. Being left handed for example provides an advantage in combat because right handed people are familiar with and tuned to fight right handed opponents, so a combatant presented with a left handed person will find their routine moves less effective, while the left handed combatant is experienced against right handed opponents, so has a very real advantage. This only works if the left handed person is in a minority. The incident rate of left handed people exists in some other characteristics that have some benefit and so the theory goes that nature maintains a 10% difference where it provides some benefit. This could include sexualities such as homosexuality, perhaps providing a bonding benefit in groups and communities. MA could fall into this category, there may be a benefit from being in a minority, earlier access to partners, bonding benefits, being close to younger people who go on to become the more effective young adults.

Another is that like some species including wolves, some animals give up breeding rights to look after the young of alphas. Similar to above, a portion of males are strongly inclined to not pursue breeding but instead devote themselves to the young of others. The evolutionary benefit to the pack is that young cubs have devoted protectors even if its parents are unable to protect them. The overall strength of the pack is stronger and more likely to survive, carrying this trait forward with some wolves devoting themselves to the young of others.

And of course the obvious one that most people think of, that if you can bond first with the best partner available then your offspring will be in the best position. If you seek a partner in her 40s then she's too old to have children with. In the 30s and many of the best females will already be taken. The same in their late 20s. Early 20s the selection is better but still reduced. In some cultures, arranged marriages would choose someone who is still a child to ensure that the bond is confirmed. In the past, the same happened with kings and queens. Finding a partner when she's too young to have children and committing together ensures that when she is able to have children, it will be with you and not someone else. The strongest and best males finding and committing to the healthiest and most attractive females while still children. Many years ago I read an article somewhere about how many of the most successful people in the world are maps or have map characteristics. I don't know if there's evidence to back that up. I did once go to a conference and met a group of other maps. In a room of 6 people, 1 was a professional sportsman, 3 ran their own successfu companies and 1 was a successful author and academic. I remember one of the business leaders asking the organiser if this was a normal makeup for a group of maps and he refused to answer. It does make me think if the data was there, would we find that maps are statstically more accomplished than non-maps and whether this might be explained by this idea that historically, maps have come from bonding with the best females at an early age.

[CantChainTheSpirit]

Building on the above, are maps a result of early bonding to the healthiest and best females within a population?

In that conference of 5 maps, was that fairly typical for maps?
I generally put it down to coincidence but then the question raised in this thread makes me wonder.

If within a population of people, maps are people who instinctively identify the best partners before they are of breeding age, and were able to secure them as partners at such an early age, before there is competition from the majority of the population, would this lead to maps gaining a genetic advantage by bonding early with the best genetic matches from that population? If over multiple generations, this became a genetic pattern and since the offspring would be genetically strong then this would culminate in successful people with map tendencies.

I'm not saying every map would be successful although success can be measured in many ways. An artist can be great but poor, a scientist can be intellectually great but not accelerate in business etc. But it could overall lead to successful maps in different fields (Lewis Carroll) including in business. It could also explain the resentment of non-maps since since they are the ones who lose out to maps and end up genetically and in terms of success, trailing maps.

[infantogirly]

I have seen once a documentary in which male sea lions which couldn't reproduce sometimes went after female sea lion pups to try (by force) to have intercourse with them. It is possible that something similar happened to humanity, I believe. Also, that's why I find the argument that humans are naturally disgusted by certain stuff such as pedophilia, zoophilia, rape and necrophilia stupid, since many species have similar behaviors. Like when it comes to animals having intercourse with animals that aren't the same species as them, you see that behavior on dolphins, sea lions, dogs, otters and etc. Not saying that we should advocate to live just like nature, I think if we do that society will be on chaos in less than 2 weeks. But I don't think currently western morality exist because of biology.

[Not Forever]

I usually put paraphilias into the same bucket when talking about their evolutionary origins: I take a step back and look at them as a whole. I believe that all paraphilias, including pedophilia (but also sexual orientations in and of themselves), are caused by the way human beings approach sex. We don’t rely on smells, we don’t get aroused by pheromones, we don’t have sex once a year, and so on. We have a complex and very psychological sexuality, a sexuality that we develop over the course of our lives and that also serves us for social interaction. This allows us to have sex often, to have sex in many situations, and potentially to have sex with anything and anyone, and I consider this to be the main evolutionary advantage.

On a large scale, then, it’s normal that some people end up being attracted to things that don’t benefit reproduction or that are not socially accepted (potentially ending up “eliminated” from society, at least in more tribal contexts). But the element that led to the emergence of these behaviors is alive and is passed on through all those people who do reproduce. In essence, I don’t see any real distinction between heterosexuality (which can be an attraction to breasts, hair, a face, a certain personality, a certain age, etc.) and zoophilia; it simply emerges according to different statistics. They are manifestations of the same elasticity of the brain.

A more picky and less elastic species would, in my opinion, lead to more problems than a 10% of the population having a non-conventional sexuality.