ANT 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Promiscuity, Partible Paternity, Child Support
Document Summary
First, a few notes on evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Humans are flexible decision-makers: behaviors are plastic, and likely depend on the environmental context. Traits (including behaviors) are the results of complex interactions between genes and the environment. We will see that strategies depend on context (environment) Also, multiple strategies may be favored no one size fits all strategy. Even if we think a behavior is adaptive, that doesn"t mean it"s morally good. If we think a behavior is not adaptive, that doesn"t make it morally wrong. Evolutionary theory predicts that some strategies will be favored by natural selection and will become more common in the population. It does not predict that all individuals of a given sex will behave a certain way. Many studies can"t directly measure the variables they are interested in. Subjects often don"t represent global population, or what was going on in our recent evolutionary history.
