I can't help but chuckle every time someone takes a human feature or habit and then attempts to force it into the massive speculative jigsaw puzzle that is biological Evolution. Not to mention the fact that we're conveniently trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where we get to continually redefine the picture on the box so it suits our latest jigsaw piece that we just found or made up...
Talk about a self-validating world-view. We have absolutely no way of ever empirically confirming what the real picture on the box is, yet we continue to find and force only the pieces that fit our conjectured "picture on the box".
This article is borderline farcical given that these conjectures are so far into the domain of unempirical "science" I would hardly call it science or even presentable theory.
I'm all for science when it works on the authority of empiricism, but once this authority is borrowed for claims about the unempirical, that's when I get incredibly skeptical. This is an intelligent community and I hate to see such reddit-level "science" passed around here.
Unlike you, I greatly enjoy articles such as this one.
Let me begin with the caveat that I agree that it is more speculation than science, and it is unfortunate that the author presents it as if it were a scientific paper rather than a blog post. But note that it hasn't been published anywhere, so it is not as if the scientific community is accepting it as science.
You seem to have the opinion that anything that is not science is at best not worth doing, and at worst evil. I urge you to re-examine that assumption.
Now, if there were a scientific way of answering the question that the article considers, that would be a very different situation. In the absence of one, it is ridiculous to suggest that no one should think about it. And if people think about it, they will present their attempted answers to the world. Hopefully, their arguments will rest on logic, even if not empirically verifiable. This is an expression of human curiosity, and I think it is natural and wonderful.
I say we should continue to discuss articles like this, but doing our best to keep in mind that they are not proven theories. As our experimental abilities improve, it might turn out that today's speculation is fertile ground for tomorrow's experimentation as a bed of hypothesis to test and accept or discard.
Finally, even if one's sole concern is the dissemination of scientific knowledge, I contend that the article is still useful if it makes people think and learn more about the fascinating, fascinating phenomenon of Fischerian runaway (to give just one example).
-- In the absence of one, it is ridiculous to suggest that no one should think about it.
I'm not saying that no one should think about it, I'm saying we should have a better filter that immediately separates garbage science from good science. It takes about 10 minutes of reading and a few paragraphs to realize that this is absolute garbage and doesn't need to be voted up.
-- but doing our best to keep in mind that they are not proven theories.
Now that I think about it, what really irks me here is that I know people are actually reading stuff like this (which throws around enough scientific terminology and academic quotes to sound reasonable) and then some of those people go on believing that really is the answer to the hypothesis presented.
That is what has happened to a lot of science these days. There's so much semi-believable trash and conjecture like this tossed out in so many different fields of study that I just wish people would get a better sense of what even has a remotely logical basis for validity. It pains me to know that even one person is reading this trash and coming away thinking that "Gee, science has solved another one!" when in fact it has not.
He is speculating, and some of his speculation is interesting. At this point, I think you are rationalizing your intuitional dislike of the article. It seems more likely that some of his speculation just rubs you the wrong way.
We're a long way from being able to tell why animals developed the traits they did through evolution. We're a really long way from being able to empirically prove it. That doesn't mean speculation isn't fun in the meantime.
At this point, I think you are rationalizing your intuitional dislike of the article.
Maybe you're not understanding me, and maybe this is partially because you're new to the community...
But when I visit HN, I don't want to be presented with the 99.99% of speculative trash that fills the internet. I can go to Digg or Reddit for this sort of junk science that gets us intellectually nowhere. I (and everyone else) want to see that quality .01% that presents legitimate scientific inquiry, regardless of whether we agree with it or not.
I think you don't get it. Speculation is not the same as junk science. Speculation can be insightful, interesting and intelligent or it can be the opposite. Obviously you thought it was trash and just as obviously a larger number of HN'ers thought it was good. You seem to arguing that everyone else should use your criteria for what should be on Hacker News.
Actually I had a look at a few of the guy's other articles and it seems he is a little loose with his facts. I love good speculation and I thought that article had some. But the author often does seem to miss the distinction between fact and opinion. Still you (kirse) should be prepared to back yourself up if you are going to label the article as trash.
Wow, you need to relax. This is hacker news, not research news. Why don't you set up a parallel site? The code is open source. Someone already did that for business articles. You're trying to take your personal preferences -- which, as you can see, other people don't seem to agree with -- and decide that HN should follow them.
Besides, initially you said this was about HN, and now it's about saving the average person on the street from their own stupidity? Because surely, people on HN are aware that this is not a theory. If that's your problem, I think this would be the least of your worries -- half the people out there still think "because the Bible said so" is a logical basis for validity.
Use of the word "sexy" 30 times in something purporting to be scientific; reliance on anecdotes rather than research to make points.
In general it sets off the crackpot alarm for me which means that I take anything else said therein with a grain of salt. One so large, as it were, that it wasn't even worth continuing to read after a certain point.
Hm, I did not notice any anecdotes in the article, unless you count stuff like "some societies post boy warriors to guard the women" - sure he does not give the evidence for that in the article, but there might be more extensive studies of it.
Anyway, I don't want to defend it as science - it's an article on the internet. But the flaws in the reasoning definitely are not obvious to me, as they seem to the first commentator. Would be interested to hear more details.
Edit: OK, I counted the "sexy" occurrences, too. Did not bother me much - it is clearly written in "popular science" tone, not "hard science" tone.
"One objection to all this is the claim that men from cultures in which the women habitually go about topless, do not find breasts sexy. I refute this: we do not say that women’s faces are sexy [...]"
That's where I stopped. There's just no rigor in there.
Fair enough, and thanks for being the first to actually point to a real example.
This point did not bother me much, because it seems unlikely to me that there are actually such cultures (where men don't find breasts sexy). Would be interested to learn more about one such culture. For all I know, there might even be cultures where women don't have breasts? I also just remembered those women that put rings around their neck to elongate them - clearly there are a lot of subtle points to consider...
I also don't take issue if people decide they are not interested in that particular subject. However, I take issue with people claiming evolution theory is nonsense, as the original commentator did.
Use of the word "sexy" 30 times in something purporting to be scientific
Well, he's using the word "sexy" to mean what it means. That is, marked by or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest. I found it rather refreshing that someone was using sexy to mean "sexy", rather than to mean popular, or cool, or useful, or profitable.
How does the article "purport to be scientific"? I read it as interesting speculation. It doesn't claim to be based on rigorous empirical evidence; it just claims to be interesting. And clearly a bunch of HN readers agreed.
"I say we should continue to discuss articles like this, but doing our best to keep in mind that they are not proven theories."
Isn't that true for all science? Still at one point we have to take the one or other theory and work with it, because it is the best we have. People built the Eiffel tower before Einstein came along and relativized physics (I think - did not look up the dates).
Not that I disagree with you, but I think "remember they are not proven theories" is still a bit of a cop out. Would you say that Evolution is not a proven theory? I think it is more accurate to assume we have not yet gotten every nano detail right, but the big picture seems very, very likely. (Of course the article in question, as you say, is just an article on a web site, not a peer reviewed thing).
Sure, this "evolution-x.com" stuff is just someone's personal writings, but the academic and peer-reviewed study of how human features were produced by evolution is definitely a valid field. Yeah, it's hard to arrive at any definite conclusions since we can't make direct observations of our own evolution, but it's still the right paradigm to use in thinking about these questions.
It's the mark of a very bad writer, to take several sources of respectable ideas and use them to get to a conclusion worse than the original.
It would be like an engineer taking the finer points of concrete and steel and making something weaker than wood. I believe it takes talent to be that talentless.
"It would be like an engineer taking the finer points of concrete and steel and making something weaker than wood."
That's a bit antisocial to bring that metaphor up around programmers... that's uncomfortably close to what we do all the time.
Just this week I was examining a project built on Java and Struts and a couple of other rock solid Java technologies, and the end result... well, you name the problem and it had it, inconsistency, no conceptual integrity, bad performance, terrible code... 'twas horrible what they did to Java. I don't like Java, but it doesn't actually have to be this bad...
(I found myself making this metaphor: It was like the team was situated in front of a bulging dam, armed with a firehose that sprays Java code. Every time a crack appears, they shoot the hose at it and spray out a few more hundred gallons of code. Eventually you're left with nothing but a mess.)
lmao, for whatever it's worth, the guy or gal has taken his/her time to go through the studies and present the information. To compare abstract thought with concrete objects is perhaps talentless :P
What is your proposed way of doing things then, just never think about anything at all? What about those people who wondered if the earth is flat? Doesn't it always start with a theory, that people then try to disprove or validate?
Also I don't understand why you think there is no empirical evidence? There is a lot of empirical evidence, namely, there are billions of people to observe, as well as lots and lots of animals.
So people create models that they think explain things - then they can compare those models to reality. That they are not perfect does not make them 100% wrong (is Newtonian physics wrong? Kind of, but would you say it is stupid? At least it lead the way in the right direction).
OK, trying agin: "We have absolutely no way of ever empirically confirming what the real picture on the box is, yet we continue to find and force only the pieces that fit our conjectured "picture on the box"."
What do you mean by that? If you have an observation that contradicts the theory exposed in the article, then publish it, and the theory will have to be amended/discarded/whatever. Before you chuckle, present the observation/evidence.
I suppose you think that maths is no science, then?
After all, there's no empirical proof that any mathematical statement is true. Even simple statements like, for example, C/r = Pi cannot be verified empirically. Following your argument, maths is just "pseudo science".
But, of course, you would not say that, would you?
However, if you accept maths to be a science, why not any other field that uses deductive logic? For biological evolution -- at least, the part you seem to find disgusting -- basically uses deductive logic: It makes a few basic assumptions, and then deduces its conclusions, using logical arguments. There's quite a lot of game theory in evolutionary biology.
Your argument, on the other hand, is based on a false assumption. Namely, that there are no empirical proofs for statements in evolutionary biology.
Because there is, sometimes.
Yes, we cannot make experiments with humans, especially not with ones we consider extinct.
We can, however, argue "by analogy". And guess what? Arguments by analogy are made all the time in empirical science. Whenever you use a bridge, you bet your life that the mathematical model of the bridge correctly reflected all the important attributes of the real bridge. All sciences using mathematical models are based on the argument by analogy.
You complain about "pseudo science". Your comment, however, lacks signs of quality as well. You seem to be ignorant about scientific reasoning and yet you dare to judge someone else's article. Why not start by fixing your own ignorance, first?
The article started out fine. It's an interesting topic that I've never really wondered about and it made me curious. And then I came across things like this:
Instincts are coded for by genes. Genes are made up of DNA strands which use a sort of language, Gattaca. In English words, a man’s instinct may have been quite simple, and something like the following:
"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests. If they have such a thing, feel sexually repulsed. Increase this feeling as they are bigger, rounder, wobblier."
One might argue that a man with such an instinct would do well, in the light of the changes in the bodies of women, to delete this programming entirely. However, a much smaller mutation could alter the programming to:
"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests. If they have such a thing, feel sexually stimulated. Increase this feeling as they are bigger, rounder, wobblier."
Can we say "pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo" here? Just because it's a smaller change in a natural-language description of an instinct, it doesn't necessarily mean that the mutation is smaller. The author is making a huge, unwarranted and rather silly assumption about the relationship between the DNA structure and the complexity of the natural-language description of the consequences of that DNA structure.
The way the author phrased this is unfortunate. However, there are very good reasons to believe that even small mutations could have resulted in large changes in morphology or behavior. A mutation in even a single base-pair could result in cascading effects. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox
Wow. I was prepared to dislike this article but I find the argument extremely compelling and well reasoned.
Edit: An especially good point is his suggestion that permanent breasts would likely have evolved before men started to find them attractive. This makes a lot of sense and is consistent with how we think other traits evolved (i.e. feathers came first; then came flying).
> Men, meanwhile, are stuck with a sub-optimal instinct. Their desires are fired by a pair of useless bags of fat. Men cannot afford to lose this instinct, however. Non-lactating breasts are like nuclear missiles: we only need them or want them because other people have them.
That has to be the least sexy description of why breasts are sexy. Love it.
He's wrong for a simple reason: Breasts are expensive. They are expensive to maintain, and no other animal maintains them. So even if it had an advantage at some point in time, as he describes, rather than maintaining an expensive evolutionary line, this "fashion" would change quickly.
I think that breast serve a concrete purpose that is essential for our society. And the fact that we have breasts is strongly tied in with the difference between us and other animals. We are different from other animals in that we are more clever and more social. We are also different in that we have breasts. It's likely that the two are tied together.
My theory is this: breasts are an age indicator. In traditional human societies it's difficult to judge the reproductive health of a woman. A woman can hide her true reproductive health by various means (like body painting or ovulating on the sly), so as our societies grew bigger and bigger, it was neccessary for the society as a group to make non-hideable means of judging how fit the particular woman is.
Breasts benefit the community more than they benefit the woman according to my theory. I.e, humans are supremely social, and the best evolved human is the one that works the best to move the entire community forward. A society of very selfish people will not survive.
Humans have certain traits that help the community more than they help themselves. Breasts could be one of them.
Small, large, medium, the size of breasts is not really critical. However, perk and 'young' breasts would always be judged more attractive than long sagging breasts. It's clear that the function of breasts is correlated to age. And that sexual attractiveness increases the more attractive the breast is.
Similarly, if a young woman is starved for a long time in a sand blown deserts, the first things to go are the form of the breasts. She is not in an ideal reproductive state, as rearing children requires a lot of water. Old women who are past reproductive age often have their breasts change to a different less attractive form.
Conclusion: Breasts, and some other female parts are a simple indication of youth and reproductive health for a society that is clever enough to fake the other things usually used by other primates.
Interestingly enough you are arguing that breasts evolved to make women more honest - makes it harder for them to lie about their age.
The author argued that breasts allowed the women to be less honest - removed indication of infertility.
But in either case, the rest of the argument of how men evolved to like breasts could still be true.
All this really tells us is that the range of possibilities are large. I think the question of how one could prove, or at least narrow down the possibilities is an interesting one.
For example, if one could demonstrate that our ancestors had an aversion to breasts, and that the change to liking them was in a reasonable probability of occurring in the way the author describes, then his explanation is reasonable.
But, given the random nature of evolution, finding the precise answer may not be possible and the best we can hope for is a set of weighted possible explanations.
>He's wrong for a simple reason: Breasts are expensive. They are expensive to maintain, and no other animal maintains them.
Your argument is not valid. It's not the cost alone that count, but the benefits minus the costs. Imagine your argument against human intelligence instead: Human intelligence could not have evolved for a simple reason: brains that produce intelligent behaviour are expensive. They are expensive to maintain, and no other animal maintains them.
I just read through the group selection wikipedia article. It does not seem to be abandoned as a theory, it seems to be a topic with proponents on both sides, and there are strong arguments for both sides. The selfish gene argument is an old one, and it's just mainstream, that's all.
A related thing that's been bugging me: Why do guys have balls? Specifically, why is such a sensitive organ placed in such an easy-to-hit place? I know that balls are hanged outside the body because they need to be at a lower temperature, but there must be another reason for it.
Well, here is the thing: no, there does not have to be a reason.
Nearly all of the problems "accepting" or understanding evolution stem from the mistaken assumption that evolution has "goals", or "reasons" or even that it is the "survival of the fittest." Essentially, from conceptualising it as an active force.
Mutations happen. Some will cause fewer offspring in the same genetic line, some will cause relatively more. Some just stick around because they are not actively harmful.
Your question has many facets: at its simplest, it could be asserted that the benefit outweighs the hazards. You are already making one assumption, though: that they are external because they need to be cooler than body temperature -- but that relationship could be inverse (and in my opinion actually makes more sense if it is.) And so on and so on.
When you see a feature of our bodies that has obvious disadvantages, it will almost always have some redeeming advantage, obvious or not. And the bigger the disadvantage is, the bigger the advantage must be.
I know there are exceptions to this rule, like maybe the appendix or the little finger in our feet, but these are exceptions, not the rule.
So I have pointed out the disadvantage of having the testicles placed in an exposed part of the body; I ask, what is the advantage?
I pointed out that there is no need for a seeming disadvantage to be offset by some redeeming advantage.
You could come up with any number of possible reasons if you were looking for a "reason," although it could simply be a side-effect of some other mutation (such as the layout of the pelvis, intestines and abdominal muscles being more efficient for hunting/etc. without the "extra" parts.)
Here is another important inversion that you seem not to have considered, though: do you think that when externalisation first happened, testicles were as sensitive to pain as they are now?
Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) have internal testicles. It's easy to guess why: they would incur a significant decrease in hydrodynamic efficiency if they had external testicles like other mammals. However, they risk not having viable sperm due to the warmer internal environment--even worse than in most land animals since cetaceans have a thick layer of insulating blubber. As a result, they have developed an alternative cooling system where blood that has been cooled in capillaries close to the skin converges on the testicles, effectively cooling them.
All of this is to say that being in an easy-to-hit place apparently does not lead to as much evolutionary pressure as contributing to poor hydrodynamics.
wouldn't women who were very fertile be able to become pregnant while lactating? Such women would appear to have permanent breasts because they were always pregnant or lactating, thus signalling their fertility continuously and in that way having what appeared to be permanent breasts and permanent fertility? That would be very tiring for those women, but it would give them the advantage of being demonstrably able to become pregnant.Perhaps the bumps evolved as a leveler of the playing field, as it were...
"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests."
That kind of thing always made me wonder a bit: can genes really encode for "like round wobbly things on chests"? There would have to be a complete image recognizer implemented in the genes?
Not that I am saying it is impossible, but maybe it also works together with breast-feeding for a bit (as infants we get exposed to a lot of breast, so that would be an opportunity to learn to like them). And people do develop different and weird things to be attracted to.
Just saying maybe the genes don't encode "like breasts" directly, maybe they encode "like that stuff you are exposed to as a baby" (more specific than that, of course, not everything we are exposed to as infants becomes sexy).
No, of course humans have image recognizers. I just question that they come preprogrammed with a recognition loop for breasts. Obviously our image recognizers can learn after birth, that is, not all images we recognize are given to us by the genes.
It seems easier to me program reactions to smells, for example, as they are mostly binary receptors?
Also, coming back to the seagull example, I think there are no equivalents for faking beaks to faking breasts? A breast has to look fairly real to be attractive, it is not enough to just have a huge circle with another circle inside of it.
I think it is at least plausible that some fairly complex image recognition could be genetically determined. Indeed, the classic example of the seagull proves that pre-programming such circuitry is possible in animals with significantly simpler brains than mammals. I don't think it's such a wild leap that more complicated image recognition could be possible at birth.
At any rate, it's not even necessary that such image recognition be completely formed at birth. It can develop along with the rest of the visual system and other systems that are tuned for sexual attractiveness. (I'm ignoring breasts-for-food-purposes, the recognition of which is largely determined by tactile stimuli, mediated by the trigeminal nerve).
The article explains the level of image recognition that is available to seagulls from birth (i.e., genetically.) Basically, you can trick them into thinking beak-like objects are actually their mother's beak.
As for the question at hand, we have to ask what happens to a male who never sees any breasts before adulthood. Will he still find them attractive?
I seem to remember from school that the beak recognition is not very good, either. Just any big yellow thing would do - don't know about the seagull specifically, though. Also, they don't recognize if the beak is attached to a seagull or something else.
That does not seem to be a very complex pattern recognizer then. It does not recognize spiders, just small, fast movements. I seem to remember from school that it is quite easy to recognize such things with simple neural networks (even frog brains can do it).
I would think recognizing a breast would be more complex (since simply circles with dots in them are not as attractive, or are they?).
Wow! Was really a good read. I don't care if the writings are biologically in good quality, but it definitely fed something different in to my tech-wired brain after a long time.
What do you find weak about the reasoning, specifically?
The differene to the "god created it" theory is that one can be falsified, the other can't. "God made it" is a useless statement with no practical value whatsoever.
Could you point to an theory from the article that can be falsified? I'm having trouble thinking how I could devise an experiment to falsify, for example, this:
"Having breasts would be a sign of having a fair amount of fat, and men would find this sexy, because fatter women would give rise to fatter children, who would survive better."
That is a quote from the "rival theories" section, isn't it - so it is not the opinion of the author of the original piece.
However, one way to falsify it (for starters) would be to look at the actual survival rates of fat children, and at the fatness of fat women (do fat women actually have fatter children, and do they actually survive better?).
Also one could look at other species to who the same conditions apply, and see if the prediction comes true - they should have something signalling "healthy fat levels", too. If they don't, the theory is in trouble.
Just some things to do off the top of my head. There seem to be countless ways to have a go at that hypothesis, no?
Sorry if I picked an inappropriate example. It was quite hard to get to the meat of what the author was saying, which I think just goes further to highlight my point.
And no, I don't think looking at the survival rates of fat children is going to help test the hypothesis. For one thing, we live in very different conditions today to those we evolved in so very few observations of modern society are relevant.
It may well be impossible to test the claim "God made it", but it's bordering on impossible to test these evolutionary claims too.
Not to suggest that I disagree with the study of anthropology -- far from it. I just don't think it's a science.
"For one thing, we live in very different conditions today to those we evolved in"
I think ultimately biology goes back to the laws of physics, and I don't think those have changed much in the last couple of 1000 years. Also, I think we have some idea what life was 10000 years ago - there certainly was no breast enhancement surgery, and no anti baby pill, for example.
That is precisely where I see a difference from the "god made it" hypothesis: for evolution and biology, and relationships and stuff, there ARE models, which can be used to predict things (either for the future, or for data points in the past). There is no such thing for "god made it". Therefore I don't understand why you think the "fat" theory can not be put to the test. Maybe my ideas were not convincing - I am not a biologist anyway. But that doesn't prove that there can be no test. In physics, there also is not always a test to test a theory. There are theoretical physicists and practical physicists, and some practitioners are considered brilliant for finding good way to test certain theories.
Of course I admit that strictly speaking, I am not making a 100% case against the god hypothesis. You could answer "of course, god made it so that {insert elaborate theory from physics}, then there would be something to test". But I hope you know what I mean anyway.
Not 100% sure what constitutes a science, either - this discussion made me think of court cases. Suppose you want to find out who committed a murder. You can not test that either - you can only collect evidence that person X did it, but I don't think you can test it (no repeatable test for the future - you can only kill the victim once). Is it therefore not a science? But still it seems possible at least in some cases to identify the murder with high certainty.
I'm not trying to make a very important point really, just point out that I don't think anthropological theories can be falsified, despite your assertion otherwise.
That's not to suggest I think the "god created it" theory has the same intellectual standing as the anthropological theories, just that neither of them are scientific.
By the way, according to Popper, a scientific theory is exactly one that can be falsified, hence my introduction of the word "science" into the discussion.
I read that essay, and I think the reason for their existence is simpler: they make face-on mating more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, which facilitates pair bonding.
One disagreement I have with the OP is in the assertion that permanent breasts would be a necessary disadvantage, ignoring the size issue. Permanent breasts probably evolved gradually, from unnoticeable to male-like to small to the size they are today. A prehistoric hominid female who sprouted D-cups among her flat-chested peers would be at a disadvantage for the reasons the OP gave-- she'd appear infertile at all times-- but the permanent-breasts/no dichotomy is false. The change almost certainly occurred incrementally.
Talk about a self-validating world-view. We have absolutely no way of ever empirically confirming what the real picture on the box is, yet we continue to find and force only the pieces that fit our conjectured "picture on the box".
This article is borderline farcical given that these conjectures are so far into the domain of unempirical "science" I would hardly call it science or even presentable theory.
I'm all for science when it works on the authority of empiricism, but once this authority is borrowed for claims about the unempirical, that's when I get incredibly skeptical. This is an intelligent community and I hate to see such reddit-level "science" passed around here.
Another example of pseudo science from this website: http://www.evolution-x.com/dumbgirls.htm