Joseph Dunphy's response here http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-explained/ kinda points out how the Salem Hypothesis does, kinda, emerge from nothing.
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Joseph Dunphy's response here http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-explained/ kinda points out how the Salem Hypothesis does, kinda, emerge from nothing.
Quite the opposite. While the Salem Hypothesis is to be taken somewhat tongue in cheek, in the linked article it's explicitly written that, quote, _ Surveys of the phenomenon suggest that it is a very real phenomenon. _, end quote.
It could be correlated with precisely the theory I am presenting in this blog post, in that engineering is a profession focused on production and practice, not on theory. Monogamy (and other group compliance paradigms such as religion) appears to me (see also my comments on this page) to be a strategy to keep men productive. So those men which subscribe to being productive are more inclined to want to see the world as structured in a conducive way to production versus chaotic genetic diversity. OTOH, it can also be argued that the Humanities are elite political agenda indoctrination camps (with heapings of theoretical bullshit and massaging statistics to tell any story desired). Isn't life wonderfully complex. I love it.
It could. It might. It is possible. Well, it is. It is also possible that the engineering education and profession is promoting an oversimplified mechanistic worldview which in turn promotes a strong negative preference for more complex explanations and theories, especially where evidence is not 100% decisive (which means pretty much everywhere). It is possible, but possible does not mean probable and while I'm inclined to believe the above explanation (not that I tried to study the phenomenon in depth), I'm honest enough to admit that I am not aware of a shred of evidence to support this speculation.
In short, I don't know.
Did you really expect me to go do the scientific method in a blog post? You criticism is disingenuous. None of the 85% of cultures that preferred polygamy were competitive economically with the dominant Western monogamous cultures over the past couple of centuries.
Nature is adapting too fast to even apply the scientific method, i.e. there appear to not be repeatable instances, but rather a continual evolution. Although perhaps we might find a cycle if we could compile enough historical data.
So just accept that is for the most part won't be a concrete science.
Perhaps you prefer posit the theory (which you've alluded to) that engineers are just simpletons and want to enclose everything into a neat equation.
(I would guess it is both your theory and my theory combined. I know from my own personal experience and other engineers I've known that we do indeed prefer production over endless theoretical bullshit. I do like theory and philosophy, but I like it to end up somewhere within reasonable time frame; whereas, some academics make a career out of theoretical research that never produces any practical real world application/production.)
And perhaps I think your cohorts rather bloviate about various speculative causal interpretations from complex data sets (making arguments about evidence leaning towards), which from another perspective appear to be aliasing error and thus hogwash.
So we shouldn't blog because neither of us have any solid veracity. Blogging is often about expressing ideas and opinions.
Frankly, I almost didn't write this blog, because I did realize that the social sciences are far to complex and muddled to make absolute arguments. But I decided to proceed, because I sense there is a decadence associated with the new fondled idea of polygamy for Western culture. We are importing the barbarians again, repeating the fall of Rome.
None, that is, except Islam. Yes, Islam declined over the last few centuries, but how much of it might be attributed to its preference for polygamy, and how much to other factors like, say, Mongolian invasions which barely touched the Western world but destroyed most of the Islamic one twice. Or accidental discovery of Americas (which is doubly funny because it was enabled by Columbus' gross miscalculation: he thought that Japan was only about 5000km westward from Canary Islands).
I do. This still does not mean it should be allowed free speculation. History is in much worse situation as what it studies is by definition non-replicable, and even approximating contemporary statistics and cross cultural studies which are available to evopsych (or would be available if they knew how to do it) are out of the question. So it's in fact only explanations of any available evidence. Yet, historians show much more of scholarly discipline than evolutionary psychologists do.
Most of the evopsych research I read appears to do the thing backwards: assume the answer (it must be an evolutionary adaptation) and try hard to support it with whatever excuse at evidence they can come at and speculation. Outside of evopsych (and Continental philosophy, maybe something else) a respectable scholar should first look for evidence against his hypothesis, then for alternative hypotheses and only failing that tentatively treat his hypothesis as confirmed. And never be ashamed of admitting ignorance (yes, I know, easier said than done, publish or perish and all this stuff.)
There are perhaps more theories of what caused the fall of Rome than bad evopsych research papers out there ;) Let's not go there, at least now.
Sorry, I missed the "Joseph Dunphy's response" part. But it does little to refute this anyway, as the phenomenon has been noticed not just by Salem or Patterson but by others as well (e.g. Mary Midgley). He points (quite correctly) that most engineers are not extremists or creationists, but since most educated people in the world are not extremists or creationists this seems not very relevant.
From what I know about this to date, I take that among people with higher education engineers indeed are overrepresented in creationism. I will however happily stand corrected if pointed to new evidence.
We could posit that building large family networks and having many loyal sons, would be advantageous in those agrarian and somewhat feudal or tribal societies, but would not be beneficial in the modern economy. Perhaps this is why monogamy has been winning and production increasing as a result. Granted these are theories. We write blogs to share our thoughts and impact on others. I don't think your experts should have a monopoly on influence and sharing. Knowledge creation is an accretive, bottom-up process, not a top-down cathedral.
Indeed the Americas have been a huge economic driving force, and especially during the Industrial Age where the USA had a coast on both major oceans the Mississippi River to bisect the Eastern portion and transport cargo most efficiently. And it was arguably the Puritan, monogamous conservative culture (along with a temporary boost of slavery in the South) that drove the great production to harvest that resource.
Again it is all conjecture.