"There´s already a consensus about EP among those ascendent....Look at where the funding is going and who's publishing."

Well, that must make it all right then!

Naturally the folks getting funded and published must be right. They always have been in the past, no? ;)

This is precisely the authoritarian, conservative slant I was talking about. Fractal´s preference for abuse of those who disagree with him shows his real mindset (which does not say anything about EP, but it does say a lot about its most vocal defender on this thread).

I turned totally and utterly against EP when it was loudly trumpeted that rape is a "useful" adaptation because it yields an evolutionary advantage to males willing to use force to mate (this contradicts what psychologists understand about rape--that it is about anger and violence, not reproduction). It became quite clear to me then what the whole EP thing was really about. Asehepe prefers to think that a tabloid media slant is misrepresenting the EP folks, but I´m much less sure. After all, that kind of garbage is rotten all the way down to its roots.

Also as another illustration, I´ve NEVER seen an EP argument for the almost totally universal historical and societal norm of marriage and monogamy--EP always argues in the context of (especially male) promiscuity even though this is not the norm. This is a viewpoint very biased to favor a Western secular belief and behavior system that in the grander picture is a huge anomaly.

This belief denigrates pair-bonding as an impossible ideal (although it frequently happens) and considers extreme promiscuity as a kind of success--as though copulation, by itself and not resulting in any offspring, is to be considered genetic and evolutionary success. Does it really take a genius to see that it isn´t?

Because of these and other points, I consider EP to be very weak minded. It just seems to take such a privileged frat boy view of human society, and never seems to take into account what humans are actually like. Then you realize that these ivory tower academics pretty much come from the frat boy demographic, and it all makes sense.

Thanks again for your more balanced and nuanced point of view. I am rather strident, because I´m a layman as per this subject, and am only exposed to the pop/MS media end of it. And the pop media end of it is infuriating...something I think you sort of understand :)

I have to admit though, it´s very, very difficult for me to see how one could conduct actual empirical research that would ever lead to some of these conclusions. The "conclusions" sound much like idle speculation, and I suspect the more sensational of them are just, and only, that.

But we have so much faith in science these days that we accept something labeled as "scientific" as already proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. Even as laymen, we could engage our critical thinking caps a little bit more, like Canuckistan Bob and some others here.

That´s my only point.

First, the gender imbalance in China may well be at the present moment slighty skewed towards women, because women live somewhat longer than men. Even in the West, the "extra" women in the population are all old. So, first off...in the coming years the ratio will become many more men vs. few women, as these four year olds grow up. As the grandmas die, the ratio will become even more imbalanced. This will also happen in India, by the way.

Next, women have never gained status by being in demand as wives. They have always lost by it, no matter how many cows or camels they are deemed to be worth.

In China you can purchase a Vietnamese girl to be your wife, who has been kidnapped from her family, or sold by them, and she will be young and terrified. But you can rape her into submission and she can cook, so its all good, and well within historical parameters. In India its happening with Nepalese girls, but there is an added twist...they are even using them as temporary wives, and seling them on to another man after they have produced a son or two for the first one. This has particularly happened in the Punjab, and is becoming a growing concern.

For a woman to gain status, she has to be looked upon as a human being and not simply a sex/baby/labor resource. This doesn´t change according to her scarcity, it changes according to people´s attitudes. And those attitudes shift at a glacial pace, if they ever really shift at all.