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Evolution of 'Pedophilia'

Posted by Remo on Monday, June 04 2007 at 01:02:45AM
In reply to evolution of paedophilia? posted by Jillium on Sunday, June 03 2007 at 3:28:42PM

Hi Jillium,

I believe the etiology of "pedophilia" is genetic. This is contrary to the current social science consensus, wherein the condition results from a disruption of a normative psychosexual development in childhood, and is thus a disorder. The latter positive is argued cogently by NARTH against a genetic or congenital etiology of homosexuality.

The theory known as "recent single-origin hypothesis" carries the strongest empirical support for explaining the evolution of humans. According to the RSOH, anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. At about eighty thousand years ago, humans numbered approximately one million individuals in Africa. A small number, about two thousand, left Africa at that time and populated the rest of the world. They replaced and did not interbreed with other Homo species already there, such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus.

It is theorized this small band of humans were able to leave by the action of the Sahara pump, an ecological phenomena that causes the Sahara desert to become fertile and bloom, then rapidly undergo desertification. The effect was to create a population bottleneck among the emigrants from Africa. Population bottlenecks allow rapid mutation of genes because of their small numbers, as opposed to larger populations where novel alleles spread slowly through the action of genetic drift. This model accounts for many observed phenomena, such as different "racial" features appearing to arise quicker than would be expected as adaptations to novel climates among small populations, and the much greater genetic diversity of Africans compared to humans living outside of that continent.

Evolutionary theory considers evidence of adaptive advantage of a genetic trait to be found in continued mutation of a particular trait. For example, it is believed that development of vision was the stimulus that drove the huge diversification of species during the Cambrian period (dinosaur-age). Vision developed from a cluster of photoreceptive cells offering no directionality, to surface occlusions setting the photoreceptive cells in a depression and thus allowing some directionality to vision, through to the modern eyeball and visual cortical systems. The increasing complexity is evidence that being able to see offered a creature greater fitness vis its peers or competitor species.

Your first and third theories share a similar nexus, in that they posit a gene or complex of alleles that produce the "pedophilic" condition. They differ in the driving force causing fixation of the condition in the population. #1 asserts a linkage to another gene on a single chromosome, with that other gene offering some competitive advantage that has caused it to undergo positive selection. #3 asserts no linkage, but that the "pedophilic" gene is positively selected by virtue of its inclusive fitness. Kin selection refers to an "altruistic" gene that enhances the fitness of an organism's own genes by ensuring that the component carried by the organism's brothers and sisters is positively selected for. This phenomena is most clearly visible in eusocial genes carried by polyploid creatures, such as bees and wasps. Polyploidy (more than two sets of identical genes) creates circumstances where an organism shares more genetic material in common with its sisters than with its own offspring.

Arguing against your first and third theories is that "pedophlia" is clearly not Mendellian, or direct, in its heritance pattern. Gaffney, et al., conclusions   /cgi/deref.cgi?url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6470698&dopt=Abstract   are not dispositive in supporting a direct inheritance for "pedophilia". Throughout much of its history as a discipline, sexology has accepted a uni-dimensional model of sexual attraction, most famously in Kinsey's "h-scale". In that bipolar formulation, heterosexuality and homosexuality were seen as the endpoints of a single axis, with bisexuality equidistant from both ends. Self-reports of preferring one gender or the other, but with some thoughts or sexual acts with the gender opposite one's prefernce, resulted in a placement on the scale somewhere between an "exclusive" preference and true bisexuality. Sexology has abandoned this model in favor of a two-factor model, with sexual preference as one axis, and inhibition as another axis. You can find details of this approach on the Kinsey Institute's website. It makes intuitive sense; while I am an "exclusive pedophile", I have slept with both men and women for various reasons. I am not inhibited to sexual contact with adults, but I have no preference for sexual contact with adults. The new model is more robust and accurate. The Gaffney results do not account for preference separate from inhibition, and therefore offer no insight into the inheritance pattern of "pedophilia".

Your second theory is a reformulation of David Brin's, Ph.D., theory of neoteny. It holds that men carry a genetic disposition to attraction of child-like traits, such as lack of hair, smooth skin, etc., because these traits dissipate with age and indicate greater fecundity. The theory posits that "pedophilia" is a failure of the neotenous system to integrate with a system that directs sexual attraction to post-secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts and menstruation. Dr. Brin extended neotenous theories with a great deal of empirical support to his idea, and did not establish any foundation for the extension outside of "common sense".

An example of neoteny outside of Dr. Brin's theory explains why the post-natal developmental period of human infants is so much longer than other species. Neural tissue is very biologically expensive in terms of energy expended to maintain it; however, it clearly provides a great competitive advantage and thus positive selective pressure. The systems that have evolved to nurse infants in placental mammals require no modification, or evolutionary adaption, to allow a longer period of lactation. It is unlikely that the separate genetic systems governing neural capacity (primarily HOX-like developmental regulatory cascades) and those governing maximal cranial circumference at birth (pelvic bone structure) would evolve in tandem; one would outpace the other, leading to reproductively unviable morphotypes of the individual. Humans giving birth to a less-well developed infant vis other primates, and utilizing existing systems for extended development outside the body that occurs in vitro in other species, gives heightened fitness to the neotenous trait.

Application of a theory of neoteny to sexual attraction utterly fails to account for the development of sexual attraction. It is not conceivable that we are born with some neural arrangement that provides the visual or aural information necessary to form an a priori image of a preferential "mate", nor is it conceivable that this neural arrangement could evolve in lockstep with an evolving morphotype (body-shape). Dr. Brin's theory is an inversion of neoteny, unreasonably extended and illogical in his articulation. As you note, it fails to explain homosexuality, "pedophilia" in women, or male-attracted "pedophilia". Its popularity is that it credibly posits "pedophilia" as a disease.

Your fourth theory lacks a sound evolutionary foundation. It implies that social constructions relative to theistic morality were true at a time when humans had no such constructions. There is no evidence that a heightened propensity to engage in procreative behavior, by those women who experienced adult-child sexual contact in the context of an agrarian society, would react similarly in a hunter-gatherer culture. Very little is known about the sexual norms of humans prior to the neolithic revolution circa 12,000 years before present. The only extant evidence are the "Venus" statuettes found in multiple paleolithic excavations. These are widely assumed to be related to "fertility goddesses" or some similar purpose.

The fourth theory holds that adult-child sexual contact induces greater promiscuity in later-life for women, and therefore a trait for "pedophilia" would exert positive selective pressure on populations carrying it. Fecundity does not seem to be the limiting factor of early neolithic agrarian societies, where adequate food does seem to be a limiting factor. Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities would not be somehow freed from this constraint, and probably were more affected by it. Further, it is probable that women outnumbered women in the paleolithic societies because some women would be precluded from engaging in the hunt, or warfare, due to nursing, where men would not be, and thus the risk of fatal injury would fall disproportionately to men. It is not reasonable to hold that a cultural taboo against promiscuity would be so enduring and entrenched among a paleotlithic hunter-gatherer society that some other tribe expressing an evolutionary mutation for "pedophilia" would enjoy greater reproductive fitness; a different tribe that simply decided promiscuity was acceptable would achieve greater fitness in a much narrower window of time, and that in itself would favor a change in belief vis biological mutation. This theory is simply nonsense.

So, refutation firmly in hand, I will offer the two theories I have worked on for several years to explain an evolutionary etiology to "pedophilia".

(1) Clothes

Humans in the diaspora (those that left Africa) began wearing clothes around the same time they migrated from the African continent. Evidence for this is the appearance of body-lice, confirmed from genetic analysis to have appeared at that time. Body-lice cannot live on humans that do not wear clothes. Africans had no need of clothing, because of the hotter environment. Traditional African tribal dress still consists of simple grass skirts for both sexes, with functional (such as a waist allowing the person to carry a weapon) and religious (such as penis gourds) utility. Clothing consisted of skins and hides, sewn by bone-needle with sinew. You can see a good example of this in the late-paleolithic corpse of "Otzi the Iceman", found in the Alps a decade or so ago. Clothes woven from textiles did not appear until the agrarian period, twelve thousand years before present, and some seventy thousand years after the advent of clothing among diasproians.

There are some who hold that formation of a psychosexual identity is a function of imprinting, similar to how ducks imprint on the first object they see at a particular point of time (48 hours, usually) after birth. This view has been consistently popular among those who still cling to behavioralist models of psychological functioning.

My theory is that psychosexual identity is formed by reliance on the olfactory sense. I have developed the idea but it would be tedious to reproduce it in this response, and I still have some unresolved difficulties to contend with before my theory is ready for publication. I believe that different stages of psychosexual development are based on visual and aural imprinting, and activated by expression of genes in the olfactory bulb that signal higher cortical areas to imprint in the presence of different major-histocompatibility-complex olfactory cues. It is not a "hard" imprint, as occurs in avian species, but rather a series of visual and aural impressions that are recorded to form a range of morphological forms triggering sexual arousal, with a clear gradiant of preference within any given morphological feature.

My theory accounts for the fact that, within a nominally heterosexual population of men, they will identify some trait that they find more arousing than another - such as large breasts compared to smaller breasts - even though they find all breasts arousing.

It accounts for why various sensory stimuli can trigger the same response. Men can have an erection from hearing a pleasant female voice; seeing a beautiful woman; from smelling a perfume they associate with attractive women; and from a tactile stimulus like a hand rubbing their back.

It posits a fairly simple scheme to "load" a psychosexual identity, whereas the other existing schemas with popular support appear to me to require an untenable sequence of mutations in neurological tissue. My theory employs the same underlying apparatus as the secondary immunoresponse system. My theory does not state that any particular aromatic compound X results in psychosexual identity formation; rather, it posits that it is a piezioelectric effect of aromatic compounds emitted by humans (including self) and the MHC olfactory receptors generating specific firing frequencies in the olfactory bulb, and thus stimulating imprinting. It accounts for why "AoA" appears to form before gender-preference (though without enough detail in this brief description to explain why; my theories holds that it is a continuous identity formation, rather than discrete between "AoC" and gender preference).

Aside from my theory of psychosexual development ("MAPIT"), I posit that when the humans that emigrated from Africa began wearing the furs and skins of other animals for protection from the elements (fairly close to the time they left Africa), the aromatic compounds present in those early clothes disrupted their psychosexual development. Because they experienced a population bottleneck and were in competition with other hominid species, and undergoing fairly rapid rates of mutation, the genes expressing "pedophilia" became fixated in the population. The positive pressure causing this was that, because the expression of the trait caused those carrying it to engage in adult-child sexual contact, it mitigated the disruption to psychosexual identity formation caused by wearing animal skins.

I interpret the "venus" statutuettes to represent fertility cults that sought to encourage early hunter-gatherers to engage in sexual intercourse, an activity disrupted by the problems caused by clothes-wearing.

I have known people from every country in this world. True sexual preference for children is known in every culture outside of Africa. I believe that a true sexual preference for children is unknown in Africa among populations that have not interbred extensively with the diasporans; i.e. West and Central Africans. It is not compelling to say that there are "black pedophiles" outside of those regions; even though the apparent "racial differences" in skin tone, etc. seem striking, they are very trivial. African-Americans have lost the genetic diversity of their African ancestors and are more similar genetically to caucasians than they are to Africans proper, due to extensive interbreeding of all of the populations outside of the mother continent.

(2) Inclusive Fitness by Absorption of Outsiders

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers most likely lived in tribes of 30-50 individuals and were periodically decimated by warfare, the dangers of a mass-hunt, or environmental conditions. There is evidence for this in the fossil record of these people. Members of a tribe would be closely related genetically.

Over time, the population density of humans reached an equilibrium with their environment, providing each tribe a fixed geographic territory that it roamed within. This probably occurred fairly quickly after the diaspora in the middle of the entire range (though not at its outer limits) that humans occupied. The first humans to enter North America occurred about 13,000 years before present or so; at the time of first contact by Europeans with them, perhaps 12,000 years after they entered the continent, those early voyagers had populated both the North and South American continents, and had time to establish fairly sophisticated agrarian cultures. It is fairly assumed that agrarianism results froma restriction in the range over which a hunter-gatherer social group has to hunt, providing an opportunity to observe the life-cycles of plants (though it can also result from a population settling down to a fishing pattern of subsistence). In any case, we populate an area quickly.

There is some evidence, though not conclusive, that intra-tribal relations of hunter-gatherer societies were not peaceful but rather involved mutually-beneficial barter or trade and boundary conflict. It is clear that there was extensive inter-breeding between tribes, and it is commonly thought that this occurred by one tribe annihilating another and capturing their women to breed with.

I disagree with this hypothesis. First, if there are more women than men, leading to polygamy in any case, it is unclear why any tribe would desire to increase its ratio of women to men. I believe the hypothesis carries patriarchical assumptions with it, which I do not think are warranted to apply to paloelithic hunter-gatherers. It is not reasonable to me to simply assume that women gathered and men hunted; more likely, I think, is that women were equally ferocious at war and the hunt to men, and some women who were precluded from those activities by nursing or late-term pregnancy gathered and minded the children (who were largely self-sufficient; this is seen in African tribes in the Congo, for example - they subsist on a diet of frogs, insects, and a portion of the food secured at hunt or in gathering).

There is a theory with popular support that the seeming submission of women to domestic abuse is an evolutionary adaptation stemming from this supposed paleolithic phenomenon of killing off another tribe and capturing their women; those women that acquiesced to the violence of their captors were more likely to reproduce.

It is clear that men are more likely to engage in physical violence than women; it is also clear that men are more likely to engage in relational violence than men. I think the reasons for this are more cultural than biological, though the elevated levels of testosterone in men compared to women does presuppose men to resort to war over diplomacy compared to women.

I think it likely that children were often abandoned in the wild to turn ferral, in the context of paleolithic hunter-gatherers. I can envision a lot of circumstances that would produce this result. The tribe was chased by animals, and children run slower. They might be fast enough to individually avoid being killed, and left to falter on their own with little chance of future reproductive success. They might be abandoned (along with the elderly) in times of privation, yet be able to sustain themselves for a short period of time.

It might be that "pedophilia" conferred a reproductive benefit by causing the individual experiencing the condition to attach to these "wild childs", where humans not sexually attracted to them would see them as no different as any other benign creature occupying a similar ecological niche (and thus have no reason to bring them into the tribe). This could account for the interbreeding that clearly occurred.

Anyway,

food for thought.

love,

kevin







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