Q: Dear Jesse: My girlfriend has several children by a previous marriage. We get along well, but from time to time I find myself possessed of a desire to kill them and roast them up. I think most men do. Not only would this provide me with needed sustenance, but it would also free my girlfriend up to nurture any potential future offspring that I father, thus ensuring the survival of my genes. I think this makes perfect evolutionary sense. What’s your take?
- Deep-Thinking Hebephage
A: Whenever society screams about cannibalism, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the crockpot. There are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who were roasted in a fine honey glaze. Naturally I abhor the notion of killing or eating anyone without their consent, and I want to make that clear at the outset. That being said, A humanitarian diet certainly isn’t rare, and as I’ve argued previously, there’s some reason to believe that a cannibalistic orientation would have been biologically adaptive in the ancestral past. Killing and eating the young of a rival male is well-documented mammal behavior, in species ranging from Ursus arctos to the Felis domesticus that lived in my uncle’s dairy barn. Even our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan promiscuous, have been known to kill and eat the young of others in their troop. Of course, it was a rival female in the one documented case of which I’m aware, and the killer was also a female, but this nonetheless provides support to your assertion in some unspecified way.
As you very likely live in a jurisdiction in which the kind of behavior you wish to practice is frowned upon, I would advise you to have your girlfriend hide her young in the highest, most inaccessible part of my uncle’s hayloft. Most of the kittens that grew up there survived. Though my telling you might have made that plan less effective. Thanks for writing!
Q: Dear Jesse: I spend most of my time in my basement by myself, and I’m generally just perfectly content with that arrangement. I think most men are. Every now and then, though, I feel a powerful urge to go out and find female humans. I have done this in the past by finding potential mates and explaining to them why it is in their best interests to engage in carnal relations with me. This approach, however, has been less than successful. Is there an evolutionary explanation for why they react improperly to my importuning?
—Deep-Dwelling Herb
A: Herb: Though I officially find your behavior a phenomenon to be met with merciless fury and disdain, it would seem you are on solid ground in an evolutionary sense. Consider the genus Magicicada, the well-known periodic cicadas of eastern North America. Every 13 or 17 years, depending on species, males of this species emerge from the ground and start making incredibly annoying sounds in an attempt to attract willing females.
Of course, Magicicada females also spend that long period underground and emerge at the same time. It may be in your best interests to look for female humans who share your periodic-emergence lifestyle. Joining Mensa or the Society for Creative Anachronism might do the trick.
Q: Dear Jesse: I am a woman of childbearing years with a gratifying sex life and a loving family, but I find myself fighting the urge to enslave thousands of adult females in some sort of celibate warrior caste that exists only to bring me sweet, sweet plant materials, while finding a like number of males who wish only to serve and impregnate me. I think most men do. Is this wrong?
- Deep-Packed Chirpra
A: You are, of course, describing the social structure of quite a number of species of ants, and our even closer relatives, the bees. Some psychologists have challenged the popular notion that being enslaved into armies of drones to serve a single absolute despotic ruler is uniformly negative for all in such relationships.
Q: Dear Jesse: Whenever I see a heterosexual couple making love, I kind of want to stab the man in the scrotal area and ejaculate into the wound, thus increasing my chances of passing on my genes by impregnating his mate to his detriment. I think most men do. My question is, do you have plans for Friday next?
- Derp-Hurfing Evo-Psycho
A: Traumatic insemination is widely practiced in the invertebrate world, so evolution certainly doesn’t argue against it. In most species of bedbugs, however, the traumatic insemination does not involve a male intermediary, but rather a strictly diadic pairing between male and female. In short, you should do what your conscience tells you to.
Q: Dear Jesse: I am a 45-year-old man married to a woman two years older. My spouse and I struggle against what would seem to be generations’ worth of social programming, which programming constricts each of us in this society into performing stereotyped roles, keeping each of us from truly attaining the fully realized human being we each deserve to be. My question is, does evolution really prescribe any kind of moral evaluation of our behavior? We aren’t blank slates, of course, but how do we tease out the genetic from the ingrained social strictures? Isn’t the real lesson of human history that cultural evolution produces change at a much more rapid pace than does Darwinian evolution, and that as a result we are free to guide that cultural evolution—to the extent we can—to make the society we would most like our grandchildren to live in?
—Deke Henson
A: I’m sorry, but there really is no evolutionary rationale for you to be involved with a woman in her late forties with diminishing mate value in the throes of intense intrasexual competition with potential rivals for a desirable mate. You say she’s two years older than you are? EW.
Love it!
Thanks, Chris, it’s funny. Just one question: reading the original, I can’t tell if Jesse Bering is serious or a tongue-in-cheek parody of advice columnists. Can you help?
What a well-wrought, and on the receiving end thoroughly well-deserved, broadside! :-)
That was hilarious. I was literally laughing out loud the whole time I was reading it. This is clearly the best way to deal with this kind of nonsense.
I thoroughly enjoyed this post. I think most men would.
Well done! (In a fine honey glaze)
Great job! Here via PZ. This post shall be my antidote, whenever I stumble across “Jesse” in his (unfortunately) many incarnations throughout the web. Bookmarked.
These are far more interesting than Jesse’s column. His was just disturbing.
Happening across your post on a rare emergence from my underground lair, I find that I am intrigued by the possibilities of despotic enslavement of armies of drones in order to maximise my reproductive potential. Is there a readily accessible newsletter wherein I can peruse further details?
Chris, this is incredible! Alon, I’d like to think that Bering’s post was a parody. Maybe that’s what he was trying for, but it just doesn’t work, not least because I’m pretty sure he believes in the weaksauce evo psych stuff he quotes.
Nice.
Perhaps a little too uncomfortably reminiscent of Olivia Judson’s “Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation”, however, seeing that sticking it in a moving it around a bit is a major preoccupation - *the* major one even - of people, nobody with biology chops like yours could approach agony aunt style writing without converging on Judson’s. :-)
That Jesse is just disgusting.
Thanks! I’ll have to look for the Judson.
And thanks all. It may be of interest that Jesse has posted a clarification on his original post that ameliorates things a bit.
Aren’t we equally related to both ants and bees, as their ancestral tree meets up with ours at the same point, where the protostomes and deuterostomes branch?
Fantastic! This is my first visit here, but I’ll definitely be coming back.
Yep. What’s more, the Linnaean binomial assigned to bonobos is not “Pan promiscuous,” and as far as I know the only documented instance of cannibalism among chimps was in the other chimp species, Pan troglodytes.
In answer to Deep-Thinking Hebephage, I would think the first and most important question to ask is whether his girlfriend is Irish, because eating Irish children has been perfectly okay for some time now.