On the Origin of Lechery by Natural Selection

Women, are you listening? Darwinists justify unleashing unrestricted male passions on you with no responsibility.

In these days of the #MeToo movement, and strict rules against sexual harassment in the workplace, are you surprised that evolutionary biology justifies unrestricted, irresponsible male sexual indulgence, with anyone at any time, as perfectly natural? The ground for this view comes from fundamental assumptions Darwinians make before they even look at evidence:

• There is no God to command “Thou shalt not … “
• Humans are only animals, primates closely related to monkeys and apes.
• Everything that exists, including morality, evolved by natural selection.
• All behavior has a genetic basis.
• Whatever is, is right. Stuff happens.

It follows that human exceptionalism is an illusion. Humans are taxonomically classified in the genus Homo, which is not controversial even among theists. Darwinians, however, go beyond classification as a convenience for description. To them, we are not just mammals, we are “mere” mammals. We are not just primates, we are “mere” primates. We are not just similar to great apes, we are “mere” great apes with certain phenotypic traits unique to our species, but no soul or spirit. Conscience, whatever that means, is not real; if anything, it’s just social convention that evolves like everything else.

Judeo-Christian morality, by contrast, builds from human exceptionalism, which comes from having been made in God’s image—unlike other ‘primates.’ It promotes responsible sex within the bonds of marriage—a covenant, not just a convention—wherein both mothers and fathers bear responsibility for raising the young, and where truth, love, and faithfulness are highly valued. The godly family is the basis for social institutions. Though we have bodies that share many traits with primates, we have minds and souls. Our brains are unusually and uniquely large. We use language and abstract thought. We value art. Humans have a universal hunger for meaning and a thirst for God, and feel shame and guilt over our sins. We desire a better world. We share needs and ideals beyond those of mere survival. These and more attributes set us apart from mere mammals.

Amorality

It follows from the Darwinian assumptions that nothing is right or wrong; it just is. Human culture evolved and can change; human morals are mere social conventions that can change, and whatever you can do and get away with is perfectly fine if it increases your fitness. The paper we’re going to analyze doesn’t say these things in such terms, but provides a rationale for concluding them. Fortunately, it suffers from two major problems: (1) It is unscientific, and (2) It doesn’t fit reality – and the authors admit it.

As we look at their statements, we are obviously not claiming that the authors themselves are lecherous deviants out to rape and harass women with reckless abandon. It seems that both are respected, well-behaved citizens within their academic milieu. Prof. Dr. Peter Kappeler is Head of the Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit at the German Primate Center. He has studied lemurs of Madagascar for 30 years. His co-author, Luca Pozzi, is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The fact he is in good standing there implies he does not violate any policies they probably have on sexual harassment.

History shows, however, that bad ideas have bad consequences. Francis Galton was also a respectable Victorian citizen, but his ideas fed into the Holocaust. Oftentimes the bad consequences come years or decades later after the idea-makers have died. Atrocities are often committed by other hands. But the perpetrators of atrocities and genocides often look back for justification at the originators of the bad ideas. When those bad ideas bear the assumed authority of “science,” watch out!

The Bad Idea

The paper by Kappeler and Pozzi is titled, “Evolutionary transitions toward pair living in nonhuman primates as stepping stones toward more complex societies,” published Dec. 18, 2019 in the open-access journal Science Advances. Readers might notice “nonhuman primates” as the subject of their paper, and ask, so what’s the big deal? Who cares what monkeys do? The danger becomes evident when they consider the implications in their own words. Phys.org, reproducing a press release from the German Primate Center where Kappeler works, states under the headline, “Pair living as stepping stone from solitary life to complex societies,” states this:

Alone, as a pair or in groups—the diversity in social systems of primates is interesting because it may also provide insights into human social life.

The paper itself draws no fundamental distinction between nonhuman primates and humans, other than particular circumstances in which they think humans evolved: e.g.,

Human pair bonding within larger social units therefore had other evolutionary origins than pair living among most nonhuman primates, because none of our most recent common ancestors were solitary. Opportunities for paternal care, including a reduction in infanticide risk, may have contributed to the maintenance of pair living once it evolved in primates and humans.

Human pair bonding is different, they agree, but only because the initial conditions varied. Whatever happened, it evolved. Pair living evolved, and human pair bonding currently exists in a quasi-stable state in most societies, but could evolve into something else if circumstances changed. Pair living, understand, is NOT marriage! It is any two members of the community finding some degree of sexual satisfaction in one another’s company, at least for a time. This could be a heterosexual bond or something else – homosexual, adult/child, or anything conceivably further down the deviancy scale.

Pair living is sometimes used synonymously with monogamy, but the latter refers to the mating system, which can vary widely within this type of social organization because of variable levels of extra-pair matings; these two components of a social system should therefore be separated conceptually.

Whatever is, is right, because it evolved. Nothing moral about it. It’s purely happenstance. The authors speak just as matter-of-factly about MM (multimale) groups, MF (multifemale) groups and other types of arrangements, like MMMF – group sex. If some of these arrangements evolved in ape and monkey groups, then they could evolve in human groups.

Pair Living Is Weird

Pair living is not even sensible, say Kappeler and Pozzi, from an evolutionary view. It’s kind of quirky. It’s not expected by evolutionary theory.

It might just be a stable state, perhaps like an eddy in a river, on a path to “more complex societies.” The paper’s title suggests this: “Evolutionary transitions toward pair living in nonhuman primates as stepping stones toward more complex societies.” Presumably, complex societies are more progressive along the evolutionary path. What would they look like? There’s no reason it couldn’t consist of open group sex with anyone at any time: no commitment, no marriage ceremony, no consequences. No-fault divorce looks tame compared to what these two male great apes would consider perfectly natural (referring to them as they would have to refer to themselves, being “mere” primates). On what basis could they say it would be “wrong” for that kind of society to evolve?

Male Liberation

Notice another fallout from this idea bomb. Male lechery (unrestrained sex) would actually be expected by evolution. In fact, it’s surprising that males would ever fall for “pair living” when they could have their thrills with any female at any time. Their investment in pair living is brief by nature of their anatomy, and being larger, they usually have the power to get what they want. The authors cite a 2012 paper titled, “The puzzle of monogamous marriage.” They themselves say,

The evolution of pair living is not only of fundamental interest because this type of social organization can be found among many contemporary and historic human populations but also because it represents a theoretical puzzle in social evolution in most taxa, including primates. Specifically, since males of most animal species have a much higher potential for producing offspring per unit time than females, evolutionary biologists have struggled to identify selective advantages that would more than compensate for the loss of potential reproduction suffered by males that limit their reproductive activities to a single female. In mammals, this problem is exacerbated because internal gestation and subsequent lactation are essential aspects of maternal care that markedly reduce the rate at which females can produce offspring compared to males. Thus, because male mammals that bond with a single female presumably forego additional mating opportunities, and because, in contrast to many birds, rates of extra-pair paternity among monogamous mammals are generally low, pair living is part of a male reproductive strategy requiring explanation.

So what is their explanation? Pair living is only a temporary stepping stone on the way to sexual nirvana: unrestricted sex.

Using Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, we consistently found the strongest support for a model that invokes frequent transitions between solitary ancestors and pair-living descendants, with the latter giving rise to group-living species. This result was robust to systematic variation in social classification, sample size, and phylogeny. Our analyses therefore indicate that pair living was a stepping stone in the evolution of structurally more complex primate societies, a result that bolsters the role of kin selection in social evolution.

What directs the path to complex societies with unrestricted group sex? You can predict the answer: natural selection. They drop the “natural” for short, and just call it “selection.” But it is certainly the natural selection of Darwin’s kind: unguided, blind and amoral. Any trend toward group sex or pair living is just as unpredictable as a prevailing wind that can shift back and forth at any time.

Kappeler and Pozzi say in conclusion,

Our analyses therefore indicate that, although random taxonomic sampling slightly affects the support for alternative models, the overall results consistently support the scenario that pair living served as a stepping stone toward structurally more complex forms of sociality.

The press release lights a match to this gas: “Pair living, the association of a male and a female, plays a key role in the evolution of mammalian social systems, as males could achieve higher reproductive success if they did not bond to a single female.” Since pair living is only a stepping stone to open group sex, maybe open group sex increases fitness! Isn’t “higher reproductive success” the path to higher fitness in Darwin’s world?

Warning: Consequences Ahead

It isn’t hard to imagine what could result by taking inspiration from Kappeler and Pozzi’s paper. What if a group of MS-13 gang members learned that gang rape is normal, and science proves it. Gang rape has been a sad fact of life in many societies, but what if lusty MM (multimale) groups are taught that  “science” says it is one of many natural manifestations of complex social groups? Suppose they hear that “pair living” is a stepping stone to the good stuff—open sex, any time, anywhere, in any size group? Faithful ‘marriage’ to a single female—ah, that old-fashioned stuff, it’s just a fairy tale. You can do whatever you want! Teach a society long enough that there is no God, that we are mere animals, and that the more sexually active you are, the more nature ‘selects’ you as the most fit – is that not a recipe for unrestricted debauchery in a society? Those who would suffer the most would be women, whose sexual investment entails childbearing and feeding the young.

Dr Jerry Bergman,  in his book How Darwinism Corrodes Morality, relates the true story of ‘The rape of Nanking,’ during World War II, in which Japanese soldiers, having been indoctrinated into the Darwinian belief they were a master race more fit than their Chinese neighbors, engaged in hideously sadistic behavior to prove their superiority after they defeated the city of Nanking. The account of atrocities against men and women, “an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history,” is almost too repulsive to read, but it included unbridled lechery and sexual atrocities against hundreds of thousands of civilians. Horrifying as it was, this was just one episode in an outpouring of rage and lust that killed millions—and would have continued—had not the atomic bombs forced the surrender of the Japanese. Bergman relates how Japanese education before this period had been infiltrated and saturated with Darwinian teaching, and influenced society all the way up to the emperor, right when eugenical thinking was at its peak. The Japanese felt justified, therefore, in everything they did, because they were led to believe ‘science’ mandated eliminating the unfit. Darwin proved it.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1872)

If you are not sufficiently sickened yet, consider what happened not that long ago in Haiti. Some of the United Nations “peacekeepers” sent in to help after the 2011 earthquake sexually abused young Haitian girls, leaving behind hundreds of orphans to be raised by the poor mothers who cannot even take care of themselves. How’s that for “foreign aid”? Lee and Bartels at The Conversation tell about the ‘sexploitation’ that occurred, and how almost none of the men have been held accountable. See also Breitbart News, “Haiti Peacekeepers ‘Fathered Hundreds of Babies’ Left in Poverty.” This is the world Kappeler and Pozzi rationalize.

Any Defense?

Kappeler and Pozzi might angrily wag their heads in protest that they don’t mean to justify any such things, but on what basis? Social convention? Ha! That has no force at all, except among “social groups” with power to enforce conformity to arbitrary, temporary rules. Evolutionary theory, they would have to admit, permits cooperators and cheaters. Neither group is “better” morally; they just are. Follow that line of thinking, and Jeffrey Epstein’s “pedophilia island” where underage girls were seduced to let rich and politically powerful men pour out their lusts on the little playthings was perfectly fine, evolutionarily speaking. Similarly, the huge problem of sex trafficking going on in the world today finds ‘scientific’ support in this Darwinian paper. It’s natural selection at work. Stuff happens. May the fittest survive: i.e; those with the best reproductive success.

Insult to Injury

But now we learn that Kappeler and Pozzi have no solid science to back up their bad ideas! It’s all suppositions and suggestions.

Our analyses reveal several new insights about social evolution and offer explanations for the disparate results and conclusions of previous studies. In particular, our study contributed to the illumination of the evolution of primate pair living, which represents an enigma in the evolutionary biology of mammals and is widely found across human societies. In addition, we resolve a long-standing controversy about the evolution of pair living by finding support for assumptions of the female spacing hypothesis. Specifically, by systematically controlling for the social classification of species, sample size, and phylogeny, we demonstrate that, in contrast to previous analyses, pair living among primates has evolved most often from solitary ancestors and served as a stepping stone toward the evolution of structurally more complex societies. This result has implications for explaining the origins and maintenance of complex societies among primates and beyond.

This whole paper rates high on the perhapsimaybecouldness index. They speak of human pair bonding as an enigma, a “long-standing controversy” that doesn’t fit the expectations of natural selection. They offer possibilities, but it’s all confabulation dressed up as science in “Science Advances” Magazine (see yesterday’s entry about the AAAS). Look how many times they admit that Darwinian explanations have been controversial:

• Nonhuman primate societies vary tremendously in size and composition, but how and why evolutionary transitions among different states occurred remains highly controversial. In particular, how many times pair living evolved and the social states of the ancestors of pair- and group-living species remains contentious.
• …how different species-specific social systems evolved with relation to species’ phylogenetic histories is still subject to much ongoing research and controversy.
• Yet, how and why different levels of social complexity evolved, i.e., how many evolutionary transitions among which types of social organization occurred and which selective factors promoted the possible state transitions, remains controversial. Pair living plays a key role in this controversy.
• Thus, infanticide risk was an important selective agent in primate social evolution, but it remains highly controversial whether reduction of infanticide risk was a driver or a consequence of evolutionary transitions to pair living.
• Despite the apparently contradictory evidence for these two hypotheses, they may not be mutually exclusive.

Of course they need to present some semblance of resolution, so in the ending discussion, they say,

In addition, we resolve a long-standing controversy about the evolution of pair living by finding support for assumptions of the female spacing hypothesis. Specifically, by systematically controlling for the social classification of species, sample size, and phylogeny, we demonstrate that, in contrast to previous analyses, pair living among primates has evolved most often from solitary ancestors and served as a stepping stone toward the evolution of structurally more complex societies. This result has implications for explaining the origins and maintenance of complex societies among primates and beyond.

After 160 years of Darwinian controversy, contentiousness and contradiction on these issues, though, can anyone really have any confidence that these two have figured it out? They didn’t see how mythical ancestors lived. It’s all storytelling and suggestions that they hope may shed some light on long-standing controversies.

But now, having opened the door and let the lusty horses out, there’s no getting them back in the barn. They’ve given the males the ‘science’ they need to take their depravity to new levels. Kappeler and Pozzi might live out their days peacefully before seeing the wretchedness that could easily result from their empty speculations published in “Science Advances” Magazine.

CEH readers may wonder why bring up sch a dark subject just four days before Christmas. Well, sometimes the morning looks greatest after the night. Jesus was born to save men from their sins. Sin has been with us since Adam, but today’s sins now have science to accelerate their potential for depravity. We need Christ more than ever.

For atheists and unbelievers reading this article, consider your choices. You can have Darwin’s amoral world, where unbridled lust is considered “natural” and has already fueled unspeakable horrors, or you can repent and believe that Christ really came to offer us a way out of the inevitable collapse of a sinful world. It starts with each man’s heart, like the inns in Bethlehem. Will you make room for the Christ child? Think honestly about the different social structures offered by Darwin vs Christ. They are perhaps best illustrated by the Apostle Paul’s lists of the fruits of the flesh vs the fruits of the Holy Spirit of Christ:

19 Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, 21 envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians 5:19-24)