[ExI] Armchair Evolutionary Psychology: Larks vs Night Owls

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 18 22:42:58 UTC 2008


--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
 
> All right, here is what I don't understand. If it's genetic---and
> evidently
> it is---then how does the greater opportunities for males to "strike"
> during their teenage years morph into more restraint later?

Assuming you are asking for a genetic explanation rather than a
psychological or cultural one, for the heterozygotes it could be that
the O and L alleles are differently expressed at different stages of
life. Teens could express the one allele more while adults might
express the other more. Also I am not generally a believer in genetic
determinism. Conscious effort and social conditioning can overcome
genetic propensity, especially with regard to behavioral traits.
Otherwise, for example, all men would cheat on their wives all the
time.  

  Well,
> perhaps I'm only confused about how to describe all this.  That is,
> in some small tightly-knit religious communities, the teenagers know
> that
> they dare not give in to any late night romancing because of the
> awful
> consequences of discovery.  So it seems like cultural aspect ought to
> be involved too. Any simple words of wisdom to set me straight here?

I am not saying cultural aspects don't matter. I am just saying that it
could have been a pre-existing condition that came about before
cultural factors came into play. I mean that is a recurrent theme in EP
is it not? That genetic traits that evolved over millions of year to
adapt us to hunting and gathering are not necessarily adaptive to
modern society?
 
> Sounds like a good hypothesis, but I'd be surprised if during the
> last 50,000 years some populations under different selection
> pressures ended up with identical distributions of this gene. For
> example, I'd predict that in Muslim countries where Sharia has
> been strongly enforced for centuries, (the Owl genes in your nicely
> worded explanation) might by now be on the decline. Historically,
> being OO could very well have lead to greater vulnerabilities
> at the hands of the authorities, and so resulted in a slight
> diminution
> of the numbers of offspring they (and perhaps even the OL and LO
> types) might have.

Well there probably are variations of the allele frequencies amongst
various cultures due to varying degrees of social selection for or
against the trait. I was simply trying to explain what seemed to be a
relatively stable ratio of owls to larks in such disparate cultures as
Norwegians and Japanese. Also keep in mind that I was assuming the
existence of an equilibrium to begin with and that enabled the math to
work out correctly as if owlishness was a simple Mendellian trait. I
was more surprised than anything else. I don't have enough data on the
subject to give you a reliable P-value so it could just be a
coincidence.  


Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"Life is the sum of all your choices."  
Albert Camus


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