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Episode 32: Listener emails and questions
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all right welcome back dr. Lyle how you been doing good about yourself all good here doing great you know the the winter is coming and dating life starts to quell a little bit and I always wondered if humans have a mating season so I figured figured we'd start the show with that today and we're going to go over some listener questions some list their emails and just kind of see where that takes us topic wise if there's any callers that want to call in we'll be welcome to take their calls all right bird boy yeah so you want to know if there's a mating season yeah what does their mating season actually not that I'm aware of the truth is is the humans spent their entire evolutionary development all the way to the modern human in sub-sahara Africa so there wasn't there wasn't any winter to speak of there so the now what did happen is that as our ancestors moved north they as some of them our ancestors migrated North Out of Africa they migrated east to the east they became Asians and to the west they became Northwest that became Caucasians and they faced harsh winters and that obviously that's why the you've got darker skin near the equator and lighter skin further away from the equator the and settl does those situations they might have evolved some some mating patterns related about but not nothing that I'm aware of and if somebody's out there that's really up it on details of evolutionary psychology they they might phone in and inform us but I don't think so I don't think yeah so the words spring fever is just for other animals well yeah I need that is very true so that that's a spring fever is a very legitimate thing in the animal kingdom yeah for humans not so much and certainly not not a if there is anything I mean there's no doubt that humans living in cold climates where you have to be covered up all the time and and shivering and worried about your survival or are now massively more focused on survival problems than they are reproduction problems and and obviously when spring comes and and clothing is reduced and as our anxieties reduce for survival then undoubtedly that in in those northern or in the the reaching latitudes both northern and southern they're they're very well maybe some some patterns there or there were there's unlikely to be true today just because people have constant sources of calories at all latitudes so the but anyway good good interesting thing but yes spring fever I think is more a function of the fact that that we can see the girls because they're wearing less clothes and that that is enticing however if we were in a warm cave and they were in less clothes and it was December we'd be interested as well yeah I had a friend that I was discussing this with long you know a few months ago actually actually a year or two ago and he was postulating that the reason he thinks that cheating he believes that there's more cheating in the hotter climates for exactly that reason is that that for six months of the year in a say in New York type area you've just got to be with your spouse or your your long-term girlfriend a boyfriend in indoors whereas out here you can go to the beach you know nine months out of the year and even the other three months you can still go to the beach just not during the nighttime so well that that interesting correlation does not equal causation right right knows will circle around that and every day yeah all right well so today's program we are going to be talking over some listener emails and also any callers that decide to call in but um we've had a couple of emails from from different listeners as all in the the topic of sex dating relationships and the listeners have called in our mail they're there they're asking questions with regards to casual mating strategy and dating strategy in general before we go into those I know that we've talked before about what what we're doing here and what we're doing here is trying to try to find a way to be happy in the modern world now happiness could come in a lot of different forms but your your view is that the male will be most happy if he's pursuing a long-term pair bond versus a casual mating strategies did I understand that correctly well I actually believe so now that there would be people I would say in general that's going to be true but this is this could depend upon several factors so for example it could depend upon the personality of the male that's involved so the male's personalities are going to differ so a males that are going to be for example more disagreeable and less conscientious are going to have reduced empathy mechanisms and it's going to make them less generally conducive to pair-bond strategy and so a big part of the pair bond the value of the curve on strategy is is to is essentially the hormone oxytocin which causes a you know loving bonds between people and between people and animals etc and so the so there there are people that are essentially just tough enough and nasty enough and disagreeable enough that they really don't have it in them very well to be playing pair-bond strategy I mean they might they might sort of you might have a best girl or whatever but the bottom line is is that they're pretty pretty ruthless customers now it can also in other words there's another factor that's involved here and that is just how much mating choice a male has over his over his how much control he has over his sexual empire so extremely attractive Mel's Justin Bieber and you know people like this that are that have extraordinary choices those individuals can can essentially be so tempted by so so such tremendous novelty in in their stone age brain essentially thinking that they can be impregnating numerous very attractive females annually that that they might they essentially are could be designed to to take advantage of that situation and not settle down with one now what's interesting is that usually very successful males with tremendous mating choices usually do settle down in serial monogamist kinds of situations so we've seen this with Brad Pitt we've seen this with Tom Cruise we've seen this with with who with the guy magic drones Harry grant yeah yeah yeah not Magic Johnson yeah the magic Johnson actually has a long-term para bond but we don't know the ins and outs of this but we certainly know a Clark Gable who had obviously the world at his feet was married five times or so and so these they still seek and revel in this in this pair bond process and the their their relationships undoubtedly are strained by the fact that the male's have such phenomenal choice that as soon as they as soon as there's some conflicts of interest in the relationship they can basically tell the female it's my way or the highway and if the female who is also very high status female or she wouldn't be in that relationship with a Clark Gable can basically not be willing to put up with that negotiation and so those relationships are very strained trauma Tom Cruise has had a just as trouble the mating history as any as any guy in many ways in terms of trying to find a long-term stable relationship that where he remains happy and however so what I would say is this that that I would not say that pursuing a pair of on strategy is the is the exclusive only way to achieve optimal life satisfaction that depends upon who you are what your circumstances are and both those things are independent so who you are is independent of what your circumstances are you could be you could be a low conscientious disagreeable human difficulty in terms of establishing pair bonds but not have a lot of mating choice and so even then your strategy pair-bond strategy may be out of your reach psychologically and the only strategy you may have on the table that makes any sense is casual mating strategy so yeah I just want to be clear that I'm not singing the tune of the broad culture here in saying that pair-bond strategy is the only legitimate path towards human happiness I would say that it is the that it is a it is a beacon that draws virtually all people to it and that's why it that's why it is that we're so interested in it and that's why we consider it to be probably the the close to the optimal strategy that a person could have I would have to say that an awful lot of males when I tell them the following they are they their eyes light up and I call it wife wife wife chippy and the when males are struggling with pair-bond strategy and the the magnitude of the commitment that's involved I explained to them that in our natural history the male might have been largely committed to one female but he would very likely and wouldn't even be surprising to his main female if every now and then he had sex with the chippy somebody on the side that was not serious and was not going to be the main claim on his resources ie that this was just playing around and that when we look at the size of males testicles relative to their body weight and we plot that on a graph relative to the other primates we can essentially tell how many females the average male across the national history of our species was having sexual relations with during any given point in time and I believe the answer is something on the order of 0.3 our 1.3 so in other words the the males that are that walk the earth today come from a long line of males that were more successful than the average male obviously that's why you're here and and as a result the the greater than average success of the average male looked like they weren't sleeping with two women at once they were sleeping with one woman and then every now and then they nailed another one on the side and when I explained this to the average married guy his eyes light up and and they will often say well gee if I could just do that once in a while I wouldn't have any problem being with my main partner okay no problem in other words that that is the margin by which the male dissonance over para bond strategy seems to go away no so this is uh so this is now a little more in depth expansive view of my of my why I put para bond at the center of importance because very few males actually seem to seek or want or strive for nothing other than a casual mating strategy life apparent this species has enough oxytocin para bonding love psychology in it that they seem to want one and then after they get an outstanding one they would just like another little piece on the side every now and then and they'd be perfectly out fish so I'm curious what that what is the wider of it where's the wife say when she hears you say this well my dog whines David do this to the wives but I actually have explained this the wives that whose husbands have cheated and essentially trying to trying to frame this so that it is understood the sometimes people get all bent out of shape and upset and think that we are talking about what is right because it was natural that is not what I'm ever interested in talking about I'm interested in talking about what is I'm interested in talking about the actual characteristics of the species that we are examining which is us and so this this appears to be the the sort of the the Midway psychology of the typical male some males are not that way so if you get a more conscientious male who is more agreeable and naturally not as open to experience you can wind up with a male that could be very happily pair-bonded indefinitely but that is not typical of our species I'd say the most typical male is wife wife wife chippie that seems to be the circuits that are in there okay very so so what you're saying is this doesn't justify any particular behavior we're just trying to understand how people are instead of trying to paint a China trying to paint a fantasy and then you know going from there just for frighteners listening we're not trying to certainly make it clear to people that the neural circuits that you have or the neural circuits that you have the the the way you play the game of life within the circles that you have that that is those those are all cost-benefit decisions that have to be weighed in and one of the things that is frustrating in life is that we have conflicts of interests with other people and that is that is the nature of reality is that we have conflicts of interest with other people and so the you can you can legislate those conflicts as best you can you can eventually invent the Magna Carta and the Constitution of the United States you can do what you can but the bottom line is is that there's still very great conflicts between people so five guys in the room all want to nail the one really good-looking chick and couldn't care less about the other four but there that's it and you know what the good-looking chick isn't interested in any of those five guys so there's a lot of frustrated people in that room there there's four frustrated women let's suppose we got four women in there that are fives we've got five guys in there that are eight and we've got one ten female okay we've got five guys that are frustrated for women that are frustrated the hot chick is a little bit frustrated but believe me she's got options and nobody in that room is happy okay so this is the conflicts are are everywhere and they are deep and they're nobody's fault and so I think that's that's the most important thing to understand is that these conflicts of interest are not the result of nails being bad I mean there's some show Men Behaving Badly you know I don't know what they're of course we could never have a show women behaving badly okay that's okay the the more morality the explicit morality the culture is very very down on the male cow so mating strategy and yet it is what it is and and there's nothing to me immoral about it it is if the females were not conducive to to playing casual mating strategy on the other side of that fence from time to time when it was strategically appropriate for them to be doing so then the causal mating strategy would not exist it does not exist because of male psychology it exists because both males and females have adaptations that have sculpted because mating strategy as a as a as a obvious corner of a conflict of interest between people mm-hmm yeah and I was actually going to ask you the next question is do females have a casual mating strategy yes they do they have a casual mating strategy they have more than one but the basic casual mating strategy is if the guy is sufficiently superior to you sleek with him with little evidence of commitment that is that that is the female casual medic strategy the if I'm weak you know if you're a female and you're weak in the knees you know that's you're weak in the knees because your adaptations are telling you that the male is your massive genetics superior and it's worth being a single mom to get his DNA and so that's the that is the mirror image it's the image of exactly the opposite direction of the male the male is absolutely willing to sleep down for casual mating he would love to sleep up but of course that's not going to happen so the male is absolutely willing to sleep down the female is never willing to sleep down for casual mating essentially she's not designed that way in any way and and so the females the females willingness it wouldn't do any good at all to have an adaptation for males to sleep down behind cow so mating strategy if there were not women on the other side willing to play that hand they're often so that that is what is on the other side and of course these things are essentially beautifully balanced in a timeless game of negotiation that is going on between the male in the fail fantastic well this brings us to our first listener question and the question has to argue with the inhibitions of females when it comes to a potential casual mating strategy with men and the question centers around does alcohol remove the inhibition from very attractive females and I think what the I think what the males try it without what the listeners trying to ask is not that does it remove inhibition from very attractive females but does it remove inhibitions from all females so that males might be more likely to pursue a casual mating strategy and succeed instead attractive females well I believe so this is uh it's not easy to get data on this but a famous study was done by Jamie Pennebaker at SMU back in probably the 1970s and that bore out this they actually ran an experiment which is very difficult to do particularly when you're talking about getting people tipsy but he'd managed to get it through an ethics committee and managed to pull this thing off where the both males and females became more attractive closer to closing time with alcohol Beyond and so this is uh yes I think that that's exactly what's going on is that alcohol is a effectively acts as an anti-anxiety agent it's been known for centuries as liquid courage in other words when you're normally supposed to have anxiety if you pour alcohol on it you will reduce that anxiety attacks very very similarly in the brain to a benzodiazepine like xanax or or about you know valium or any of these sorts of kind of drugs that that knock out a bunch of your anxiety and so alcohol will dull the anxiety down and of course the female should be very anxious about giving up her eggs without any sign of commitment and so the alcohol is going to be very helpful to the male cow so mating strategy which is precisely why you know these social processes involve bars exactly what this is about I remember somebody in a friend's group at a party was asking they were they were a little bit in II braided and they told us in the group they said you know they should have places in the bar where you can let go so if you're looking for casual sex you don't you can just like skip all the different things and just like stand in that corner sit on that bench and that way anybody who's interested can come and sit next to you and we were all joking with it we said there is a bench that it's at the front of the bar yeah actually actually if you think about it a something that's very interesting in in this whole in this whole thing which is I don't think particularly mimicked in the animal kingdom perhaps it is well it is to some degree but and that is this there's nothing quite like humans in the animal kingdom in terms of how upset they are about being found unacceptable for mating and so the it's going to turn out that that this is why you know these are charged situations emotionally though in a bar a man finds a female sexually appealing wants to make his move but he needs to be careful because he's he doesn't want to lose status in that situation and being seen as obviously making a play for a female and losing and so that's touchy on his psychology females on the other end of it are maybe interested in a male from what it is that they look like and what they appear to be and so they send positive signals and they're drinking and their inhibitions are dropping but at the same time once they start to talk to the male they may not be very interested and and as a result now they have to shut him down when they did encourage him so these are you know these are pretty charged kind of situations and and they're they're interesting ones but you're seeing some things that you're seeing some behavior that you wouldn't normally see in humans as a result of the alcohol being in the game reducing the male's anxiety for making an ass out of himself or losing losing a flirtation in front of village and also watching the females getting more more bold about signaling positive feedback to males because they're they're anxiety about about that whole process and where could lead is been artificially reduced so that's that's why it is no accident why alcohol is smack dab in the middle of the casual mating dynamics in in our in our culture and so the follow-up question from this listener is our females capable of turning off their sexual inhibitions voluntarily my guess is absolutely not no no of course not no the females are not at all capable of turning off their inhibitions voluntarily they they any more than a male's can can look at a an eight male can look at a four female and turn on is his sexual excitation when he feels nothing okay so the these are these feelings are involuntary feelings are involuntary reactions two deep computations that the mind is performing and if if the cost-benefit analysis of the value proposition that's in front of you doesn't add up to what makes sense for you given your personal knowledge of the adaptive landscape your yeah and who it is that you are and what you have to bring the table you can't do it this is the this is also this is part parcel of a much broader question certainly about free will which would be the biggest the biggest question on the table but similar questions would be can you can can a person just decide to love somebody and just make a decision that they're going to be committed to them no you cannot you cannot will your feelings in and out of existence your feelings are our automated byproducts a very very sophisticated cost-benefit equipment that runs in your head and so you you cannot do anything of the kind yeah I remember discovery were discussing a few a few shows back about the weight gain that females deal with in the twenty thirty years of their life and how young mentioned that can you imagine how much easier dating could be if men could turn off their advocates for detecting fertility connectors sure of course yeah that would be that would be trivial in other words if you are there's all kinds of women which you can look into their faces and you can see pretty and you can know that you are in principle looking at a date but it looks like a four and that's because it's seventy pounds overweight and so there's no possible way for the male mind to look past that because that that body shape looks like it's pregnant and there's and the essentially energy conservation mechanics inside of his brain say forget it not work done that's exactly what it feels like young so all these emotions positive negative everything is this they works the same way yeah they all work the same way they're all completely involuntary you you have no choice as to what you feel I'm always amused and irritated when I hear psychologists say well that's what you choose to believe or you can choose to think this and you can choose to think that we can't choose anything of the kind your your what you believe is true and what makes sense to you this is not up to quote you it's uh your brain is running deep automated algorithms that that essentially make a decision as to what they think the truth is and you don't have a choice about it you have no more choice about that then you know it's an interesting thing as to what that would look like go can you you can choose to believe anything really can you choose to believe in Santa Claus you know how about Paul Bunyan okay like where does it end how about about Bigfoot okay so how about the Loch Ness monster I got at what point is it that you can choose to believe what the answer is you cannot choose to believe anything and and as a result you can't choose to feel anything because your feelings are ultimately based on what you believe to be the case and and these are very deep algorithms you or you can't you can't choose to believe a plane faced female that looks plain to you is beautiful can't do it it can't be done the it is and it's quite quite distressing and yet it is the case that a lot of this is quite objective it's not totally objective but it's quite objective it means that in the game of man-woman relationships and in and in mating choice there is a the lion's share of the success that's involved here has to do with the genes that you were born with and that's the way it is alright so our next next question actually has to do with potentially messing up these genes with medication so yeah this is a question from one of our listeners and it's a little bit long so it just tells a nice little story about birth control the question is assume you have a female in her peak reproductive years and she begins a sexual relationship with the male eventually they start an exclusive typical modern-day dating relationship and it lasts a period of time that extends well beyond the time it would ordinarily take a healthy fertile female to get pregnant without birth control say between one and two years but not long enough to trigger the decline in sexual arousal that you typically see in long-term relationships lasting several years however throughout the relationship the couple has taken precautions and has successfully used some form of birth control and avoided pregnancy and all so let's assume that this is one of those magic 10-percent situations that you've referenced in past broadcasts where each person thinks they're getting a hell of a deal and yeah they're thrilled to be in the relationship do you think it's possible that in this situation the females stone-age brain may cause the female to accelerate her loss of sexual attraction desire or interest for the male because let's face it she's been having sex with him for a long period of time and he has in fact not yet impregnated her the theory is that her stone-age brain will attribute her lack of pregnancy to his infertility and signal to her that he is not despite his superior physical attributes in her a good mate choice du-de du-de potential inherent defect affecting his fertility of course logically i was in oh good i said the last sentence is of course logically both individuals know the real reason she's not pregnant because they've been consciously and actively trying to prevent it right this is a great question very thoughtful deep thinking i first encountered this logic in a book called the moral animal written by robert wright back in nineteen ninety-three and outstanding work on in evolutionary psychology by the way for anybody who's interested the and if he was speculating it about this at that time and i'm not aware of any data that that backs this up it wouldn't it wouldn't shock me if somebody found something like this on i i but i don't know i my guess is that the following is true and this is going to be true for a number of things like this that could be related to this so for example the use of birth control pills themselves are will cause women to think effectively feel pregnant and as a result of that they will have more conservative mating choices etc so there's a there's a number of dynamics here this is it this is a very interesting speculation yeah just to reiterate it for the listeners the concept is if you're having sex with somebody for a year or two and there's no kid is there a chip inside the females head that says whoa you know nothing is happening here and therefore there must be something wrong with this guy that's a it's the only reasonable guess from the standpoint of evolution because if there's something wrong with you there's no harm at all in trying it out another partner just find out if it turns out you you go over to then you go over three and see what happens try another one but but this the the the correct inference from the standpoint of evolution would be to make is that this this guy can't knock you up and so would does is essentially having sex with that issue winding up creating a distancing effect and the female wants to to step around the male the on Glenn is suspect that the following is true I'm going to suspect that that and this is nothing other than my speculation and there may be data but I'm not aware of any the there may be a what we're going to call an effect size in this direction so that wouldn't mean that you would find that it all would always happen it would mean that it would mean that if you looked at enough people and looked at enough population statistics on this particular shoe that you may very well find an effect where were this this tendency or this inference effectively gets occasionally activated it might be in marginal situations where the female is not that hot on this male anyway etc so it that may be a typical tip her over the scale sort of an issue I don't know but it it's a great question it's actually a would be a fantastic doctor'll distribution if nobody's if nobody has done it so great question my answer is I suspect that there that there is something of that kind but I suspect that the effect size is small so I don't think it's a major influence in human behavior but it very well might lead but it very possibly could be a minor effect mm-hmm yeah and the next part of the question from this same exact listener is basically clarifying that the hormonal chemistry a woman has when she's pregnant causes her to prefer males displaying provider qualities and child rearing qualities as opposed to simply superior genetic and reproductive qualities when she's trying to get pregnant so you're saying this is actually true this has been studied right yes yeah these are this is uh this is true at different points in the menstrual cycle so when she's fertile she's extremely preference towards very sexy males and when she's not fertile she's very very much prefers you know guys who look like me okay let's sort of round or friendly nice eyes you know have been the pleasant characteristics that look like they're going to stick around reliable all that sort of thing so long walk yeah like wah long walks on the beach and talking about all the things that I'm going to do for all that kind of stuff so this is uh this is true and so this is we can see how how for example birth control could could mix up a lot of mating dynamics potentially in people and and not that it would all be bad but you could see situations where where the following could be true where a girl that's on birth control could meet a guy that she's not really that hot on but but he could be very hot on her because maybe she's trading down and she's feeling conservative because she is essentially feeling that she's pregnant potentially so she chooses a partner that is not very exciting but is reliable that is in her and and main while if she ever gets off the birth control and they are thinking about having kids it turns out that she's really not interested in him at all and that she's very interested in other people that you could see how that picture could be put together and probably has been lived by some people um I expect that that female mating decisions in general are are more of a hybrid of other words the average female was trying to split the difference between two strategies she's trying to find somebody who's kind of exciting but kind of dependable and and as a result that she's probably playing both strategies all the time and just may lean and a more conservative strategy a relatively more conservative strategy when she's using birth control so I don't expect that these are essentially either-or strategies I think that these strategies are actually being played on a continuum and of course if you add that to a very low conscientious female will she'll get the one where she'll get the provider and then cheat on him with the with what's his name with Jimmy of course the ten and then now Horace gets to pay for the kid of course that's right so this is very rare on your bumper sticker don't be Horace today you know on that same topic of I guess essentially screwing with the genes is a few years ago I read a very psychology that the journal one of the one of the articles that they published was about couples splitting up because they postulated that it was because of the perfumes that they both were the perfumes and colognes that masked the normal smell of the I guess the pheromones kind of you know like love potion number nine type of thing where yeah where the they can smell each other's DNA signature and with the perfumes and colognes on it just it messed the whole thing up and muddied the waters that's actually possible and I think that's very interesting I think some of the most interesting stuff that I've seen is that some of the the sense that are now available actually definitely increased increased female libido with their partners and and I think that's fascinating that that's true and they've actually got experimental evidence to this and so anybody that's interested may want to look up the look up the journals and look for that for that study and find it I read it in last year and because my life is so boring I didn't I didn't bother to follow it up but in principle I should know what those cents are I know your tricks you're just not sharing them which I don't blame you at all that's giving me a lot of credit mate all right all right so our next question this has to do mmm I'm assuming again with the casual mating strategy oh no this is a ok this is about soft and hard value in the in this in the dating market place so this listener says I recently became from listening to your show I recently became aware of soft versus hard market value a male who might have been say unpopular in high school and was very very thin and just you know had pimply face and everything like that may have had a hard a hard value of say a 5 but as they got older as they grew into themselves they got a good job etc they may have been able to expand it to a soft 7 but deep inside he may still have have just have a psychology of a 5 so when dr. Lisle said about losing fall status it strongly reminded me about fitness testing that women might subject men to and by fitness test this listener is referring to the little questions the I think you call them cross examinations when they are trying to figure out what the actual genetic value of a male is and if you can pass them that the fitness test by joking or humor or you just don't let it affect you you don't get too irritated by it this this listeners assuming that if you can pass them then the female is the status was preserved otherwise your real status takes a hit and you know you don't get to you don't get the chance so the question for dr. Lisle is can you comment on this type of fitness testing that females do and is there a way to pass them without loss or anything negative well this is very interesting sort of an interesting question and there's a a lot of this there's there's quite a lot of supposition that's sitting under questions like this the first of all let's let's look at what a date is so what a date is is the if it's a blind date nobody knows if anybody qualifies okay so you're walking in there and there's there's no there's no telling whether you qualify physically or not the if the female does not qualify physically this thing is done okay it's over the male is just going to be polite or impolite and he's out of there he the female may not qualify physically for pair-bond strategy at which point she may qualify for for casual mating strategy and then then we've got you know this sort of mess on our hands where where the male's just trying to figure out how little he can maneuver a little action he has to do and how little resources yes to come up before he could get to the casual mating strategy and he's running cost-benefit analysis
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