Toxic Masculinty

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You know, I don't like people with that much sense of superiority over animals as well.

Humans are animals too, and yes, while the alpha-beta terminology is debatable, even when it's applied for the animal kingdom (for instance, it turned out what was thought about wolves in the wild was wrong, however we are primates, not canines) but we are still part animals.

The whole alpha-hierarchy thing might had been elastic/changing during eons of our ancestry, theories of how bonobos diverged from the chimps is a perfect example of how hierarchy structure may greatly change due to circumstances and environment changes; humans (and their ancestor humanoid) might had went through such fluctuations too; so basically we are not destined to accept a certain narrow model (such as alpha male dominance model).

However, we shouldn't dismiss the whole science behind studying our "animal remnant" in us, just because we are humans:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 3813000615
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 3813000603

Denying our biological link with animals is a very Creationist way of thinking.

I have all kinds of difficulty believing that the average Joe who has spent a majority of their existence enjoying human comforts, having their lives made easy by human devices, with food and clothing (clothing? Lol) from human systems and constructs, and who has no intention of assuming a feral lifestyle would look to the behavior of animals out of a sudden sensibility towards their origins .
It's more often than not used to justify really sh***y and self serving thinking.

And the rationale for it just doesn't add up. It's like using your great great grandpa's behavior to explain yours, only going way further and using a basis for comparison that is genetically different from you instead.


"I can't believe it's not ape" comes to mind

If you want to see this as superiority, so be it, I see it more as honesty, sure it's our origins, sure there are similarities, that doesn't mean we can dismiss our differences for the sake of convenience.

Last edited by Antharis on 18 Apr 2015, 6:15 pm, edited 3 times in total.

^ You are so oversimplifying the human being; the comforts you are talking about are all very recent on the human history scale.

Since when is humanism a "Creationist" way of thinking? Humans are animals, yes, but they are rational animals who can abstract from immediate needs and conditions, delay gratification, act according to ethical and aesthetic programs, and empathize with other animals.

Frankly, I think the recent tendency toward evolutionary biology and the view of humans as merely sophisticated animals overstates the importance of our "animal nature" or "animal remnant," and is often used as an excuse for politically and ethically questionable behavior. We have physical needs, we depend on the physical world, and so on, but that doesn't mean we can't be democratic, empathic, and rational creatures, or what some people might call "spiritual," although I don't mean new-agey or religious.

I think the alpha-beta model reifies hierarchical, elitist, and also patriarchal social relations that we should be moving beyond rather than idealizing.

Human behavior is animal behavior because humans are animals.

If that sort of reasoning was of primary importance to employers, they would apply it to potential female employees as well rather than "rewarding" the latter for modesty, as a previous poster suggested.

Who even mentioned humanism?

Creationists do deny that humans are animals of any sort, rational or otherwise - because Creationists simply deny evolution - hence denying any genetic relation between humans and animals. For example, Creationists deny the chromosome 2 to two ape chromosomes relation.

And yes, biology-speaking humans are mere sophisticated animals, very sophisticated in some areas like intelligence, less sophisticated in others. Scientists use the term "sentient" to point to high level of intelligence and reasoning- we are the only sentient beings for now, but so were the Neanderthals as well.

What else would they be biologically-speaking? Saying otherwise is again...a creationist belief, Christianity/Judaism for instance doesn't consider animals to have souls while humans do, so they make humans very special in that regard; with a higher ranking in the cosmic scheme.

However, there's no soul in science and there's no such ranking.


I have explained this point clearly, and I don't disagree with you on this:




That's a stupid conspiracy theory. Look at the studies I've linked and into other studies, plenty of researchers involved are women, so they are not some overlord evil male conspiring organization trying to justify patriarchy in any way, not everything is a conspiracy, you know.

There are well documented and video-taped signs of empathy with same species and other species among certain animals like dolphins, elephants chimps, and dogs; empathy leads to some ethics too.

Look, humans might be superior in all these stuff, but you are inflating its superiority too much.

It's not a conspiracy theory. I don't think there's a group of men behind the scenes fudging data or whatever. My point is that historically, the scientific understanding of what it means to be human is generally conditioned by existing social relations. And there's a sort of feedback loop, such that those theories then retroactively justify those relations. It's not very surprising that during the era of slavery in the United States, lazy or runaway slaves were considered mentally deviant, for example, as it was believed that the nature of black people was to be subservient.

You don't need to be a Christian or Jew to have a concept of the "soul." Aristotle, for example, considers the soul to the entelecheia of the natural, living body. Spinoza holds that the soul is the idea of the body in the Mind of God (that is, Substance, rather than the personal or anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian God).

Biologically speaking, humans are sophisticated animals. But I don't think biology, as it presently exists, is in a state to form a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human. And because of the hard problem of consciousness, it won't ever be in such a position, unless the meaning of the word "biology" changes quite a bit.

Of course, speaking historically, human beings descend from other animals and a genetic relationship between the two exists. My only point is that such a relation shouldn't be taken as the sole guide for human behavior. Humans are rational as much as they are animal.

And I'm not trying to put down animals here, either. I'm a vegetarian, but I don't get upset with my dogs for eating meat. I'm a leftist, but I'm don't try to make my pets into democrats either, because I realize they don't have that capacity.

I love animals, but they just don't have the faculties that people have, and that ensemble of especially human faculties basically becomes what we usually call "free will," which is just the ability to abstract from instinctual drives and the immediate present, and which does in fact radically divorce us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

I am sure the reliable modern researchers are smart enough to take this into consideration - such as taking the social influence into consideration; in fact they do so in many studies.
Like for example, in certain such studies (such as mating selection) they make two samples of people from two different cultures; to see how great the influence of culture and society.

Budget limitations hinder to expand such measures sometimes.








A belief which is not supported by modern science; it was just that - a stupid belief. And if there were any "researchers" in that era pointing to that then they were certainly applying nazi-like pseudoscience.

Modern science is not like the science of those dark times.
Your point?

Pretty much. Reminds me of the philosophy book "Might is Right" aka "Survival of the Fittest."

Seems a bit strange that something so obvious required a study to be conducted to tell us this. It's been experienced & written about for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

One could argue suggesting ape social structure being transferrable as is to humans is doing the oversimplification.

Sure our changes are recent but they are really far-reaching and radical in a lot of counts, to summarize them as us being "Smarter apes" doesn't cut it. No other animal has built a body of knowledge on the workings of pretty much every single documentable entity/phenomenon on the planet as we have, no other animal has managed to manipulate natural laws to the extent we have. No other animal has managed to reinvent their surroundings and the rules that dictate what "fittest" means (or even manipulate evolution itself) to the extent we have. Most behaviours from other species that betray a superior intellectual or emotional capacity we have done with much more complexity and on a consistent basis, and the cultures in different human populations have a role in shaping human behaviour to a degree that isn't seen in the animal world. I don't think this stuff is as easy to disregard as you make it out to be, and I don't think I'm a creationist, an animal snubber (anthro hipster?) or arrogant for thinking downplaying our differences is just short sighted and a sign of low self worth.

Biologically speaking we are animals and we evolved from primates, not denying this in any way, but it's one thing to trace physiological similarities to our genetics, and another one is to attempt to trace behaviour and social structure; in the latter case it only is effective up to a point due to the roles of culture and upbringing in our development. Even now the degree to which specific human behaviours are seen to be the result of genetics is not fully clear and you can find tons of evidence arguing both ways IE Twins separated at birth for genetics, and feral children and domestic abuse in the formation of serial killers for upbringing.

As for studies, I have no way of telling what criteria they used to define a particular attribute (Dominant? Macho?) and I don't have every single detail on how they were conducted so I am inclined to take them with a grain of salt. The fact the behaviours in question aren't traced back to physiological sources also makes me inclined to treat them as speculation. It doesn't help that I've read about and seen many social scenarios and unions that just don't subscribe to the alpha/beta social structure to take it seriously. (Plus there's my own personal opinion that the so called Alpha male is the most repellent thing in the world, betas coming second, and there's no in between. This can be disregarded)

OTOH I've lost count of people I've encountered that have attempted to justify cheating, lying and general scumbaggery by pointing at the primate du jour. Promiscuity? Bonobos Violence? Chimpanzees , etc . Sometimes they don't even bother with primates, canines? sure, rodents? ok , insects? fine. It's really convenient and it means you don't need to take responsibility/exercise careful judgement about anything, yay anthropology.

I'd like to see someone play the anthropology card to justify infanticide. It'd be chuckles aplenty.

No one here is suggesting that the social structure being transferable as is to humans.

I said earlier:





The chimps/gorillas don't really belong to the same genus, strong evidences show that Neanderthals were smart and nature-manipulating species (tools creation, drawings...etc) but they went extinct, we are the only lucky surviving species of the homo genus, genetically chimps are very close yet not enough close.





All this is true but none of this disapproves that humans have animalistic tendencies in certain areas.





Who are these people? Where do you find them?

Modern anthropology (I guess you are referring to the biological anthropology) is a true scientific discipline and it has no such agenda of its own.

Alright, off the bat, I think we need to recognize that the word "animal" has more than one definition. On the one hand, it refers to the entirety of the animal kingdom, as it's defined in the natural sciences. On the other hand, it refers specifically to those animals which are not humans, in contradistinction to human beings. This is why we can use terms like "animalistic tendencies" when describing humans, although it would be odd to say that an opossum has animalistic tendencies. And both of these meanings are valid and important, because one stresses the continuity involved in the evolution from non-human primates to our ancestors and the shared characteristics of humans and other animals, while the other allows us to specifically understand what makes human beings different from other animals. This is exactly why Aristotle calls human beings "rational animals." We have the genus (animal) and the differentium (rational) that allow a definition of humanity to be determined.

But our rational character is unique in the animal kingdom, in that it allows us to completely transcend that animal nature. If an animal is hungry and sees food, it will eat. If a human being is hungry and sees food, he or she may decide to save the food for later, or to portion it out, or to add another ingredient and make it taste better.

Human beings, largely by virtue of being rational animals, are historical animals. Where other animals will exhibit relatively similar behavior through the years (physical evolution notwithstanding), human culture has its own course of "evolution" that operates on a strictly social/mental level. We read history books, and say "oh the Holocaust was really sh***y, and we probably shouldn't let that happen again."

At one point, women were literally the property of their fathers and husbands. Later, they were formally more or less free, but unable to vote. Thanks to the suffrage movement, they were given the right to vote. And so on. Outdated, hierarchical ways of organizing society and perceiving other people are replaced with more egalitarian models. This historical tendency toward democracy, freedom, and reason separates us further and further from our so-called "animal nature."

I'd seriously rather tear out my own gonads with a rusty spoon than read that filth. Seriously, people, wtf? How can you not see that modern feminism is just a ploy to keep less-attractive and desirable men down?

Dr.Nerdlove is just another simpering mangina like Arthur Chu, who thinks that if he demonstrates his loyalty to the feminist imperative, they'll reward him by upping his miserably-low social status, but they never will. Trust me, if you are a shy, nerdy, conventionally-unattractive man (and I'll take an educated guess and say most people in this forum are), then feminism is NOT your ally. In fact, it's one of your worst enemies.