Behaviors That Reduce Reproductive Success
Behaviors such as homosexuality and suicide seem to reduce reproductive success and pose a challenge for evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists have proposed explanations, such that there may be reproductive benefits for relatives or that they may be byproducts of adaptive behaviors that usually increase reproductive success but a review by Confer et al. states that they "remain at least somewhat inexplicable on the basis of current evolutionary psychological accounts."
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Evolutionary Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words behaviors, reduce, reproductive and/or success:
“Numerous studies have shown that those adults who feel the most frustrated by children—and the least competent as parents—usually have one thing in common.... They don’t know what behaviors are normal and appropriate for children at different stages of development. This leads them to misinterpret their children’s natural behaviors and to have inappropriate expectations, both for their children and themselves.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane’s rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“... the selfishness that is bred of great success is our shame. We have subdued the wilderness and made it ours. We have conquered the earth and the richness thereof. We have indelibly stamped upon its face the seal of our dominating will. Now, unlike Alexander sighing for more worlds to conquer, we should address ourselves to adding beauty to that glory and grandeur.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)