Platonic spaghetti sauce and one-brand great males

[muckefuck]

Two days, two articles, two completely different subjects, a common thread. That thread is choice and its relationship to human variability. From an article on ketchup ganked from princeofcairo:

It may be hard today, fifteen years later--when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties--to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish--the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended because that's the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.

Now for a feminist critique of evolutionary psychology brought to my attention by zompist:

"A female will choose to mate with a male whom she believes, consciously or otherwise, will confer some advantage on her and her offspring. If that's the case, then her decision is contingent on what she brings to the equation." For example, [Patricia Gowaty of the University of Georgia] says, "the 'good genes' model leads to oversimplified notions that there is a 'best male' out there, a top-of-the-line hunk whom all females would prefer to mate with if they had the wherewithal. But in the viability model, a female brings her own genetic complement to the equation, with the result that what looks good genetically to one woman might be a clash of colors for another." Maybe the man's immune system doesn't complement her own, for example, Gowaty proposes. There's evidence that the search for immune variation is one of the subtle factors driving mate selection, which may be why we care about how our lovers smell; immune molecules may be volatilized and released in sweat, hair, the oil on our skin. We are each of us a chemistry set, and each of us has a distinctive mix of reagents. "What pleases me might not please somebody else," Gowaty says. "There is no one-brand great male out there. We're not all programmed to look for the alpha male and only willing to mate with the little guy or the less aggressive guy because we can't do any better. But the propaganda gives us a picture of the right man and the ideal woman, and the effect of the propaganda is insidious. It becomes self-reinforcing."

Odd, isn't it? We're perfectly willing to accept human variability in the face of consumer choice in our complex modern world, but somehow it couldn't have existed among our dull-witted forebearers on the primal savannah. Darwinism ruthlessly selects for one and only one best choice for surmounting the myriad challenges of survival; the idea that there could be various competing strategies all with their own strengths and weaknesses gets too easily discarded--at least, that is, when the One True Strategy confirms the underlying biases of our society.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

We're perfectly willing to accept human variability in the face of consumer choice in our complex modern world, but somehow it couldn't have existed among our dull-witted forebearers on the primal savannah.

Can't this also be seen as the idea coming into play at more or less the same time, penetrating different fields of thought at slightly different rates? It seems as if the idea of a single optimum was on the upswing through much of the twentieth century (examples in large-scale political and economic thought are almost too obvious), and has provoked a reaction which is now itself a rising tide.

(I also haven't read enough evolutionary psychology to know if they really are pushing the idea of a one-dimensional model of better and worse genes-- I'm wary of taking an opponent's characterization of someone's position without a fair amount of salt.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I read much evpsych myself, but I certainly remember that the idea of a single optimal strategy underlay much of what I did read, even when it wasn't explicitly stated. It certainly seems to be an axiom of much popular discussion of the subject. (zompist linked to the debate in order to inject some sense into a debate on the effect of sexual selection on women's personalities.)

It seems likely that, as you say, this is part of a spreading reaction. Certainly, it wouldn't be the first time in the history of ideas that the assertion of a monolithic optimal strategy caused people to champion personal choice and variability. (Protestant Reformation, anyone?)

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I'm not all that strong on early Protestantism, but didn't most of the Reformation figures have a different idea of what they believed optimal, rather than actively preferring diverse outcomes? (That is, no one organization was offering spicy Christianity and chunky Christianity and original recipe Christianity, instead multiple figures were offering their idea of the right recipe.) I guess that came in later in the process, though, at least in some places (the C of E, with its high church and broad church and low church factions, seems to be an example, as does the post-Counter-Reformation RCC itself to an extent).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Fundamental to the Reformation, though, was the thought that salvation was something that a person could achieve through direct experience of God without the mediation of a clergy. Certainly, some leaders thought they'd hit upon an ideal recipe, but others seems to have viewed congregations as far more conducive to salvation that working solo, but by no means necessary.

Think of it as, "It's far better to make your own sauce at home than buy Ragu! (But best of all would be to buy Newman's Own.)"

[gopower.livejournal.com]

My exposure to orginal darwin(ism) is minimal, but it would seem to me that this feminist interpretation must be very far from the mark. If evolution did not allow for, indeed command, divergent optimal outcomes, wouldn't all species tend to converge on the same characteristics? Could you even end up with different species in the first place?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I think only if sexual selection was a) the only thing doing the selecting and b) itself unchanging according to circumstances. For example, if you assume that the basic criterion is "Who'll be most likely to ensure that my children survive to give me grandchildren", then that might point to someone with good eyesight and running speed in an environment where the major issue is finding nuts and berries and hunting small prey to avoid starving, but big muscles and aggression where the major problem is large predators or human invaders killing the kids.

The fact that there will be lots of simultaneous problems in practice, and that an individual's primary survival focus may change over the course of a single lifetime let alone generations, points to the idea that there probably shouldn't be one optimum. But even if there were it could be a different optimum in different regions, or for different populations, or for the same population at different times, so that isolating populations would lead to divergence and eventually speciation.