Induction and Childbirth

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

After reading Straight Dope article, I can't resist the urge to use the above word pair, but with the philosophical meaning of the first term in mind. Cecil Adams fields a question that had never occurred to me, namely: When did human beings first conclude that there was a causal connection between sex and human reproduction, and, much more interesting, how might they have done so?

Why couldn't primitive humans deduce the secret of sex just from watching their own species? Well, they could have, of course, and there's a chance some did. But the difference between humans and animals is that women are always partial to sex, whereas females of other species are in heat only during certain seasons. If you're constantly hosing and the women are constantly pregnant, the connection between the two phenomena isn't all that obvious. With animals, though, sex is infrequent and the linkage of cause and effect (a tumble, an interval, a birth) is clearer.
It can be an adventure to consider something that "everyone knows" and, assuming that that "something" really is knowledge, ponder how one might learn it without being told. Too bad for me that, in addition to never having considered the above question , I didn't try to come up with my own answer before reading the article: It might have been good practice for the barrage of questions I'll someday have to field from my daughter.

She seems to be applying her version of "daddy" ("hi-da-da", which sometimes comes out sounding more like, "Hey, Dad.") exclusively to me, lately. The clock is ticking...

-- CAV

10 comments:

Steve D said...

So, as far back as historical records go, humans knew of the causal connection between sex and reproduction. Aboriginal North Americans did; their technological development before the coming of the Europeans was around the level of North Africans about 20,000 BCE. I’m guessing the article’s date of 10,000 BCE is way off. I’d bet at least some humans had this figured out more like around 50,000 BCE. But then, I’ve questioned the existence of man-made global warming and the expanding universe as well, so what do I know?
As far as the Australian aborigines go, they came to exactly the correct induction based on their available evidence; that sex is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reproduction. Why otherwise would pregnancy never occur without sex BUT sexual intercourse only occasionally lead to pregnancy? Some other factor HAS to be involved.
Here is another interesting question, I’ve pondered. Why did sex evolve in the first place? Given natural selection (the selfish gene), why would any organism consent to transmitting only half its genes?

Gus Van Horn said...

I'm not in position to argue about exactly when humans first realized that sex was necessary for reproduction -- and it's beside the point anyway (i.e., What would it take to reach such a conclusion absent the benefit of much knowledge we take for granted?) -- so I'm just going to post your comment. Regarding exactly when, this strikes me as the kind of question that even specialists might have sharp disagreements about.

Steve D said...

Historically, I would suspect that mystical interpretations actively hampered or delayed this realization. Just considering the inductive (philosophical) problem, it’s a pretty straightforward conclusion.

Gus Van Horn said...

I'm not so sure it's straightforward in a primitive culture, given the nine-month time delay and so much else that is undiscovered, but that's my opinion.

Steve D said...

But it only has to come to mind once, right? Then all else follows and the idea spreads. And there were thousands upon thousands of years for this idea to occur.

My guess is that humans discovered the connection initially by observing animal behavior. We first domesticated dogs about 30,000 BCE. It seems unlikely that we would not have discovered at that time, at least in very simplified terms how they reproduced.

I know I’ve wandered from your main point, but it’s still a very interesting topic.

Gus Van Horn said...

Sure, maybe we did make the connection earlier, with the domestication of dogs, but that really just makes my point: we likely needed to see how other, similar animals reproduced to make that connection.

Regarding exactly when that occurred, it is an interesting question (although not as interesting to me as the philosophical one), but I am not particularly interested in making my detailed speculations on the matter public. This is because (1) I am a layman who has done little reading on the matter, and (2) I have already had my fill of seeing laymen regularly issue uninformed pronouncements on topics I know something about, but which they obviously neither know anything about nor understand well enough to read about critically. I don't care to add to that kind of noise.

Steve D said...

What I find interesting about the philosophical question is more general. How does induction work when the specific concretes which are required to form a conclusion are long separated in time and space? - and complicated by other stuff occuring at about the same time.

Gus Van Horn said...

That's what I find interesting, as well.

Mike said...

"I am not particularly interested in making my detailed speculations on the matter public. This is because (1) I am a layman who has done little reading on the matter, and (2) I have already had my fill of seeing laymen regularly issue uninformed pronouncements on topics I know something about, but which they obviously neither know anything about nor understand well enough to read about critically. I don't care to add to that kind of noise."

I know exactly what you mean, and wish others knew enough to be able to tell when they don't know enough to talk usefully about a subject. For instance, I recently ran across a creationist who peddles crapallacious thermodynamic arguments against evolution respond to arguments from non-equilibrium thermodynamics by dismissing Ilya Prigogine's work by reducing it to Benard convection cells (he won a Nobel Prize for work a lot more extensive than that), and adding what he clearly thought was a knock-out blow by saying it was later pointed out that Benard cells increase entropy production and therefore cannot be a suitable model for life, and therefore non-equilibrium thermodynamics can't salvage evolution.

That only seems like a knock-out blow to someone who doesn't know what he's talking about: First, if memory serves it was Prigogine himself who pointed out the fact that Benard cells increase entropy production overall, and this was important because, as has been recognized at least since Schroedinger's What is Life? of 1944, increased entropy production overall is a necessary accompaniment to the decresed local entropy needed for life; Prigogine's whole schtick, if you want to be crass about it, is far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems, and it's a truism in biological thermodynamics that life must increase entropy production compared to a non-living system, to such an extent that a proposed principle in non-equilibrium thermodynamics is that complex systems evolve so as to reach the maximum possible entropy production overall for a given set of physical constraints.

But that just reflects said piker's pop-science-and-creationist diet of analogies and metaphors about disorder in place of solid training in the subject, such that said piker constantly makes basic errors in failing to distinguish systems, subsystems, and environment, among other basic errors. But such a person clearly doesn't know enough to even recognize the limits of his knowledge--alas, it's clear from reading said piker's other entropy productions that it is also signally uninterested in being corrected by them that know better since said piker simply doesn't think they know better. I too have said any number of bone-headed things in the course of my education, but I've never closed myself off from accepting correction by people who know better, regardless of what I think of them as people.

Gus Van Horn said...

"I know exactly what you mean, and wish others knew enough to be able to tell when they don't know enough to talk usefully about a subject."

Amen, brother!

"... I've never closed myself off from accepting correction by people who know better, regardless of what I think of them as people."

I'm with you, there, too.

In my experience, people like your piker rarely change, and I think combinations of the following go a long way towards explaining why: (1) They are too un-self-aware to change. (2) They are being dishonest and think they can get away with obfuscation. (3) They do not integrate things that they know, resulting in much of what they "know" really being taken on authority.