I’m becoming interested in infanticide in humans as compared to non-human primates. On the face of it, you should be able to predict such things as child sacrifice to Baal and Moloch, since there’s no real connection between such things and the stated goals. It stands to reason, therefore, that motivated reasoning is at play: people sacrifice children not because it helps the crops grow or because it creates Generation Zyklon, but because they had some incentive to sacrifice children in the first place and it became a solution in search of a problem.
This infographic struck me as a good starting point:
We’d expect there are two separate motives, the R-selected reproductive strategy and the social competitor strategy of destroying the reproductive fitness of children unrelated to you (e.g. Alpha male gorilla infanticide), under a general factor of psychopathy/criminality. The general factor would explain why sexual abuse is almost exactly 1/2 of physical abuse in all categories. The outlier to this trend, requiring a two-factor explanation, is the “neither parent” category (adoption) where both types of abuse are almost equally common. It would be helpful to know the percentage of gay couples in this sample, but I’d guess that it’s pretty low in comparison to traditional adoption.
A rise in the general factor may explain all the incest porn.
Related to the sexual exploitation of genetically unrelated children:
I haven’t read the thread this is from but you, anon, could summarize it for the rest of us if you have time on your hands.
“It is interesting that Dr J D Unwin described this exact phenomena in his 1934 book, “Sex and Culture.” Dr. Unwin researched 86 societies across a 5000 year span to prove that Freud’s theory that sexual ‘freedom’ creates dynamic societies and sexual repression destroys them. What he found instead astounded and greatly alarmed him. Dr. Unwin concluded that ‘the fabric that holds a society together is sexual in nature.’ When a society relaxes its moral code to allow for pre-marital & extra-marital sexual activity and homosexuality, then it takes only 3 successive generations who reject absolute monogamy to destroy that society.”
This is the jist of that thread.
I’ll have to revise my opinion of crowd wisdom downward yet again. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
>Freud’s theory that sexual ‘freedom’ creates dynamic societies and sexual repression destroys them
I don’t know much about Freud but that doesn’t sound right to me.
It’s not, the Jolly Heretic covered this in his video on Puritans (which I have downloaded audio of, but you can’t find online anymore).