I dislike stuff like that, because to me behaviour is something one controls using one’s will power. Saying something unfavourable is “caused” by one’s genes is a great way to excuse bad impulse control, and my inner Calvinist wants to tear her hair out in frustration. Not everything is as scientific as some people believe.
The fact that children raised in homes without a dad have sex earlier is down to their genes, say US researchers.
The study tested for genetic influences as well as factors such as poverty, educational opportunities and religion.
The more genes the children shared, the more similar their ages of first intercourse regardless of whether they had an absent father or not.
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Rebecca adds: I think there’s something to this (and I also think that having a genetic predisposition to something – drinking, anger, unacceptable paraphilias – doesn’t give you a blank cheque to indulge, although it does mean you deserve extra credit for being disciplined.) J. Philippe Rushton, not by any means uncontroversial but not automatically wrong on that account, points out that animals and their reproductive strategies fall along a continuum, with frequency of reproduction increasing as the amount of effort put into parenting decreases. Humans, horses and elephants are at one end of the extreme; the vast majority of their pregnancies are singletons, gestational periods are long, and offspring require sustained and expensive care before they are autonomous. Rabbits and mice are at the other end for mammals, having large litters few of whom need to make it to adulthood for the genes to be passed on, and shorter gestational periods. Non-mammals trend even more strongly towards frequent reproduction and low investment parenting; think of the number of tadpoles produced by one pair of frogs.
Rushton suggests that humans show variation on this continuum by group. We would expect that a high frequency, low involvement approach would manifest biologically in greater frequencies of multiple births, slightly shorter gestation, and earlier sexual maturity. He gets people smoking out their ears by grouping different races along this continuum. But we can dispense with that dimension entirely and still consider a genetic connection here. It’s notable, though, that minorities with conservative social values and largely intact families seem to suffer vastly less from “racism” than other groups with particularly high out of wedlock births and their accompanying ills; if racism were indeed the causal factor, it’s puzzling that it harms some “non-whites” so much more than others.
Another, less inflammatory, approach is the “cads vs dads” theory. This holds that men in particular can ensure that their genes are passed on in one of two ways: by having relatively few children and focusing extensively on their nurturing to adulthood (dad), or by fathering multiple children and relying on the odds that some of them will make it to adulthood even with his dissipated involvement and resources (cad). What I would find really fascinating would be a look at whether sexual maturity comes earlier to children raised without fathers, since this is more a result of nature than first sexual activity which, being largely behavioural in a way that physical puberty isn’t, is a product of nurture.
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As a Calvinist, I can confirm that all sinful tendencies are inherited. God still holds us individually responsible. See, for example, Ezekiel 18. (Speaking of sinful tendencies, I should note that when the BBC speaks of “early sex,” it is usually speaking of premarital sex.)
I fail to see the philosophical objection. Genetic factors do influence behavior – this isn’t a recent revelation, it’s been known for decades, and to argue otherwise is really indefenseable in scientific terms. Individuals may by choice try to ignore their instincts, but in any statistically significent population the impact of genetics is clear.
The only reason sex is so popular is that humans, and every other sexual organism on this planet, come genetically programmed to want it and to seek it. That’s just basic secondry-school level natural selection: The more sex someone had (prior to reliable contraception), the more offspring they have to carry those sex-seeking genes.
A lot of human nature can be traced to instinctive behaviors evolved in harder times. The desire for sex, and for energy-rich junk food, an aversion to the smell of rotten meat or feces, even complex emotions like shame, injustice, envy. There’s a whole field of evolutionary psychiatry devoted to the subject.
Of the seven deadly sins, there is a simple evolutionary explanation for why five of them would be of reprodutive advantage in a prehistoric civilisation. Humans may like to think of themselves sometimes as packages of logic without connections to primative nature, but they are still animals, loaded with all the instincts needed to be a skilled breeder in a tribe of apes.
Suricou,
I guess my secondary-school level sciences must be rusty, but I always understood that, evolutionarily speaking, monogamy was the optimum means a male human can employ to ensure that his genes are passed on.
As I understood it, that is why, in primitive, polyamorous/polyandrous societies, the avuncular relationship is so important. A man could not know for certain who his children are he is not the only one having intercourse with a woman. So, he latches on to his sister’s children, as the next best way to ensure his genes progress.
At any rate, the Christian theologian doesn’t necessarily need to disagree with modern science. Yes, some evolutionary advantages and genetic factors might be contradictory to Christian morality, but that doesn’t somehow “disprove” said morality. If anything, it further bolsters the idea that said morality developed independant of humans. It accentuates the divinity of said morality, rather than diminish it.
Am I reading this article correctly, or am I missing something? The first set of statistics found the following prevalences for sexual activity of children in 3 domestic contexts: 63.2%, 52.5%, and 21% for children whose fathers were absent, sometimes absent, and always present, respectively.
Then the second set of statistics found that the average age of first intercourse was 15.28, 15.36, and 16.11 for children whose fathers were absent, sometimes absent, and always present, respectively. You cannot use an unknown value when calculating averages. The second set of statistics therefore cannot include the children who did not have sex as measured by the first statistic, since one cannot assume when they will have sex.
Furthermore, they were being compared with their cousins on the basis of “age of first intercourse”, suggesting they were being compared only to other children who’ve also already had sex. After doing this, they found that genes played more of a role than the parental situation in the age they started to have sex.
The problem is they’ve essentially selected the kids who’ve had sex early and biased their sample. When the kids who are currently virgins start to have sex, then the average age of first intercourse for kids in families where the father was always present will likely go up more than the others since they represent 79% of the individuals in that group. This could potentially produce the opposite conclusion.
So correct me if I’ve missed something, but I don’t think they can justifiably conclude from this that genes are more important than the presence of a father.
Matthew N, from my admittedly fairly cursory reading, I’d say you’re right on the statistics. Further, they are of necessity relying on self-reporting, and it would be silly to expect teens not to lie about their sexual activities – concealing or embellishing – to researchers when they often lie to parents, friends, doctors, teachers, you name it.
I suspect, though, that genes and the absence of a father reinforce each other in this regard.