When we talk about behavior being evolved, we mean the underlying processes (cognitive tendencies, hormones, physiology, social learning rules, etc) that lead to differences in behavior are subject to natural selection.
www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

lol. Why thank you. Hope I wasn’t coming across too defensive in my responses also...

I suspect we are in good alignment - in retrospect the paper would have benefited from interrogating issues of measurement, etc.

Thanks for helping me understand where you are coming from.

Wonderful. I’ll send you a link.

I’d love to better understand your conviction to throw the (overparented) baby out with the bath water, rather than think about how to refine the concept. Seems a bit harsh and stifling to declare the whole exercise worthless.

But time will tell if it’s a useful concept I guess… 😬 2/2

Im surprised you see no value in the notion that parental behaviors driven by positive intentions to aid or improve success of children can be developmentally misaligned & have scope for detrimental impacts.

Parents themselves appear to recognize these behaviors & have anxiety about them.

1/2

None of this means polygyny is NOT harmful to children or that it is beneficial of course (studies estimating positive or no impacts also suffer from poor causal inference). But my general sense is that forgone conclusions has led much of the literature on this to accept weak standards of evidence.

Type 2 - large-scale multinational studies (so much scope for confounding!), but some do a more thoughtful job than others. Here, maybe a better example is the work of Smith-Greenaway & Trinitapoli, but I think they would agree causal inference is weak... pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... 3/4

Type 1 - smaller-scale studies comparing families within a single population (ruling out confounding with socioeconomic marginalization of groups that practice polygyny) + often some supporting ethnography. Here, I would point to the work of Beverly Strassmann sites.lsa.umich.edu/bis/polygyny/ 2/4

That is a sobering question - practically all studies on the topic suffer from issues of poor causal inference (i.e. lots of potential for selection and confounding). There are 2 main types of study. So, I can maybe point to examples from each type 1/4...

The 1st point is fair. I agree it’s still an ill defined concept (but would urge you not to dismiss it outright). 👍

As for the second, all behavior evolved. So still confused on “evolutionary basis”… is there any behavior that did not evolve? Maybe you mean adaptive? But we aren’t claiming that.