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Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by zelly on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @11:10AM (#21525709)
This is BS. You can't use biological evolution to explain high level cultural behavior. It also implies that females have no agency and just run on instinct like frogs. The real reason they want diamonds is culture.
Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by seph-reed on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:46PM (#21527067)
> You can't use biological evolution to explain high level cultural behavior

If you can use math to explain physics, physics to explain chemistry, chemistry to explain biology, biology to explain psychology, psychology to explain sociology, and sociology (plus history) to explain culture, then it would be fair to say you could use math to explain culture.

Of course, there's a lot of big gaps here, but the point is: trying to tie culture to biology is not without merit.

IMO, males and females both run on instinct through chaos crafted channels of superstition we call "culture". Like water running down a mountain in streams, it's not the channels which explain the waters movement downward (that's gravity), they just define the means through which it happens.

Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by AtlasBarfed on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:07PM (#21526460)
Biological evolution to explain motivations: yes you can

Implies that <people> have no agency and run on instinct: see psychology, marketing theory

Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by ncmncm on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @08:41PM (#21531963)
Scientists call it a "Just So" story. They know everyone is tempted by them, even themselves.
Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by ryanmarsh on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:05PM (#21526424)
You can't use biological evolution to explain high level cultural behavior.

Why not?

Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by cowpig on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:31PM (#21526827)
It's like trying to use molecular physics to explain the immune system.

It's not just impractical; it's impossible to know enough of the variables to derive one from the other.

In practice "evolutionary" explanations are constantly used to make something intuitively plausible for which there is no evidence sound scientific and convincing.

[dead]
Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by Miraste on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @04:20PM (#21529717)
A more concrete reason it's not true in this case: diamonds as engagement gifts from men to women are a recent cultural phenomenon. For most of human history this was not the case, and there were/are large cultures where the tradition is a dowry instead (more or less the reverse) or nothing at all.
Re:Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper by zelly on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @07:06PM (#21531267)
It's not science. Human brains are very recent in evolutionary terms. What a frog or a peacock does is a result of many orders of magnitude more time under natural selection than the age of modern humans. People guess that this or that behavior is because of natural/sexual selection and pass it off as science with no proof just because the word evolution was mentioned. It takes a very long time for something to become an instinct. Given how much human brains are capable of, I just think the most Occam's razor answer is culture and mimicry rather than somehow some {{uniquely human behavior}} having been important enough to survival to become an instinct across the board.