All of the data on STDs above is from the US and Canada.

Monogamous marriage is the bedrock of the nuclear family. It is the decline of traditional marriage and the rise of modern sexual hedonism that is facilitating this surge of disease.

Unhealthy choices have consequences. Sometimes the consequences are obvious like they are with SDS. Other times the damage is more subtle.

I think we should bring back biblical marriage...

Ya know... the kind where... when your brother dies without having children... his wife/widow is forced to marry me... even if I'm already married... then I get 2 wives, like Abraham, or Joseph Smith!

Perhaps I can have a few concubines too... Abraham had Sarah and Hagar... do I get some sex slaves too?

This "biblical marriage"/rape stuff sounds awesome!

Sexual selection under parental choice, by Menelaos Apostolou (Review by Bruce Charlton)
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-science-of-sex-most-important.html

Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.

This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).

Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.

Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.

Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.

The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).

The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.

The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.

More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who their children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).

But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.

Apostolou summarizes this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.

Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.

Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.

This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enough about the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.

Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.

So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.

Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.

However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.

The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalization for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.

My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.

Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.

An intoxicated person is maladaptive.

So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.

We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.

Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarizes.
In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.

I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.

An interesting post but it is more of an argument against the traditional mechanism of Darwinian evolution where evolution is felt to be driven by random mutation combined with natural selection then an argument that there is no evolution.

Garbage in garbage out.
Henry M. Morris have degrees in civil engeneering and not evolution or mathematics.
It's obvious to anyone that know alittle about the evolution theory that he don't have a clue what he talks about

Perhaps about Morris.

But you don't know how to do the math or you would see that Morris is right in this area.

Morris went easy on the evolutionists in two ways. First, he assumed a evolutionary stance of every other mutation being a beneficial mutation... something that would never happen in nature even once. Second, he didn't take into account all of nature that would have destroyed any mutation, good or bad, had a mutation even happened.

The point is that evolution is not only impossible, but it is so extremely impossible that any scientist that looks into evolution should be embarrassed beyond blushing that he is considered part of the scientific community.

Since impossible evolution is believed among so many, it is a religion, hands down.

You have spoken well coincube.


Humanity seems to be degrading morally and with it comes low reproduction rate.

We are at the edge of an apocalypse.

The scientific law of cause and effect as upheld by Newton's 3rd law shows that there is no random in the pure sense. All the suggestions and theories that there is pure random do not stand up against the proven facts.

Natural selection is either based on pure random, or it is just a wonderful piece of guesswork. It does not come close to standing against the facts of cause and effect or probability.

The closest you come to being right in your statements is, "It's changes over time." But the real changes are the way the term/word "evolution" has changed in meaning over time.

In the past, evolution that took inanimate substances and turned them into, say, a human being, was thought to have been done by mutation. Then when science looked at the probability math, they realized that they had foolishly made themselves into a laughingstock, so they changed the meaning of the word "evolution."

Trouble is, whatever the changes are that supposedly take inanimate substances and turn them into plants, animals and people, is just as full of mathematically impossible probability as the mutation idea was. It simply isn't being done at all in nature that anyone has been able to document anywhere in any way. Any supposed documentation of such in nature, can be attributed to factors other than evolution as well.

In addition, cause and effect as supported by Newton's 3rd Law is evident all over the place. Every aspect of life and natural mechanics is ruled by cause and effect. We live and do everything that we do by automatic cause and effect activity and responses. This means that even if there was some change that "evolved" inanimate substances into plants, animals, and people, it was done by cause and effect. This means that there was a "Causer" that started the whole thing going in the beginning.

Just because scientists don't like the idea of God, doesn't mean He isn't staring them right in the face in all their scientific activities, even though they don't want to see Him.