I'm going to **** my hand now!

edit: welcome to page 3

I don't really understand your objection. Can you possibly rephrase it? I'm possibly just being stupid.

I'm certainly not claiming that this definitively is the source of society's disdain for masturbation, just proposing a mechanism whereby it arises. I think it does so coherently.

I think the most contentious part of this mechanism is probably the idea that masturbation could, in some sort of excess, reduce the reproductive success of an individual. I have no idea whether this is true or not, and I'm becoming inclined to believe it probably isn't. In which case the proposed mechanism would indeed not explain society's disdain for masturbation.

I hasten to add, though, that this mechanism does not exclusively require the transfer of genetic information. It could possibly work in a similar vein with the transfer of cultural information and similar selection processes occurring thereafter. A genetic basis would make more sense, as evolution by natural selection is well established and uncontroversial while memetics (and other cultural selection theories) have thorough critiques and need much more development.

After 15 minutes on Chatroulette I have to say that I'm now totally in favor of the masturbation taboo.

Agreed.

Because you have a small dong. And it's not disdain. We're laughing.

Hahaha. Nice.

Also because you touch yourself at night.

Not just at night.

Welcome to page one =p

My understanding (limited as it may be) of Natural selection is that it is based off of physiological characteristics, whereas a "disdained view of masturbation" is psychological.

No. A genome encodes surprisingly many complex behaviors. An animal's brain is not an undifferentiated mass of neurons.

To the extent that there are widely supported explanations for how morality could have come about. Additionally, these explanations are remarkably straightforward and appear in the early chapters of The Selfish Gene.

There have been a lot of big words in a thread about masturbation...baffling

GTFO

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

I'm not so sure about that. There's been much development of memetics since the late 70s when the Selfish Gene was published, and similar approaches by Douglas Hofstadter (rapidly becoming one of my favourite thinkers, I encourage all to explore his work), and much of it fairly elaborate critique. For example, even the very definition of meme - a single unit of cultural information transferred from one person to another (Dawkins) - may seem like a clever analogy to gene, but that alone raises confusing questions.

Is a song a single meme? A song can contain a vast amount of thoughts, ideas and feelings - and those that I experience can be different to those that you experience. So is a song then a collection of memes? How does one explain the different interpretations you and I may have of that single song? Does it exist somewhere between the sender and recipient?

A lot of the work in memetics has been in trying to use the gene analogy and explore where that takes us, and many of the problems with it arise specifically from the strict dependence upon this analogy.
Somewhat prophetically, Dawkins himself discouraged this in the same chapter that he introduces it

An important factor in any hypothesis of how the masturbation taboo began would be a cross-cultural analysis. I've heard a lot about how sexual mores vary greatly between cultures, but I don't remember ever hearing anything specifically about masturbation. The idea that aversion to it is biologically programmed is pretty dependent upon near-universality of the taboo. So far the only universal sexual taboo I've heard of is incest (though exact definitions vary).

I'm not talking about memetics, I'm referring to when he introduces altruism as a consequence of group selection, ie the genes that make you self-sacrifice are the same genes that make you succeed because your siblings self-sacrifice. He doesn't mention memes until later in the book. Of course there are competing theories and subsequent improvements, but it's an excellent illustration of how morality could have come about.

Evolution operates just as well on learned behaviors as on genetic information. That's all any of that means.

I know what it means...

Somebody lock this thread. It's about masturbation.

masturbation is a fairly big word for a thread about masturbation

Yeah, as spotty as it is, "Not spilling seed" and "better in the belly of a whore than on the ground" just don't make sense to me.

Regardless, I agree with the fact that it seems more women are too embarassed to admit doing it than should be. Then again, more women seem to not have that 'need' that guys do. *shrugs*

It saves me the effort of making a booty call and wasting my gas.

I don't have time to read the rest of the thread so please accept my apology if this was already mentioned...

The "Antichrist" movie has the best masturbation scene, EVER.