A computer upgrade shut down BART

Every culture in the world operates on shame. It goes beyond culture and is intrinsic to human nature. The actions of almost everyone on the face of the earth accounts for shame. It’s an emotion we avoid and we act in ways to avoid it. It’s a very surface level thing. We break the rules of a society and others know about it, we feel shame. Thus to avoid shame we avoid publicly breaking the rules of society.

If an attribute of humanity is universal and historically prevalent it becomes for sure through induction that the attribute survived the gauntlet of natural selection. There is a huge survival benefit here.

All of evolutionary psychology can only be formulated through induction as there’s no way to find causal evidence for psychological attributes short of time travel.

> Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse?

We don’t know if it does. But abuse is possibly not evolutionary and possibly not beneficial. The reason is because it’s not universal across societies. Not like Shame.

Though there is evidence that it is beneficial. Hitting children in Asia is normal. The high achievement and IQ and work ethic of those in China are often achieved through physical abuse not to the extent where it injures the child extremely but to the extent where pain changes behavior. A large part of the economic success of the Chinese is due to high industriousness of the society which is very much influenced by physical abuse of children.

Additionally, the overwhelming majority of human societies have men as the dominant sex and often hitting a wife is equivalent to spanking a child in societies where men have power. Was this beneficial? Who knows. One thing is that in societies where men dominate women rate their lives as happier and the divorce rate is significantly down. While the data on this isn’t fully solid this isn’t strictly evidence it’s food for a thought. It’s also the overwhelming dominant paradigm of humanity where men dominate women. Modern society as we know it where women are equal to men is experimental we’ve never done it and there’s no way of knowing if natural selection will select for this.

Another thing to note is that modern societies are all experience population decline. There is enough of a correlation here that we believe modernity is causal to population decline. What part of modernity? We don’t know. Likely it is very complicated but male domination could be an aspect of it. Take India. Spousal abuse is much more common and men hold a dominant place in the family unit and they also follow more traditional arranged marriages. Indias population is not declining, it is growing and it is quite possible spousal abuse or the attributes that lead to spousal abuse are causal.

We don’t know. So my long winded explanation here is that you cannot use abuse as an example of evidence against the evolutionary benefits of shame. It doesn’t follow from the logic or the evidence and you only said it as if it was like dropping the mic because you’re heavily influenced by modern culture. Abuse = universally bad to you but from an impartial and objective standpoint it is not.