Evolution of Sport
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Sports are the most extensively studied non-instrumental aspect of human culture.[1] A sport, in this article, will be defined as a "subset of games that require physical skill".[2] therefore excluding games of chance. Sports are both ornamental and competitive aspects of culture, as winning is a central component of games, and ornamental because there is no direct evolutionary function or use of sport.[3] Sports are responsible for developing moral codes, collaborative networks, social capital, and social status.[4] Sports also help construct collective cultural identities.[4] The evolution of sport as a cultural invention can be linked to specific evolutionary processes. Applying cultural evolution theory, framing culture and the development of sports and games as a system analogous to biological adaptations and evolution, as well as understanding how biologically evolved mechanisms of the brain have created conditions for culture and culturally expressive activities such as sport, we can understand how both sexes have evolved to compete in sport.[3] These theories are cultural evolution theory and evolutionary psychology respectively.[3] The third and most compelling perspective, dual-inheritance theory, a fragment of cultural evolution theory, frames the human ability to create culture as depending on both biologically shaped learning mechanisms, innate mating needs and goals, and domain biases that lead to cultural transmission.[3] In other words, culture is an adaptation.These sections will illuminate the different hypotheses for the driving force behind sport evolution.
Male predisposition to sport[edit]
Much of the existing hypothesis and theory on sex difference in sport, or why males are predisposed to competition and females are not, focus primarily on evolutionary functions as a cause for the development of sport.[1] These functions are culturally constructed courtship and mating rituals for advertising to the opposite sex,[1] physical competition for status and resources that does not involve warfare, and training for physically demanding survival activities such as hunting and warfare.[1] Sexual dimorphism is also cited as evidence for male predisposition to sport competition and physical competition, such as strength, speed, and secondary sex characteristics most likely to be found in males such as beards and pronounced jaws that function to threaten other men.[1] Throughout history, men have been more likely to engage in contest-based physical aggression with other males, hunting groups, and between-group raids.[1] Modern sports have evolved from traditionally violent combat activities that relied on aggression and prepared participants for warfare and hunting.[4]
Sexual Selection[edit]
Sports don’t promote survival, so therefore the evolutionary force behind athletic behavior is most likely sexual selection. Sexual selection is the evolutionary forces that enable an organism to attract and retain mates,[1] and athletic behavior functions as intersexual selection. Sport allows men to signal their most reproductively beneficial abilities and traits, and disallows males with disabilities from participating at high levels.[1] Proof of this hypothesis lies in the mating success of athletes.[1]
In a study of females who were allowed to rate photos of males identified by their status of playing a sport aggressively, playing a sport non-aggressively, or not playing a sport, it was found that men that play competitive sport in an aggressive manner were rated as more attractive and more desirable for a sexual relationship, long term relationship, marriage and parenthood, which suggests that sports and aggression signal to potential mates and are sexually desired traits.[4] This can also be argued as intrasexual competition, rather than intersexual selection. Intrasexual competition shaped athletic behavior by way of enabling males to allocate better resources over their rivals and gain mating access and monopoly over available women.[1] This example is used as an argument for why men are more likely to watch sports competitions than women, even though sporting events may have once functioned as sites for choosing mates[1]
The costly-signaling mechanism, developed by Alan Grafen, could account for sport as a cultural invention.[3] Sports are a culturally invented signal of fitness that cannot be faked by those who do not have athletic ability.[3] Sports signal that fitness to both rivals and potential partners, which makes the driving force behind sports both intersexual selection and intrasexual selection,[3] making sports a costly signal. Different individuals prefer different partner characteristics can explain variability in sport competitions that rely on different levels of skill, speed, and endurance.[3] The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller attested that “each sport could be viewed as system for amplifying minor differences in physical fitness into easily perceivable status differences” which could all lend itself to easing sexual selection.[3]
Fitness[edit]
Evolutionary psychology frames sport as culturally invented signifiers of fitness.[3] Therefore, successful sports must exhibit viability to prove that sports themselves evolve to indicate optimal fitness.[3] This is done through accuracy, informativeness, and transparency. An informative sport indicates a quality of fitness that is evolutionarily relevant.[3] Successful sports must be accurate, or reduce the chance of winning through luck rather than endurance, speed, and skill.[3] Transparency is the ability to show that the successful competitor won by being the best, and this must be perceived by those watching.[3] Sports "signal phenotypic quality and heritable fitness to potential partners"[3] which again, makes sports a costly signal, one that expends resources and signals to rivals. This argument is dependent on the fact that the skills sports require, like explosiveness and coordination, are highly heritable traits[3] meaning that sexual selection is the process that helped the evolution of sport rather than natural selection.
Evolved Biases[edit]
Cultural transmission allows people to profit from the adaptive knowledge gathered by the members of their culture before them.[3] Much of our social learning and cultural transmission is based on imitation of the majority or the most successful individuals of a society.[3] Conformist bias leads people to copy behaviors and strategies of the majority.[3] A counterbalance to the conformist bias that prevents the idea that if everyone copied each other there would be no new information, is the prestige bias.[3] This allows people to copy the behaviors of the most successful. These two biases converge to allow for certain sports to gain popularity and be the signals of success for long periods of time, at the same time, individuals will be less likely to diverge in order to avoid ostracism, because sports signal in groups and out groups.[3] The downfall of the conformist bias is over time there may be a lack of new adaptive information due to the tendency to copy the majority. The flaw in the prestige bias lies in the idea that humans are good at determine who is successful but not how they became successful, which leads them to try and solve adaptive problems the wrong way.[3] Conformist bias is what may keep popular sports popular long after a better sport, with more viability and entertainment, comes along to rival i[3] t. Furthermore, Identifying with a sport teams is not just social, as the capability to do so are by products of psychological mechanisms that evolved in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) due to tribal warfare and a need to identify with most successful and fittest of the competitors.[3]
Sex Difference[edit]
When it comes to sex difference in competition, men are more likely to use direct and costly aggression while women are more likely to involve indirect tactics such as gossiping.[2] Males are more likely to focus on winning as motives for playing sport, while females and males share equal interest in goal orientation.[2] Males are also more likely to be ego-oriented in their competition, valuing winning as the true form of success rather than improvement.[2] Males are also more likely to take risks in sport - however, at the risk of losing the competition. In a study of marathoners, males were more likely to start at a pace they could not maintain and risk the entire marathon due to physiological failure to keep the pace.[2] This proves that males and females compete in different ways, for different reasons.
In a cross cultural study of 248 sports, both males and females participated in 37, only females participated in 13, and only males participated in 198, making males the participants in 95% of sports, and females 20%.[1] This study was used to argue that cross culturally, females are less interested in sport and therefore males were more predisposed to compete.[1] The only conclusion of the study was that males play more sports, but the discussion pondered the underlying reasons for males preferring to play more sports as an inherent and biological predisposition.
There can be a case for universal sex difference in hunting and combat sports, not only due to parental investment, encouragement, and socialization of males in sports from a young age, but there is evidence for heritable genetic variation and exposure to androgens before birth.[1] Young males, on average, often engage in rough and tumble play and form small coalitions during early development, whereas females tend to engage more in dyadic relationships and form long-term bonds with other females.[1] If sports function primarily for sexual selection and gaining status, then females might be expected to participate in sports more in societies where females compete more to be chosen as mates or to gain status.[1]
There can be a case for universal sex difference in hunting and combat sports, not only due to parental investment, encouragement, and socialization of males in sports from a young age, but there is evidence for heritable genetic variation and exposure to androgens before birth.[1] Sex differences can be attributed to socialization effects such as parents shaping their children's preferences, or through the adaptationist theory which combines biological predispositions and sociocultural factors.[5] The spectator Lek hypothesis shows that sports act as context in which males aggregate and compete with one another for status and alliances among same-sex peers.[5] While the courtship display hypothesis speaks to sexual selection and competition, even between females.[2] The mind, as an evolved system, can be tested for specific selection pressures that could have shaped sex differences.[5] Different selection pressures therefore would have then crafted gender-specific sociomotivational mechanisms that are made to address sex-specific adaptive challenges.[5] Using these strategies, we can predict the ancestral sporting environments activated the male and female sociomotivational mechanisms that exist now to understand why there may be a male predisposition to sport.
Sports cannot only be for sexual mate selection, as they are also forms of building coalitions with others and sharing success- and team sports function as tests of friendship and trust between individuals. This would explain another issue in spectatorship: why men are interested in men’s teams sports and women in women’s.[3] The adaptive ability to ally with coalitions is another reason why men are interested in men's teams, on top of the spectator lek hypothesis, and intrasexual selection.[2] Although sports teams do not provide individuals with economic resources like an ally would, there are psychological benefits to identifying with a sports team and an individual can bond with others through shared interest and shared distaste in other teams.[2]
Female Participation[edit]
On the sociocontextual level, females face more barriers than males when it comes to sport participation such as differential access to recreation and programs.[2] Females also tend to focus, as young adults and children, on schoolwork rather than extracurricular activities like sports.[2] However, females have still evolved to participate in sport, with success. Because sport is hypothesized to have evolved for sexual selection, it is unlikely that females would compete in sports in order to gain access to mates in societies that value physical attractiveness, femininity, and personal integrity, based solely on the fact that competing in sports does not directly emphasize those traits to males.[1] It is hypothesized, however, that sport participation patriarchal societies will be lower than in non-patriarchal societies.[6] Patriarchal societies are societies in which female capacity for control over resources and political influence is low.[6] One possibility of evolution of female participation is that males are more likely to participate to compete, whereas females is a way of fashioning their bodies to look good, adhering to a sexual selection hypothesis.
“The very existence of skilled and strong women athletes demanding recognitions and equal access to resources is a destabilizing tendency in the current gender order”.[7] But on the other hand, sports are still sources of repression, oppression, and domination of the female sex through the existence of structural control of men over women in sport.[7] The existence skilled women in sport destabilizes the gender order but at the same time, sports remain a domain of masculinity and oppression, both physical and structural.[7] In a patriarchal society where sport is a signifier of male power and a success, females may copy this behavior - which adheres to conformist and prestige bias, giving possibility to why females have evolved to play sports.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 Deaner, R. O.; Smith, B. A. (2012-10-29). "Sex Differences in Sports Across 50 Societies". Cross-Cultural Research. 47 (3): 268–309. doi:10.1177/1069397112463687.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 Deaner, Robert O.; Balish, Shea M.; Lombardo, Michael P. "Sex differences in sports interest and motivation: An evolutionary perspective". Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. 10 (2): 73–97. doi:10.1037/ebs0000049.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 DeBlock, DeWitte (2009). "Darwinism and the Cultural Evolution of Sports". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine: 1–16.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Brewer, G.; Howarth, Sharon (2012-10-01). "Sport, attractiveness and aggression". Personality and Individual Differences. 53 (5): 640–643. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.05.010.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Apostolou, M (2015). "The athlete and the spectator inside the man: a cross-cultural investigation of the evolutionary origins of athletic behavior". Cross-Cultural Research. 49: 151–173.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Balish, Shea M.; Deaner, Robert O.; Rainham, Daniel; Blanchard, Chris (2016-09-07). "Sex Differences in Sport Remain When Accounting for Countries' Gender Inequality". Cross-Cultural Research. doi:10.1177/1069397116665815.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Dworkin, S. L., & Messner, M. A. (2002). Just do... what? Sport, bodies, gender. pp. 17–36 – via Gender and sport: A reader, 17.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link) Search this book on
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