Memes
Sexual Selection to Explain Human Intelligence
Even if the survivalist theory could take us from the world of
natural history to our capacities for invention, commerce, and knowledge, it cannot account for the more ornamental and enjoyable aspects of human culture: art, music, sports, drama, comedy, and political ideals. At this point the survivalist theories usually point out that along the transverse lies the Central Park Learning Center. Perhaps the ornamental frosting on culture's cake arose through a general human ability to learn ne...
notesHuman intelligence goes too far and is too artistically-bent, rather than scientifically-bent, to have evolved for survival alone. We should entertain the possibility that our big brains evolved for the same reasons peacocks have ornate tails.
Sexual Selection is a Sheltered Feedback Loop
The worlds of academia, high fashion, religion, and modern art produce sublime wonders, and sometimes monstrous absurdities. They can afford such creative freedom because their systems of self-regulation and self-perpetuation are insulated from the mun- dane pragmatics of the outside world. Their autonomy endows them with liberty and creative power. They are free to evolve under their own momentum, along lines of their own choosing, without having to justify themselves at every step to outsid... notesGenes selecting genes.
Complex Brains as an Advertisement for Genetic Fitness
The healthy brain theory suggests that our brains are different from those of other apes not because extrava- gantly large brains helped us to survive or to raise offspring, but because such brains are simply better advertisements of how good our genes are. The more complicated the brain, the easier it is to mess up. The human brain's great complexity makes it vulnerable to impairment through mutations, and its great size makes it physiologically costly. By producing behaviors such as languag... notesThe cognitive tricks performed by our complex brains may not have a survival benefit, but they do advertise the overall fitness of our genes.
The Brain is Too Expensive for Survival Purposes
My interest is in the psychological adaptations that are uniquely
human, the 10 percent or so of the brain's capacities that are not shared with other apes. This is where we find puzzling abilities like creative intelligence and complex language that show these great individual differences, these ridiculously high heritabilities, and these absurd wastes of time, energy, and effort. To accept these abilities as legitimate biological adaptations worthy of study, evolutionary psychology must bro... notesIt makes more sense that our capability for complex thought, music, and socialization are adaptations to prove our genetic fitness to a potential mate.
Evidence of Sexual Selection in Humans
By primate standards, humans look strange, even after we step out of our sport utility vehicles. Compared with other apes, we have less hair on our bodies, more on our heads, whiter eyes, longer noses, fuller lips, more expressive faces, and more dextrous hands. In most species, sexual ornaments like long head hair, hairless skin, and full lips would have evolved only in males, because females would have been the choosy sex. Males have few incentives to reject any female mates. The fact that ... notesMany characteristics of our bodies which differentiate us from other primates, are probably the result of mating preferences of our ancestors.
Sexual Selection in Penises and Clitori
In species that do not use copulatory thrusting, especially
insects, penises evolve more obvious tactile stimulators: nubs, spikes, ridges, curls, barbs, hooks, and flagella. Male insects often try to push each other off during copulation, so copulatory thrusting would risk disengagement. Better to lock the genitals together and have internal flagella to excite the female. With primates, it is not so common for male rivals to swarm over females knocking each other off. This allows couples a ... notesFemale sexual preferences may have guided the evolution of these sexual organs.
Sexual Selection in the Wodaabe Tribe
Perhaps human aesthetics emerged through runaway sexual selection, with aesthetic tastes evolving as part of female mate choice. In this view, some female hominids just happened to have certain tastes concerning male ornaments. The artists best able to fulfill these tastes inseminated more aesthetic groupies and sired more offspring, who inherited both their artistic talent and their mothers' aesthetic tastes.
Something like this still happens among the Wodaabe people
(also known as the Boro... notesAs a result of their mating rituals, the men have diverged phenotypically from those of neighboring tribes.
Art as an Evolutionary Fitness Indicator
To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low-fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time. Also, like bow... notesThe artwork must connect to the potential mate and communicate the fitness of the artist, but it cannot be too errudite, or it becomes elite art and the communication becomes noise.
Hand Axes as an Extended Phenotype
Two and a half million years ago, our small-brained ancestors
evolved the ability to knock flakes from rocks to use as cutting edges. By doing so, they could also make the rocks themselves useful as choppers. This basic tool kit of flakes and choppers served the needs of hunting and gathering for a million years. Then, around 1.6 million years ago, a medium-brained African hominid (Homo erectus) evolved the ability to produce an extraordinary object that archeologists call a handaxe. A handax... notesIf, as the author assumes, handaxes were genetically-informed because they did not change for hundreds of thousands of years, then why do we not still have the instinct for hand axes?
Why Marriage is Not Like Prostitution
What's more, most males could not possibly afford to buy a
woman's reproductive potential if courtship were a simple economic exchange. What would be an appropriate market price for a nine-month pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the exhaustion of breast-feeding, and twenty years of maternal care? At least half a million dollars at a basic salary of $25,000, one would think. How much do men spend on courtship in the first few months? Perhaps a tenth of 1 percent of the proper market price. Th... notesNo amount of gifts and showy displays can pay for the investment a female would have to make in offspring.
How Our Predisposition Toward Empathy Taints Our Logic
Our sexually selected instincts for displaying sympathy tend to affect our belief systems, not just our charity and courtship behavior. When individuals espouse ideological positions, we typically interpret their beliefs as signs of good or bad moral character. Individuals feel social pressure to adopt the beliefs that are conventionally accepted as indicating a "good heart," even when those beliefs are not rational. We may even find ourselves saying, "His ideas may be right, but his heart is... notesWe find logical ideas repulsive when they conflict with our need to associate with sensitive people. If a person suggests a correct and logical idea, but it is an idea that lacks empathy, we tend to find the individual repulsive (This happened to me on a thread when I suggested letting pandas go extinct).
