18 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
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... 1 
notes
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.
18 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
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... 1 notes
notesAs a result of their mating rituals, the men have diverged phenotypically from those of neighboring tribes.
26 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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 ... 1 notes
notesFemale sexual preferences may have guided the evolution of these sexual organs.
26 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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 ... 1 notes
notesMany characteristics of our bodies which differentiate us from other primates, are probably the result of mating preferences of our ancestors.
24 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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... 1 notes
notesIt makes more sense that our capability for complex thought, music, and socialization are adaptations to prove our genetic fitness to a potential mate.
24 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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... 1 notes
notesThe cognitive tricks performed by our complex brains may not have a survival benefit, but they do advertise the overall fitness of our genes.
24 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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...Folksonomies: evolution sexual selection
Folksonomies: evolution sexual selection
1 notes
notesGenes selecting genes.
24 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
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...Folksonomies: sexual selection mating
Folksonomies: sexual selection mating
1 notes
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.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Human Race Differences the Result of Sexual Selection
Most of the genetic differences between races are trivial. And yet others,
those physical differences between a Japanese individual and a Finn,
a Masai, and an Inuit, are striking. We have the interesting situation,
then, that the overall differences in gene sequences between peoples are
minor, yet those same groups show dramatic differences in a range of
visually apparent traits, such as skin color, hair color, body form, and
nose shape. These obvious physical differences are not characteris... 1 notes
notesCultural norms in different societies probably shaped many of the physical differences we see between races today, different definitions of beauty.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Mating Strategies of Males and Females
A vivid demonstration of this difference can be seen by looking up the
record number of children sired by a human female versus a male. If you
were to guess the maximum number of children that a woman could
produce in a lifetime, you’d probably say around fifteen. Guess again.
The Guinness Book of World Records gives the “official” record number
of children for a woman as sixty-nine, produced by an eighteenth century
Russian peasant. In twenty-seven pregnancies between 1725 and
1745, sh... 1 notes
notesA Great summary of the differences between them evolutionarily.
