It was some sort of a competition inside our species, probably sexual.
I’m not sure about that. Be very skeptical of claims that something evolved due to sexual selection, it tends to be the default explanation lazy evo-psy people reach for when they can’t immediately think of a better explanation.
Wait, what? What are even the alternatives? The only alternatives are environmental pressure—food, predators etc. But such an environmental pressure affects a lot of species at the same time and for this reason, most traits in the animal kingdom have the expected normal distribution. Such as the ability to swim amongst mammals—many can swim a little, some better, and a few really well. Yet the distribution of intelligence in species does not follow normal distribution. Humans are far, far ahead from the species in the second places (apes, dogs, dolphins). If it was environmental pressure, adult chimpanzees were basically like retarded humans or humans who are stuck at the mental capabilities of a 10 year old. Bonobos would be flipping burgers at McD. (OK some people do claim that certain dogs have the IQ of a 5 year old human but it is really a stretch. Their communication ability and suchlike does not even compare.)
Being so far ahead can mean only one thing—the selective pressure MUST have came from withing the hominid species, not from the environment.
But what could hominids compete for? Not food. Food is also an environmental variable and if we don’t see e.g. gorillas compete a lot of for food, we should assume there was enough around.
This gives really only one option left.
Factor in that runaway processes MUST have, I will risk a “per definition” here even though it is not math, a feedback element. Whatever X-factor (lol) pressed humans to get more intelligent, must have been made worse by humans getting more intelligent, so it exerted even more and more pressure or how else could it be such a runaway process.
This is useful, because it suggests we should just look at what was made worse by the evolution of intelligence and we found the feedback factor. And the answer is obvious: reproduction. Childbirth, the physical process of getting the head out, and the babycare.
In my mind it is a fairly strong set of evidence and it not only predicts everything we want it to predict here, it also reliably fails to predict everything it shouldn’t and that is what a good theory should do.
For example, if food scarcity was a selective factor, we would have iron stomachs, able to eat everything. In reality, we have shit for stomach, we need to cook our food, we cannot digest most leaves nor grass—the most available resource! - we get ill easily and so on. Sure, human diets have a wide variance, but it seems we are really picky eaters, going for the special stuff, not the easy available stuff: leaves, grass, carcass. What does that suggest? It suggests no food scarcity.
Or say predators. Most animals try to protect themselves from predators with claws and fangs. Again, we have crap in that department. If there was any serious pressure there, we’d kept these around.
So what kind of environmental pressure is left, really?
I am also surprised that it is you who say it, because I had the impression you give some credibility to the set of views that are sometimes called red pill or manosphere. They are 100% based on sexual selection shaping human nature, without that they haven’t any chance of getting anything right.
This is what I mean by lazy evo-psych. You dismiss the alternatives using hand waving logic and assert that it must be sexual selection even though one could dismiss sexual selection just as easily by hand waving. Let’s go through you comment piece by piece.
The only alternatives are environmental pressure—food, predators etc. But such an environmental pressure affects a lot of species at the same time and for this reason
And different species respond to [edit:similar] environmental pressures in different ways.
most traits in the animal kingdom have the expected normal distribution.
This is the only part of your comment that might be worthwhile, assuming you have data about the traits actually being normally distributed and are not just doing the lazy statistician thing of assuming all distributions are normal. Even then, it’s not clear that this doesn’t apply to traits that are the result of sexual selection.
Being so far ahead can mean only one thing—the selective pressure MUST have came from withing the hominid species, not from the environment.
I’m not sure what the distinction between environmental and intraspecies selection pressure that you’re trying to make here is supposed to be.
But what could hominids compete for? Not food. Food is also an environmental variable and if we don’t see e.g. gorillas compete a lot of for food, we should assume there was enough around.
First yes gorillas compete for food. Second the claim that “there was enough around” is silly. If there’s enough food around, a species’ population generally increases until it either reaches the Malthusian limit or it’s stopped by some other factor, e.g., disease.
Factor in that runaway processes MUST have, I will risk a “per definition” here even though it is not math, a feedback element. Whatever X-factor (lol) pressed humans to get more intelligent, must have been made worse by humans getting more intelligent, so it exerted even more and more pressure or how else could it be such a runaway process.
This is useful, because it suggests we should just look at what was made worse by the evolution of intelligence and we found the feedback factor. And the answer is obvious: reproduction. Childbirth, the physical process of getting the head out, and the babycare.
I’m trying to parse the above argument as anything other then a complete non sequitur and failing. Perhaps you can help: Suppose we have a hominid of above average intelligence, how does the above translate into a causal mechanism that leads to him having more decedents?
In my mind it is a fairly strong set of evidence and it not only predicts everything we want it to predict here, it also reliably fails to predict everything it shouldn’t and that is what a good theory should do.
In particular if sexually selection is responsible for intelligence, we would expect highly intelligent people to be highly sexually desirable especially when considerations like resource constraints are removed from the picture. We now live in a highly prosperous time, and to say that nerds aren’t sex gods would be a gross understatement.
For example, if food scarcity was a selective factor, we would have iron stomachs, able to eat everything.
Why? Yes, iron stomachs are one way to adept to food scarcity, they aren’t the only way.
In reality, we have shit for stomach, we need to cook our food,
More interestingly we can cook food, i.e., we can partially pre-digest our food externally, which is another way to adept to food scarcity.
we cannot digest most leaves nor grass—the most available resource! - we get ill easily and so on.
It’s actually incredibly hard to digest leaves and grass, that’s why cows, etc., need four stomachs.
Most animals try to protect themselves from predators with claws and fangs.
No most animals protect themselves by being really good at running away, or having a hard shell/hide. In fact nearly all animals that have claws or fangs are predators themselves and use their claws and/or fangs for hunting.
I am also surprised that it is you who say it, because I had the impression you give some credibility to the set of views that are sometimes called red pill or manosphere. They are 100% based on sexual selection shaping human nature, without that they haven’t any chance of getting anything right.
Just because some aspects of human nature are shaped by sexual selection doesn’t mean all aspects are.
I’m not sure what the distinction between environmental and intraspecies selection pressure that you’re trying to make here is supposed to be.
Food is a resource outside the species, sex is a resource inside the species.
Suppose we have a hominid of above average intelligence, how does the above translate into a causal mechanism that leads to him having more decedents?
In particular if sexually selection is responsible for intelligence, we would expect highly intelligent people to be highly sexually desirable especially when considerations like resource constraints are removed from the picture. We now live in a highly prosperous time, and to say that nerds aren’t sex gods would be a gross understatement.
Wait a bit here. We are not talking about going from 120 IQ to 140 increases the number of descendants. We are talking about going from 80 to 100 does. On that level the distinction is not between super smart nerds vs. everybody, but more being able to handle normal things vs. shooting yourself in the foot all the time.
Of course, that environment, that social environment was far simpler. Still if you ever hang out with simpler people (e.g. what in the UK is called a flat roof pub ) it is typically the 80 IQ guy who insists on fighting some other guy for no good reason whatsoever and it is the 100 IQ friend who is telling him don’t be an idiot he is twice your size and did time for stabbing someone. Or you see how dumber criminals get busted on really trivial mistakes—if all you have is tribal customs instead of laws it probably still works the same way. Or, maybe, the difference between a 80 IQ and 100 IQ tribal warrior is largely that the later does not think “we are the awesomest” is a good enough reason to attack a tribe that has three times as many warriors. In short, while really high IQ does not help with reproduction much, really low IQ provides excellent opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot in a competitive social environment. What we today consider average IQ simply translates to a hominid who is a bit cautious and can assess when to be brave and when to be a coward. Not some super nerdy level of intelligence.
Even today, I would say there is an IQ threshold below which people have lower number of children. I don’t think Idiocracy the movie got it exactly right. While the dumbass having 4 kids with 4 different single moms is a popular trope, in really the really dumb guys tend to go in and out of prison or be really ridiculous at pick-ups because they cannot think of anything to say really beyond “nice tits”. The charming simpleton with the 4 different single-moms is actually going to be somewhere closer to the average IQ.
Sure, a peacock having a REALLY huge tail may be detrimental to its reproductive success because it cannot even go through a mating dance routine maybe, but that is no evidence wrt to the average sized one not being more useful than the small one. Same for intelligence.
Still if you ever hang out with simpler people (e.g. what in the UK is called a flat roof pub ) it is typically the 80 IQ guy who insists on fighting some other guy for no good reason whatsoever and it is the 100 IQ friend who is telling him don’t be an idiot he is twice your size and did time for stabbing someone. Or you see how dumber criminals get busted on really trivial mistakes—if all you have is tribal customs instead of laws it probably still works the same way. Or, maybe, the difference between a 80 IQ and 100 IQ tribal warrior is largely that the later does not think “we are the awesomest” is a good enough reason to attack a tribe that has three times as many warriors. In short, while really high IQ does not help with reproduction much, really low IQ provides excellent opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot in a competitive social environment. What we today consider average IQ simply translates to a hominid who is a bit cautious and can assess when to be brave and when to be a coward.
Note that none of your examples are cases of sexual selection.
While the dumbass having 4 kids with 4 different single moms is a popular trope, in really the really dumb guys tend to go in and out of prison
Sure, a peacock having a REALLY huge tail may be detrimental to its reproductive success because it cannot even go through a mating dance routine maybe,
A REALLY huge tail is detrimental because it makes the peacock more likely to be eaten by a tiger, i.e., non-sexual selection. If peacocks were placed in an environment without tigers females would chose even larger tails. Heck they’ve done experiments where they glued on extra tail feathers to give a lucky peacock an even larger tail, the result being that females preferred those males to any males with a natural tail.
Heck consider an actual example of sexual selection in humans: Men like women with large breasts. Notice how common ridiculously large breasted women are in everything from advertizing to anime to video games. Heck in ancient times people would worship multi-breasted fertility goddesses. Contrast that with the portrayal of smart men, who must be given an actual “sexy” trait (like being rich or a badass) for women to accept them as “sexy”. For example, Q’s gadgets contribute to James Bond’s (not Q’s) sex appeal even though he’s not the one developing them.
Sexual selection doesn’t end at being attractive. It could be everything from killing competing suitors to making sure kids have a good career. Just as every organ is a reproductive organ, drawing the borders of sexual selection is hard. Everything cashes out in reproduction, where I try to draw the line is that the survival of individual animals against the forces outside the population is not, so getting food and getting away from predators is not. But pretty much everything inside the population is. But even getting a lot of food can be an aspect of it… crap. The point is that the traditional/popular views of evolution tend to be “survivalist” and basically this intra-population competition / sexual selection stuff is largely everything else that it is not directly survivalist but is about competition for things beyond the survival of the individual. Be that sexual partners or childrearing.
And yes, in this sense Mr. Dumb taking a knife to the heart in a pub and his girlfriend hooking up with someone else is an example of this intra-species competition...
Yes, you could define “sexual selection” that generarly. However, I don’t think a terms that refers to everything is particularly useful.
And yes, in this sense Mr. Dumb taking a knife to the heart in a pub and his girlfriend hooking up with someone else is an example of this intra-species competition...
Yes, but I wouldn’t call that sexual selection unless the fight was specifically over the girlfriend.
I’m not sure about that. Be very skeptical of claims that something evolved due to sexual selection, it tends to be the default explanation lazy evo-psy people reach for when they can’t immediately think of a better explanation.
Wait, what? What are even the alternatives? The only alternatives are environmental pressure—food, predators etc. But such an environmental pressure affects a lot of species at the same time and for this reason, most traits in the animal kingdom have the expected normal distribution. Such as the ability to swim amongst mammals—many can swim a little, some better, and a few really well. Yet the distribution of intelligence in species does not follow normal distribution. Humans are far, far ahead from the species in the second places (apes, dogs, dolphins). If it was environmental pressure, adult chimpanzees were basically like retarded humans or humans who are stuck at the mental capabilities of a 10 year old. Bonobos would be flipping burgers at McD. (OK some people do claim that certain dogs have the IQ of a 5 year old human but it is really a stretch. Their communication ability and suchlike does not even compare.)
Being so far ahead can mean only one thing—the selective pressure MUST have came from withing the hominid species, not from the environment.
But what could hominids compete for? Not food. Food is also an environmental variable and if we don’t see e.g. gorillas compete a lot of for food, we should assume there was enough around.
This gives really only one option left.
Factor in that runaway processes MUST have, I will risk a “per definition” here even though it is not math, a feedback element. Whatever X-factor (lol) pressed humans to get more intelligent, must have been made worse by humans getting more intelligent, so it exerted even more and more pressure or how else could it be such a runaway process.
This is useful, because it suggests we should just look at what was made worse by the evolution of intelligence and we found the feedback factor. And the answer is obvious: reproduction. Childbirth, the physical process of getting the head out, and the babycare.
In my mind it is a fairly strong set of evidence and it not only predicts everything we want it to predict here, it also reliably fails to predict everything it shouldn’t and that is what a good theory should do.
For example, if food scarcity was a selective factor, we would have iron stomachs, able to eat everything. In reality, we have shit for stomach, we need to cook our food, we cannot digest most leaves nor grass—the most available resource! - we get ill easily and so on. Sure, human diets have a wide variance, but it seems we are really picky eaters, going for the special stuff, not the easy available stuff: leaves, grass, carcass. What does that suggest? It suggests no food scarcity.
Or say predators. Most animals try to protect themselves from predators with claws and fangs. Again, we have crap in that department. If there was any serious pressure there, we’d kept these around.
So what kind of environmental pressure is left, really?
I am also surprised that it is you who say it, because I had the impression you give some credibility to the set of views that are sometimes called red pill or manosphere. They are 100% based on sexual selection shaping human nature, without that they haven’t any chance of getting anything right.
This is what I mean by lazy evo-psych. You dismiss the alternatives using hand waving logic and assert that it must be sexual selection even though one could dismiss sexual selection just as easily by hand waving. Let’s go through you comment piece by piece.
And different species respond to [edit:similar] environmental pressures in different ways.
This is the only part of your comment that might be worthwhile, assuming you have data about the traits actually being normally distributed and are not just doing the lazy statistician thing of assuming all distributions are normal. Even then, it’s not clear that this doesn’t apply to traits that are the result of sexual selection.
I’m not sure what the distinction between environmental and intraspecies selection pressure that you’re trying to make here is supposed to be.
First yes gorillas compete for food. Second the claim that “there was enough around” is silly. If there’s enough food around, a species’ population generally increases until it either reaches the Malthusian limit or it’s stopped by some other factor, e.g., disease.
I’m trying to parse the above argument as anything other then a complete non sequitur and failing. Perhaps you can help: Suppose we have a hominid of above average intelligence, how does the above translate into a causal mechanism that leads to him having more decedents?
In particular if sexually selection is responsible for intelligence, we would expect highly intelligent people to be highly sexually desirable especially when considerations like resource constraints are removed from the picture. We now live in a highly prosperous time, and to say that nerds aren’t sex gods would be a gross understatement.
Why? Yes, iron stomachs are one way to adept to food scarcity, they aren’t the only way.
More interestingly we can cook food, i.e., we can partially pre-digest our food externally, which is another way to adept to food scarcity.
It’s actually incredibly hard to digest leaves and grass, that’s why cows, etc., need four stomachs.
No most animals protect themselves by being really good at running away, or having a hard shell/hide. In fact nearly all animals that have claws or fangs are predators themselves and use their claws and/or fangs for hunting.
Just because some aspects of human nature are shaped by sexual selection doesn’t mean all aspects are.
Food is a resource outside the species, sex is a resource inside the species.
Wait a bit here. We are not talking about going from 120 IQ to 140 increases the number of descendants. We are talking about going from 80 to 100 does. On that level the distinction is not between super smart nerds vs. everybody, but more being able to handle normal things vs. shooting yourself in the foot all the time.
Of course, that environment, that social environment was far simpler. Still if you ever hang out with simpler people (e.g. what in the UK is called a flat roof pub ) it is typically the 80 IQ guy who insists on fighting some other guy for no good reason whatsoever and it is the 100 IQ friend who is telling him don’t be an idiot he is twice your size and did time for stabbing someone. Or you see how dumber criminals get busted on really trivial mistakes—if all you have is tribal customs instead of laws it probably still works the same way. Or, maybe, the difference between a 80 IQ and 100 IQ tribal warrior is largely that the later does not think “we are the awesomest” is a good enough reason to attack a tribe that has three times as many warriors. In short, while really high IQ does not help with reproduction much, really low IQ provides excellent opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot in a competitive social environment. What we today consider average IQ simply translates to a hominid who is a bit cautious and can assess when to be brave and when to be a coward. Not some super nerdy level of intelligence.
Even today, I would say there is an IQ threshold below which people have lower number of children. I don’t think Idiocracy the movie got it exactly right. While the dumbass having 4 kids with 4 different single moms is a popular trope, in really the really dumb guys tend to go in and out of prison or be really ridiculous at pick-ups because they cannot think of anything to say really beyond “nice tits”. The charming simpleton with the 4 different single-moms is actually going to be somewhere closer to the average IQ.
Sure, a peacock having a REALLY huge tail may be detrimental to its reproductive success because it cannot even go through a mating dance routine maybe, but that is no evidence wrt to the average sized one not being more useful than the small one. Same for intelligence.
Note that none of your examples are cases of sexual selection.
Those don’t necessarily interfere with each other.
A REALLY huge tail is detrimental because it makes the peacock more likely to be eaten by a tiger, i.e., non-sexual selection. If peacocks were placed in an environment without tigers females would chose even larger tails. Heck they’ve done experiments where they glued on extra tail feathers to give a lucky peacock an even larger tail, the result being that females preferred those males to any males with a natural tail.
Heck consider an actual example of sexual selection in humans: Men like women with large breasts. Notice how common ridiculously large breasted women are in everything from advertizing to anime to video games. Heck in ancient times people would worship multi-breasted fertility goddesses. Contrast that with the portrayal of smart men, who must be given an actual “sexy” trait (like being rich or a badass) for women to accept them as “sexy”. For example, Q’s gadgets contribute to James Bond’s (not Q’s) sex appeal even though he’s not the one developing them.
Sexual selection doesn’t end at being attractive. It could be everything from killing competing suitors to making sure kids have a good career. Just as every organ is a reproductive organ, drawing the borders of sexual selection is hard. Everything cashes out in reproduction, where I try to draw the line is that the survival of individual animals against the forces outside the population is not, so getting food and getting away from predators is not. But pretty much everything inside the population is. But even getting a lot of food can be an aspect of it… crap. The point is that the traditional/popular views of evolution tend to be “survivalist” and basically this intra-population competition / sexual selection stuff is largely everything else that it is not directly survivalist but is about competition for things beyond the survival of the individual. Be that sexual partners or childrearing.
And yes, in this sense Mr. Dumb taking a knife to the heart in a pub and his girlfriend hooking up with someone else is an example of this intra-species competition...
Yes, you could define “sexual selection” that generarly. However, I don’t think a terms that refers to everything is particularly useful.
Yes, but I wouldn’t call that sexual selection unless the fight was specifically over the girlfriend.