Hm, my background here is just an undergrad degree and a lot of independent reasoning, but I think you’re massively undervaluing the whole “different reproductive success victory-conditions cause different adaptations” thing. I don’t think it’s fair at all to dismiss the entire thing as a Red Pill thing; many of the implications can be pretty feminist!
I don’t think it matters that much that Bateman’s original research is pretty weak. There’s a whole body of research you’re waving away there, and a lot of the more recent stuff is much much stronger research!
You don’t necessarily have to talk about sexual competition at all. You can just say, for instance, that female reproductive success is bounded—human women in extant hunter-gatherer tribes typically have one child and then wait several years before having the next. If a woman spends twenty years having children and can only have one child per four years, then she’s only going to have five children. Her incentives are to maximise the success of those five children and the resources she can give each child. Meanwhile, a man could have anywhere between zero children and… however many Genghis Khan had, so his incentives tend much more strongly towards risk-taking and having as much sex as possible.
Of course there’s massive variation between species; there’s massive variation in how every and any trait/dynamic plays out depending on the context and environment. But we can generally come up with reasons why particular species might work the way they do; for example, I’ve heard the hypothesis that the fish species with very tiny males are adapted for the fact that finding a conspecific female to mate with in the gigantic open ocean is basically random chance, so there’s no point investing in males being able to do anything except drift around and survive for a long period until they stumble across a female. Humans aren’t a rare species in a giant open ocean, so male humans don’t have to really rely on just stumbling across female humans through sheer luck after weeks of drifting on the currents.
You don’t have to bring “males face more competition than females” into it at all. You can just say “whichever parent has higher parental investment is likely to have stricter bounds on reproductive success, so they’ll adapt to compete more over resources like foods, while the low-investment parent competes more over access to mates”. Then when you look at specific species, you can analyse how sexual dimorphism in that particular species is affected by the roles each sex plays in that species and also the species’ context and environment.
Sometime when it’s not 2am, if it’d be helpful, I’d be happy to pull out some examples of papers that I think are well-written or insightful. Questions like “ok, so, if males maximise their fitness by having as many mates as possible, what the heck is going on with monogamy? Is there even any evidence that human men in extant hunter-gatherer tribes have much variation in their reproductive success caused by being good at hunting or being high-status or whatever? For that matter, what the heck is going on with meerkats?” are genuinely interesting open research questions, I don’t really think they’re associated with the red pill people, they’re things the field is approaching with a sense of curiosity and confusion, and also I would really like to know what the heck is going on with meerkats.
You’re right. Honestly I wouldn’t be able to talk about this in detail because this is getting far from the things I know best (full disclosure, my own research is on bacteria). The few papers I’ve cited give some general patterns, and my general point was “things can go in many different ways depending on the specifics, and even the well-known Bateman principle isn’t universal”.
That’s unfortunately all can do: there’s a whole world of things to say about how sexual dimorphism actually develops in metazoans, but it takes years of learning to get a deep understanding of what’s going on.
Definitely post the papers you’re thinking about! If you feel like making a new post about that, I can’t encourage you enough to do it. This post was by far my most successful, so it looks like a lot of people are interested in the topic. I’m sure many people would enjoy your contribution (at least I would).
As for the Red Pill thing, I kind of regret mentioning it – I just thought it was funny, but it’s not really that funny or useful. Maybe I should edit it out.
OK, “top level post on the biology of sexual dimorphism in primates” added to my todo list (though it might be a while since I’m working on another sequence). Now that I know you’re a bacteria person, this makes more sense! I’m a human evolution person, so you wrote it very differently to how I would’ve. (If you’d like an introductory textbook, I always recommend Laland and Brown’s Sense and Nonsense.) I don’t know as much about the very earliest origins in bacteria, so that was super interesting to read about!
The stuff about adding a third sex reminded me somewhat of the principle that it’s unstable to have an imbalance between the sexes; even if it would be optimal for the tribe to have one male and many females, an individual mother in such a gender-imbalanced tribe would maximise her number of grandchildren by having a male child. I’ve seen this used as the default example to prod undergrads out of group-selection wrongthink, so I’m curious if this is as universally known as I think it is.
I can’t tell you whether to edit the post, but I think it’s very common for people to act/joke/suggest as though the study of human evolution inevitably leads towards racist/sexist conclusions. In part, this is because fields like anthropology have a terrible history with sweeping conclusions like “women just evolved to be weaker” and other sins like “let’s make a categorization system that ranks every race”, which has certainly been used by unscientific movements like Red Pill. But anthropology has done a lot to clean up its act, as a field, and I don’t think this is ground we want to cede. The study of human evolutionary biology has only ever confirmed, for me, that discrimination on grounds like race and sex is fundamentally misguided. So I try to push back gently, when I see it, against the implication that studying sexual selection or sexual dimorphism will lead towards bigoted beliefs. Studying science will generally lead away from bigoted beliefs, because bigoted beliefs are generally not true. (I don’t intend this to come across as harsh criticism, either! I just want to explain why I think this is worth caring about.)
And yes, many people will upvote this kind of post because I think folks appreciate the virtue of scholarship. We have a lot of people who can write down their ideas on how to improve your thinking, but fewer who can come in from a specific field and explain the object-level in detail. You deserve many upvotes for citing your sources!
The Yanomamo maximize the number of females in their tribes by kidnapping them from other tribes sucker enough to feed & raise females rather than males (which they could have used to raid females from other tribes).
Hm, my background here is just an undergrad degree and a lot of independent reasoning, but I think you’re massively undervaluing the whole “different reproductive success victory-conditions cause different adaptations” thing. I don’t think it’s fair at all to dismiss the entire thing as a Red Pill thing; many of the implications can be pretty feminist!
I don’t think it matters that much that Bateman’s original research is pretty weak. There’s a whole body of research you’re waving away there, and a lot of the more recent stuff is much much stronger research!
You don’t necessarily have to talk about sexual competition at all. You can just say, for instance, that female reproductive success is bounded—human women in extant hunter-gatherer tribes typically have one child and then wait several years before having the next. If a woman spends twenty years having children and can only have one child per four years, then she’s only going to have five children. Her incentives are to maximise the success of those five children and the resources she can give each child. Meanwhile, a man could have anywhere between zero children and… however many Genghis Khan had, so his incentives tend much more strongly towards risk-taking and having as much sex as possible.
Of course there’s massive variation between species; there’s massive variation in how every and any trait/dynamic plays out depending on the context and environment. But we can generally come up with reasons why particular species might work the way they do; for example, I’ve heard the hypothesis that the fish species with very tiny males are adapted for the fact that finding a conspecific female to mate with in the gigantic open ocean is basically random chance, so there’s no point investing in males being able to do anything except drift around and survive for a long period until they stumble across a female. Humans aren’t a rare species in a giant open ocean, so male humans don’t have to really rely on just stumbling across female humans through sheer luck after weeks of drifting on the currents.
You don’t have to bring “males face more competition than females” into it at all. You can just say “whichever parent has higher parental investment is likely to have stricter bounds on reproductive success, so they’ll adapt to compete more over resources like foods, while the low-investment parent competes more over access to mates”. Then when you look at specific species, you can analyse how sexual dimorphism in that particular species is affected by the roles each sex plays in that species and also the species’ context and environment.
Sometime when it’s not 2am, if it’d be helpful, I’d be happy to pull out some examples of papers that I think are well-written or insightful. Questions like “ok, so, if males maximise their fitness by having as many mates as possible, what the heck is going on with monogamy? Is there even any evidence that human men in extant hunter-gatherer tribes have much variation in their reproductive success caused by being good at hunting or being high-status or whatever? For that matter, what the heck is going on with meerkats?” are genuinely interesting open research questions, I don’t really think they’re associated with the red pill people, they’re things the field is approaching with a sense of curiosity and confusion, and also I would really like to know what the heck is going on with meerkats.
You’re right. Honestly I wouldn’t be able to talk about this in detail because this is getting far from the things I know best (full disclosure, my own research is on bacteria). The few papers I’ve cited give some general patterns, and my general point was “things can go in many different ways depending on the specifics, and even the well-known Bateman principle isn’t universal”.
That’s unfortunately all can do: there’s a whole world of things to say about how sexual dimorphism actually develops in metazoans, but it takes years of learning to get a deep understanding of what’s going on.
Definitely post the papers you’re thinking about! If you feel like making a new post about that, I can’t encourage you enough to do it. This post was by far my most successful, so it looks like a lot of people are interested in the topic. I’m sure many people would enjoy your contribution (at least I would).
As for the Red Pill thing, I kind of regret mentioning it – I just thought it was funny, but it’s not really that funny or useful. Maybe I should edit it out.
OK, “top level post on the biology of sexual dimorphism in primates” added to my todo list (though it might be a while since I’m working on another sequence). Now that I know you’re a bacteria person, this makes more sense! I’m a human evolution person, so you wrote it very differently to how I would’ve. (If you’d like an introductory textbook, I always recommend Laland and Brown’s Sense and Nonsense.) I don’t know as much about the very earliest origins in bacteria, so that was super interesting to read about!
The stuff about adding a third sex reminded me somewhat of the principle that it’s unstable to have an imbalance between the sexes; even if it would be optimal for the tribe to have one male and many females, an individual mother in such a gender-imbalanced tribe would maximise her number of grandchildren by having a male child. I’ve seen this used as the default example to prod undergrads out of group-selection wrongthink, so I’m curious if this is as universally known as I think it is.
I can’t tell you whether to edit the post, but I think it’s very common for people to act/joke/suggest as though the study of human evolution inevitably leads towards racist/sexist conclusions. In part, this is because fields like anthropology have a terrible history with sweeping conclusions like “women just evolved to be weaker” and other sins like “let’s make a categorization system that ranks every race”, which has certainly been used by unscientific movements like Red Pill. But anthropology has done a lot to clean up its act, as a field, and I don’t think this is ground we want to cede. The study of human evolutionary biology has only ever confirmed, for me, that discrimination on grounds like race and sex is fundamentally misguided. So I try to push back gently, when I see it, against the implication that studying sexual selection or sexual dimorphism will lead towards bigoted beliefs. Studying science will generally lead away from bigoted beliefs, because bigoted beliefs are generally not true. (I don’t intend this to come across as harsh criticism, either! I just want to explain why I think this is worth caring about.)
And yes, many people will upvote this kind of post because I think folks appreciate the virtue of scholarship. We have a lot of people who can write down their ideas on how to improve your thinking, but fewer who can come in from a specific field and explain the object-level in detail. You deserve many upvotes for citing your sources!
The Yanomamo maximize the number of females in their tribes by kidnapping them from other tribes sucker enough to feed & raise females rather than males (which they could have used to raid females from other tribes).
Count me as a vote for sharing those papers, here or in your own post.