While I would say that family concerns make males much more risk averse
than without such responsibility. It is an evolutionary goal of males to
pile up as big a pile of stuff, as pretty a nest as possible, in order
to attract the closest to optimal mate. This factor does vary in
relation to the males short term libidinous drives, as well as to what a
particular male considers his "optimal" mate and what his preexisting
assets physically and charismatically are (shades of your BS ability
theory below)
>
> I also have a theory that young males should be more optimistic than
> Bayesians; the better they think of their prospects the more likely
> they are to fool young women into thinking highly of their prospects.
>
So liars have an evolutionary advantage over Bayesians?
> As we become better at exchanging information in ways other than via
> sexual reproduction, it seems the longer time-horizon of asexual
> reproduction should win out. This suggests a future of very patient
> risk-averse asexual Bayesians, in contrast to the impatient optimistic
> risk-taking young males who dominate science fiction.
>
So you are saying that the future portends being boringly stable, with
high social pressures for conformity (if you reproduce asexually, you
are producing identical clones) with low growth, low interest, long term
investments being the norm. I predict that such a society will not
survive long in the face of possible world ecological disasters, threats
from within or without. Its stability and conformity will not make it
suitable to adapt to radical changes. The machine will stop. Get me off
this rock ASAP.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}