From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 14:22:54 MDT
gts wrote:
>>Greg's essay is deeply inspirational.
> Yes, absolutely. My own experience with Atkins:
> I once followed Atkins religiously... -Fred Flintstone
Reading Greg's experience with dieting and
fitness gave me an idea regarding evolution via
mate selection. I once remarked that humans may
be able to evolve more quickly than typical large
mammals because the mechanism of mate selection
is very powerful in humans. Do let me expand on
that thought.
In evolutionary terms, the human ecological niche
was constant for a long time. Then we recently
we exploded out of Africa, drove the European
humans to extinction, fanned out over the planet
and very recently invented agriculture. In the
past eyeblink, we suddenly have available to us
every high-fat food imaginable, in arbitrarily
large quantities, coupled with a newfound option
of being physically inactive. Recall that food
itself is also evolving, ever selecting the more
irresistable varieties. The result is the many
health problems we see today related to flab.
Nowthen, one could argue that mate selection is
working to counteract the fact that we still have
the ability to store fat, even tho it is no
longer needed and is actually detrimental. Slender
people carry a possible reproductive advantage, for
they might be preferentially chosen as mates. Certainly
one would conclude that from looking at clothing ads.
Here's the idea. We have seen animal groups where
mate selection is dominated by female choice, such
as most birds, animal groups which selection is
dominated by male choice such as chimps, animal
groups in which mate selection is defeated altogether
by the alpha male keeping a large harem such as
in elephant seals.
Insight: human groups have all of these subgroups.
In the technically advanced western world, mating
seems to be dominated by female choice (I am open
to suggestion or counterpoint here). In what we
might call more primitive human societies, male
choice might be the driver. There remain some human
societies that have harems and reproduction dominated
by the powerful and rich. So unlike most animal
groups, humans have everything on the scale from
female selection to male selection and the
orthogonal scale: the intentional defeating of
mate selection as an evolutionary driver, all the
way over to the opposite of that, which is the
soon-to-come human ability to manipulate genes
for arbitrary characteristics, which would put
evolutionary change into high gear.
In a society in which mate selection is driven
by female choice, would we not see a different
set of characteristics emerge than in a society
in which mate selection is driven by male choice?
For instance: mammal females love and nurture
their babies. For that reason, perhaps adult
males which maintain some juvenile characteristics
would enjoy a relatively greater appeal to the
female population. This would explain why we
have the term "boyish good looks."
Since human babies have relatively large heads
with respect to their bodies, perhaps female-
choice societies would tend to evolve populations
with bulbous heads. That is the best way I can
explain how humans came to have such enormous
brains, making us far smarter than is optimal
for mere survival, and far smarter than is optimal
for maximum reproduction.
What I really want to do is develop software to
try to simulate genetic drift as a function of
mate selection, which I see as a far more important
driver of human evolution than survival selection.
spike
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