Comment on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 23:24:10 GMT

Wait, what? What are even the alternatives?

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.

Discuss