Sexual selection for moral virtues

[dyctiostelium]

Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. Lately, this argument has been updated by integrating recent research on mate choice, person perception, individual differences, costly signaling, and virtue ethics. Many human virtues may have evolved in both sexes through mutual mate choice to advertise good genetic quality, parenting abilities, and/or partner traits. Such virtues may include kindness, fidelity, magnanimity, and heroism, as well as quasi-moral traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, mental health, and intelligence. This theory leads to many testable predictions about the phenotypic features, genetic bases, and social-cognitive responses to human moral virtues.

Most of the arguments come from The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature

The general idea is that human morality is not as much a cultural construct that has emerged fairly recently with the purpose of restrain the oh-so-depraved biological instincts, but that, really, morality is just the result of altruism being useful for sexual selection purposes.

Meaning that, basically, male humans become heroes in order to get the chicks.

Since evolution is "survival of the fittest", all evolutionary theories of morality have to find a hidden genetic benefit to apparently altruistic acts. Kin selection does it by pointing out that genetic benefits can be spread across relatives by helping them, and reciprocal altruism theory does it by pointing out that benefits to oneself can be spread across time, through repeated interactions with trusted trading partners. These theories are good at explaining parental solicitude, nepotism, economic prudence, and instincts for cheater-detection. However, they leave most of human morality unexplained. Sexual selection provides a complementary way of explaining how selfish genes can give rise to altruistic individuals.

Basically, the hidden genetic benefits of altruism could have been reproductive: conspicuous magnanimity and other moral behaviors became sexually attractive because they were good fitness indicators. Their reliability was guaranteed by the costs of altruism, under the handicap principle. Only the fit could afford to be generous. Sexual selection can favor almost any degree of generosity or heroism, despite their survival costs, just as it can favor almost any length of peacock tail. Mate choice can work as a moral filter from each generation to the next.

And then is also the general idea of the human mind as a sexual ornament. Sexual ornaments, like the peacock tail, are things that not intrinsically useful but that function as direct 'indexes' of fitness. Human brains make particularly good fitness indicators because their growth depends on about half the genes in the genome, thereby summarizing a huge amount of information about mutation load, and are also good indicators of nutritional state and general health, because they have such high energetic costs (only 2% of body weight, but consuming over 25% of adult metabolic energy).

Once language evolved, much more of human mental life became subject to sexual selection, and as language gave a clearer window on the mind, the mind became more easily shaped by mate choice. This sexual selection feedback loop between mate choice, language ability, and creative intelligence was probably an important drive of human mental evolution.

Vocabulary size provides a quantitative case study of how modern human language exceeds any plausible demands of survival and social reciprocity. Our average 60,000 word vocabularies far exceed the 850-word vocabulary of the artificial language 'Basic English', invented in the 20s. Basic English, like most small-vocabulary pidgin languages, suffices for all ordinary aspects of trade, cooperative work, and survival, including the exchange of threats, promises, warnings, and news. Biology and astronomy textbooks have been written in Basic English. This suggests most of our words are pragmatically redundant, and must be serving some self-advertisement function. Since vocabulary size is highly correlated with general intelligence, and is highly heritable, it appears to function as a reliable indicator of heritable mental fitness. People are generally unaware of their sexual preferences for large vocabularies (rare is the personal ad asking for a partner who knows 50,000 useless synonyms), but assortative mating for vocabulary size is higher than for almost any other mental trait.

This whole thing has been going around my head for some days now. And then Dan Rowden says in "The World of Woman" podcast about "men coming back to women to prove their worth" or something like that, and I am left wondering is this isn´t exactly that, females defining through sexual selection what is worth to have as a species, and fueling it forward. Of course, leaving that to female judgement, no wonder every ugly thing of the current civilization exists, is the fault of women, after all, as the "Woman" line goes. But the twist would be that also every good thing about human civilization comes from sexual selection done by females: morality, poetry...

It might just be.

(Mmmm, I suppose it could be argued that is not only females who do sexual selection, there is a strong selection of females done my males too. But, really, if the things that are judged "good" and "evolved" are mostly done by males, whereas the frivolous, destructive ones are pretty much always done by Barbie-biased females, sexual selection by males has been pretty awful, while females have done a much better job for the species...)

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Selection for moral virtues through the legal system is far more efficient; group-inflicted punishment on the individual has altered human morality far more than the flighty fancies of women.

Now I will not, for moral reasons, perhaps out of a sense of history, claim that any children I have are morally superior to the children of any other human being: my moral sense is not something that could be passed genetically from me down to my progeny. If any children I have behave immorally it is not the fault of my genes. Such beliefs were once used to... (I end this thought here, because I believe by now your education has kicked in and you are suitably chastised.)

[daybrown]

Missing from this dualism is hominid evolution in small gene pools. DNA suggests that Native Europeans evolved in villages of 150-300 over the last 10kya. Africans in tribes of 75-150 over the last 150kya, other races somewhere in the range.

When there's only a few dozen mates of every generation to pick from, who all knew each other since toddlers, nobody is looking for Mr. Wright. When the gene pool is this small, the smart females use a different sperm donor for every child. Any Y chromosome line may have resistance to cholera, dysentery, malaria, plague, etc and what the dude looks like has nothing to do with it.

Really successful hunting or farming takes *teamwork*. Alpha male egos get in the way of that. The Chalcolithic bone middens of the most technologically advanced cultures show that most of the meat was rabbit. Snared, no doubt, by women and kids. Bog body stomachs show that meat from the mighty hunter was a trivial part of the diet. Over 100 different wild plants and animals from these sources have been identified, the vast majority of the caloric intake was flora, not fauna.

And since veggies dont jump around, strength has nothing to do with it. What does, is a sharp eye and the attention span needed, which again, is not that obvious. As for moral values, the elders, shamen, witches, and midwives had the liberal instincts to raise the kids of incompetent parents to help maximize diversity and keep pathogenic resistance in the group. Groups that let the stupid mutherfuckers starve got wiped out by what ever new microbe was doing the rounds.

Part of the reason Europe was so successful was that the witches knew of herbal birth control, and were able to limit the birthrate of the airheads to what the case manager class could handle. That lesson has been forgotten, and moral virtues are going to be adjusted in dealing with it as the case loads go thru the roof and the social safety net rips apart.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Women don’t pick moral men; they pick men that are better adapted to provide for their offspring by being loyal workhorses, cooperative with others, non-confrontational, so there’s a big difference.

I will agree that women have provided adequate intuitive mate selection for the present civilization. They have chosen a wide variety of mates that allow many of the hellish occupations to be filled by blind men. However, hopefully in the future, the women’s intuitive mate selection skills will no longer be needed because these ‘smart’ intuitive women mostly choose very safe, unthinking, fun, silly, tough, conservative, loyal, ambitious, cowardly wiener men as mates, which is fine for the moment because they are needed for a lot of these so called ‘jobs’ that are in high demand, but I suspect there is an ultimate masculine plan where the importance of woman to keep a balance will be fazed out of existence as men become more conscious thinkers collectively, and in unison to this development, technology should become more self-sufficient, and self-generating.

‘Woman’ is man’s training wheels to slowly ease him into total, and naked liberation, this to me seems like God’s plan, which is not what the preachers are babbling on about…

[dyctiostelium]

There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards . . . Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.

Likewise, deep in the mind of modern woman is the same hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they both be the same man . . . Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth and genes.
Matt Ridley, "The Red Queen"

So, women would have carefully selected for mindless, hard working, tame males for husbands and witty, clever, intelligent, passionate males for lovers: two parallel processes of sexual selection. If that is true, brilliant, sexy men would tend to have had terrible fathers more often than not. Sexual selection on lovers would choose the crème de la crème only, since a less than extraordinary set of attractive traits wouldn´t be worthy the risk of losing the provision of parental care and wealth if the plot gets discovered. Male jealousy, then, through monogamy, indirectly would have fueled the improvement of human civilization, allowing to introduce a low level of genetic noise into the second male lineage.

Any Y chromosome line may have resistance to cholera, dysentery, malaria, plague, etc and what the dude looks like has nothing to do with it.

Yes, I also like the idea of human culture (morality/intelligence/language) arising as a fluke of natural selection, with genes for those traits spreading because they were physically close (at the chromosome level) to genes that protected humans from a particular infectious agent. I.e., being intelligent, witty and entertaining was sexy to our ancestors because it happened to occur in those individuals that have done better during a meningitis epidemia (more brain tissue left after the infection was cleared...).
Or intelligence could be a fortuitous consequence of sexual selection if what females selected for in the alpha males were larger heads, say because they were easier to hold on during sexual intercourse, but since this initial preference was quite arbitrary and only came about by chance, it is reasonable to assume that an equivalent preference never arose in the other apes.

When there's only a few dozen mates of every generation to pick from, who all knew each other since toddlers, nobody is looking for Mr. Wright. When the gene pool is this small, the smart females use a different sperm donor for every child.

And yet, the genetic evidence seems to go against this idea of females giving every male a chance. Y-chromosome ancestry supports the view that humans were essentially polygynous during much of their history, with the consequence that until recently only a few men contributed a large fraction of the gene pool at every generation.

[daybrown]

I had not considered the relationship between immune response and intelligence. Thanx. Today, we see reports that autism is sometimes triggered by infections. And of course, in more recent times, the number of new mutants has multiplied dramatically in mass urban populations, which hominid immune systems, which evolved in such small isolated groups, were never adapted for. Likewise, there's some data suggesting that vaccines may trigger mental pathology during development, but that data is being repressed to protect the profits of transnational pharmaceuticals.

But there's another dynamic going on among the Aryans in sharp contrast to other gene pools, which were so much more reliably dominated by the alpha males. And part of that was the attitude that the womb was merely the room for their seed to grow. Challenging smart women were often shipped off to nunneries, given to low status men, or removed from the aristocracy in other ways, while the leaders selected stupid agreeable submissive bimbos to bear their sons. thus, the number of stupid sons of great leaders is legion, and why we all saw how dense the boss's sons were.

But in SE Europe, ever since the invention of the bronze axe 7000 years ago, a smart young woman, fed up with the leadership of the group, could, and did, select a smart young man to flee into the vast forest with the tools to clear the land and the seeds to go into the yeoman farming business. There's no history of this going on anywhere else on the planet.

Moreover, the ecosystem provided a wide variety of herbs for birth control and abortion. Fennel & Fenugreek have phytoestrogen and diosgenin- the active ingredients in the birth control pill. There's also "Bachelor Button", "Blessed Thistle", "Motherwort", "Queen Anne's Lace", that I know of, besides the mythic Silphium. As a result, women could space out their birthing and if capable enough, have the resources to properly nourish every child thru a crop failure, rather than watching a whole litter of them die of starvation.

The bone middens of the Chalcolithic communal houses tell a very different story than seen everywhere else. Landed aristocracy *always* goes into mono-culture, to feed the slave class as cheaply as possible. then, when the Nile fails to rise, or the rains at Chaco Canyon fail, or El Nino messes with the irrigation at Carcal, there is starvation and soon, new male management.

But the 5000-9000 year old Tels along the Danube are a whole different trip. 100 wild plants and animals in the diet, along with fish from the river. Soil cores show that they never clearcut the forest and rotated the crop land which had several different varieties that ripened at different times of year. Course, the whole thing was run by women using birth control so the populations were dead stable for millennia. There were a few dozen trading towns that grew to 20,000 like Tripolye on the Dneister, but the rest was all villages that stayed the same size til the whole area was abandoned 6000 years ago. Looks like Anthrax.

When you consider that this is the very same era in which the first domestic horses were introduced from the Steppes, and that horses can carry anthrax, its a nobrainer. It wasnt such a big deal on the Steppe, where grass fires would cauterize the land, but in Rumania, it was too wet too often to do that.

EW Barber, "The Mummies of Urumchi" says that some women got on horses, taking their Aryan techologies with- (writing, wheel, bronze, & fabric) and some show up in NW China 4000 years ago. And from *here*, we soon have the documentation and the artwork to determine what kind of men they selected. Some are seen at the bottom of http://www.dc-pc.org/artifax/artifax.html (lotsa jpgs, give it a minute to load). Barber also shows us some of the mummies. Like a dude who is 6'6", lanky, not heavy. then there's the Boddhisattvahs, who all look like classic stud muffins.

But Kucha also produced many scholars. Tocharian men were hired by the Shang Dynasty court as astrologers and magicians. And even today, Kuchan musicians and dancers are popular in China. Tracing family lines even reveals some Tocharian generals in the Chinese army and an emperor. But nowhere in Tocharian art do we see the usual glorifications of the warrior class. No depictions of kings with their goon squads.

So- when women select Y chromosome lines, they dont often choose alpha males, but when they do, they only pick the smartest and most self controlled. Which eliminates all the jackasses in the postings. They are not so stupid they dont know that, and go on as if *all* alpha males will be weeded out of the gene pool, and the culture would loose effective leadership. But no, what the culture will loose, is *ineffective* leadership.

Like the diff between the first president named "George", and the last president named "George".

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

Keep in mind that different people have different tastes. More intelligent women have a greater tendency to screen for intelligence than brute strength. On the other hand, Barbie wants Ken and neither seem to really care that both of them have nothing but air inside their plastic heads. Perhaps equally, wiser women screen for wiser men. Now there's a thought on how to motivate guys to at least increase their wisdom to their personal maximum capability... Encourage women to gain enough wisdom to select wiser men. Wise men do not abuse women (or anyone else), and have various qualities that make life work out better than how life works out with unwise men - so the reward to women would be obvious. As the effects of wisdom increase the alterations in the individual's mind to reflect ever-growing wisdom - well then it becomes naught for us to be concerned with what other wise individuals choose to do - it is only our concern that they become, in fact, truly wise.

The final product is a combination of nature and nurture, so perhaps it would be wise for wise individuals interested in propagating wisdom to pass on their genetics as well. That does not eliminate the likelihood that there will be many individuals who deludedly think themselves wise and want to spread their genetics - and women deluded enough to believe them - but at least this is a more functional idea than alienating as many females as possible and trying to convince men that if they are wise, will keep their wise sperm to themselves. Meanwhile Barbie and Ken are having tons of children and psychologically damaging them all in addition to whatever genetic shortcomings the children may have.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Elizabeth wrote:

The final product is a combination of nature and nurture, so perhaps it would be wise for wise individuals interested in propagating wisdom to pass on their genetics as well. That does not eliminate the likelihood that there will be many individuals who deludedly think themselves wise and want to spread their genetics - and women deluded enough to believe them - but at least this is a more functional idea than alienating as many females as possible and trying to convince men that if they are wise, will keep their wise sperm to themselves. Meanwhile Barbie and Ken are having tons of children and psychologically damaging them all in addition to whatever genetic shortcomings the children may have.

I agree that some sort of eugenics movement that values wisdom would be highly beneficial to the gene pool, but a problem is that most sages have a difficult time earning money in the current civilization, they have no tolerance for it, so a major obstacle is that you would need intellectual women that value wisdom to such a high degree that they would be willing to have children, without the financial security that a blind unthinking workhorse man provides.

However, this is an impossible hurtle for intellectual women to get over because most of their intellectual expansion was unconsciously done for ambitious purposes, and not for the purpose of wisdom at all, so when they select a mate, financial security still reins a much higher priority for them than wisdom.

The major problem seems to me that a sage’s environmental sensitivity is centuries ahead of its time, whereas even the most intellectual women base their mate selection choices on the ideal male that will be able to blindly adapt himself to the present industrial civilization.

[daybrown]

The witches usta provide both case management and birth control. But now, the case manager class has used birth control effectively ever since the pill came out, while the client class has not, and case loads are going thru the roof. Liberal group think about educational opportunity is necessary, but not sufficient.

The upshot is a generation driven by consumerism and the decline in moral values- which require self control they dont have. Fortunately, Jesus offers forgiveness. But Gibbon noted that moral values must be maintained to keep a republic, and that every effort to restore them once lost, has failed. He does not go on to say what Machiavelli does, that the result is dissolution and/or tyranny.

The world shows us many examples of dissolution: the fall of the USSR, Slovakia & Scotland breaking away, cities with 'free trade' zones, and many becoming defacto independent city states. Alliances like Nato & the EU are hampered by partisanship. History shows us several examples of independent city state systems operating outside the hegemony of empire, most notably the Silk Road, but also the archeological revelations of a Viking Amber road from the Baltic to the Black & Caspian seas, and hooking up with the Silk Road.

In that kind of political/economic system, women tend to be much more powerful, and dont show the usual preference for the warrior class. And since competent people can vote with their feet, nobody can, as they try in empires, impose their moral values. There was a city state in Bavaria, and nobody fucked with their shit because their craftsmen made the best armor that every king wanted to wear. Like transnationals today, different cities were in different businesses, and all tried to accomodate the middle class craftsmen.

The skills of sychophancy, which are so attractive to the women of the aristocratic courts, dont cut it in Kiev. The cabinet maker, the ferrier, the blacksmith, etc, know they can take their craft anywhere just like the network administer today, and while he wont make as much money as the political administrator, his services are not at the whim of the powers that be. And as the global cadre of professions becomes more uniform, and its practioners more mobile, their devotion to the political & cultural values of any given nation declines, leaving those in the hands of local zealots who dont have any place else to go.

Geeks are global, Republicans are not. Republicans bitch about the loss of moral values, but it is the high cost of their management which is driving innovative geeks and skilled craftsmen away. And both on the Silk Road and on the Amber Road, we see the graves of fabulously wealthy *women*. As noted, the airheads still go for physical attractiveness, being too stupid to evaluate other qualities. But there has always been this cadre of professional Aryan women in business who sometimes married into royal houses and took over the whole damn nation. And ran it like a family business.

In most European languages there's a word like "fair" that means both honest & noble, but also light colored. There's a reason for that. For one, the Vikings who went south and conquered who liked dominating others, stayed there. Only the men who were not into that went back to Scandanavia. And secondly, lower melanin is related to the likelihood of lower adrenalin. This slows reflexes, which is no biggie in precision crafts, but not the kind of thing a successful warrior has. It also makes a man less impulsive, and more able to handle cabin fever during the long winter months, spending time in a corner with a craft.

Another thing you need for long winters, is good inventory control. So- fair, honest, noble leadership made sure there was enuf firewood and food to last the community. And for all the millenia of life in small villages, that meant getting everyone thru the winter so as to not loose genetic diversity, and *that* required a liberal attitude twards other members of the tribe. The other thing I'm sure the matriarchies noticed, was that it was the sons of men like this who were most attentive to their mothers in later years, whereas the warrior is all about his relationship with the younger hotties.

So- when it comes to sexual selection, it depends on who's doing the choosing.

[dyctiostelium]

So- when it comes to sexual selection, it depends on who's doing the choosing.

Indeed.

The main question here is if intelligence and morality are traits that human females use during sexual selection. It would be useful to have solid evidences one way or the other.

I found this great study where people actually looked at how the choosing worked in humans, defining not only the parameters used by males and females in mate selection, but also the degree of success that both males an females had in actually getting a mate that fulfilled their selection parameters:

David M. Buss and Michael Barnes, Preferences in Human Mate Selection, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986.

The authors studied 92 married couples, and found that for both males and females the ten characteristics most valued in a potential mate were good companion, considerate, honest, affectionate, dependable, intelligent, kind, understanding, interesting to talk to, and loyal.

Could this be somewhat consistent with moral virtues being among the sexual selected traits? Not clear.

Now, females tended to prefer mates that were: considerate, honest, dependable, kind, understanding, fond of children, well-liked by others, good earning capacity, ambitious and career-oriented, good family background, and tall, while males tended to prefer physically attractive, good looking, good cook, and frugal.

Yes, the boring traditional gender roles. Sigh.

But the really interesting part is the section on

Relationships Between Mate Preferences and Obtained Spouses

The wives of husbands who preferred kind-considerate spouses scored high on several measures of agreeableness as well as on measures of extraversion. In contrast husbands of wives who preferred kind-considerate spouses appear to be aloof, submissive, unmasculine, unsociable, undominant, and unassuming.

Men who preferred artistic-intelligent wives appeared to have wives who scored high on self-acceptance, ambitiousness, autonomy, and masculinity,and low on neuroticism. In marked contrast, wives who preferred artistic-intelligent husbands appeared to have husbands who scored high on Neuroticism, and were described (and described themselves) as somewhat lazy, quarrelsome, emotional, feminine, and arrogant.

Men who preferred mates who have high professional status indeed had wives who scored high on capacity for status and who rated themselves as ambitious. In addition, such wives tended to score high on agreeable and gregarious, but low on laziness, submissiveness, emotionality and fearfulness. Such wives generally had elevated high school grade point averages. In contrast, the husbands of wives who preferred mates who had high professional status did not show signs of ambition or capacity for status. Instead, they seemed to be relatively low on psychological mindedness and vocabulary.

So, in a nutshell, females appeared to have reasonably good sexual selection parameters, but they didn´t seem to actually use them, and as a consequence they hardly ever got what they said they wanted. In fact, female sexual selection is favoring sub-optimal males.
Why is this? What does it mean? Is it that females lie to themselves and believe they want mates with certain characteristics while in fact they are actively selecting for mediocre males? Or is it that there is not enough supply of high quality males, so they settle for what there is?
(The data presented on the paper doesn´t allow to see how many kind-considerate, artistic-intelligent, high professional status males existed in the sample, and who were they married to).
Or that human females, regardless of how clear their preferences could be, marry for love, disregarding any objective evidences of adequate choice?

(Not sure which one of the options I´d prefer to find confirmation for...)

These are, of course, evidences for sexual selection of husbands, so there is still the possibility of the existence of a sexual selection process independent of the monogamous bond, (i.e. selection of lovers), one that could eventually result in a genetic improvement of the species...

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

I agree that some sort of eugenics movement that values wisdom would be highly beneficial to the gene pool, but a problem is that most sages have a difficult time earning money in the current civilization, they have no tolerance for it, so a major obstacle is that you would need intellectual women that value wisdom to such a high degree that they would be willing to have children, without the financial security that a blind unthinking workhorse man provides.

I don't particularly see that as a problem. There are many welfare Moms who have a whole horde of children of various fathers who they never even see. A broke but mature father is vastly better than no father at all in any female's book - and there is enough of a female drive to reproduce that the availability of a father is only on the wish list, not the mandatory list. A wise female could be inclined to reproduce with a wise man for the good of the next generation even if he could only provide wisdom and guidance to the child. At least in neither America nor Canada, society won't let a child go without food, shelter, and now even medical care. If the parents are psychologically enriching to a child, society will do whatever it can to keep those children with those parents.

[Dan Rowden]

Dyc,

Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality.

I think he was right. There's no doubt certain moral memes have survived and flourished. Sexual selection in an environment of a flourishing meme seems self-explanatory to me. Men who exhibit that meme will seem a better bet because it is the prevailing state of things.

To select against that would require a dynamical explanation that I would not pretend to automatically understand.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

Men who exhibit that meme will seem a better bet because it is the prevailing state of things.

I think you have your cause and effect reversed here. That which seems like the better bet becomes the prevailing state of things. Even criminal activity has become more popular because it seems like a good idea to those who choose to do that - at least at the time they are so choosing.

[Dan Rowden]

I don't really get your point. Mine is that in any prevailing meme, the man who best fits the criteria for that meme will be a target.

[Dan Rowden]

We seem to be in chicken/egg territory here.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

I don't really get your point. Mine is that in any prevailing meme, the man who best fits the criteria for that meme will be a target.

Yeah, I got that.

We seem to be in chicken/egg territory here.

Apparently

[dyctiostelium]

Dan,
I hadn´t think of this as having much to do with memes at all, or as being chicken/egg territory, so you made me thinking it all over. Let me try to understand what you´re getting at,

There's no doubt certain moral memes have survived and flourished. Sexual selection in an environment of a flourishing meme seems self-explanatory to me. Men who exhibit that meme will seem a better bet because it is the prevailing state of things.

So, you talking about the propagation of memes of moral conduct? I agree that some of the moral ideas, like the golden rule, are great replicators, and in consequence have spread and fluorished.
But good moral memes would propagate independently of the individuals whose brains they inhabit. I am not sure if there is such a thing as "men who exhibit that meme", since memes are not like blue eyes, that can be exhibited only by some and not by others: if the meme is good enough it would go on infecting everbody´s brain, so there wouldn´t be no point for invoking sexual selection there.
If a female goes and chooses a mate because a decent meme got stuck to his brain, it wouldn´t contribute anything else that "brain-stickiness" to the next generation, but the meme itself won´t be inherited. (Lamarck´s second law turned out to be just wishful thinking, so no heritability of acquired characteristics.)

The idea as I see it, in plain biological fashion, is not about moral memes and their replication, but rather about moral conduct being subject to sexual selection. Not the ideas per se, but the implementation of them into altruistic behaviors. And the ability to implement them would be exhibited by only certain individuals, who would be seen as more attractive mates. With the assumption that the ability to be altruistic (or the overall increased firness that allows someone to afford altruism) is genetically encoded, so that it will be passed to the next generation. So if altruistic/heroic is sexy, the species would be getting more and more altruistic and heroic over time.

But up to this point, we are leaving memes out of the equation. Now, moral memes would have an evolution of their own, of course, spreading to more brains in the same generation and being taught to brains in subsequent generations, if successful. The interesting thing would then be how these two evolutive processes work in parallel: better "moral implementators" are selected in the human population (by being found more attractive) and better moral memes (that have successfully infected many brains) are floating around, ready to jump at the brains of the new generation that carries the genes of the best "moral implementators". And so synergy occurs and moral behavior is rapidly refined and pushed forward....

Sexual selection might be really fueling the whole thing, selecting either "good implementators" (altruistic individuals are sexy) or "good meme absorbers" (intelligent individuals are sexy). Or both, of course.

[daybrown]

The reason the question has come up has to do with fundamental economic changes in the culture. Rational men dont often see the secure economic future previous generations had on which to take on the responsibility of a family.

The global market is trending twards lowering the cost of management now that the cost of labor is so trivial. And to do that, is switching to female management. We've seen marriage during college, and then seen divorce after the degrees are granted. This usta be by the guys, but now that women are getting more degrees, that dynamic is changing.

This confuses the whole issue of sexual selection, which is still based on socialization from earlier economic realities, but then confounded by the new opportunities for women. The specialization that civilization has always expanded is now moving into the home, with increasing numbers of women living with other women, and taking stud muffin lovers as their nature inclines them, for as long as that lasts. The relationship with another woman, whether Lesbian sex is involved or not, is more stable, more often.

The men who have the more secure economic future, are not in management, but in specialized skills. Geeks. Whose personality is dramatically different, with different kinds of relationships. The geeks, for instance, dont have the notion that they own women the way alpha male leaders have.

[dyctiostelium]

daybrown,
I find your posts very rich on historical and sociological context for thinking the subject of human sexual selection and its consequences. Clearly, the subject has many more facets that the ones I can comfortably get my mind to deal with, so the feedback is very much appreciated. I might not have much to say in response to the miriad of intriguing facts and proposals posted, but I am grateful to have those memes thrown at me. I´d jump right back in the discussion if and when I have a decent contribution to make.

[daybrown]

Well, thanx, but since I'm retired at 68, I have more time. I also took typing in summer school in 1957. I am so dyslexic I flunked it, but nonetheless, did learn to touch type, and the professors in college didnt care that much about typing errors. They had secretaries to do that, and expected I would as well.

But then, doing post grad work in 1981, I got my hands on an apple ][ keyboard, where I could go back and fix the typing errors on this screen, and the volume of my writing has gone up ever since.

I've been lucky on the input side as well; I got polio right after learning to read, so they threw me in the hospital and gave me all the time in the world to read. Then, in 10th grade, they gave me a speed reading course, and I usually crank along at 750 wpm, about 5 times faster than anyone can talk. And the more I've read, the more I can skim looking for that which an author has yet to bring to my attention.

So- while other boys had sport heros, I had Einstein and Arthur Clark. (who I now both regard as naieve). And while they were watching sports on TV, I was reading books. I didnt really get that much from Plato at 14, but I was the only boy I ever heard of who tried. I did see that he was asking questions which were not dealt with in the Bible. And in the hospital and special schools, I saw a lotta freaks who were not in the Bible either. So- when the preacher in the pulpit talks of the perfection of man, I think he's fuckin nuts.

Every time I woke up in post op, the other bed had a demented freak strapped in, often complaining loud enuf to wake the dead. Dont bother with Gabriel; a deformed idiot will do wonders to bring you around. I usta wonder why the nurses always did this, but after I'd worked in some clinical settings realize the staff knew I'd push the call button when he started spreading shit on the bed and wall.

It kinda raised questions about the nature of "sin". And the philosophical arguments about rationalism vs empericism. Then, after I got out, I sometimes went to live on the farm, where a convenience food was something that was already dead. You know, you dont have to stuff a chicken or goose, that they come already stuffed? And butchering a hog gives you a whole new perspective on chops and bacon.

And as for Mother Nature, know why the dogs always start dancing when you drag the sickle bar mower out of the machine shed? Cause they know, that as the field gets mowed, from the outside in twards the center, the gophers get concentrated. The same dog that you let play with the toddlers in the morning, will be out there in the afternoon. And when he finds a gopher, up on his hauches hissing, will grab the critter by the neck so fast you cant tell how he did it, whiplash the backbone to kill it, then put a paw on the head and rip the belly open like there's a zipper there you never noticed, and eat the gopher fetuses like chocolate bon bons.

Dressing out a deer on the tailgate of a pickup with a garden hose and a sawzall gives you a whole new perspective about Bambi. Similarly, while there are guys in the city in the moving business, there are guys in the Ozarks in the body moving business. It occurred to me to have friends give them a call after I croak. Save a ton of money. If they setup an Ozark body farm, and they should, they can have mine, to see what a body is like a year after being shallowly in the ground. Too rocky to put anyone down very far in most of the hidden hollows you want that kind of thing done.

Growing up in Hot Springs, which is in very similar hilly country, no doubt really helped Clinton. One problem he had tho, was that if you grow up there, you dont think a blowjob is a "relationship". But just as with Mena, there are somethings going on that you do not want to know about. Just ask Vince Foster. The moral virtues of country people are different, and with large families, you have some idea of which you do not want to get involved with, much less marry into. Regardless of whatever charm you think any given individual has.

I'll say this for gun ownership. I know women who didnt get raped cause they got to the shotgun first. The women here, know a lot more about this than I do. And, they know which moving company to call. There is also, like the Clintons, an instinct on the part of Law Enforcement, not to look into things they shouldnt. The gun nuts dont seem to get it, that just cause a woman is stupid enough to try living with them, dont mean they have not figured out where the guns in the house are. So- dudes either live alone, or get weeded out of the gene pool more expeditiously.

Sexual selection is also being affected by airheads moving to the city where the welfare benefits are more generous. Since the roads are often muddy, it dont take too long to figure out where the tire tracks behind a truck match those from a crime scene. But rather than call the cops, they write an exit visa back to the city in bullet holes in the truck, with the common understanding that next time, they wont wait for it to be parked. So, the cumulative result is shown in the better performance of the schools, which have surpassed the national average despite the reputation of dumb hillbillies.

Thus, there are areas where the number of acceptable mates is low, but they are not mixed in with a mass of unacceptable neurotics. There is something about the necessity to deal with blood, guts, and shit with shovels in the country that increases the general level of common sense.