The truth about love and dating

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Actually I'd disagree with the OP in this sense - the most attractive get together, the ugliest get together knowing that its already a done deal, its the inbetween and that tend to get weeded out. Part of it can be self-overvaluation but at the same time these people can't do right for themselves by lowering their expectations either as they'll be just as single and have their heads stepped on more. Personal irregularities and not fitting the stack in ways that people find coherent make things exponentially worse as well - whether you're aspie or NT.

It is natural selection one one hand but on the other it has a lot of esoteric/niche loopholes to where it still would never satisfy the standards of someone like Margaret Sanger in terms of it performance as such. Suffice to say though, if you're a failure as an animal, how shiningly brilliant an example of humanity you will be rather limited in how far it can get you.

That just makes things worse over the long term. Stupid people outbreed everyone else. Rinses and repeat until civilization falls.

People keep telling me that you don't judge a book by its cover-well I may be a bad person or a good person inside depending on who you talk to-and I am not visually pleasing to say the least and people keep saying the don't judge a book by its cover and I say when is the last time you bought a book without looking at the cover for the title of the book-I just think if a person doesn't like what you look like they aren't going to try and talk to you to find out that you are smart,rich,talented,maybe defective in some way etc etc -I have found that I guess I am destined to be left out of the relationship game because I truly believe no one wants me for anything but what I can do for them in the way of favors and my ability to fix things.

Who says being in a relationship has to= reproduction?

says who? you? the W.H.O?



who decides? who throws the first stone?

the alpha bully with the biggest muscles and teeth? the one that threatens and beats you?
or the lamb of god?

Last edited by Surfman on 05 Oct 2011, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In all he's right about the net effects though. Our inbred tendencies determine what's 'healthiest' and, as we've all learned even about ourselves, these are things inside of all of us that are deaf to reason.

Nope. You're operating under the assumption that traditional physical attractiveness is the sole criteria for breeding. It's far, far from.

You're also working from the criteria that all breeding seeks optimal outcomes. Again, that's not the case.

First off, physical attractiveness varies depending on the conditions. Look at weight. 400 years ago, a heavier woman was signaling access to leisure time and a genetic protection against famine. Nowadays, when calories are cheap, a heavier woman is signaling poverty. That's a full inversion of what is attractive and what it signals.

Secondly, breeding does not seek optimal outcomes. Males are generally driven to spread their genetic code without serious consideration for quality. Look at Tiger Woods. He frankly wasn't seeking sexual partners for the sake of optimal offspring, especially relative to the women that were accessible to him.

In most studies on the subject of ugliness, far more men are rated as ugly than women. This suggests that because men can put a thumb on the scales of attractiveness (or a mansion and several sports cars), ugly males have not been filtered as much as ugly females. Females are selecting for success as perceived through prevailing conditions in a society while males are selecting for frequency of sex plus survivability of potential offspring.

I am reading a book which suggests that while people are selecting according to their preference, random factors come into play a lot too. So it is not as simple as Natural Selection, it is also about individual preference, and factors such as urban or regional population numbers, numbers of venues to meet, and many factors not even thought of.

^ ^ ^

I think the problem people have with Natural Selection is that like many things, we read too much intelligence into. It is man's nature to see faces in the clouds. That tendency, when applied to natural selection, seems to always degrade into some form of Social Darwinism highlighted by rational actor theories from economics.

Many human behaviors model better against gaseous dynamics theories. Simply put: welcome to the pinball machine!

It's fun because it being so serves a biological and genetic/evolutionary imperative,
so, technically,
they explain everything.

It doesn't have anything to do with external circumstances. The way I look at it, everyone has to establish their worth by proving that they can be an integral part of the social hierarchy. Survival is the ablilty to integrate and be accepted into the social hierarchy, by showing offensive and defensive skills.

If the kid shows that he cannot be integrated into the social hierarchy, he's a reject and the hierarchy will force him out. In the forest, many species of animals will even kill the rejects. Natural Selection, the type of gene that a person has that would cause them to be rejects and is not a desirable trait to be passed on to future generations. The social hierarchy makes sure that it won't be easy to do so. Women prefer to go for the social survivor, the guy who can support himself within the social hierarchy.

Yes, that is what the book is saying. I have only started reading it:

http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Life-Ration ... 886&sr=8-1

The degree to which those "preferences" are really the program of popular culture (IE, as exemplified by MrE's example of women's weight from a historical perspective) is especially-fascinating, I think, as are such things as negative and positive assortative mating.

Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 07 Oct 2011, 3:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

I dont really know about that. The reality is that most humans end up mating whether they were the captain of the football team/prom queen etc or not. So to me I dont really see evidence of natural selection here, I think it would be more likely seen in a wild population of chimps, or perhaps stone age humans. Modern man's mating processes are far different than what they were when we were immersed in nature, and when Charles Darwin was formulating his theory of natural selection, he was studying finches etc, not humans living in New York for example.

I think, too, a glaring fact is that humans, a social species, have sex and establish human relationships to serve a variety of evolutionary benefits other than producing and raising offspring.

^ that is true, and I guess it is similar to the way Bonobos are.