The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum – Book review

Tags

Eveish Selection, Richard O. Prum, Sexual Selection, The Evolution of Beauty

This is a curious book that explores the evolution of beauty in tropical birds, such as Manakins and Bowerbirds, and then applies the generalizations observed in birds to human evolution. This exposition revisits classic evolutionary debates in the late 1800s between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin’s idea of sexual selection has been mostly ignored for a century by evolutionary theorists, who favored Wallace’s concept of explaining evolved traits in terms of adaptation to the environment. However, in 2017 Prum makes a strong case for the role of mate choice to account for many traits that are nearly impossible to explain using standard survival-of-the-fittest adaptationist arguments.

The general term for these qualities is “beauty”, but that term is defined to include not only expected qualities such as coloration, patterns, and ornamental appendages, but surprisingly some other kinds of traits, such as the ability to learn new songs that are attractive, or perhaps the ability to fly high above the forest and then dive at high speed to make specialized feathers buzz attractively in the fast flowing air, or to make a beautiful garden of colorful objects to show their refined aesthetic abilities. Prum stresses the evolution of female sexual autonomy as a factor in mate choice, which has led, for example, to the development of bowerbird structures that protect the females while enabling them to observe the male’s display traits.

These things have no noticeable direct survival value but they do have value in attracting a mate, and securing successful sexual intercourse, and thus in producing the next generation of offspring. If there is any genetic component to this form of mate selection based on perceived beauty, then it gets passed onto the next generation, and this quality is eventually propagated throughout that species or subspecies, which sometimes becomes an isolated species. When that spatial separation occurs the subspecies can develop very specific beauty specifications for mate selection.

The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum

All of this bird-brain selection for beauty stuff was fascinating to read about, but then we come to the processes for human mate selection. Prum applies the ideas he cultivated from his years of study of birds in general and tropical birds in specific to us humans. We humans like to think that we with our larger brains would be better at selecting mates. The general ideas for selection based on Prum’s broad definition of beauty seem to hold up better for describing human mate choices than the standard theories based on simple reproduction of the survivors. Recently we humans haven’t had too much of a problem surviving to reproductive age when we make our selection for mates; thus other options arise, such as social status and the various forms and measures of beauty. I have written about this in this blog under the rubric of Eveish Selection where the great number of unusual human traits have arisen because human females found these traits attractive in males. Males, on the other hand, are still primarily driven by the standard sexual selection of beauty based on physical attractiveness and health.

If you have the slightest interest in sex you will find this book fascinating. 

The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson – review

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Edward O. Wilson, Eveish Selection, John Shelby Spong, Science combining with Religion, Science versus religion, The measure of man, Women choosing mates

The measure of man and everything else.

As always, a book by E. O. Wilson is a pleasant experience because he has a deep kindly wisdom of his subjects based upon a lifetime of being in the center of his scientifically inclined intellectual world. The goal of his creative instinct is to “translate the previously unperceived into the limited audiovisual world of human consciousness. … the advance will come with understanding the evolutionary forge in which culture was shaped, slowly and often painfully, from animal instinct.” … “The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madrassas, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.” (p. 194-95) This way of approaching religion is similar to 1st Presbyterian Bishop John Shelby Spong‘s approach which I discussed in several posts. Both of these scholars have had a life-long pursuit of truth from very different perspectives but have come close to a common worldview.

In Wilson’s concluding pages, he writes, “The real limitation of present-day philosophy is not clashes of authorial logic but incoherence, due chiefly to inattention to science. This is curious, since we are in what can reasonably be called the Age of Science, and science is positioned to combine with the humanities to rekindle the spirit of the earlier Enlightenments. I believe that the two, meeting in common inquiry, can at last solve the great questions of philosophy. … At the base, we need to explore ever more deeply the meaning of humanity, why we exist as opposed to having never existed. And further, why nothing even remotely like us existed on Earth before. The grail to be sought is the nature of consciousness, and how it originated. Equally fundamental is the origin and proliferation of life as a whole.” (p. 196-97) These two longish quotes illustrate the coming together of Bishop Spong and Harvard Professor Wilson.

What caught my eye was the sentence bolded by me but emphasized by Wilson with the words “The grail to be sought, … and how it originated.” That is precisely what was discussed in Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. Below is a quote from that post.

“Eveish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older sexual selection tends to choose a single quality as a marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness but Eveish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate including those which distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for humans. Women converse at great length with each other about humans the various human qualities and it is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.

Eve chooses Adam with a little help from her friends.

I made this composite picture, derived from Michelangelo’s “God creating Adam” and Goya’s “Naked Maja” to illustrate my theory of human-style selection in action. The picture shows Adam having ascended some difficulty, showing his prowess over another man and Eve choosing him as her mate but with the advice and counsel of a group of angelic friends whispering in her ear.

Males are still choosing females based on their physical attractiveness, health and vigor but females have been choosing males since the beginning of modern humans and of speech for all of those qualities which make us human. It is reasonable in this view to replace Michelangelo’s God as the creator of the human species with Eve and her talkative companions.”

It is women who are measuring man and breeding with the best available one.

The big problems for Wilson and Spong are answered by observing human women and who they choose to mate with.

 

The single best idea anyone has ever had.

Tags

Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Edge.org, Eveish Selection, Helena Cronin, Scientists conflict with irrationalists, The eerie irrationalists

EDGE.COM has a fine series of articles under the title – 2013: What *should* we be worried about. In the article by Helena Cronin, in the fourth paragraph, she states, “Darwinian science has high status in this world of objective knowledge as perhaps, ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’. And, probably uniquely in the history of science, it is unlikely to be superseded; biology will be forever Darwinian—for natural selection, it seems, is the only mechanism that can achieve design without a designer.” It is a fine article condemning, in rational detail, the problems with the anti-science crowd, but it doesn’t give any solid methods for crushing their non-thought into the oblivion of discarded non-sense where it so obviously belongs, when judging it by the methods of science.

That said, I did have a problem with the core argument she pursues about Darwinian theory hitting a profound snag with its relationship to the evolution of human beings. She and all other scientists I’ve read and encountered insist that human beings came into existence by Darwinian principles. Strangely, she missed the argument that both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace asserted, that their theory didn’t fit human beings because there wasn’t enough time to have evolved so many unusual and disparate abilities that humans clearly possess. There is a rational answer, but strangely they didn’t pursue it, or even mention it. It is not uncommon for an obvious idea in retrospect to be overlooked by thoughtful people. The idea that works, and is easily demonstrated to be still in action, is outlined in the article Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. If the Eveish theory was presented to those bound to scientific or religious methods of thinking nearly everyone would embrace it. It puts human motivations using artificial selection into the system of natural selection. Scientists will like it because there is no use of supernatural reasoning, and there are observable human qualities which could be challenged on the plausible deniability aspects, and should pass. And, the Eveish theory makes human beings into creatures truly to be honored and respected for making us into the wonderful creatures that we are.

We are not only the descendents of apes, we are the descendents of thinking women.

Atheists for Jesus by Richard Dawkins – a critique

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artificial selection, Atheists for Jesus, Eveish Selection, Evish Selection, evolution, Richard Dawkins, Super niceness

Today I was reading a Richard Dawkins article which pondered over the problem of why people are so nice to one another. He wrote, “From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb.” He believes that all animals live in a world of pure self-interest, and humans, being animals, would naturally take every opportunity to steal everything they could from the environment and from other people. That we don’t behave that way leaves Dawkins, and formerly Charles Darwin, flummoxed.

Dawkins’ article searches for an explanation of our super niceness, so observed human niceness could be intentionally induced to spread through humanity like an epidemic.  “Could super niceness be packaged in such a form that it passes down the generations in swelling traditions of longitudinal propagation?” When I read that line I momentarily thought he had read my Eveish theory and was going forward with it, but he then lost track of the obvious, and started beating on his favorite straw man, Jesus and other religions. Later he returns with, “The advent of human super niceness is something unprecedented in four billion years of evolutionary history.” He obviously didn’t understand the operating principle of niceness, so then he corks his erroneously bottled theory with, “The singularity [of humans] is a product of blind evolution itself, not the creation of any unevolved intelligence. It resulted from the natural evolution of the human brain which, under the blind forces of natural selection, expanded to the point where, all unforeseen, it overreached itself and started to behave insanely from the selfish gene’s point of view.” This is wrong and even Darwin and Wallace knew it to be wrong back in the 1860’s, because humans have too many genetically unusual qualities to have evolved independently so quickly, under the blind forces of natural selection. What would be the natural driving forces for language, or the ability to learn computer games? There had to be something more.

Dawkins and all of the other modern evolutionary theorists still don’t understand how humans came into being, and it wasn’t from natural selection, it was from human-driven artificial selection, which I call Eveish selection. Our human qualities arose because humans began choosing their breeding partners for qualities other than pure natural selection of the physically healthiest mates.

All humans, and especially women, choose their mates on more than physical strength and health, and among the many qualities we seek is niceness. There is a heritable quality to being a nice person, and because all humans voluntarily choose to be around nice people, those are the ones our ancestors chose to live with and have children with. Dawkins was searching for a rigidly doctrinaire evolutionary method for creating super niceness, while ignoring the fact that we have been selecting for niceness for at least a hundred thousand years. We are nice to one another because it is bred into our genetic code to be nice to one another, as much as possible. That is covered more thoroughly in Eveish Selection Theory.

Humans are already nice because that’s what women have consistently chosen for breeding partners.

Philosophers Squared – Charles Scamahorn

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Charles Scamahorn, Eveish Selection, human evolution, Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Source of human morality

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Charles LeRoy Scamahorn (1935- fl 2013) is a philosopher of the origins of human morality and humanity’s survival. Modern humans were created and are maintained by gossiping women.

Charles Scamahorn, philosopher of the evolution of human morality.

Quotes for Charles Scamahorn – sources: Probaway.wordpress.com, see:

Darwin’s Unfinished Business — Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women. — Intelligent Design – of humans by humans and for humans. — Charles Darwin’s original idea !!! — Triage is an application of natural selection. — — Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do. —

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Everything about humans that was created in the last one hundred thousand years or so didn’t happen simply because of Natural Selection, or Sexual Selection, but primarily because of Evish Selection. This idea is based on the easy-to-make observation of the way humans choose sexual partners. Males are still primarily choosing their female partners based on a Sexual Selection strategy. They choose for physical beauty, and based on that strategy the species has maintained a healthy condition. Health and resultant vitality of the animal body is attractive to potential sex partners, but when one becomes sick and unhealthy, which has a heritable component, they are unattractive and have fewer children because they breed less. Sexual Selection changes the expression of the genes more quickly than Natural Selection, but both of these are very slow when compared to Evish Selection practiced by women.

Women choose their mates only in part based on physical beauty; they choose their mates, hopefully to be their lifelong husbands, based on a large variety of other qualities too. Once early human females developed the ability for rudimentary speech,  they began analyzing potential mates based on their combined verbal analysis with other women of the entire package of qualities possessed by the male potential mates. This selection process was particularly sensitive to the moral qualities of the men. The women would be very desirous of being protected by their potential husband, but also they would be very observant of how well he treated women. A woman would want her mate to keep unwanted men and other dangers away, but not at the price of being abused herself. Thus with a hundred thousand years of breeding with this as an important part of the selection criteria for a husband these moral qualities would be bred into the human genome and human behavior, and we would see men of all the cultures of the world treating women with locally defined courtesy.

Eve choosing Adam, with a little gossip from her friends, for his many qualities.

There are many facets which make up morality and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying morality, but because of these genes people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be moral. We have bred into us the capacity to develop a refined and sophisticated morality just like we have bred into us the ability to learn and speak languages. These specific moral qualities are not fixed into the genes like the speaking of the English language isn’t fixed in the genes, but the ability to easily learn these things is there. We have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the thousands of languages spoken by humans, but we also have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the moral codes of the various groups of humanity. We are latent moral creatures from the beginning, but we are also self-serving animals from the beginning. There is always a struggle going on within our manifest behavior of how to balance the multitude of conflicting inner impulses. The basic animal needs for survival are always there to protect the life of the animal we inhabit, but these necessities are overladen and often controlled by the human need to live within the strictures of the local human society and the genetically directed developments of a human moral code.

These genes guiding our moral development were bred into us by our female ancestors choosing moral men, just like they selected for men with all the other qualities that make us humans what we have become as a species. Our innate moral propensity is as deeply bred into humans as is our propensity to learn a language. Of course we can do many things with our moral ability just as we can do many things with our languages. We don’t need much human interaction to learn basic morality, just like we don’t need much human interaction to learn to speak. Some people become wonderfully skillful with language and some people develop their moral sensitivities to a high degree too. Having a fine moral sense isn’t the same as taking graduate classes in ethics, but it is an ability to see and do the best thing for our interbreeding group of people. To carry that idea to its conclusion would be to define morality as doing the right thing as discussed at some length by a group of gossiping women, who choose to marry those men who possess those moral qualities to the highest degree and train their daughters to choose by the same criteria.

Human morality is based on carefully refined gossip entering our genetic code.

“Eveish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older type of sexual selection tends to choose a single quality as a marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness, but Eveish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate, including those that distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for modern women. Women converse at great length with each other about the various human qualities, and this is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.”

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COMMENTS:

It is outrageous to place oneself in a list with so many fantastically successful philosophers, and yet I have created the most coherent theory of why people have risen from an animal state to the condition they now occupy. We are not only highly intelligent animals, we are also surprisingly social ones and this is permitted by our innate morality. Without our morality our civilization could not have arisen and thus the understanding of the source of our morality is of fundamental philosophical importance.

Modern humans were created and are maintained by gossiping women.

I have not been totally isolated from the philosophical, anthropological, linguistic community, having had personal conversations about this subject with various leading people in those fields, but Eveish Selection is wholly my idea.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778) said it well, “We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.” I agree, but suggest that it was the cumulative intelligence of women that created our Newton’s.

Human evolution favored talkers and dancers

Tags

Dancing, Eveish Selection, evolution, Sexual Selection

Human females select those qualities which make us human. They continue to maintain our species and improve our human fitness by choosing the best males they can attract and having children with them. One of the qualities which is a clear indicator of physical and mental fitness is the ability to dance well. This dancing ability is a sub-set of the ideas presented in Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. Dancing gives a very quick, easily observed and probably accurate analysis of the physical and mental health of the dancer as well as his social flexibility. It also gives the girls something to gossip about in their analysis of a male’s suitability for their procreativity needs.

Some proofs for these assertions are found at the BBC science & environment site post Good dancing may be a sign of male health. Some scientists say that but what will they say about Snowball the cockatoo who really jams to Stevie Nicks? If you can’t get up and match Snowball’s moves you must be very old and moving out of the prospective gene pool. In the background of this remarkable YouTube video you can hear women expressing their emotion charged appreciation.

Intelligent Design – of humans by humans and for humans.

Ray Kurzweil on human evolution

Tags

Eveish Selection, Living forever, Natural Selection, Ray Kurzweil, Sexual Selection, Transcend: Nine steps to living well forever

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman have a new book Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever which gives a program for outwitting our genetic heritage. They claim that Natural Selection has programmed us humans to die and get out of our children’s way soon after we have brought them to adulthood and that our bodies are designed for maximum efficiency, survivability and procreativity only up to age 25. After that age our bodies are neutrally programmed genetically for survival so we have no natural bodily inclination to repair ourselves and we begin to rot.  That developmental theory and similar ones are usually discussed under the term Evolutionary Psychology.

I don’t think these theories emphasize human intelligence in the selection processes enough, especially for the last 100,000 years or so. I have developed a new theory for human development based on the concept of Eveish Selection which emphasizes the verbal gossip-like quality of women analyzing men for mate choice. With Eveish selection many more qualities than just vigor at the time of mating are being analyzed and brought into the reproductive selection process. Because modern human mate selection is greatly influenced by social status, and that status is largely derived from social standing of the parents, then the aging of the body being chosen for a mate isn’t as strong a selective factor as it is in standard natural selection or standard sexual selection.

Kurzweil is fighting a life and death battle with a slightly skewed theory of what is happening and therefore if he improves his theory to closer to how humans were actually selected he will enhance his chances for an extended life. Being more precise in the definition of human genetic heritage might not make much difference in life expectancy in the technologically advanced modern world. These days an individual has a good chance of living to the age of eighty years if they simply choose to live a healthy life – avoiding dangerous materials like drugs, smoking, alcohol, and dangerous activities like motorcycles and of course eating excessive amounts of high calorie foods. Then everyone also knows the positive things they should do like cultivate low stress behavior, be comfortable with several social associates and get plenty of physical exercise like walking.

Kurzweil is taking an infinitely more proactive approach and is trying to find ways to one-up our genetic heritage and find workarounds to what has in the past been called natural ageing. He wants to find and implement ways to not only stop the ageing process but to reverse it such a way that after ten years of his program the individual practitioner will be physically five years younger. He doesn’t want to be like Jack Benney and be sluggish middle aged thirty-nine forever but rather to be a far more active age twenty-five … forever. Many years ago, about 1969, I attended a lecture by a then famous futurist, Herman Kahn and he said that if one could live for another fifty years technology would be so improved that one could live forever. It’s now fifty years later and Kahn didn’t even come close as he died shortly after the speech, but average life expectancy for people who choose to live healthy lives has certainly improved. People who were excessively over weight like Kahn are not having an improved life expectancy but who knows perhaps a diet pill will be found that works really well for them too. Kurzweil does walk the walk as well as talk the talk and looks surprisingly spry for someone his age.

Life extension is certainly available now but forever is a very long time.