Books This Week

The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O Prum

This book is about sexual selection, in particular why the author is annoyed at the biology ~party line about sexual selection (that is, evolution via animals choosing their mates, as opposed to evolution eg based on surviving to have offspring). The fact he is self indentifiedly thinking something controversial makes me a bit hesitant about how much I should trust his hypotheses, but overall I think I agree with his overall idea even if I don't agree with all the examples he chose.

In biology at the moment, there's a consensus that "display traits" (like a peacock's long tail, or the song and dance routines of mannakins) are secretly actually adaptive. For example, they give the males a handicap that proves that they are fit in the natural selection sense, which is why females choose to mate with them. The problem with this is it just... doesn't work mathematically? Any handicap would have to impose costs equal to it's desirability, making it sort of cancel itself out.

Prum thinks that actually, a lot of the display traits that female animals prize are just arbitrary. He believes there's a self reinforcing feedback loop with sexual selection. Let's say a peahen mates with a peacock with A Very Nice Tail. Her sons are likely to have Very Nice Tails, and so she'll have more grandkids. But there's a chance her sexy sons* will pass on her trait of finding long tails sexy to her granddaughters. And so the whole system self reinforces, even if the display trait is totally arbitrary, and has no adaptive or survival at all. Hell, even if it's actively detrimental survival! The example he uses for this is the club winged mannakin. The males use specialised wing feathers to make a noise during their display. Almost 100% of birds have really similar bone structures in their wings, probably there is only one good way to make wings? The 0.1% that's doing something different is the club winged mannakin, who have really weird looking wing bones! And they make the sound better, but they do not make them better at flying.

The other thing he hypothesises is that sexual selection only really works if animals can chose their mates. The peahen can only guarantee really sexy sons if they can choose to mate with the sexiest male. Which leads to another self reinforcing ratchet of either females evolving to be better able to defend their choices, OR for males ~~respecting female autonomy more.

Which is where the specific examples come in. I'm mostly convinced by his bird examples, but the last third of the book is talking about human sexual selection. I'm not entirely convinced, but I admit I appreciate a hypothesis for "why are humans so weird compared to our great ape cousins" being "hominin women found it sexy OR it became part of a feedback loop that prioritised being a good dad + hominin women freely choosing to bang you over physically attacking other males to maintain sole sexual access."**

A Billion Years by Mike Rinder

An autobiography of an ex-scientology executive. It's an interesting look at how the sausage got made? Rinder was around in the early-ish days, and was one of the first children raised scientologist. I find it interesting both as a document about what was going on at the time, and also the scientologist mindset. (A thing that came up a lot was how scientology as an organisation didn't/couldn't realise how suspicious it looked, so it kept trying to divert suspicion in ways that made it look worse.)

It also provoked some interesting thoughts, about, hmm. claims you can't easily refute with 🐛 logic. Logic might not be quite the word. But, for example, I don't have a counter argument for "L Ron Hubbard is infallible" based on facts. I do have one based on "that's exactly what I'd say if I was Hubbard and wanted to manipulate people."

"Now, that's Pascal's wager. You can't do math with infinity like that and get sensible results, and that's why you don't try doing that."

"Ah, yes, talking to people who don't agree with you is actively dangerous to your immortal soul. That's a classic of the genre!"

But all those arguments are 🐛 heuristics and 🐛🐛 knowing how people work based, not fact based

Anyway, interesting book. Major content warnings for ideological abuse, imprisonment and institutionalisation.

*Fun fact: while this book does not use the term, this process is named The Sexy Son Hypothesis, which I love. ** This did lead to me, while I was discussing this book on discord, writing that "[his hypothesis for male-male homosexaulity is] those hominin baddies were just complete fujoshis"

NANO!

I have written 50k words in 18 days!

I was about to say "and I now have less WIPs than when I started!" except, no, I've counted, and I have slightly more WIPs than when I started. ...oops. (It would have been equal if only I hadn't gone “aaaaa, I need 2k from somewhere, I'm just going to bang out a quick outline of a self indulgent fic” today. I could have left with less wips than I started! I coulda been a contender!)

Now if you'll excuse me [falls face first into a bed]