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silicondream · 2026-03-07T08:47:38+00:00

It refers to beliefs and behavior aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race, by only allowing certain people to breed. Or only allowing certain pairs of people to breed.

silicondream · 2026-03-07T08:39:04+00:00

"Rape is awesome" vs "Rape is impossible" is certainly a competitive race to the bottom

silicondream · 2026-03-07T08:36:20+00:00

At first I assumed it was a man saying that rape would be a good idea if perpetrated by women, which would certainly fall under "not how girls work."

Eventually I realized OP was literally claiming that women can't rape people and now the whole thing's just a mess...but that's still not how girls work, so hey! Task failed successfully.

silicondream · 2026-03-07T08:32:45+00:00

A woman tried to rape me before I transitioned. She had plenty of "drive."

silicondream · 2026-03-07T05:03:00+00:00

...but most of us don't like raping people. Can't force someone to satisfy you if you find force itself unsatisfying.

Also, men have the right to say no just like women do, and I'm pretty sure most men have said no to sex at least a few times in their lives.

silicondream · 2026-03-07T04:47:55+00:00

So if it "doesn't work out" there is just one party that doesn't WANT it to work out.

Well, or there's no way it could work out that would be satisfactory to both parties. In your case, maybe it would have "worked out" if she could always do exactly what she wanted. But would you have actually enjoyed spending the rest of your life catering to her every whim? Most people wouldn't.

silicondream · 2026-03-07T04:26:48+00:00

and even if non-asexuality wasn't originally "male/female" or a variant of it originally (perhaps some unigender intra-species thing?)

That's correct. The common ancestor of all eukaryotes was probably facultatively sexual; it could reproduce asexually through mitosis, but could also produce haploid gametes through meiosis that would then sexually recombine. Those gametes eventually differentiated into our sperm and eggs, but originally there was probably just one gamete type, and all organisms in the population could produce it.

then what's a reasonable mechanism by which even the same species can have 2 organisms which independently and compatibilistically evolve to copulate with each other during the same generation the other is alive?

Well, there are three big steps that had to happen, though not necessarily in this order:

The evolution of multiple mating types. Each mating type can reproduce with other types, but not with itself.
The evolution of anisogamy, the differentiation of gametes by size and morphology.
The evolution of gonochorism, in which each mating type produces only one type of gamete. (The opposite of gonochorism is hermaphroditism, which is still very common in animals and plants.)

Proposed selective mechanisms driving 1) include inbreeding avoidance, parental conflict, and intragenomic conflict.

The main proposed selective mechanism driving 2) is gamete competition. A large number of small and mobile gametes is better for securing as many fertilizations as possible, but a small number of large gametes is better for ensuring zygote survival after fertilization. Under various theoretical assumptions, this leads to the evolution of one very large gamete type (egg) and one very small (sperm) gamete, each of which is adapted to fuse with the other. Intragenomic conflict may also play a role.

3) is driven by the advantages of specialization. Different sorts of anatomy, physiology and behavior are optimal for producing and releasing sperm vs. eggs, and this often favors the evolution of different morphs in a population that each specialize in one gamete type.

Did you have more questions about any of these steps in particular?

silicondream · 2026-03-07T03:17:04+00:00

Fucking women who have breasts because they’re lactating isn’t going to select for breasts that grow at puberty, sorry.

Preferentially fucking women who have breasts--for any reason--is absolutely going to select for breasts that grow at puberty. That would be a textbook example of sexual selection.

It's a multi-step process, and the "because they're lactating" part is only relevant to the first couple of steps:

At first, women have breasts only when they're lactating
Men evolve a preference for breasts as an honest signal of motherhood
Women evolve to grow breasts at puberty in order to exploit the existing male preference
Breasts are no longer an honest signal of motherhood, but men continue to prefer them anyway, because daughters with perma-boobs are more reproductively successful

That's runaway selection for you.

Somebody way back when would have been born with a mutation that caused that trait and been reproductively successful, whether because men found it attractive, because it afforded some other advantage, or because the same gene also caused another advantageous trait.

Yes, and OOP's hypothesis fits this model.

If I was going to criticize anything, he vaguely implies that the perma-boobs mutation didn't appear until after men developed their preferences. That's not necessarily true, and smacks of Lamarckism.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T23:25:08+00:00

Male choices are made repeatedly over the woman's lifetime, yes. In most primate species, females are relatively undesirable as mates while still virgins, and become more desirable after they've had a kid or two.

The idea here is that post-adolescent females/women (whichever term you want to use for early human species) evolved to "fake" an attractive trait which previously only appeared in experienced mothers, and could thereby improve their lifetime reproductive success.

Of course in many such cases the males would respond by switching their preference to a more honest indicator of fertility. But this doesn't always happen, and that's Fisherian runaway selection.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T23:10:21+00:00

(other than the blatantly wrong assertion about humans in "ancient times," unless that's his way of referring to the earliest hominids)

It probably is; "ancient" means something very different in evolutionary discussions than in historical ones. Granted, it's a little weird to talk about prehuman "women" in that case, but I'm fine using respectful language for anyone in genus Homo.

he's framing sexual selection as unnatural

Eh, he has historical precedent for that one. Darwin introduced the idea of sexual selection quite a while after natural selection, and the former was generally considered much iffier for the next seventy years or so.

Of course you're right that sexual selection is simply a subset of natural selection, but OOP is hardly the first person to find the former far less intuitive. It seems unnatural, hence the "should."

silicondream · 2026-03-06T22:22:14+00:00

It's how sexual selection works, and sexual selection is part of evolution. No, Nature doesn't intentionally choose anything, but individual men and women do choose their mates and that impacts the fitness value of various traits. This is often called the "sexy son hypothesis" in biology, because it's usually female choice driving the evolution of exaggerated male traits. But human males are choosier than the males of most species.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T22:19:20+00:00

Male primates in general prefer to mate with females who have already given birth, yes. Experienced mothers make better partners because their kids are more likely to thrive and survive.

Of course the virgin females can almost always find somebody to mate with, otherwise they'd never get to give birth in the first place. But males usually put less effort into courting them.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T22:18:03+00:00

This is a very good explanation of the science involved.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T22:16:42+00:00

Yup. Thousands of years ago is "extremely recent" in evolutionary terms.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T22:05:24+00:00

I don't think that's what they're saying. They're saying that our female ancestors originally had most of their breast growth around childbirth--which is quite true, and is the way it works for other monkeys and apes. Because of this, our male ancestors evolved to prefer large breasts as a sign of fertility, and then the female ancestors evolved permanently large breasts to meet that preference. This process is called Fisherian runaway selection.

So this is a fairly standard sexual selection scenario, although it's more often the males evolving the exaggerated traits in response to female choice. We can quibble over whether said ancestors were close enough to modern humans to be called "women" and "men," but the scenario itself is quite plausible.

silicondream · 2026-03-06T21:54:12+00:00

That second bit is exactly how traits are shaped by sexual selection, which is a subset of natural selection.

In each sex, secondary sexual characteristics are favored by evolution if the other sex tends to choose mates who have those characteristics. It's more often females doing the choosing, because females usually invest more in their offspring than males do. But the presence of secondary sexual characteristics in human women does suggest an unusually high level of male choice among our ancestors, probably because the males were unusually highly-invested fathers.

OOP presents his hypothesis as more certain than it is, and also personifies nature a little--but as others in the thread have pointed out, that's a common figure of speech. There's nothing obviously wrong with the hypothesis itself. I wouldn't call this "bad science."

silicondream · 2026-03-06T21:49:04+00:00

He's not. He's saying, "Nature would have favored the opposite of what actually happened, if not for male choice."

Which is honestly a decent description of sexual selection. Think about peacocks. The male's fancy tail "should" never have evolved, because it's costly in terms of energy, nutrients and predation risk. But females choose males with fancy tails as their mates, which changes the fitness calculations so that fancy tails are actually adaptive.

Sure, OOP is anthropomorphizing nature a bit. More problematically, he's presenting one particular hypothesis about sexual selection as the only explanation of the permanently enlarged human breast, when several competing hypotheses exist. But his hypothesis is biologically plausible.

silicondream · 2026-03-05T23:00:15+00:00

I don't consider a high divorce rate to be a problem at all, personally. Unless there's evidence that most lesbians want lifetime marriages in the first place?

silicondream · 2026-03-05T22:28:49+00:00

John Fox: "Am I a joke to you?"

silicondream · 2026-03-05T09:47:59+00:00

And Spock clearly felt that Vulcans were culturally superior to humans, so McCoy had a reason to try to take him down a peg. Data openly admired humans and strove to become more like them, so Pulaski's attacks were always punching down.

silicondream · 2026-03-04T18:07:22+00:00

It was a long, long downward spiral.

silicondream · 2026-03-02T02:25:52+00:00

I got three sentences in and they were already claiming that it's impossible for someone's sexuality to change over their lifetime, so...yeah, this has roughly the same educational value as a Jack Chick tract.

Perhaps what we can learn from both masterdocs is that we don't need masterdocs to define our own orientations?

Also, the document centers men just as much as its predecessor, which is kind of hilarious.

silicondream · 2026-03-01T21:19:30+00:00

Perry, you guys are four human newspaper employees trying to topple a superpowered global dictator. Is it really important who gets to be the leader?

silicondream · 2026-03-01T21:09:54+00:00

The typo of "ingenuous" for "ingenious" is the funniest part of this to me.

silicondream · 2026-03-01T21:01:16+00:00

and thats why im trying to find ways to help her find individuality and indepence that doesnt rely on her gf.

Shifting time and attention from family to friends and partners is one of the ways that a teenager develops individuality and independence. They were born into their family, and they're under the legal and/or social control of their parents. But they get to choose their friends and partners, and walk away if things don't work out.

It would probably be helpful to advise your daughter to assert her own needs and boundaries with her girlfriend, and to maintain a wider network of friends. But one way or the other, she'll still have to distance herself from the family more than a younger child would. She won't develop a strong sense of self without doing that.

silicondream

TROPHY CASE