When Evolution Fails

Can evolution fail? I offer the following thought experiment as evidence that there are circumstances in which evolution proceeds along a path that violates its own precepts.

A high SMV (sexual market value) man who likes the idea of being an anonymous father but not a real father, donates to a sperm bank. One thousand low SMV (fat and/or ugly) women get impregnated by his sperm and have one son each. Will this de facto harem leader’s sons grow up to be

a. more attracted or

b. less attracted

to fat or ugly women?

As commenter Arch Hades put it,

Higher quality male peckers have evolutionarily evolved to not want to impregnate fatties.

But what happens when a high quality male pecker makes a contribution to the wombs of low quality females via an aesthetically neutral conduit like a sperm bank? The intrinsic desire of the man for slender, beautiful women will still be passed onto his one thousand sons, despite the fact that, from his genes’ point of view, he willingly plunged the portals of a lot of gross women. He didn’t start with a predilection for fat or ugly women, so whatever genetic code he passes on through the sperm bank women won’t appear in any of his male progeny as an increased attraction for ugly women.

In this instance, the ironclad law of evolution has been overturned. The “attraction for ugly women” genes that would increase in a state of nature where men with those innate predilections seek out ugly mates and pass their predilection onto future generations does not increase in this scenario of the sperm bank acting as middleman.

Now one could say the sperm bank is unnatural and thus the laws of evolution don’t apply, but anything created by humans must be natural in the sense that culture and its appurtenances are manifestations of genetic architecture previously selected for. The sperm bank is as much a part of the evolutionary biofeedback loop as is the stick that a chimp uses to flush out termites.

What does it say then about evolutionary theory that a sperm bank can essentially sever the connection between reproductive fitness and sexually selected traits? What about contraceptives? In a sense, condoms and the pill act like individually owned and operated sperm banks, altering the ancient equation between female (and male) sexual choice and what kind of children they eventually bear (or not bear).

All this is to say we as a species are entering uncharted territory. Anyone who thinks there won’t be awesome consequences lacks the requisite imagination.

Interestingly, you can sort of see the outlines of the above ugly female client sperm bank scenario playing out in real time in the bars and clubs across America. Just substitute “ugly female client sperm bank” with “fat women”, and the picture crystallizes. Like the man contributing to a sperm bank patronized by ugly women who would otherwise only have sex with attractive women, a nontrivial number of men are crossing their lower bound of acceptable female sexual attractiveness to rut with fatties out of necessity and fear of unwilling celibacy. As upwards of 70% of all American women are heavier than their ideal weight, it’s simply a matter of insufficient suitable mate availability driving an evolutionary trend that is at odds with actual reproductive fitness or male sexual attraction predilection.

The future, should my attempts to clear the SMV fog prove prescient, looks like a horror show of gargantuan beastwomen and sexually and romantically unfulfilled men drifting in and out of each others’ lives in a loveless nihilistic melancholy.

***

PS On a related “Is evolution failing?” note, the buzzy AmRen article titled “Confessions of a Public Defender” is a harrowing read, and provokes some illicit thought about where we are heading demographically. The impression one gets from this titillating exposure to the minds and values of the zoo animal underclass is that the moral senses… fairness, reciprocity, empathy, guilt, even a basic conception of right and wrong… may very well be unevenly distributed not only among members of the same race but between the races in general. If you quake at the idea that average IQ varies by race, how badly will your bowels shake if it’s discovered that some races are more, or less, morally evolved?

CH has gone out on limbs before that have proven to be supported by trunks of strong empirical oak, and we’ll go out on a limb again, one so far up the tree that few if any will have the balls to venture out with us. Morality and empathy are evolved traits, and like many human traits they will be found in varying degrees and complexities of expression among the world’s races. Given this, the civilized nations would do well to consider that their jurisprudence systems are incapable of impartially subsuming the less morally evolved in a manner that suits their own elevated moral sense. If you cannot or are unwilling to grasp that the defendant sitting across from you is closer in temperament and moral evolution to a feral beast than to your kin, you will forever be stricken with crippling doubt about the nature of your race’s achievements and philosophies.

Demographically, then, it becomes imperative that advanced peoples act to limit the fecundity of relative moral degenerates in their midst, or barring that to erect barriers against the incorporation of the upwardly moral and the downwardly amoral. And yet the exact opposite appears to be the rule of the land currently. Evolution is failing, thanks to a warped altruistic impulse that has provided and sustains a fitness advantage for morally infantile, and thus exceedingly dangerous, humans. Again, like the sperm bank scenario above, the state of nature has been upturned and bifurcated by a middleman — in this case, misplaced leftoid equalist generosity towards lesser people who would impulsively kill them without losing a wink of sleep — and traits that would normally get culled due to the dual pressures of sexual and natural selection become instead numerous and widespread.

Deus ex machina has become hominis ex machina.

PPS This post is supameta, and readers will find it hard to resist pointing out the impossibility of evolution “failing” in a system that is part of the natural universe, but as humans we have also evolved a disposition to employ value judgments that maximize our Darwinian fitness, which is a jargony way of saying that an impersonal natural process can indeed fail if it results in the failure of the one species which has proven capable of identifying that process.