From: Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 02 2000 - 21:01:23 MDT
On 7/2/00 9:24 PM, "Brian Atkins" <brian@posthuman.com> wrote:
> Timothy Bates wrote:
>> Tall is not a quantity, it is a relative quantity: taller than your
>> conspecifics.
>> If the perfect human is tall ("because he gets the girls"), you will rapidly
>> have half-mile high humans.
>>
>> Life is trade offs. We cannot, logically, all be tall. Therefore, we cannot
>> be "perfect".
> There are alternate ways to define tall. Such as "taller than the tallest
> woman" or "taller than the average height of a woman", neither of which
> would lead to a tall arms race if the woman also refrain from getting stuck
> in such a race.
The working hypothesis is that women like taller men, not men who are tall
erhtan them. They (this hypothesis runs) like these tall men because they
can disuade other less-tall men from attacking them and their children.
Hence this solution is no solution, that is, this solution assumes that
there is no problem.
tim
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