From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 14:22:59 MDT
"Peter C. McCluskey" wrote:
>
> lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
> >So since the mindless *always* win these fights, who can suggest
> >a good two-word phrase for a voluntary movement of people who
> >favor obtaining for their children the best natural sperm or eggs
> >that they can?
>
> How about "sexual selection"? If the theory proposed in The Mating Mind
> is correct, it is already solving the problem that the eugenicists say
> we should be worried about, without any of the risks associated with
> giving a small group of experts authority to decide what is best.
Sexual selection already has a distinct definition. Furthermore, sexual
selection in this technical sense is very often a dysgenic pressure when
considered in terms of environmental fitness rather than competitive
reproductive fitness.
http://singinst.org/CFAI/info/glossary.html#gloss_sexual_selection
Sexual selection:
Sexual selection is a kind of evolutionary positive
feedback that can result in ridiculous and even
suicidal traits becoming overwhelming evolutionary
advantages, leading in some cases to a kind of
genetic suicide.
Suppose that there's some species - let's call it a
"tailbird" - that happens to have a small, ordinary,
unassuming tail. It also happens that the tails of
healthy tailbirds are slightly more colorful, more
lustrous, then the tails of tailbirds that are sick, or
undernourished. One day, a female tailbird is born
with a mutation that causes it to sexually prefer
tailbirds with bright-colored tails. This is a survival
trait - it results in the selection of healthier male
mates, with better genes - so the trait propagates
until, a few dozen generations later, the entire
species population of female tailbirds prefers
bright-colored tails.
Now, a male is born that has a very bright tail. It's
not bright because the male is healthy; it's bright
because the male has a mutation that results in a
brighter tail. All the females prefer this male, so the
mutation is a big success.
This male tailbird isn't actually healthier. In fact,
this male is pretty sick. More of his biological
resources are going into maintaining that flashy tail.
So you might think that the females who preferred
that male would tend to have sickly children, and the
prefer-bright-tails trait would slowly fade out of the
population.
Unfortunately, that's not what happens. What
happens is that even though the male has sickly
children, they're sickly children with bright tails. And
those children also attract a lot of females. Genes
can't detect "cheating" and instantly change tactics;
that's a monopoly of conscious intelligence. Any
females who prefer the non-bright-tailed males will
actually do worse. These "wiser" females will have
children who are, sexually, out of fashion. Bright tails
are no longer a survival advantage, but they are a
very strong sexual advantage.
Selection pressures for sexual advantages are
often much stronger than selection pressures for
mere survival advantages. From a design
perspective this is stupid - but evolution doesn't
care. Sexual selection is also a Red Queen's Race:
It involves competition with conspecifics, so you can
never have a tail that's "bright enough". This is how
you get peacocks.
Any time you see an enormously exaggerated trait
- the tail of a peacock, the antlers of a buck, the
intelligence of a human - it's a good guess that two
forces are at work: Competition with conspecifics,
and sexual selection.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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