Oh My Darwin! (Back to May/December)

[DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com]

what a great article . . .

Two random thoughts.

1.  The early adaptive environment:

> Proponents of EP are
>quick to emphasize that human nature was crafted by natural selection to
>solve the problems of life on the African savanna 1.8 million years ago

The main mechanism of Darwinian natural selection is extinction.  There is
very sketchy and poor evidence for extinctions of human populations in
prehistoric times.  There is, however, very good and clear information
about extinctions of human poulations in the last three hundred years
(basically, wherever white people have gone).  Why don't the
sociobiologists study this evidence?

*****************

2.  May and December/studs and slags reasoning:


>In the EP view, males are likely to be promiscuous because it is
>advantageous to spread their sperm far and wide. Females, on the other
>hand, are programmed to be more selective: Their eggs are more precious
>than male sperm, and they are strapped into months of gestation and
>suckling after conception.

My "understanding difficult science things" credentials are probably in the
upper quartile of this list.  I've had my head round Ricardian trade,
advanced derivatives pricing, the Feynman-Kac theorem, and the relative
merits of Fourier transforms and Monte Carlo analysis.  But I cannot
understand for the life of me how Darwinian evolution would select such
contrary traits for males and females of the same species.

**************

>three cheers for Richard Lewontin,

>Yoshie

And a few more from me.

dd











___________________________________________________________________________
                                         _____



  ---------------------------------------------------------
  This email is confidential to the ordinary user of the
  e-mail address to which it was addressed.  If you are not
  the intended recipient, please notify the sender
  immediately on (44) 171 638 5858 and delete the message
  from all locations in your computer. You should not copy
  this email or use it for any purpose, or disclose its
  contents to any person : to do so may be unlawful.

  Email is an informal method of communication and is
  subject to possible data corruption, either accidentally
  or on purpose. Flemings is unable to exercise control
  over the content of information contained in
  transmissions made via the Internet.  For these reasons
  it will normally be inappropriate to rely on information
  contained on email without obtaining written confirmation
  of it.
  ----------------------------------------------------------