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Comment Re:Simpsons...errr....Matt Ridley did it (Score 1) 85

Or in the "Red Queen."

So much time would be saved, and so much more understanding of evolution would be had, if sexual selection was thought in schools. My guess is that this isn't done be because of the word sex in the name.

In the context of the article:

survival of the fittest -> narrows the gene pool
sexual selection -> increases variation in the gene pool

The fist part prunes the "bad" genes. The sexual part actually encourages any "bad" genes that became sexually attractive by any random start.

The examples are peacocks tail, deer's antlers and human brain.

Comment Re:Occulus Rift (Score 1) 186

"Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?"

Oh boy, somebody is going to get very disappointed.

Comment Re: Progenitors? (Score 0) 686

I would recommend an excellent book "The Red Queen" by Ridley.

It explains why sexual selection pushes many organism features that are in fact handicaps for survival.

Human brain has all the characteristics of a feature evolved to be a handicap. It uses 40% of total energy, it evolved quickly, and we seemed to survive without it being such a big organ before.

Once you have a large brain and language, it becomes harder to just look at the genetic evolution, since it becomes a genetic/memetic evolution. And it is this person/culture complex that is seemingly most evolutionary successful thing.

One could also argue that is it in fact bacteria that are evolutionary most successful organisms on earth.

I would agree that it is hard to argue that a huge brain is a survival handicap. It may have started that way, but it got useful in all sort of ways. And also, we all look at this problem from the brain's perspective, since this is what we actually are, and not from the genes' perspectives. Also, being in a long non-food crunch situation also makes those 'details' hard to see.

Comment Re:Progenitors? (Score 1) 686

Excellent points.

Maybe the Earth is just lucky to contains all sorts of frequencies with various periods that hugely help evolution.

Daily temperature cycles, yearly temp cycles, ice ages, continents moving around, volcanos with huge cycles.

Perhaps we got lucky that the earth is not locked with the sun, that is, only one side always pointing to the sun. Perhaps we had some lucky series of large comet collisions that kept those cycles going. This could be quite rare thing in the universe.

Comment Re:Progenitors? (Score 1, Interesting) 686

That is a very simple and probably the most important explanation.

Life does not need intelligence. In fact intelligence itself is a handicap, and a product of sexual selection and its handicap principle. (Same with elks' antlers and peacocks' tails.)

We don't know how long do intelligent species exist. By using one smoothing technique, one can say that they live for average of 200k years.

It's worse for nuclear civilisations. A guess by the same rule would say that they live for around 100 or so years.

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