[ExI] IQ and beauty

[John Clark]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 8:14 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> You've again trimmed out context that would shed light on what your
> interlocutor meant. I don't believe you want to make others look foolish
> here.
>

​Oh for heaven's sake, anybody who wants to see untrimmed context can do so
in about .09 seconds.​

​I take responsibility for every sentence I write and I expect others to do
the same.​

​> ​
> My point was and is not that sexual selection isn't operating anywhere or
> doesn't explain anything but that without close empirical studies and some
> degree of skepticism, one might all too easily accept that a given just so
> story explains it all
>

​Obviously.  ​

​> ​
> We don't exactly know that the antlers were clumsy for the elk having
> them.
>

​They were on top of an animal's head and were 9 feet across and weighed 90
pounds! ​I think we can be certain such a monstrosity was clumsy,
or at least as certain as we can be about anything that happened 7700 years
ago. Trying to argue that such a thing wouldn't be clumsy just isn't
viable.



> ​> ​
> It's also easy to speculate they played a role in intimidate whatever
> wanted to dine on the elk.
>

​Why isn't there even one example in the entire 500 million year history of
the animal kingdom of any predator having antlers? Because antlers are
LOUSY weapons.   ​

>>
>>> ​>​
>>> What little I've read and seen on elks leads me to believe, perhaps
>>> ​ ​
>>> wrongly, that the males compete with each other for females
>>
>>
> >
>> ​>​
>> I'm sure they do, but that would still be a form of sexual selection.
>
>
> ​> ​
> Yes, but it's not females then selecting males on the basis of larger
> antlers.
>

​Then it would be males selecting who gets to mate based on the size
 of
​the​
 antlers
​, the bigger the better. And that would still be a very very bad rule of
thumb to ascertain fitness, to ascertain the probability of survival in any
given environment.  ​


> ​> ​
> In many male to male competitions I've read about or seen,it seems often a
> display or a low level of non-lethal violence is used to remove competitors
> from the running.
>

​Yes antlers work fine if you want ​
non-lethal violence
​, and ​
nonviolence
​ may have worked well for Gandhi but an animal would find it works less
well against a predator.


> ​> ​
> why don't humans have horns or antlers?
>

​If humans did have antlers and they had the same proportions as the Irish
Elk but were scaled down ​due to their smaller body weight and height then
humans would have antlers coming out of the top of their head that were 6
feet across and weighed 15 pounds. The angular momentum alone would
SEVERELY limit the speed you could turn your head even if the antlers
didn't hit anything, and they probably would.

​ John K Clark​
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151012/b5904c0b/attachment.html>