1450 words
PumpkinPerson’s most recent article Are muscular guys genetically inferior? is a joke. He makes huge assumptions and attempts to this ‘social experiment’ as evidence that women find ‘nerds’ more attractive. The logic here is that since East Asians are the ‘most evolved’ race and (in his world) they have the least testosterone along with the highest intelligence, that this is some kind of apex of human evolution. However the conclusions he makes off of this one video are very erroneous and I will explain why.
PP writes:
They are simply genetically inferior because the muscular body type branched off the evolutionary tree pre-maturely.
…No idea what he’s talking about. No source that the ‘muscular body type branched off the evolutionary tree prematurely.’ This is just an assumption because Africans supposedly have higher testosterone than both Europeans and East Asians, except East Asians have the highest testosterone out of all of all three traditional races, not Africans.
After watching this video I feel like starving my muscles off (not that I recommend that).
Good luck with that.
I realize not everyone agrees with the progressive model of evolution, but real scientists do. For example, check out this phys.org article:
This article has nothing to do with progressive evolution at all. In fact, this article is basically a summary of Full House (Gould, 1996) in which Gould argues that since life began at the left wall of complexity—where no organism can get simpler—that a right-tail distribution of complexity was inevitable. I have covered this here. This is not evidence for progressive evolution. It is, in fact, the opposite. He’s never read Gould’s books so he wouldn’t know that.
Now, PP’s contention that women find nerds more attractive has no basis. When I think of a ‘nerd’, I think of a scrawny pencil-neck, buck teeth, person with thick-rimmed black glasses. This, obviously, isn’t true. If it were, then why do East Asians—Japan specifically—have the lowest birthrates? Of course, social factors have a lot to do with it—birthrates decline in developed countries (Nargund, 2009; Sinding, 2009), as well as genetic ones (Harris and Nielson, 2016). So, clearly, the more intelligent, more developed countries don’t have more children, which then, of course implies that either higher IQ people are less desirable from a reproductive point of view (plausible), or they forgo having children until around 28 years of age (Lange, Rinderu and Bushman, 2016). Whatever the case may be, those with higher IQs do not conceive as many children as those with lower IQs, signifying something about their fitness aspects.
Further, women, evolutionarily speaking, sexually selected men for high levels of testosterone, which leads to bigger muscles, more defined facial features, higher levels of aggression (good for protecting genetic interests) and so on. The fact that some people may think that nerds have better prospects than non-nerds, evolutionarily speaking, had no basis in reality and for one to believe as much, it has to be driven by ideology.
Dixson et al (2010) showed that women prefer men with the mesomorphic somatype and ‘average’ body type, then prefer ectomorphs (a skinnier body type) and finally endomorph (a heavier build) ranging from most attractive to least. This study shows that, at least when it comes to European females, they prefer mesomorphic somatypes, which, more often than not, one who is over 6 feet tall will have. Does that seem like a ‘nerd’ to you? I don’t think so. Someone who has the potential ability to control a room with his presence doesn’t seem like a nerd to me. These are the same people who are CEOs.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell showed that on average, CEOs averaged just under 6 foot tall. Since the average American is 5 foot 9, the average CEO has a three-inch height advantage over the average man in America. However, when looking at those who are 6 feet tall and up, for average Joe the percentage is a paltry 3.9 percent while, in Gladwell’s sample, 30 percent were over 6’2″. So, Gladwell states, the lack of minorities and women in high positions has a plausible explanation: height. Men are, on average taller than women. Tall men earn more money than their shorter counterparts. Taller children also perform better on cognitive tests, taller men earn more money in Mexico, and taller children do better on learning tests in India (Lawson and Spears, 2016).
Women want taller men more than men want taller women (Stulp, Buunk, and Pollet, 2012). Tall men are also more likely to have a mesomorphic somatype. Those somatypes are seen as the most attractive. Does that seem like a nerd somatype to you? An athletic somatype? On the other hand, women aren’t attracted to short men (Nettle, 2002). East Asians—the so-called ‘most evolved race’—are the shortest race. Doesn’t look too good for them.
Furthermore, while East Asian men see themselves as attractive and dateable, they don’t believe society sees it that way. Forty-six percent of the sample said they could recall one instance where they hear someone state that they do not date Asian men, while eleven percent of Asian men have heard it at least six times. For Okcupid’s 2009 race/dating data, 18 percent of Asian women (3,381 yes) would date someone of their own background/skin color while 82 percent (17,227) wouldn’t! So much for the ‘most evolved’ race having dating prospects in their own race. East Asian men said yes to the question at a rate of 24 percent (7,965 yes) and no 76 percent of the time (25,358).
To further put this into perspective, white women would said yes to the question at a rate of 54 percent (154,595) and no at a rate of 46 percent (132,497) while white men said yes at a 40/60 yes/no rate (183,360/277,827 respectively). In total, 45 percent of whites would prefer to date someone of their skin color/ethnicity while 55 percent wouldn’t (337,955/410,324) while non-whites said yes to the question 20 percent of the time while they said no 80 percent of the time (56,080/222,484).
A 2014 follow-up found the same thing, however with Asian women showing some positive ratings toward Asian males (while all races of men didn’t find black women particularly attractive). However, Asian men were seen as the least attractive throughout the whole sample. Asian males are also seen as less attractive than males of other races (Fisman et al, 2008). In their sample, they found even after running regressions that Asian women found white, black, and ‘Hispanic’ men. They also show that even Asian men find white, black and ‘Hispanic’ females more attractive than Asian females.
In sum, PP’s contentions and reaches in his article are wrong. ‘Nerds’ (in the way I’m defining the word) are not more successful than the alpha CEOs who are over 6’2”. PP seems to have an aversion to testosterone (believes that it is the cause for racial differences in prostate cancer differences, but vitamin D deficiencies are a more likely culprit). East Asian men—the so-called ‘most evolved’ men of the ‘most evolved’ race do not fair well in terms of physical attractiveness, and this may be a reason why the Japanese birthrate is declining, with the average Japanese woman having only one child during her lifetime (Nomura and Koizumi, 2016). PP’s theory makes no sense, because women favor mesomorphic somatypes. Mesomorphs are more likely to be CEOs of 500 companies, more likely to be more cognitively adept and make more money than their shorter counterparts. Making evolutionary theories off of one (obviously fake) ‘social experiment’ is ridiculous. East Asian men, the so-called ‘most evolved man’ fall short in the dating game, due to being seen as less attractive.
References
Dixson, B. J., Dixson, A. F., Bishop, P. J., & Parish, A. (2009). Human Physique and Sexual Attractiveness in Men and Women: A New Zealand–U.S. Comparative Study. Archives of Sexual Behavior,39(3), 798-806. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9441-y
Fisman, R. J., Iyengar, S. S., Kamenica, E., & Simonson, I. (2008) (n.d.). Racial Preferences in Dating: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.610589
Gould, S. J. (1996). Full house: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony Books.
Harris, K., & Nielsen, R. (2016). The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. Genetics, 2016 doi:10.1101/030387
Lange, P. A., Rinderu, M. I., & Bushman, B. J. (2016). Aggression and Violence Around the World: A Model of CLimate, Aggression, and Self-control in Humans (CLASH). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-63. doi:10.1017/s0140525x16000406
Nargund G. (2009) Declining birth rate in Developed Countries: A radical policy re-think is required. F.V & V in ObGyn. 2009;1:191-3
Nettle, D. (2002). Women’s height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,269(1503), 1919-1923. doi:10.1098/rspb.2002.2111
Nomura, K., & Koizumi, A. (2016). Strategy against aging society with declining birthrate in Japan. Industrial Health INDUSTRIAL HEALTH,54(6), 477-479. doi:10.2486/indhealth.54-477
Sinding S.(2009) Population, poverty and economic development. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 364.
Stulp, G., Buunk, A. P., & Pollet, T. V. (2013). Women want taller men more than men want shorter women. Personality and Individual Differences,54(8), 877-883. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.12.019
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
I’m sure he doesn’t believe his theory. It was an attack on us and an ego booster for him but you see he defended it poorly in the comments section. Interestingly, he only based that on the video, he didn’t mention anything from his personal experience. The whole thing is bogus.
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It was an attempt at saving his ego. He has to force things and look for idiotic ‘experiments’ to ‘prove’ his ‘point’ on the ‘genetic inferiority’ of muscular men. And, as you said, he thought up a whole ‘evolutionary theory’ based off of one cherry-picked video.
Clearly, women like mesomorphs the most. That’s the CEO somatype. Is that a nerd somatype? Nope. The citation from Malcom Gladwell pretty much proves my point. Tall people are way more likely to be CEOs. I remember reading years back that something like 70 percent of CEOs were over 6”2′. Doesn’t seem like a nerd somatype to me, though I could be wrong. (Not.)
I proved that nerds (as I have defined them) do not get more women than non-nerds. Believing they do is fooling yourself.
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I find your source for East Asians having the highest levels of testosterone to be “problematic”, for a lack of better word. In fact, I would even say I don’t take the source and the blogger “Ethnic Muse” very seriously.
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What are your contentions? Taking EMuse seriously is one thing, denying the robustness of his data set is another. If you have any problems with it you’re more than welcome to do an analysis yourself.
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Its correct, however, Asians do not appear to have a form of testosterone that’s quite as usable.
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@danielchieh
Are you talking about free testosterone?
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Wouldn’t this go against Genetic Similarity Theory?
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No. Even when people marry/mate outside their ethny they still match on heritable traits. Read this.
When we tested predictions from genetic similarity theory, we found that spouses assort on the basis of the more genetically influenced of cognitive tests. From our analysis of data from several studies employing 15 subtests from the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition and 11 subtests from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, we calculated positive correlations between assortative mating coefficients and estimates of genetic influence both between and within samples. Thus, estimates of genetic influence calculated on Koreans and Canadians predicted assortative mating in European Americans in Hawaii and California. These observations were weaker when the g loadings of the tests, on which the spouses assorted most, were partialled out. They confirm the robust nature of the phenomenon and suggest that epigenetic rules may incline people to detect and prefer genetically similar others as marriage partners.
Genetic Similarity Theory, Intelligence, and Human Mate Choice
Read this paper too.
GENETIC SIMILARITY THEORY, ETHNOCENTRISM, AND GROUP SELECTION
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Isn’t Genetic Similarity Theory based on genetic distance, not matching on specific traits?
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It’s based on both. People who marry outside their ethnic group still match on heritable traits. Heritable traits are, of course, genetic in nature. So the fact that people marry outside of their ethny or don’t find their ethny attractive isn’t a hit to GST.
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The fact that they “match” on some arbitrary trait would not mean that they’re similar. Wouldn’t asserting that they’re similar be a version of Lewontin’s fallacy?
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They match on blood groups; women prefer the scent of men that they share more similar genes with, not men who they were more similar with (this occurred on the HLA gene, which was only from the father). Hell, even best friends are related on the genetic level on the magnitude of 4th cousins. Sure these are ‘arbitrary’, but when you have a lot of data points, a pattern begins to emerge. (Rushton and Ann Bons, 2005)
How would it be in the vein of Lewontin? Because he used blood groups to show that races are more similar than they are different and one of the things showing GST is using blood groups? I get what you’re saying, but there is matching on a lot of variables. Also, more heritable items better reflect the underlying genotype. So by using heritable traits, we can gauge degree of GST.
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I’m not necessarily arguing against the GST. My point is that I don’t see how inter-ethnic pairings are evidence for the GST, as you seem to suggest here. Regardless of how similar inter-ethnic mates may be on some trait or other, they would not be as similar as they are to their co-ethnics. That’s the Lewontin’s fallacy here.
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“I’m not necessarily arguing against the GST. My point is that I don’t see how inter-ethnic pairings are evidence for the GST, as you seem to suggest here. Regardless of how similar inter-ethnic mates may be on some trait or other, they would not be as similar as they are to their co-ethnics. That’s the Lewontin’s fallacy here.”
Ah, but here’s the thing. Inter ethnic pairing, as in macro-races, are rare compared to inter ethnic ones. Thus, when discussing them we are generally discussing outliers.
If anything, the fact that they match on traits individual strengthens it.
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For context on “outliers”, that technically we are more similar to our co-ethnics on average and thus we would match up on traits with co-ethnics more often.
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They’re outliers, but they still seem too common in multiethnic environments compared to what one would expect the GST to predict.
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Based on what intuition or data? Regarding the people in the U.S who mix the most with others are Asians and Hispanics, which can pretty much be chalked down to Asians being a very small community in the U.S and Hispanics not even being racial homogeneous to begin with.
As for your peacock example, it’s actually quite strongly the inverse on relatedness
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347204004129
However that is likely because they are low on diversity. In case of whether or not a species mates assortively would depend on it.
Basically you are assuming that all organisms breed the same way, which they don’t, and humans certainly show evidence of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating
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Re: Todd’s comment on phenotypic assortative mating not being the same as genotypic assortative mating. Apparently it ain’t so
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4226554/
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This is something that JayMan needs to get through his head.
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Is he a genomic assortative mating denier?
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Yep. He says the result of that study is due to population stratification.
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That doesn’t make a lick of sense. If rich folks for example were more similar to one another than to poor people, then they’d just be assortatively mating for those traits which separate the rich from the poor.
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I never said that specific phenotypes don’t map onto to specific genotypes.
I said that inter-ethnic mates who assortatively mate based on phenotypes, whether it be intelligence or height or taste in music or whatever, aren’t genetically more similar to each other than they are to co-ethnics who vary in intelligence, height, musical taste, etc.
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On the whole you’re always more similar to coethnics. But sexual selection can’t account for every gene, just the ones for height, IQ, etc. So they’re still selecting mates on the basis of similarity, but it doesn’t always work.
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In sexual selection, mate selection isn’t based on similarity, but on certain characteristics. For example, a female peacock doesn’t choose a male based on how similar it is genetically, but on how elaborate its feathers are.
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It’s based on both. High IQ women prefer high IQ men and low IQ women prefer low IQ men but all else equal they both prefer attractive men (strong jaw etc). In some ways they sort for similarity but in some ways they sort for desirable phenotypes.
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https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1244970645529792512
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Your old pal Captain Occam got a RationalWiki article:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kane#The_Bad
You’re briefly mentioned:
“Kane was topic-banned from editing the race and intelligence article the same time that Michael Coombs (a.k.a. Mikemikev) was.[29]
Kane and Coombs share the same hereditarianism point of view (POV), while both worked together against the same editors they thought were anti-hereditarianism, including an editor named Mathsci who was largely responsible for later getting Mikemikev banned.[30] The fact Coombs is a literal neo-Nazi, doesn’t seem to have bothered Kane; he has also defended other individuals with alt-right political views, however, he supposedly doesn’t share these views himself and is a libertarian.”
“In 2012, Kane joined the forum Wikipediocracy to criticise Wikipedia, where he has further defended Mikemikev against Mathsci.[34] Kane notes Mikemikev had emailed him Mathsci’s dox.[35] Mikemikev had posted this on
Stormfront.”
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