Friday, February 12, 2010

Mutant Atomic Super Men part 2


I've been thinking about these so-called atomic super men. And of course what I mean is, this hypothesized splitting of the human race in a few thousand years (see past post). While watching the horrible yet hypnotic tv show "Manswers" where some guy screams at you the whole time about things guys like (always acted out with unrealistic women present), I was informed about the possibility of men selling their reproductive haploid cells. You know what I'm talking about. And if you don't, I'll explain in the most family-friendly style possible. Men go to a clinic and undergo some activities. Then later on, women go to the clinic and can have babies, without the trouble of spending years finding, bonding with, and mating with a man. The problem (from my perspective) is that if I do this, then I don't get any choice for mate selection. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense for every man to do this, because it costs him nothing (in fact he gets paid right now, because so few men do it), and his genes could be passed on to several children without him having to feed or raise them. But my goal in life isn't just to spread my genes as far and wide as possible. If I found out that some female version of Hitler (see Godwin's Law), or someone ugly in every way (including on the inside) was the mother of my baby, I would feel kind of sick. Don't I have a responsibility to boycott, as every other man has, this woman who is spreading ugly genes? (Again I stress, I mean not just physically ugly, but selfish, rude, impatient, impulsive, short-sighted, irrational, etc.)

Let's put that on the side for a minute. I can assume that, because they actually pay us guys lots of money (like, $100 a week) to do this easy, quick activity, that not many men are doing it. And reading a little bit more about it, it looks like it takes kind of a lot of money for a woman to then benefit from this procedure. From this I infer that it happens rarely, and does not have a big effect on our gene pool. In addition, because these clinics are pretty selective about men, I assume that the "fit" genes from the men sort of balance out any potentially "unfit" genes from the mothers.

So if this process is having almost no effect, what happens to our unpleasant, ugly woman? She might not find an acceptable mate through her twenties, but as she gets older and her clock ticks louder, she may be forced to settle for someone just as unfit as she is. Two people with unfit genes will be more likely to make children with unfit genes, who may be stuck in the same situation. In fact, it seems like the children would be even less fit, maybe? I'm not a geneticist, but don't two tall people make a really tall child? And two unfit people make a really unfit child. Not sure about this. But anyway.

Isn't it conceivable that this group of people would eventually develop traits that cause them to "settle" for others similar to them? And of course most of the "fit" people won't want to mate with this group. Now we have the makings for a species split. Two groups of individuals of the same species who stop mating with each other. And eventually, each will appear attractive and fit to others of their own species. Sound plausible?

I'm not even convinced myself, but it's an interesting idea. And the evolutionary force of "male promiscuity" would oppose it. By that I mean, these desperate, unfit women might cheat on their unfit mates with more fit males to get better genes, while these more fit males would have no real cost in letting this woman have their baby. For this reason I don't think the human race will split until we colonize another planet, or until some kind of nuclear apocalypse.

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