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Episode 11: Love, Sex, Dating, Relationships Part 3
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so this week we're going to continue on to our topic about love sex dating and relationships and this is with a psychologist dr. Doug Lyall he's been in practice how long you been in practice for I don't know too long many decades well looks good what's uh what for uh clinical work for over 30 years Wow yeah that's that's quite a long time to do a lot of clinical work and especially with this perspective of you know using the the type of perspective that you bring bring to this practice to your practice is something I'm sure it was a very big pioneering thing to do yes it's uh these are really quite new ideas in psychology and then figuring out how to apply them effectively has been sort of what I've been up to since the early 90s great well before we begin with the questions I have a little clip to play you and this is a satire clip it's it's a it represents the conflict and the arguments that men and women had when they're in a relationship or when they were dating or when they're friends and they're trying to solve a problem and the man is always trying to solve the problem and find how to fix it whereas the woman more wants to just talk about the problem and express her feelings and of course this is a satire it says that to have a man and woman on a couch and the woman has a nail that's stuck in the middle of her forehead so let's look here this there's no pressure you know and sometimes it feels like it's right up on me and I can just feel it like literally feel it in my head and it's relentless and I don't know if it's gonna stop I mean that's the thing that scares me the most is that I don't know if it's ever going to stop yeah you do have a nail in your head it is not about the nail are you sure because I mean I'll bet if we got that out of there stop trying to fix it no I'm not trying to fix it I'm just pointing out that maybe the nail is cause you always do this you always try to fix things when what I really need is for you to just listen see I don't think that is what you need I think what you need is to get the nails okay fine I will listen fine sometimes it's like there's this a key I don't know what it is and I'm not speaking very well at all and all my sweaters are snagged I mean all of them really hard oh come on if you would just don't and they try to sum it up right like that's just beautiful right yeah yeah so so is this is this a satire is this how men and women really do do try to approach things yeah I think there's a there's definitely some truth in this and this is you know John Gray the the pop pop psychologist you know writing 20 years ago or whenever it was when he wrote Mars and Venus this was his sort of one one insight or he beautifully and comically told this story which led to the phenomenal success of Mars and Venus the and it's clearly a stereotype with with truth in it as many stereotypes do have greens of truth and this is clearly a man/woman difference no question mm-hmm okay so I saw this clip my sister showed it to me and it was just hilarious because the woman clearly has a nail in her head and every guy in the wall would look at this problem say you've got this problem and all the girl want to do is just talk about it so it was really really funny but but let's move on to the to the questions that that some of the users on the forum posted yeah this the first one that I want to go over question is it actually talks about evolutionary psychology and this notion that human nature is what drives our the decisions rather than say our you know our childhood or our traumas or anything like that and the question this user asked is why are people so offended by this idea that human nature drives our decisions well that's a really complicated question and there's there's there isn't one answer to this I think that that certainly I mean we could go down a list of potential motivations of why this is very upsetting for so many people but but one of them is that people do not like to be see I don't like to see themselves as animals and we sort of have separated ourselves out from the animal kingdom and we think of ourselves as essentially free agents operating or hovering above the animal kingdom and we don't place ourselves within the animal kingdom and with some justification because human beings are clearly spectacular in some ways but you don't you don't see other animals you know doing many of the things that humans do so I can understand why people it's like well if you can if you can build and drive a Ferrari you know doesn't this just make you above everything else and above the sort of lower quote/unquote instincts or behavior of lower animals and the answer is no it really doesn't it makes you a chimpanzee with a fancy toy that you you know chimpanzee with a the remote controller for a TV in front of it the truth is is that no no human being can build a Ferrari no human being can do that and no ten human beings put together could build a Ferrari the Ferrari is built on the back of of tens of thousands or actually probably millions of individual expertise in all kinds of different things collectively so the truth of the matter is the individual that's driving it is a very fancy very smart souped-up chimpanzee and human beings don't really have that clear and it offends their feelings of their own status to to see themselves sort of lowered in that way so that's one reason and another reason is that people don't don't like that there's a there's a right around the corner from this is the notion that genes are super powerful and there's that a highly determinative of action and not too far away from that is the notion that individual differences in genetics are going to account for the individual differences that we see in humans and this is very offensive for people partly for the reasons of historical processes that took place around the world in the early 20th century aa eugenics Adolf Hitler etc and so those notions were very very offensive and they were so offensive that post-world War Two in academia in the United States if you even breed the word of the concept that individual genetic variation had anything to do with outcomes and people you were essentially more or less kicked out of academia and seen as as not being not being appropriately open-minded and actually being fascist and being hateful and divisive and everything else in the Sun and so so that that lingers on in the spirit of political correctness particularly in the United States and also elsewhere but particularly in other states and so as a result people sort of feel like if you if you start to realize that individual genetic variation where you start to say that it has a lot to do with individual variation and outcomes then you are constraining some individuals people or their their children for example to certain socio-economic strata potentially or other strata for heterosexual attractiveness strata athletic strata etc and people don't like the idea that their freedom to rise or their freedom to essentially work hard and then trump other you know competitors is actually constrained by genetic variation and so that offends people you will hear parents very upset at any concept that their children be told that they cannot do something it's like oh well you can do anything it's like well no actually you can't if you're five foot six inch male you're not going to be playing Center for your high school basketball team it's not going to happen just that fast we're going to hit the constraints if you are of moderately average above intelligence you are not going to be a rocket scientist that's not going to happen and there's no amount of studying that you're going to do that's going to make up for it so but these that kind of talk sounds very dismissive and elitist and that that disturbs people makes them feel like they're going to be shut out where their their genes ie their offspring may be shut out and they don't like that and so that that's another thing that offends people so it also is true that men women differences that are very apparent to evolutionary theorists this this disturbs women because women like to believe or they have a hovering belief that when that men are being quote bad when they have wandering eyes that men the men that would want to have several sex partners at the same time during a course of their lifetime for many sexual partners in their lifetime but particularly more than one in a given time period this is this is bad this is essentially a moral failure or etc and so the female a bit I'm not saying this is all females I'm just scary Oh typing this but these are very very clear main effect of human psychology that because the male tendency to have a wandering eye is quite powerful and it is in direct contradiction to what what a female may want out of relationship with a given male that she sees any explanation from biology as a as essentially giving him moral equivalency over his tendencies versus her tendencies and this is very threatening and upsetting because the female is wanting to be on the moral high ground believe she is on the moral high ground and when evolution says no actually you are not on the moral high ground at all that these two tendencies are absolutely morally equivalent this is very disturbing and so that will also upset people I'll just say one more thing and then we're done it's also true that evolutionary theory basically sweeps aside other theories of how it is that we came to be and what our purpose is and who we answer to so it pretty well sweeps away religion and not that you might not believe in religious certain religious tenets and also believe in evolution people can can have those two thoughts in their head and have them essentially not having computed their way through and understanding that those two things are contradictory some people are unaware that those are in contradiction that they are logically in contradiction but the notion that those are potentially contradictory is also something that is going to upset people and it's been upsetting people since 1859 when Darwin published the origin so many we see sexual issues between people we see individual differences within populations being upsetting we see the very notion of human creation and our and our quote purpose to be to be challenging we see quite a number of problems with evolutionary theory and why this is upsetting people yeah because this is this is equivalent to I guess Copernicus when he figured out that the whole solar system you know we're revolving around the Sun rather than the other way around and it seems equivalent to the to the earth being somebody telling us that the earth is you know flat or round or whatever the prevailing theory was and it's it seems as though people get as upset about this as when you to India when when doctors were told that they have to wash their hands in between surgeries and and on top yes yeah this is in fact when you really get down to it there this is probably more upsetting than just about anything else because it's attacking it's attacking human personal interests and their status in a variety of dimensions number one you're just another animal okay number two men and women are significantly different and males wandering eye is not a sign of moral weakness number three you were created by an evolutionary process not by a Supreme Being that sculpted you to some kind of magnificent perfection and his or her image or whatever the and number four the individual differences between people that you observe are largely genetic in origin and many of those are are not subject to much modification and so therefore they're going to have enormous consequences for human success in a variety of pursuits financial athletic and in terms of sheer sexual attractiveness your sexual attractiveness is almost entirely dependent upon your genetic variation and almost not at all dependent on anything that you can learn do or you know mimic or anything else so all those articles in Cosmopolitan magazine and all the articles in the men's magazines that the tell that tell women if you if you say this particular magical phrase you'll get the guy to marry or to commit to you it's like why for the men if you say this medical you know technique and you run these routines you'll magically have all this casual sex that's absolutely not true is what you're saying yeah actually I was suggest in an airport and I was walking past something and it was a magazine cover I don't know it's one of magazine covers just out this month it's just a couple days ago and it said what to say to women you know the sneaky or the secret words to say to women to get them into bed or something I thought there it is you know there's no end to people selling you snake oil on how to get in a magical advantage in these processes the truth is is that you can improve your station to some degree and in some cases significantly through a hell of a lot of hard work and maybe some good luck but but the majority of the outcomes with respect to your intellectual abilities your physical abilities your sexual attractiveness the majority of the variants in humans is right there at the level of it's who your parents were not what it is that they taught you mm-hmm well so so then the things that can be done is basically understanding I guess in essence you know all these all these magazine covers in the magic I've always considered them as as beefing up the marketing system of the marketplace where as well let me explain what they're really doing what they're really doing is that they are they are attempting to make you an offer that you can't refuse so if someone is telling you well if you send me five dollars I'm going to give you back twenty five there's going to be a sucker that it's going to say wow I got to do that and we were so it somebody this is how Ponzi schemes work okay that it the the rate of return is just too good to be true and so this is exactly how they sell everything that they can these days is that they they make phenomenal and extravagant promises and somebody will buy it because somebody somebody's hoping that they can tap into some magic that will give them an advantage mm-hmm yeah and because I remember let's suppose the suppose you had an honest man who said I have a stock portfolio that I've done a lot of research and I believe that I can get you a 5.7 rate of return in the next five years each year I'm pretty sure that I can do it now that guy has no chance because somebody else is going to look at the same data and say I can get you seven and a half and then somebody else is going to say I can get you thirteen and a half and then somebody else is going to say I can get you fifteen and a half and then somebody else to say I can double your money every year okay and so where is our guide that has got it figured out that he can give you five point seven percent rate of return he's no where nobody's paying any attention to him because the marketplace is screaming that they've got a better value proposition on their corner of the marketplace and so that's all the magazine covers are is saying I've got a better deal for you than anybody else has for this thing that I know is extremely important to you which is to if you're a woman it's to land a high-quality meat permanently and if you're a man it's to land a whole bunch of good-looking casual sex out of a number of females well it seems to be working for them because uh those are multi-billion dollar industries right yeah people want that we've imagined Ellis family yeah like this yeah so the vitamin till industry is I mean yeah this is exactly how that this is how snake oil is sold and that's it's it's simply you simply need to do all you need to do is you need to get within the tolerance limits of the human reasoning capabilities and some humans aren't very smart and so as a result they can't compute realistic probabilities and their money is just as good as a Caltech you know scientists so I think it's entertaining when people argue about the fine points of politics but when the truth is is Johnny lunch bucket with an ad IQ and a job washing windows his vote counts just as much as the Nobel Prize winners in economics and the same thing is true in the marketplace of stuff so it isn't it isn't the the quote best most effective most truthful product doesn't win what wins is the one that manages to capture the hype and the hype is all about value proposition the organisms that are watching these advertisements trying to make decisions are running cost-benefit analysis and if it looks like your benefit is better than the other guys benefit for similar cost they're going to buy your product very interesting okay so now let's wrap this around and let's start the let's continue on from last couple of weeks about love sex and dating I love this topic about evolutionary psychology it is a really broader topic and you go over some of the common common things that people go under on your website esteem dynamics org and talking about this concept of being the genes but a couple of weeks ago in in our in our show you mentioned that and this is from a user who commented his name is series and and he mentioned that you mentioned a couple weeks ago that initially in the history of our evolution men had very high lust and females went only for the went for the best-looking males while men by kind of went for whatever they could get their hands on and so this users question is does this suggest that women always had a higher standard or higher standard of mating strategy and higher lust when it wouldn't be higher less that's a mistake women women's sexuality would have been much more you know than male sexuality so think about this that the if the women are working very hard to figure out who the specific best male is then the women's sexuality should be under a great deal of inhibition so when they bump into a male they're probably going to say no I don't think so and then they're going to bump into another one and say no I don't think so and they're going to bump into another one and say no I don't think so they are looking for the one that makes them weak in the knees okay and so the females sexual psychology is under a great deal of constraint relative to male sexual psychology this is not just true in humans this is a this is a trans species phenomenon women females have more at stake in population and males do because of the possibility of pregnancy they're going to make a greater investment in the offspring than a male is going to make so as a result they have to be more discerning about their mating choices and this is of course true in the human female the males are going to be much less discriminating so the males are in most species now have no discrimination whatsoever in other words they're they're basically like if it's female and it'll have sex with you do it and the answer is they probably won't do it because you have to be very fancy relative to other males in order for them to be willing now in our species what has happened is something very interesting which rarely does happen but it can and that is is that the the males started to invest in offspring and if males are going to invest in offspring rather than just screwing and leaving in the woods then they are going to have to then then sex is going to wind up being a much more investment Laden process for them and so as a result of that they are going to then start making discriminations about the females that they're having sex with and so starting probably about two million years ago what was the dawn of what we're going to call para bonding or what you would call love in our species where there would be an attachment between the male the female and there'd be repetitive sexual activity not just once and gone that this that this characteristic then this characteristic starts to be selected for and as that's happening the males are no longer indiscriminate they start to be like females remember the females were highly discriminating and because they're trying to pick only the fanciest smell but now the male starts to be discriminating and he starts to develop what we're going to call mating search images that include beauty so before this males did not have and do not have standards of female beauty in most species they don't care it's a female and she presents herself to you you service her but not in humans okay so humans are the male it has for a couple of million years now being increasingly and sophisticatedly selective about their partners they are still much less discriminating bend and females are so males are carrying around considerably more easily activated lust than females very very good okay and so nowadays what type of mating strategy this is from a user Lucy leo of Anini what type of mating strategy is humanity predisposed to and to clarify you saying are we naturally monogamous polyamorous polygamists you know monogamous what is this what are we mostly predisposed to yes we are a mess we are a bunch of mixed strategies and the way you can tell this is you you can look at various will certainly all you have to do is look at at human beings and you can see it you can observe their behavior very clearly they have a have some degree of tendency for romantic pair bonding they are clearly not monogamous as a species they do not behave like monogamous style species at all the if there are certain characteristics physical characteristics that are a dead giveaway in biology that tell you whether a species is going to be essentially a casual mating species or what we're going to call a he-man species so a he-man species is a species where the really sexy males get all of the action and the other males get none and all of the females line up to be serviced by the he-man so that is that stock operating procedure through almost every mammalian species and but there are a few species where they are pair bonders where where the species are very very faithful to each other possibly for life we're often through an entire mating season that will be how they will act and and the males will not be trying to cheat around the edges now there are there are two two characteristics that come to mind that that are tip offs for this one of those characteristics is that there's physical differences in the size between males and females so if the if the mammal of a species is significantly different in size than the female of the species then this is going to be what we call being sexually dimorphic ie to morphs and humans are moderately sexually dimorphic they are not as sexually dimorphic as some some species you will see some species where the male is vastly larger than the female where the male is three times the size of the female so in elephant seals for example the male elephant seal is much greater than a female and we would expect that this would be a he-man species that the male has been selected for this tremendous size because there's so much at stake in being alpha that the males have been genetically in competition for size and ferociousness and so they just continue to get larger and larger and larger and larger with succeeding generations until the point where you've got a gigantic male versus very much smaller females now that is not true in humans so in humans typical difference between male and female is you know I think it's 20% of body size or something like that in terms of body weight the there's some normal difference between males and females there's about a five or six inch difference in their height which is about 10% but strength is generally considerably different so we are a moderately sexually dimorphic species which would tell us that we would expect to be half as monogamous with a bunch of cheating around on the sides and quite a bit of casual mating strategy the other the other evidence is to look at a difference or different look at the size of men's testicles relative to their body weight and so if you actually plot primates for example on a graph about the weight of their testicles relative to their body size this tells you how much sperm is being produced and how important it is to produce a great deal of sperm in that species now if you are a species where there is where they are very faithful then the testicles are small relative to the body size because they're not needing to try to produce a lot of semen because they're just going to like impregnate this one female and then they're going to be done and they're going to be helping raise the critters whereas if you have like in the chimpanzee the male's do not help with with the children at all and there's a tremendous competition to try to mate as often as you can as a male chimpanzee so it's a fairly standard operating procedure in chimpanzee society for for an individual to be having sex probably eight times a day and that would be typical and so what's happening is a female is having sex with probably eight different partners in a day so there's tremendous competition within her reproductive tract of the sperm so the sperm is literally at war with each other and the more the more soldiers that you have the better off that you are so male chimpanzees produce tremendous amounts of sperm and there are testicles are gigantic compared to humans so if you look at humans we are on a log linear graph and you plot us we we wind up right in the middle between a team and species like a chimp species at a and a pair bond species like some other species are and we look like we're a half-ass mixed strategy if you were to hand this to a biologist that didn't know anything about humans some other species some Martian biologists they would say ha well I would expect that there would be you know some loving attachment and but they would last for a while for a portion of the lifetime and but they probably would then have some novelty seeking where they would really be curious about sleeping with other people I have sex with other people they probably would and so there would probably be a lot of conflicts over how many resources that we would give to offspring the male would have a strong tendency to try to chisel the female on the amount of child care and ie resources that they would direct towards offspring and they would be looking to impregnate other females on the sly and they'd be trying to essentially minimize the amount of investment per copulation that they could get away with because the females are and the females on the other side of this would be psychologically engineered to try to get the maximum amount amount of resources out of the males per population and so this would be an endless evolutionary game between the male and female of the species as they battle with each other as the females would withhold and they would use various and sundry sexual strategies to try to reduce copulations per unit of per unit 'iv of resource acquisition and the males would be trying to get one up on that because the male is effectively are competing with the other males in order to get populations and each of them in principle wouldn't have any more resources than the other one on average and so as a result there's this is going to be quite a game of males telling females that they're going to give them a hell of a lot of resources but then as soon as they can get to the eggs they try to back off on those resources so hopefully what I'm describing here suggests a tremendous amount of what people's life experience has been and I'm sure it does you know as the married male males are coming back from checking checking checking in the mirror but via is the audio okay here yes right yeah yeah and you know I was just talking about this with a friend the other day is that that that the psychological process of advertising that you're willing to share your resources very much a first date where you are willing to buy a dinner or drink or a movie ticket or something like that to advertise hey look I've got resources and I'm willing to share them with you what what's astonishing to me is that of course in my career I talk to a lot of women and they will tell me that a lot of men don't do this we're men signal very clearly at the first date about how they're they're concerned about how much is this is going to cost and and who's going to pay for what and I would just suggest to all males listening which there might be like 13 of us but for goodness sakes don't signal any cheap behavior on a date for God's sakes this is a disaster and you are much much better off overspending and making it very clear that you have no problem letting go of these resources you aren't you aren't doing yourself any good by by signaling that you are trying to save eighteen or twenty three dollars on not spending quite that much on her because after all you might not get laid so you're like running this cost-benefit analysis on copulation right there staring at 20 bucks for God's sake don't do that that's a disastrous strategy you know I was reading one of these forums and and I came across an article and the logic I believe is that they say they were the the article was basically saying that well if you're stingy with your money that it makes the other person believe that you're stingy with your mates so they've got a compensating like I don't raise their game which made no sense to me because you know you know ten twenty dollars is nothing when it comes to advertising in a business so why is that any different than dating what what will help me help me understand so their logic was if you're stingy on the date then then what does what does the other person infer the other person refers that you're a picky male in general and so they are then motivated to elevate their own game and display more the Royal tendencies this is great you know you showed me somebody's somebody was had written about their objections to to evolutionary psychology this was one of our our listeners who had is in in England and in England as opposed to America evolutionary psychology is very much more part of the culture and the teaching of the university level largely because of the history of Darwin and then Richard Dawkins and William Hamilton and many of the major evolutionary theorists have been British and so one way or another that that is in much it's a much more palpable message over there than it has been over here and it's been better popularized the and the criticism was that gee you know everything if you listen to some evolutionary theorists like everything under the Sun that you see they have a story for and and is this correct or isn't it correct and the answer is is that no there is not an evolutionary story for everything under the Sun not exactly maybe in a very very long reach through conflated convoluted reasoning there might be but I understood the objections even though there was there was some there was some fuzzy thinking that I was reading in this person's objections but this would be a point of where of this type of objection that somebody they can sit back and say well if you're a picky then they're going to think you're a picky in mate selection so therefore what they're going to have to up their game and like this is ridiculous this is a this is the notion here is that that there are queues going back and forth between male and female as they try to they try to read various aspects of the other person's personality as well as how it is how valuable they seem to the other person so let me give you an example of this is how it is that you play cards or negotiate you know if you're trying to buy a used car like you want to show that you're interested but you don't want to show that you're super interested if you act when you are buying a used car like you're really not very interested then when you give your offer they're going to be like well you're not that interested so the next guy that's more interested is going to be willing to offer more so the hell with your offer if you say oh my god is credible of this car what do you want for fourteen thousand years fourteen thousand they're going to think well now wait a second you were so excited I could have gotten more for it okay so this is the gamesmanship that goes on and the humans have evolved mechanisms for reading each other and so I have seen many times where some some guy is just so enamored with some girls good looks but he's falling all over himself and she is designed by nature to read these kids and to realize what wait a second I must be fancier than anything else that you've ever had and if that's true then I don't want to be with you because it means that this would be your beneath me and so that behavior isn't going to work but the the I've read like I don't know 15 or 20 pages a few years ago of a guide named the pickup artist or you wrote some quasi evolutionary thinking on these issues the notion that you can act cool to a female that you're interested in and that act like you're not that interested and that this is going to increase her her what do you call it interesting luck or disconnects equated yeah like but maybe she won't qualify I mean this is very interesting speculation but I have to tell you empirically it's totally full of shit the true the matter is is that when when human beings first of all the female in the majority of cases drives the relationships so we know this from scientific evidence so the notion that a male can can can actually stoke her interest by acting like he's not interested is a very interesting convoluted idea but this is actually a desperate maneuver on the part of males that have had a hard time stoking any female interest the truth is is that if you're a male who is struggling to potentially qualify for a female who you would really like to be with but she is acting not not that interested the worst thing that you could possibly do is act like you're not interested human beings are designed by nature to seek esteem they desire signals that indicates that they're valuable what you want to do is you want to signal to her that she is valuable you want to be honest about it you want to be smooth about it but you definitely don't want to underplay it not unless you happen to be internally falling all over yourself but if you're falling all over yourself nothing I'm going to tell you is going to help you because you're going to mess it up anyway and god help you that maybe you're just going to have left but there yeah the truth of the matter is is that the worst thing that you could ever do is to try to play it cool like she doesn't qualify that would be if that that's a fiasco you would you want to look people yeah you want to look people in the eye and you want to let them know that you view you are interested that's very important hmm what are some techniques to give a steam in that in that in that scenario well one of the ways that you're going to give a steam is you're going to make sure the I'm a quitter yeah if you're if you're male yeah if you're a male for goodness sakes you are definitely going to signal that you're generous and if you act chintzy with female you are basically telling her I don't think you're that good-looking you know these eggs are really aren't that worth having that's what you're singling and so don't think that she's not going to infer that she is smart enough to realize that if you were really attracted to her you sure as hell wouldn't be counting your money and trying to save twenty bucks so you want to be very relaxed and generous you want to be signalling you know that the person is valuable and the way you signal the people are valuable is you both ask them questions and you tell them stories about yourself and but you certainly ask questions and you give compliments the this is how it is that we signal to other people that we esteem them and along the same line actually this is this is a question that came up in the same forum of of this evolution of psychology and this came from from a female user who wanted to know what's a Darwin had some very very controversial opinions about women being inferior men and they wanted to know your opinion in terms of contribution to society intellectual emotional capacity this user would like to know our women inferior to men in this regard well you know that's a strange question let's back it up for just a second before we answer it in a way that might get me in any kind of hot water the first we're going to look at the world and we're going to say our males superior to females in general and the answer would have to be well according to what criteria so the are males larger than females is that a good thing are males more physically capable in some ways than female like by what criteria so by by there's certain criteria where men and women are different and somebody finds those differences valuable in some ways like I find women a hell of a lot more valuable than men I just send all the rest of you die Hawk three and a half billion women all to myself okay so the the point is is that it the net now if you're going to try it so clearly from the standpoint of biology neither male nor female is more valuable they are equally valuable which is why you find the sex ratios as effectively 50/50 you know that's that's how that works if females were inherently more valuable we'd see we'd have more females than males because it would be a better biological reproductive system if males were more valuable than females than that then the opposite would be true the fact that that things are essentially 50/50 tells you that from the standpoint of biology they are both equally viable methods for reproducing genes which is their ultimate biological purpose now if you start talking about American society and you say well who's more valuable to society well what do we mean by that and what valuable to whom and what do we mean by society once again I would just send all the male's be dead personally and so as a result like once again we have the situation that like who are we talking about now if we're going to try to say what about contributions to science or business or blah blah blah okay we're going to find that in general the following is going to be true that males are are driven to try to amass esteem in and try to do very spectacular things in order to be spectacular in ways that will enable them to inseminate females without without large investments so they're there the point here is to try to become a he-man and and so this is this is a big driving force of male achievement so if we were to look at major achievements by almost any measure through through a period of human history where there's been basically free enterprise and the the shackles had been lifted off of the female so if you looked in America in the last 30 years so since 1986 there's been no real constraint on female achievement if you wanted to be the president of a big corporation go ahead nobody's going to really stop you okay if you wanted to be a chief litigator you know it's a big law firm nobody's going to stop you and you might say oh the good old boy next works will stop you but they won't the truth of the matter is that that women have achieved spectacularly in every area of American society in the last 30 years in increasing numbers but it's going to turn out but there's going to be a cap on that relative to males and the reason is is the males have so much more to gain than a female a female in principle only wants one really good male she wants the fanciest male that she can get she wants to repetitively have sex with that individual I'm talking about from a deep biological motivation perspective she's looking to actually land one great victory and be done the male of our species does not have that as his cheap overriding goal some of them do if they're more paraben dominant many of them don't the the species is playing a mixed strategy and the truth is is that the average male would just as soon have a harem and the only way he's going to get a harem is he has to obliterate competition by being spectacular it's going to turn out that when you observe males who are spectacularly successful you will overwhelmingly find that they will they will be involved in multiple relationships so one of the famous lines in the NBA is you know what's the hardest thing to do when you when you leave home to go on play on the road and the answer is try not to smile when you kiss your wife goodbye and this is this is you know this reality okay and this is uh this is a tough you know difficult reality this is the philosophers have a name for this and we call this the tragic view and of existence doesn't mean that it's a tragedy it just means that there's that there's conflicts of interest that are just tough and this is one of those conflicts of interest but in answer to the question are males more valuable than females the answer is males on average will do many more spectacular things than females per thousand or 400,000 or per hundred in any per capita issue and the reason why is very simple is that a male could sire a thousand children and a female can only be mother - I think the world's record is 63 and so the fact that that difference could be in principle a hundred to one that there's a difference in in the the amount of reproduction that an average male versus what an average female could could do biologically that means that the male is massively interested in great achievements and some of them will do great achievements they will take tremendous risks and they will pour energy into developing abilities in developing spectacular outcomes and females are just not that motivated as soon as they've got themselves a couple of kids from a good guy they're more or less satisfied psychologically and that that is the reason why there is a difference in the achievement levels okay that makes that makes a lot of sense and it sheds shows a lot of light under this question so so the next question from sublime mongrel asks what's the truth behind this hypergamy and doesn't mean that social and cultural values will lose out what does that person what are they asking translate for me uh they're trying to figure out what hypergamy is and from what I from what I've read it's basically it's a desire to get a better and better mate ie you know if I date somebody when I'm 17 and they're they're extremely attractive the next one that I want to want to date is not going to be like you know like the unattractive is I want to be comparable and and and maybe always even date date higher but I believe that the question is about about women more so than men and so let me so let's read the question again what is the truth behind hypergamy and does it mean that social or cultural values will always lose out I oh you mean because people will always be wanting to do better that we're never going to sort of we're not going to see a society that has mating stability which would be potentially seemingly advantageous to to a cultural to societal stability is that kind of the idea I guess so yeah it sounds it sounds sound about right yeah I'm not really sure exactly what the person is asking but the the the truth is is that that people are are running cost-benefit analysis on their on their mating situation and they're they're going to always be asking the question could I do better and the the the answer is going to be complex for every individual for one thing it could be that they are getting evidence from their mating environment that they could do better so let's suppose you're a guy who is a rock singer and you've been struggling along you know playing your guitar and little holes in the wall and then you get discovered and then it turns out you go to Hollywood you cut a record and then you wind up with a big hit and now suddenly you got a lot of money and a big fan following and you know the girl that you were with you know you were about a seven she was about an eight and a half and she was hanging with you she might you might even be married to her but suddenly now you've got a hell of a lot of resources and a lot more options and so now you are absolutely running the cost benefit on whether or not it's time to move on now in those situations usually the guy it does move on so that's that's very typical the so the that would be the inside that the programming of humans is not necessary females right I understand know so in other words what what I'm getting at is that human beings don't they don't have a incessant desire to get a better mate what they have is an incessant cost-benefit analysis that they're running okay so there are many people that have trekked their way through the marketplace bumped into somebody at when they're 35 and said you know what this is as good as I can do and they're very happy about it and those two people may actually remain pretty happy with their choice indefinitely okay the but there's many people where that's not going to happen where for various and sundry reasons that individual was the best individual that they could bump into at the time and that they they were they initiated a relationship and they were in a relationship for a while but the truth of the matter is a year goes by two years goes by and they are running the cost-benefit analysis and that all it takes is some somebody at work flirting with them that's five percent more attractive than a partner and suddenly their partner's not looking so good and so the the net so there are factors there is not an incessant novelty factor they would necessarily say that a person could never be could never be in stasis in a relationship and be willing to settle down however the novelty factor in males is greater than the novelty factor in females for reasons that I've mentioned before and so it's going to turn out that this this little burning candle inside of male psychology is going to be tougher on the the quote cultural ideal of everybody like happily pair-bonded and everybody's stable okay which is essentially a bullshit concept anyway when it really gets down to it because the truth of the matter is is that you know who is this good for it isn't you know I'm not sure what it's not good for divorce lawyers like who exactly is best best off under a completely stable situation so there there are there are people who are who benefit from that and there are people who don't benefit from that my children are children more better off in a more stable environment yes children are better off in a stable environment but children can have stable environments that are being single parented so children are actually best off under circumstances where they have stability with respect to resources and they are and that there is not acrimony between the parents so if there's acrimony between the parents but they're living in the same house that is a worse situation for children than with those with those parents divorce living in different houses but there being peace so people need to keep that in mind that what children what's uncomfortable for children is is instability and resources and emotionally instability in the parents but that's what makes childhood tough incidentally it's not going to scar them it's just unpleasant it's like being in a hot room like you're uncomfortable but it's not going to kill you being in a child if it's uncomfortable for reasons of your parents being unsettled and uncomfortable is uncomfortable but it isn't damaging you and so it's useful for parents to know that their children are not damaged if they go through divorce they're made uncomfortable that's all that's a big difference there's an enormous difference between discomfort and damage big difference time see uh yeah so I forget where the original question I lost track of the original question we were talking about hypergamy and how social and cultural values that yes I think I now understand the word hypergamy which is this sort of potential incessant desire to trade up and I would say that that is that is not actually a characteristic of our species a characteristic that is interesting is novelty seeking particularly on the part of the male but also on the female so that adds instability to monogamous pair bonding as well as the cost-benefit analysis that people run as circumstances grow and change and people's fortunes rise and fall nothing like getting nothing and getting a guide monogamous nothing will get a guy more monogamous oriented to losing his job suddenly his wife's the best thing that he could ever get and he loves her and it will stick with her forever nothing more likely to cause a female to leave a guy than a guy losing his job suddenly the cost-benefit for her has changed that she could now maybe find somebody that's employed as opposed to unemployed and she's looking for resources to trade resources for her sexuality and by god that is exactly when women are most likely to leave their mates when they lose their jobs so to work hard and don't lose your job men yeah for women the most likely time that you'll be cheated on will be when you're pregnant so that makes also perfect evolutionary sense so the male basically stares at the female's big belly and says no point in having sex there the job has already been done let me look across the street so you don't if you're a female you do not want to mimic pregnancy by having extra weight that's why you want to eat a diet of whole natural foods and exercise and keep yourself in good shape that'll keep the guy interested in you and as a male work hard be responsible financially and and be responsible professionally because that's going to be a very important variable that the women are always going to be analyzing
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