"I would speculate that for many generations, evolution did not care much about your IQ. In the past few hundred years, with modern culture, IQ began to matter more. That is my story for the Flynn Effect."
Evolution cared enough to keep making 'modern' humans many standard deviations smarter than their distant ancestors, long before there were any IQ tests or Flynn effects.
Evolution 'cares' about any potentially useful capability like intelligence that might offer an individual a competitive advantage, and keeps increasing the average frequency and degree of its expression until it hits some kind of equilibrium in balance with a countervailing cost or disadvantage.
So, for example, the bigger brains needed for greater intelligence need lots of (historically scarce) calories and require infants to be born at higher risk with larger, squishy, fragile skulls to make it out of the womb of females, the pubescensce and fertile years of whom had to be delayed over time in part to make those wombs larger too and thus capable of handling larger-headed babies. Delay of years of first viable reproduction is also costly in evolutionary terms.
I think there are a number of aspects at work here.
1: Dating apps encourage people to select for things that are easy to communicate, which generally means easy to measure. People start paying attention to what they can easily compare and start to ignore what they cannot. You see a similar effect in commerce when e.g. tool manufacturers will put stats for an item on the box that don't actually matter much, but people will use them to compare without even knowing what they are. This number is bigger, so this must be better.
2: Short people consume less food, hide better/don't stand out in a crowd (important when one is getting picked/volunteered for something nasty), and have advantages in some sorts of fighting. All bonuses to survival. Plus, when you are protein constrained, many men will be short regardless of gene potential.
3: People historically have had a lot less choice when it comes to mates. Short men might be less desirable, but if it is a choice between a short guy and nothing, short will do. Humans don't have the winner take all style of reproduction of many animals.
4: Gene studies suggest that something like twice as many women have managed to pass on their genes than men. That is a bit of a fuzzy number, but it suggests that the majority of men never successfully pass on their genes, which itself suggests that the outcomes are fairly random, the result of wars and such which kill fairly indiscriminately. A small advantage towards smaller men in a highly deleterious context can overwhelm disadvantages in more stable context. In other words, being 5% more likely to survive a war where half your village's males get killed might well overwhelm a 20% propensity to get picked last at the dance.
The woman who became my wife was initially attracted to me because she liked my friends. My guess is that dating apps do not make it easy to advertise “I have nice friends,” nor do they make it easy for women to realize that having nice friends is important in a partner.
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This would be my own advice to people. I think online dating is a cesspool for this reason.
So why do people do it? I don't know many people that enjoy online dating that much.
Mostly I think you could call online dating "low risk/low reward/instant gratification". Hits all the right places in our hindbrains if you want engagement.
First you need to convince me that you have a representative sample. Next you need to convince me people like blind dates and other offline dating more.
Well, tall people need to eat more than short people, and if the tribe is in a constant state of near starvation the members who can get by on fifteen hundred calories of grubs and fallen fruit may do as well as, or better than, the ones who need twenty-two hundred. We can easily be blinded by recent events.
Tom Wolfe observed that whenever we walk into a room full of people, we unconsciously but invariably assess the status of everyone there, and where we stand in the hierarchy. I suspect that short men (and possibly women) do the same thing as regards to height. Tall men (like myself) never give our height a thought, but it seems be a matter of smoldering resentment in the minds of short men. As a schoolboy, I never had trouble with bullies, but I was constantly set upon by small, pugnacious boys who thought they could take advantage of my mild nature and make a name for themselves by knocking me down. I can still see their furious faces looking up at me through a blur of tiny fists.
Some online calculator thing tells me I am 97th percentile of tallness in the US.* In my neighborhood I bet I'm no more than 95th percentile - maybe much less.
.
*Same website says I'm 99.379th percentile in South Korea. I'm a fucking weirdo there.
I think people underestimate how quickly evolution can shift the distribution of genes under selection pressure. New mutations can take millions of years to get right, but altering the distribution of existing genes can happen in just a few generations.
I’ve often wondered if the stereotype of the “skinny nerd with glasses” vs the “strong jock” exists – and is real – because those represent the two ways for a man to pass on his genes. Women aren’t going to go for weak *and* dumb, so men who are both don’t reproduce. But if you have brains or brawn, you’ve got a chance to pass on your genes.
It seems online, women might be selecting against brains-without-brawn, which probably isn’t a good thing.
I'm going from memory that the genes for lactose tolerance appear to have become dominant in Europeans and their descendants in about the last 10,000 years, supporting your point.
Many women may say they won't date anyone under 6 feet tall but that doesn't mean they actually won't. They may well "settle" for a shorter man for a first date, and he then has a chance to show her he has other desirable qualities.
And--believe it or not!--some men lie about their height on their profiles.
Genes determine potential. They confer the maximum height you can be, but do not guarantee that you will reach that height. The deciding factor is nutrition which is why average heights now in developed Countries are higher than even a century ago. If you visit Britain and take tours around castles and centuries old dwellings, you will notice how low the doorways are, how short beds in those days were. Calcium depleted diets also meant long bones dud not develop as they should. Short statured men were best suited for working in the deep shaft coal-mines. Tunnels were not very high and coal seams not very wide. Coal was hewed by miners lying on their sides in the coal seams with picks and shovels... not suitable for large men. Wages for miners at the coal-face were much higher than other occupations because of the danger, dirt and hard work - a good catch for a woman. Also women were shorter formerly, so short men were a good physical match. So, nutrition, environment, attractiveness for a mate, and best adaptable... as with all organisms.
It's the short women! The men in my ancestry are over 6 feet tall. The men in my wife's ancestry are over 6 feet tall. My mom is short. My grandmothers are short. I am under 6 feet tall. My wife is not short but our daughters are short. I have one son over six feet tall. The other is shorter than me.
No woman in my family over 4 generations has ever been more than 5'4", even as nutrition & health has improved. My sister, her two daughters and myself stand side by side & you could put a level on our heads. I suspect there's a x-linked limiter in play; my brother is 6'.
Height burns calories, like everything else in the body. So does a big brains (IQ).
Whether its selected for depends on whether the benefits outweigh the cost. Being a tall viking means you might be able to use your height to kill other men in combat and take their calories. Having a high IQ might help a Jewish merchant get better deals and thus more calories.
But it's a give and take. Even the Spartans were short, at some point the extra calorie requirement wasn't worth more height. The Romans were famously shorter then many of their opponents, but made up for it with organization and discipline.
I think I read that Jews are slightly shorter then whites, which would make sense given the selection pressures.
The modern Flynn Effect definitely isn't a genetic phenomenon, though in some cases its a biological one (nutrition, etc). There isn't a lot of selection impact today. Selection impact would require that the children of low IQs not survive to adulthood because they can't obtain calories or treat/avoid disease, but that isn't the case. Mostly though Flynn Effect is just fake (not real 'g').
Selection effect did happen in Europe and especially NW Europe during the high Middle Ages and modern period. Warfare was not so total that people with non-violent tendencies were weeded out of the gene pool, cousin marriage was forbidden, property rights were strong enough that yeomen farmers and businessmen could have higher surviving fertility then others, and practitioners of private violence (murder) were executed by the state. This condition carried through to the modern era when mass availability of calories and effective medical treatment ended the selection pressure.
"I prefer to think that the fitness of short males is not as weak as the dating apps would make it appear"
I think of height as largely a proxy or signal of other things and with the online environment other proxies that probably matter more are not as easily discernible. Things like smell, symmetry, and personality.
Unless men are also checking 'I want tall' in the dating app, it is going to be difficult to cull short people from the human race. Long before that happens, we'll have the ability to edit our children's genotype, and once that happens, then shortness may disappear.
"I would speculate that for many generations, evolution did not care much about your IQ. In the past few hundred years, with modern culture, IQ began to matter more. That is my story for the Flynn Effect."
Evolution cared enough to keep making 'modern' humans many standard deviations smarter than their distant ancestors, long before there were any IQ tests or Flynn effects.
Evolution 'cares' about any potentially useful capability like intelligence that might offer an individual a competitive advantage, and keeps increasing the average frequency and degree of its expression until it hits some kind of equilibrium in balance with a countervailing cost or disadvantage.
So, for example, the bigger brains needed for greater intelligence need lots of (historically scarce) calories and require infants to be born at higher risk with larger, squishy, fragile skulls to make it out of the womb of females, the pubescensce and fertile years of whom had to be delayed over time in part to make those wombs larger too and thus capable of handling larger-headed babies. Delay of years of first viable reproduction is also costly in evolutionary terms.
I think this is relevant to the topic:
https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1671513584738750467
I think there are a number of aspects at work here.
1: Dating apps encourage people to select for things that are easy to communicate, which generally means easy to measure. People start paying attention to what they can easily compare and start to ignore what they cannot. You see a similar effect in commerce when e.g. tool manufacturers will put stats for an item on the box that don't actually matter much, but people will use them to compare without even knowing what they are. This number is bigger, so this must be better.
2: Short people consume less food, hide better/don't stand out in a crowd (important when one is getting picked/volunteered for something nasty), and have advantages in some sorts of fighting. All bonuses to survival. Plus, when you are protein constrained, many men will be short regardless of gene potential.
3: People historically have had a lot less choice when it comes to mates. Short men might be less desirable, but if it is a choice between a short guy and nothing, short will do. Humans don't have the winner take all style of reproduction of many animals.
4: Gene studies suggest that something like twice as many women have managed to pass on their genes than men. That is a bit of a fuzzy number, but it suggests that the majority of men never successfully pass on their genes, which itself suggests that the outcomes are fairly random, the result of wars and such which kill fairly indiscriminately. A small advantage towards smaller men in a highly deleterious context can overwhelm disadvantages in more stable context. In other words, being 5% more likely to survive a war where half your village's males get killed might well overwhelm a 20% propensity to get picked last at the dance.
The woman who became my wife was initially attracted to me because she liked my friends. My guess is that dating apps do not make it easy to advertise “I have nice friends,” nor do they make it easy for women to realize that having nice friends is important in a partner.
---
This would be my own advice to people. I think online dating is a cesspool for this reason.
So why do people do it? I don't know many people that enjoy online dating that much.
Mostly I think you could call online dating "low risk/low reward/instant gratification". Hits all the right places in our hindbrains if you want engagement.
First you need to convince me that you have a representative sample. Next you need to convince me people like blind dates and other offline dating more.
Well, tall people need to eat more than short people, and if the tribe is in a constant state of near starvation the members who can get by on fifteen hundred calories of grubs and fallen fruit may do as well as, or better than, the ones who need twenty-two hundred. We can easily be blinded by recent events.
+1
Most people who die in war die from disease and hunger rather than combat. And disease is often the result of hunger.
Being more fit at killing large animals for food is an advantage -- but only if there is a supply of large animals you can hunt.
What no mention of genital size!
Tom Wolfe observed that whenever we walk into a room full of people, we unconsciously but invariably assess the status of everyone there, and where we stand in the hierarchy. I suspect that short men (and possibly women) do the same thing as regards to height. Tall men (like myself) never give our height a thought, but it seems be a matter of smoldering resentment in the minds of short men. As a schoolboy, I never had trouble with bullies, but I was constantly set upon by small, pugnacious boys who thought they could take advantage of my mild nature and make a name for themselves by knocking me down. I can still see their furious faces looking up at me through a blur of tiny fists.
"Tall men (like myself) never give our height a thought..."
Until a guy four inches taller gets into the same elevator.
That is usually a very rare occurrence though. Rare enough that it sometimes even sparked deep contemplation on " how life would be if I were short)
Some online calculator thing tells me I am 97th percentile of tallness in the US.* In my neighborhood I bet I'm no more than 95th percentile - maybe much less.
.
*Same website says I'm 99.379th percentile in South Korea. I'm a fucking weirdo there.
I think people underestimate how quickly evolution can shift the distribution of genes under selection pressure. New mutations can take millions of years to get right, but altering the distribution of existing genes can happen in just a few generations.
I’ve often wondered if the stereotype of the “skinny nerd with glasses” vs the “strong jock” exists – and is real – because those represent the two ways for a man to pass on his genes. Women aren’t going to go for weak *and* dumb, so men who are both don’t reproduce. But if you have brains or brawn, you’ve got a chance to pass on your genes.
It seems online, women might be selecting against brains-without-brawn, which probably isn’t a good thing.
I'm going from memory that the genes for lactose tolerance appear to have become dominant in Europeans and their descendants in about the last 10,000 years, supporting your point.
Many women may say they won't date anyone under 6 feet tall but that doesn't mean they actually won't. They may well "settle" for a shorter man for a first date, and he then has a chance to show her he has other desirable qualities.
And--believe it or not!--some men lie about their height on their profiles.
and many tall women lie about their height in the other direction so as not to embarrass the men lying about theirs!
Genes determine potential. They confer the maximum height you can be, but do not guarantee that you will reach that height. The deciding factor is nutrition which is why average heights now in developed Countries are higher than even a century ago. If you visit Britain and take tours around castles and centuries old dwellings, you will notice how low the doorways are, how short beds in those days were. Calcium depleted diets also meant long bones dud not develop as they should. Short statured men were best suited for working in the deep shaft coal-mines. Tunnels were not very high and coal seams not very wide. Coal was hewed by miners lying on their sides in the coal seams with picks and shovels... not suitable for large men. Wages for miners at the coal-face were much higher than other occupations because of the danger, dirt and hard work - a good catch for a woman. Also women were shorter formerly, so short men were a good physical match. So, nutrition, environment, attractiveness for a mate, and best adaptable... as with all organisms.
It's the short women! The men in my ancestry are over 6 feet tall. The men in my wife's ancestry are over 6 feet tall. My mom is short. My grandmothers are short. I am under 6 feet tall. My wife is not short but our daughters are short. I have one son over six feet tall. The other is shorter than me.
No woman in my family over 4 generations has ever been more than 5'4", even as nutrition & health has improved. My sister, her two daughters and myself stand side by side & you could put a level on our heads. I suspect there's a x-linked limiter in play; my brother is 6'.
Height burns calories, like everything else in the body. So does a big brains (IQ).
Whether its selected for depends on whether the benefits outweigh the cost. Being a tall viking means you might be able to use your height to kill other men in combat and take their calories. Having a high IQ might help a Jewish merchant get better deals and thus more calories.
But it's a give and take. Even the Spartans were short, at some point the extra calorie requirement wasn't worth more height. The Romans were famously shorter then many of their opponents, but made up for it with organization and discipline.
I think I read that Jews are slightly shorter then whites, which would make sense given the selection pressures.
The modern Flynn Effect definitely isn't a genetic phenomenon, though in some cases its a biological one (nutrition, etc). There isn't a lot of selection impact today. Selection impact would require that the children of low IQs not survive to adulthood because they can't obtain calories or treat/avoid disease, but that isn't the case. Mostly though Flynn Effect is just fake (not real 'g').
Selection effect did happen in Europe and especially NW Europe during the high Middle Ages and modern period. Warfare was not so total that people with non-violent tendencies were weeded out of the gene pool, cousin marriage was forbidden, property rights were strong enough that yeomen farmers and businessmen could have higher surviving fertility then others, and practitioners of private violence (murder) were executed by the state. This condition carried through to the modern era when mass availability of calories and effective medical treatment ended the selection pressure.
"I prefer to think that the fitness of short males is not as weak as the dating apps would make it appear"
I think of height as largely a proxy or signal of other things and with the online environment other proxies that probably matter more are not as easily discernible. Things like smell, symmetry, and personality.
Unless men are also checking 'I want tall' in the dating app, it is going to be difficult to cull short people from the human race. Long before that happens, we'll have the ability to edit our children's genotype, and once that happens, then shortness may disappear.
"I wonder why I exist"
You exist because God created you and He loves you.
“I am 5’3”.”
For what it’s worth, I had had a mental image of you being close to six feet. You certainly punch above your height, so to speak, intellectually.