Sex with someone from the future is hazardous to your health - with experiments | Hacker News Reader

Sex with someone from the future is hazardous to your health - with experiments

mblogs.discovermagazine.com

109 pointsColinWright39 comments

> When the male traveled 22 years to mate with a female, her life was cut short on average by 12%.

Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn't she be better positioned to resist the effects of the male? She has had 22 years worth of advances, and is dealing with a "primitive" male.

Since the article is about travelling from the future, I would assume that that it's the males who have 22 years of advances.

I thought so to, but it doesn't seem to be what it said. I reread it and it's really unclear.

It made a reference to the terminator movie where the male main character traveled back in time to mate with the female, so I'm guessing it's the latter.

The article proposes that "attacks" and "defences" may evolve cyclically, rather than "upwards" - as an (unrealistically) extreme example, it's better to be a clockwise-turning female duck when most males are counterclockwise-turning and vice versa.

This makes sense.

There are two scenarios that could explain this.

One, the fact that a particular trait is present in a current generation only tells us that it is superior relative to just one iteration prior, and not necessarily any more. There is no rhyme or reason to evolution. In fact, it is almost an evolutionary disadvantage to incorporate traits that were once fit, but no longer are, as it likely costs more energy, diminishing efforts against current threats.

A non-biological example of this would be US foreign policy. We are very well positioned to battle the Soviet Union in a Cold War turned hot. That threat is no longer with us, but we're left with strategies and equipment that are useful in that sort of situation. Today, our problems in the Middle East are not helped by the fact that we have thousands of costly nukes and tanks (not suited for urban warfare and occupation in Iraq and Afhanistan!). I'm no military buff, but I think that this illustrates the point.

Another scenario could be that the relationship between clingy males vs. females is much like that of a predator vs. prey[1]. Very clingy males result, successfully, in clingy progeny, resulting in more dying females, resulting in fewer clingy progeny, resulting in more females, resulting in clinginess being more successful, and so on...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation

That's not quite true. The reason Gulf War 1, post-Cold War, was so lopsided was that the Iraqis had Soviet equipment and training, and the desert is open terrain just like the Steppe, and NATO had spent 40 years preparing to go head-head-to-head with the Red Army using maneuver warfare. There are other nations in the world that saw that and know that NATO will dominate them in any conflict even now 20 years later.

Also remember that the Russians haven't gotten rid of their nukes yet...

I was under the impression that the US "easily" dominated Iraq's institutional armed forces, toppling their government and "winning" (Mission Accomplished). What we're doing very poorly, though, is occupying and policing the region, now that we've taken care of the previous government.

In the case of war with the Soviet Union, I'm guessing that there was heavy emphasis on dealing with nuclear war or full-scale land combat in Europe, with the primary objective of beheading and toppling the Soviet control structure.

By contrast, in Iraq, our goal is (apparently) to occupy and subdue the entire region, which is a different, difficult problem.

This is why I was very careful to say Gulf War 1! But the problem with Gulf War 2 was another Cold War assumption, that was nothing to do with equipment or tactics or indeed anything directly military: that the people of Iraq would welcome their liberators, in the way that the people of the former Soviet-occupied have embraced the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ah, whoops. My mistake. So much for a simple example to illustrate my point :)

A little more detailed explanation. In Gulf War 1 we demonstrated what happens when you crush air defenses, hard targets, and communication networks and then simply roll though huge areas quickly. It was basically a vary well executed blitzkrieg with both technological and tactical superiority. At the time we where expecting tens of thousands of US casualties but it turns out mostly the Iraq soldiers simply surrendered vs fighting losing battles. We also had much better medical treatments now than in prior wars with people often surviving extremely traumatic injury which relates back to treating car accident victims among other things. (The stabilize side of stabilize and extract work vary well.)

PS: This is an unclassified summery I got while working on software that's designed to estimate casualties in both human lives and materials during conflict. It was developed because most of their existing models vastly overestimated US casualties in GW1 and this better estimated what happens when you take out air defenses and communication networks quickly.

I wonder how many different iterations is in this set, taking out environmental variation. If it's true that males, but from the future and the past, are harmful to a female's health, then your assessment of iteration prior makes sense - but...

If there's no distinct improvement from iteration to iteration, that means there could possibly be (and should be) iterations of males that are less harmful to the females than the current time frame males. In other words, some set of iterations before or after, should mimic conditions like one iteration prior to that of the female - correct?

When it comes to sex, you have to separate out human seduction versus animal seduction because of culture. Ideas pass down human generations through culture rather than through instinct. Future generations of humans will still be able to read books like "The Art of Seduction" unlike brine sea shrimp.

Now it can be easily argued that culture itself is also cyclical (fashion, promiscuity, cultural rules all rotate), but it's definitely divorced from the pure animal kingdom.

Evolution does not advance. The entire concept of "advancement" is totally inapplicable and will produce wrong results. Anthropomorphizing for rhetorical convenience, evolution will happily "regress" if it increases reproduction.

There is also a link to some very kinky ducks in that article. Worth a read: http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/12/22/kinkiness...

It's a pity the video isn't there. Or perhaps it's better - it's still too early in the morning to see an exploding duck penis

http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/209781-a-corkscrew...

For when you wake up a bit.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction between the arms race and merry-go-round models of male-female competition. The former concept seems to indicate that gender dominance is a zero-sum game, whereas the latter seems to indicate that dominance swings back and forth among the competitors. In other words, they don't appear to be in competition.

I understood it as a question of how many strategies/antidotes are retained. Do the males specialize in only a few poisons at any one time, and so the females also specialize in a few antidotes, and new poisons are developed and old ones lost? Or do males release all developed poisons up to that point, and so the females have to manufacture all known antidotes, with no poisons being lost when new ones are developed? (Think of a modern military; they have fighter jets, yes, but they also still have the age-old weapons of knives and swords.)

That's how I understood it as well, but it seems to conflict with the researchers not being able to pick between hypotheses. If one hypothesis has the female growing their arsenal of antidotes, that is incompatible with the result that past males caused more deaths in future females. Since they didn't reject either hypothesis, neither can have been that.

Thank you for a very clear, helpful explanation!

Yet, courtship in the yesteryears appears to have been much more involved and complex. Are humans bucking this trend?

Birth control.

Sex for a female is now free, so she is not as selective. This is bad news for human fitness, but is not likely to change.

That is a pretty big simplification. If nothing else, consider Romeo and Juliet and the hundreds of similar plays: pre-modern women (and men) [EDIT: were not always in a position to marry/have sex with their first choice] - resources (food) were finite and the family was (sometimes) placed above the individual.

As to human fitness - I expect that we'll widely use gentech before that becomes an issue [1], and anyway I think "smart/succesful people have fewer kids" would be a bigger issue than slightly less careful mate selection, if indeed modern females are less careful in selecting a mate (I doubt it.)

[1] This is a prediction, not a value statement. I think it's a good idea, but I'm somewhat squeamish.

> pre-modern women (and men) could not always marry/have sex with anyone they liked - resources (food) were finite and the family was (sometimes) placed above the individual.

Doesn't that confirm what I said? She can't just marry whoever she wants, she needs to very carefully pick.

Edit: I see your clarification, and I'm not so sure it argues against me. Her first choice is (presumably) a romantic choice, but instead she must choose the practical choice. I would assume the practical choice is fitter.

>As to human fitness - I expect that we'll widely use gentech before that becomes an issue

That would be even worse. Whatever our notion of fitness would be, it's definitely different from nature's needs. If anything, gentech would make fitness worse before making it better.

I don't think that this makes sense.

In the end, males and females are mating, so there is selectivity going on as before in terms of choosing who you want to father/birth your children.

The introduction of birth control could be said, though, to reduce the impetus for selectivity with regard to sex, but not mating.

I thought of that, but once the person has spent a lot of time with another person they are more likely to continue to mating (as you call it) with that person, rather than find someone else.

Even if they would have never chosen that person in the first place (for mating) if they were more selective at the outset.

Ah, that's a good point.

Either way, I think that you can just as easily say that a woman is more likely to leave a "bad" candidate for mating, since she is not tied down by the presence of offspring.

I guess we'll just have to see :)

Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control are rocketing past us in fitness.

Increased female reproductive choice (of whether and with whom to mate) yields an upward trend in fitness because it results in fewer, better cared for offspring.

> Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control are rocketing past us in fitness.

It takes a lot longer than that, and it would be impossible to measure due to birth control being correlated with medical care.

> ...yields an upward trend in fitness because it results in fewer, better cared for offspring.

The level of care to an offspring has no effect on its genes, and if anything can mask genetic weakness by substituting extra care. So it does not cause an upward trend for the children of the offspring.

Interestingly one trait that is being selected for is female non-sensitivity to hormone contraceptives. Now that would be interesting to measure.

Another trait that is theoretically being selected for is behaviors that would discourage contraceptive use (physical or hormone based), but I doubt that that would be measurable - at least not for many more generations.

It's an interesting world we've made for ourself, I would love to see demographics for 250 years from now.

Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control are rocketing past us in fitness.

They're outpopulating us. That's more or less all that Darwinian fitness boils down to.

>Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control are rocketing past us in fitness.

Meanwhile, in Africa, human beings are evolving resistance to AIDS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_disease_progression_rates#H...

In the absence of data one random-ass hypothesis is as good as another. Here is a different one: Thanks to the invention of reliable birth control, the declining risk of childbirth (particularly late-in-life childbirth), and the decreasing economic value of children in modern urban societies, human mating rituals in such societies have tended to become orders of magnitude more baroque and complex, now typically extending over decades and involving multiple pairings-off, moving in and out with each other, extended auditions with both sets of families, and careful correlation of childbearing attempts with career paths and financial flows.

Remember, though: This is a hypothesis, no data. Consult your friendly neighborhood sociologist, who will tell you that the world is more complicated than that. Consider, for example, that not everyone in America is in the same social class...

More ceremonial, yes, but more involved? People do spend a lot of time dating...

Except in the name there isn't much distinction between what we call "dating" (of the co-habitating type) today, and what they called marriage in the past.

Discover's headline and use of the Terminator photo analogy doesn't make sense. The experimental group of sea monkeys from the past were the males. The health-at-risk females were from the present ('future')

Sex with males from the past is hazardous to females' health.

If you look at graph, both future and past male sea monkeys were disastrous to female's health.

"Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. ... They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com