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Comment by sonicggg | Hacker News Reader

You're comparing apples to oranges. Not trying to guess your height, but it seems you got personally attacked by the fact that society in general looks down on short guys.

Different from skin colour, there's an evolutionary trait to height preference. Studies have shown that heterosexual women prefer partners taller than them. It's understandable this subconscious bias. And what seems like discrimination, it's just a natural product.

Similarly, men have always shown preference to larger breasts and hips, signs of fertility. We can't, even shouldn't, shut down our instincts due to politically correctness.

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"just a natural product" is an argument that has been used for racism as well. White people claimed to be naturally superior to black people which is one way they falsely justified slavery. See "appeal to nature" fallacy.

Obviously taller men are naturally superior to shorter men and so it's just natural that they make more money. /sarcasm

And saying men have always shown a preference for larger breasts is begging the question. There are plenty of studies out there showing that breast size preference is complicated -- bigger is not always better.

Some cultures prefer medium sized breasts (actually, most studies I found this is the preference).[1] Poorer men might prefer larger breasts and richer men might prefer smaller breasts [2][3] Or maybe sexist men prefer larger breasts [4]

I don't think we know why women have the breasts they have or if breast size actually is a meaningful signifier of reproductive fitness. Seems like evidence points that women get breast implants because of their own opinions of their body image and not because it's an actual reproductive advantage.[5]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20862533/

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23412650/

[5] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-we-do-it/202001/...

Yes thank you! My whole argument is that we should reconsider the ingrained belief that short == bad and is some natural truth.

Also I would like to add that not even all cultures like big asses. Some even find the practice of injecting cement into buttocks (to enlarge them) to be repulsive. Different cultures have different preferences. Heck, different cultures can even be sensitive to different colors in their eyes[1].

Once people open their eyes and broaden their minds they'll see that perceptions are extremely malleable.

Height didn't work out for the dinosaurs, and being small works great for the cockroach. There is no objective short == bad in reality.

[1] https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/how-do-namibian-himbas-...

> Also I would like to add that not even all cultures like big asses.

Isn't this something we're watching evolve in real time? like right now? Cultures that didn't appreciate them now seem to be viewing them in a positive light.

We can't, even shouldn't, shut down our instincts due to politically correctness.

Of course we should. Relying on reasons that would have been acceptable to a caveman 10,000 years ago is no basis for modern society. We've beaten evolution. Modern science, medicine, and society means evolutionary pressures can be ignored - women with bigger breasts and hips aren't any more likely to have successful offspring now because women without those traits can go to Walmart for baby formula and a GP if their baby gets ill. Evolution has no bearing any more. Why keep using it as a reason?

>We've beaten evolution

No we haven't, and that's a good thing because a society made up of completely dysgenic people who need countless supplements and medical products just to stay alive would not be the utopia you're trying to paint it as.

That’s not dysgenic. If you’re in an environment and supplements are available and you function best with them, that’s just a food source you’re adapted to. I don’t go around calling people poorly adapted for needing oxygen and vitamin C.

Becoming reliant on additional external resources to survive is objectively backwards evolution.

You brought up oxygen reliance as a silly point but you're actually right. Humans relying on oxygen actually isn't that great, we can't go into space or underwater (without external support) and we get out of breath when exercising. A group of humans that evolved to not need oxygen at all would be a great genetic improvement.

What anaerobic organisms have you been outcompeted by recently?

I believe the main evolutionary advantage of your anaerobic humans is that they're imaginary, so they don't have tradeoffs, which definitely helps if you want to add features.

I think I'd prefer to be able to detect low O2 instead of instantly passing out; that'd probably be good enough.

But human evolution is basically a story where bigger brains coevolved with increased reliance on more diverse and higher quality food sources. Otherwise, for example, we would have much lower requirements for exogenous Vitamin C, like many other mammals.

> We've beaten evolution.

It's an impossibility. Evolution is by definition something we can't escape.

> Modern science, medicine, and society means evolutionary pressures can be ignored

No. It means evolutionary pressure will increase and accelerate. Modern science will allow couples to genetically alter/select for best embryos. It will be a genetic arms race to produce the taller, faster, smarter, healthier, etc children.

The advances of modern science will do the exact opposite of what you are claiming. Take down syndrome. Genetic screening has all but eliminated the down syndrome trait from much of the advanced world.

It means evolutionary pressure will increase and accelerate. Modern science will allow couples to genetically alter/select for best embryos. It will be a genetic arms race to produce the taller, faster, smarter, healthier, etc children

People choosing which traits to optimize for isn't evolutionary pressure. Evolution is a very specific mechanism that optimizes through random mutation. Choosing what to optimize for, using science to continue 'undesirable' genetic traits, making people choose who to reproduce with by manipulating what's considered attractive through Pornhub and Instagram, etc are all ways humans are now a poat-evolution species.

The fact we happen to still pick the traits that evolution optimized for in the past is because this is something that's only happened very recently. We're only just starting to move past evolutionary pressure. We could select for anything through science and tech. The fact we'd probably go for things like height, intelligence, etc just means we're not being very imaginative. One day we might decide to push for smaller offspring so we can fit more of them on spaceships, or for children who can survive with less water because the climate is screwed, etc.

The outcome will be the same as evolution, eg optimizing for the survival of the species, but the mechanism that causes it will be very different and absolutely not evolution.

If anything, what you describe is intelligent design, just by humans instead of a god.

> People choosing which traits to optimize for isn't evolutionary pressure.

It sure is. Look up selection or selection pressure ( another name for evolutionary pressure ).

> Evolution is a very specific mechanism that optimizes through random mutation.

Random mutations are meaningless without selection pressure. It's the selection that drives evolution not random mutations. You could have evolution without any mutations - the environment could change which selects for certain existing traits.

> We could select for anything through science and tech.

Which is called evolution. You seem to have a misunderstanding of what evolution is. Evolution isn't only "natural selection". Artifical selection exists. For example, dogs evolved from wolves by human/artificial selection, not "natural" selection. Regardless, it is still evolution.

I don't mean to argue that people shouldn't have preferences, but do you know many men who have breast and hip size requirements for a partner and wouldn't consider someone under those measurements? I'm sure there are some, but I can't imagine that's true of the vast majority of men. There's something rather different about a man's height.

I think it's erroneous to think someone who demands a 6'3 guy won't settle for someone shorter. Those "requirements" as listed on a dating profile are about as strict as "5 years experience with a framework that was released 4 years ago" on a job posting. They're an ideal, There aren't enough men in the world to meet the "6'-6'3" requirement and the majority of would-be partners will have to settle.

> Different from skin colour, there's an evolutionary trait to height preference.

Does this difference exist? I recall studies that showed that babies are afraid of people who look very different from them and their family members. As such I was under the impression that there was a genetic basis for discrimination of people based on some outward difference in appearance like skin colour that was due to people having an inherent distrust in the 'other.'

If that's the case it's not unreasonable to desire that society progress in a way that mitigate these biases against short people in the same way that we desire that society progresses in a way that mitigate biases against people of colour.

> Similarly, men have always shown preference to larger breasts and hips, signs of fertility. We can't, even shouldn't, shut down our instincts due to politically correctness.

What kinds of things that you feel are due to an instinctual bias to discriminate against short people, and why should we not attempt to shut down this discrimination? If your children were short and they felt like they were discriminated against for being that way, what sort of advice would you give them?

Isn't this another discrimination that short men face? They cannot even engage in a conversation without getting an ad hominem attack. Think napoleon complex.

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