Sexy Son Hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

Sexy Son Hypothesis

en.wikipedia.org

32 pointsushakov21 comments

I haven't heard that one before, but it makes sense.

but of course it's never just one thing. and what "sexy" is to any given woman is highly variable.

to a significant extent, human males do become sexier as they increase in wealth, or simply in distinction. are these qualities that will make a son likelier to reproduce? probably yes.

but they also increase the whole family's general security and therefore the mother's chance of bringing a healthy child to term in the first place.

and the chance that the woman will survive to have multiple children.

and that the family will be accepted in a protective community, etc.

and who's to say there is no deep, obscure strategy guiding the mating process? Maybe I'm watching too many Michael Levin videos on YouTube, but perhaps there is an "intelligent" navigation of the genomic/body shape vector space that may have cross-species/ecosystem strategies we're incapable of understanding ...

So, it turns out that what females find sexually attractive is… sexual attractiveness? Someone phone the Nobel committee!

It seems like this what this theory states is that what females find sexually attractive is the ability to create sexually attractive offspring, not sexual attractiveness itself. It's all about the potential for future generations - in this case it's more than just the next one, but also trying to guarantee the one after that.

> the ability to create sexually attractive offspring

And promiscuous offspring.

Right, but the way that females judge "the ability to create sexually attractive offspring" is the sexual attractiveness of their partner. So it's completely tautological.

No. Captain America is sexually attractive but not in a heritable way.

Care to explain that? The fact that he's a superhero aside, how is his attractiveness unrelated to heritable traits? In this case, he's strong, good looking and charming, all of which have clear genetic and probably even epigenetic components.

In the sense that, his strength and stature are probably not genetically heritable as they aren’t encoded into his genes (although I don’t know my Marvel lore).

Right but in non-fictional humans, strength and stature are indeed encoded into genes.

more like baseline and maximum possible (natural) strength are encoded in genes. and even that is still subject to environmental factors (diet growing up, etc)

I mean, a purposefully limited partial analysis can support this argument applied to Captain America actor Chris Evans as well. He has a good degree of natural sexiness, but also a large amount of his sex-appeal is from steroid use. So it's not heritable.

However, a more detailed analysis might be used to argue that in a world where steroids are highly available, Chris Evan's genetics facilitate/complement the use of that available resource better than other genetics.

But the steroid use could also be considered a "Supernormal stimulus"[0], which hijacks/cheats sexual selection criteria with specially tailored artificial stimuli. Relevant would be instagram filters, steroids, plastic surgery, makeup, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

This falls under "supernormal stimulus"[0], which is where artificial stimuli is favored over the naturally occurring stimuli. A fake signal can hijack/overload the existing sexual selection criteria by being "even sexier" than naturally possible.

This is particularly relevant in the age of instagram filters, steroids, plastic surgery, makeup, etc.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

This is interesting. It might explain how women are thought to be less* looks oriented when choosing a partner, because defects that aren’t genetic (ex being out of shape, having scars or injuries) are less weighted than the “blueprints”

* Key word here, doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m not saying looks don’t matter to women.

It explains how useless ornamentation is nevertheless sexually attractive, as opposed to just characteristics with clear evolutionary value.

It just strikes me as a completely inanely self-evident observation. If evolution is an ongoing optimization for fitness and survival, success in procreation is a blindingly obvious component of that equation.

The more interesting question would be why ornamentation independently emerges as a trait in evolution. Is it that partners favor certain functional traits that become more and more exaggerated, until they're no longer functional? Is it that ornamentation itself is intrinsically interesting to animals with eyes? Or is it that ornamentation is a stand-in for genetic quality of some kind?

Any of those would be less vapid than "females prefer attractive and promiscuous males because they want their offspring to also attract mates and procreate."

I think its more like it gives a definition to sexual attractiveness as an infinite regress

SA of father = A*(SA of future son) + B

After reading the Wikipedia but not other sources it does feel tautological

On the other hand, it also implies the reverse: the features that one would normally expect to be _negatively impactful_ to one's perceived sexual attractiveness shouldn't actually do so in reality, as long as those features aren't hereditary.

So, things like bad haircuts, horrible burn scars, a constant need to derail every conversation into a digression about Klingon culture, a humorless personality--none of those should matter in the long run as long as the man would be attractive without it.

I can't say that I'm onboard with this idea or not. I only read the article because of the funny name.

Another aspect is that sons will always inherit the Y chromosome from the father. Other genes on other chromosomes have a 50/50 chance of inheritance, which gives a bit of leeway.

Sorry, can you explain how this related to the hypothesis?

If a female picks a mate with good X chromosomes for girls and Y chromosomes for boys, the children are guaranteed to have a good XX or XY chromosome pair.

For any other chromosome, it's half chance whether child will get the better half.

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