I don’t think it’s fair to represent an edge case, “noteworthy for being different” type species as being just one example out of many. As far as I’m aware the behavior exhibited by sea horses is extremely rare, and I recall it being highlighted as such in, at least, The Selfish Gene. Can you think of other examples?
There are other behaviours in the sea, and they are in general so different to mammals that we can consider them as alien.
I would even say mammals are the edge case, just by virtue of having a fewer number of species than fish, arthropods, insects, and almost any other clad.
You are simply more used to mammals, to the point it seems the only natural behaviour.
I don’t see egg laying species behavior as being very representative of the game theoretic patterns in childcare species behavior, though.
Ditching after birth vs raising the young is clearly such a massively important game theoretic dimension that it likely substantially determines the workable ranges for most other dimensions. How can we make conclusions across such separate subspaces of organism game space?
In my first year at college we were all set an essay about why human females invest lots of resources preening and enhancing their appearance, while across nature females normally put almost no effort into their appearance, and males are the ones with the bright colours.
This is an enormous area of study with thousands of papers published. Sexual selection is incredibly important. Especially as modern human evolution is driven almost entirely by sexual selection.
It’s worth understanding how sexual selection works.
My comment tries to give the PCA to what contributes to males taking more risks than females within the human species. This isn't a hypothesis - there have been a lot of studies which have shown human males to engage in risk-related behaviors when other females are present. It's also supported by other male-dominated species as well - the males have one single 'alpha' male which females choose to mate with -- but that 'alpha' male will need to take more 'risks' and be more aggressive in order for him to be in such a position in the first place. I'm not sure what you're expecting me to also list out in a hacker news discussion, but this is the best I can do. If you feel like you have counter-arguments -- feel free to post them and I'll be happy to take a look at them and reconsider my position OR post studies which show that you're wrong. Cheers.
Why not? Do you think that this:
> Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species)
Is the only answer applicable to "Why to males take more risk than females?"
Also, evolution is likely not precise enough to have evolved accurate intuitions about the fitness value of all possible risks. We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
>"What gain do colourful feathers on birds really have except to draw attention"
When drawing attention gives you a disproportionate advantage to attracting a mate vs. attracting a predator, it's a very important (and non-neglible) gain.
>We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
I don't think this negates the point. Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution. I can say there's a distribution of individual player height in the NBA, but that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions about height having generalized value at the population level regarding the chances of making it to professional basketball.
Humans have no natural predators, so one side of the equation is zero, and the other non-zero.
> Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution.
Yes, and there is directionality in risk-taking as well. Discoveries, fortunes and high-value mates all require risk taking.
Even risks that appear to have negligible or even zero fitness value, like extreme sports, have netted many people valuable sponsorships or YouTube fame and fortune.
Evolution is not precise and simply cannot capture the full nuance of a concept like "status" in human culture, therefore it has permitted a broad distribution of risk taking.
You do realize you contradict yourself here, right?
You’ve essentially said “This activity that amasses stays and resources has negligible fitness value.”
That only makes sense if you think status and resources don’t impact fitness/survivability. You might be confusing inherent value with signaling value. Driving a Ferrari doesn’t give me any additional inherent fitness. But it does serve as a potential signal for status, which can confer added fitness in practice. Signals can be wrong, of course, while still giving an advantage.
I'm pointing out your contradiction, because extreme sports are exactly the same kind of behaviour which is the subject of this article, and that you classified as negligible or zero value before it exploded in popularity.
The point being that a wide latitude of risk seeking behaviour allows people to find new and unexpected success modes, even if they at first appear to convey little benefit and incur considerable risk.
Of course, you want an adversarial network that's difficult to trick, otherwise the training will produce suboptimal results.