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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember.

I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible.

I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs.

I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.

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I suspect this is not unusual. I was asked to be a sperm donor at a party by a lesbian couple I'd never met before. They were completely serious, but the catch was no contact with the child.

The problem with arguments from reproductive psychology is that we know very little about reproductive psychology in history.

So modern ideas about female partner choice shaping genetics aren't necessarily a given. It's not unlikely there was plenty of rape, random sex with strangers because why not?, and all kinds of other non-vanilla behaviour.

Edit: And there's another issue - the implication that selecting for male variability is more successful as a species-wide reproductive strategy than selecting for high IQ.

That may be true, but it's a slightly strange place to end up in, because it implies that both ends of the bimodal curve are equally successful, and there's no selection advantage to being at the top of the curve. (If there were the bimodal would collapse to a standard Gaussian.)

"both ends of the bimodal curve"

Technically it's still a unimodal curve (single mode, roughly at the center of the distribution - i.e. ~= mean, median), it's just that the variance is increased.

There are other traits than IQ which promote the success of the species.

Even if unintelligent, physical strength and endurance enable one to hunt, to flee from predators.

Sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing.

Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.

...or red hair, or blue eyes, which spread simply because they were so darn cute. They're only like 12,000 years old!

A recent study found that those with blue eyes are predisposed to alcoholism. Doubtlessly that will lead to employment discrimination against those with brown eyes, as management types like to party.

I once read that every human society that had agriculture also had beer. We have had agriculture for roughly 12,000 years.

> Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.

That's not quite right. Being heterozygous for the sickle-cell trait produces reduced symptoms from malaria (but not immunity), while being homozygous for the trait produces sickle cell disease and and, consequently, greater vulnerability to malaria (since malarial infection, in addition to its other effects, frequently produces sickle cell crises in persons with sickle cell disease.)

I stand corrected.

I expect that I was actually taught what you explained however it has been many years.

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