From a cellphone, so my linking is lousy.
In the Evolutionarily stable situation (ESS), there was a pretty simple situation. If you were female...then you did what the male told you to...because he was bigger, and stronger, and more violent.*
If you were a littler male...you did what the big guy said because in fights of tooth and claw...mass wins 9x out of 10.*
In both of the asterisked above cases, that isn't really true. Shifting, ever-fluid in-tribe alliances trump mass...and a coalition of 3 little guys can kick the big guy's ass.
The invention of the spear provided huge balance, though, as now rather than odds being 10:1 that the big guy wins....now it's 2:1 or 60/40.
Agriculture reestablished male dominance, but the industrial age mostly killed it. Since then...it's been a zombie. The transition to $ denominated value was huge...and the remaining patriarchalisms died with manufacturing.
As is...even without affirmitive action or socialism...male-domination is dead except insofar as individual women want it. Unless violence is re-accepted. AFAICT...that's the only path back.
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If you were a littler male...you did what the big guy said because in fights of tooth and claw...mass wins 9x out of 10.*
Is fight winning the controlling metric? For sheer survivability, other traits are more important. Bacteria rule the world, in a sense, with little mass.
As is...even without affirmitive action or socialism...male-domination is dead except insofar as individual women want it.
??? Males dominate pretty much everywhere, and not just by using violence.
Hell, males often dominate merely by being dominant. Violence is rarely necessary, or even the threat of it.
Simple confidence and assuming you have the right to do something is usually more than you need.
Perf and RSF,
There's a big difference between SOME males and most/all males.
I'll grant up front that top 5 (10?)% males are indeed dominant. It's middle-tier men where the the issue comes up.
Males dominate with better executive function in a group setting.
Sorry to break it to you, but almost all transactions are of a cooperative nature. Even between gov't and the people.
You should keep going with the implications of this...
This get's me thinking about a question I think I will cross post at Aretea.
Aretea claims that he doesn't understand tribalism or groupism. I propose that this is a selective impulse that only applies at middle tier in group levels (e.g. nation/community or "skip..skip" theory as some call it).
Aretea clearly has a tribe: his family. His family is a unique social unit. We could call the borders his house. In trades with other social units (other families/society). Within the home Aretea is the sovereign (and maybe Mrs. Aretea).
Aretea is a very well off individual. High income, high IQ, in great shape. Presumably his kids are very lucky to have him as a father. A good head of household.
Aretea could remarkably improve the life of a third world person by bringing them into his family. Not just a little, but massively. If I can prove the net happiness of the world will increase if he does so, doesn't he have a moral obligation? Why does his tribal loyalty end with his own family? I'll even suppose the new entrant pays rent or something to simplify the charity argument.
Presumably this benefit would apply to welcoming additional individuals. Why not adopt even more people into the family?
Is there any argument as to where that should end? If such an argument works for his family, why not a nation?
Anon....
1. Where else did you crosspost?
2. I'm not in great shape YET, but I'm down 11 pounds in 3 weeks on Kurt-Harris-style high-fat paleo while my muscle mass has increased substantially on a superslow routine...so we'll get there. I'm not sickly, except for skin and respiratory allergies to everything under the sun.
3. The real key to your argument is "The family is like a tribe". This is false. The family is a biological structure, wherein one can observe mammals making (statistical) decisions to die if it saves 2.5 children or 8.5 cousins. Tribe is a whole different deal, and as far as I can tell, a different (set of) brain subsystems.
4. There is a HUGE difference between forced inclusion, non-impedence and forced prevention. I'm arguing for (from a family point of view) not preventing Brad Pitt and Angelina from adopting Shiloh. The anti-immigrationists here are arguing for preventing Brangelina from adopting foreign kids. And further
more, the anti-immigrationists are ALSO misrepresenting the pro-immigrationist position to be one of forcing the Pitt-Jolie to take new foreign kids they don't want.
Getting back to the OP.
Could the current dominance of some males be merely the dominance of tall people?
We know this is a separate phenomenon. How much of current dominance by some males (who happen to be the tall males, and hence the tallest humans with upper tier socio-economic characteristics.)
In other words, if we took the top 5% of intelligence and education* and looks. And THEN selected the tallest people... would the current distribution of power look any different from today?***
*Where "education" means both formal education in "managing" type areas like management, MBAs, Law. And also informal education in things like networking and social interactions**
**which social type people assure us exist, though nerds like me have apparently sleep-walked straight through an ivy-education and wealthy upbringing without ever encountering.
***What we see today ± selection errors, nepotism and just plain freaky people who would rise to the top in any case.
Aretae,
1) Foseti
3) And a community/nation is different from the whole world.
If your going to say, "I naturally feel more loyalty to my family then strangers because of biology" then don't go around playing the universalist morality card with people that say "I naturally feel more loyalty to my community/race/nation then strangers because of biology."
4) A family is a very good comparison here. In a family you have to accept everyone and be a part of their lives. Cousin gets sick, you gotta help him. Aunt you don't like dies, gotta go to the funeral. Once someone is a part of the family, it effects everyone in the family. Everything they do is part of the families business, one way or the other.
When third world people, especially low IQ third world people, immigrate here they are joining the family of our nation. It fundamentally changes the way we live and what our nation is like.
If you grew up with three brothers that were violent anti social retards it would effect you. Bringing these people into our nation means growing up with them. It's not as bad as being in a family with them, but it does mean sharing a community with them. I'm aware that your wealthy enough to isolate yourself from these people, but others aren't as lucky.
Dr. Pat,
1. I think you can bail on education and have your predictor play the same way.
2. I'm not thoroughly convinced it's tall. I'd wager that BIG beats tall, and (for example) Refrigerator Perry wins over Kareem. That tall and big (Cam Newton?) are related makes it hard
to tell.
Anon,
3) We didn't evolve nations. Those are very recent. Kin is a deep evolutionary thing. Nation is a bullshit recent construct that some folks imagine.
4) Family is never a good comparison for anything else. It's not like anything else. This was my key objection on point one, and it's still my key objection. It's not like a family...any more than a hummingbird is like an hippopotomus. Oh...they're both the same category? Ok. So what else do they have in common? Virtually nothing.
I'll be annoying and point out that from the perspective of say a virus, a hummingbird and a hippopotamus may look identical. But that's irrelevant.
Your point about education (formal and informal) not being an important variable might be explained by your second point about big and tall being correlated. The right education and the top socio-economic tier are highly correlated, so the relative effects are difficult to distinguish. To see the effects we might need something like a war resulting in the upper class of a nation being made destitute and fleeing as refugees to another nation. Do these people (who've lost the socio-economic advantages, but presumably retained their natural abilities and education), soon regain their former social status in their new homes?
Nation is a bullshit recent construct that some folks imagine.
???
Too harsh. Nations are important, they have many characteristics of a family. Ignore them at your peril.
I'd say there is a distinction to be made between a nation as an ethnic grouping with a sense of solidarity (ie. nations as described for most of history), and the Nation State, which has only really existed in Europe since about the 30 year war, and has only spread to (some of) the rest of the world over the last 2 centuries.
Even now, English speaking nations have a sort of skew view on this, there are many, many countries, from African states to China, where one State contains many nationalities.
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