Aristophanes wrote:
Klowglas wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
Klowglas wrote:
That being said, a shy good looking male will get beaten by a extroverted good looking male. women prefer stronger males because it is their biological imperative to do so, stronger males = stronger offspring, more resources, etc etc.
Fallacy alert. Fallacy alert.
Strength has nothing to do with more resources, if that were the case humans would be below a whole litany of other animals that are both larger and stronger than us. Cunning is a much more valuable trait in that regard. As for biological imperative with strength, numerous species feature females that are larger and stronger than their male counterparts, therefore we can't claim anything with nature in this regard. It's a currently held societal belief, but it's not a hardwired genetic instinct.
Only up until a few centuries ago, strength had plenty to do with resources and it's still in the biology, which takes a VERY long time to change. Men had to be strong enough to slay a woolly mammoths, strong enough to fend off saber tooth tigers, etc.
But I wasn't being literal in talking about strength, and I was talking about humans in addressing the female imperative to seek out an efficient male, it's in their biology to emphasize male utility because women don' have the muscles required to deal with the environment, thus they seek out males that do.
Again, killing a mammoth is one thing, tracking it to the proper location, separating it from the herd, cornering it, and wearing it down is another. Those "cunning skills" were much more fundamental to killing the mammoth than having the strength to jab a spear in it. Fending off animals was much more about having a larger group than anything to do with physical strength. A solitary hunter doesn't go after a large group of animals unless it can isolate one, and in the case of say a saber tooth tiger and a human male, the tiger wins regardless of how big and strong the human male is due to it's vastly superior agility and speed (assuming the human isn't using his cunning in the form of a weapon). Strength is a culturally driven aesthetic, it doesn't hold up in nature. Here in the west we celebrate strength and so yes, women will gravitate towards that ideal, but it's not nature. Medieval Europe celebrated fatness, it was a sign of prosperity, and women gravitated towards fat men and vice versa. Ancient Egyptian culture celebrated slender almost what we would call feminine men, and women gravitated towards that. When one hears an aesthetic ideal pumped from youth to young adulthood it's easy to subconsciously make that a preference and mistake it as "instinct".
Some food for thought: small organisms, i.e. Bacteria kingdom, Chromista kingdom, and Protozoa kingdom have much more biomass than the remaining "large organism" kingdoms (Plantae, Fungi, Animalia)-- on a biomass level they are much more powerful than us, if they stopped functioning every other kingdom would perish. That's power, which is vastly superior to mere strength.
Edit: syntax and structure.
Most of this sounds right, but I take issue where you said strength doesn't have anything to do with more resources when it was in fact the case throughout human history. Hunting does require cunning but much of it is still a massive endurance test, for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting which is pure endurance (nothing clever,just chasing the prey down to the point of exhaustion).
Hunters in Africa still hunt that way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_oPredators also tend to avoid prey if the prey shows that they're capable enough to inflict injury, to certain degrees, Most predators would rather go after a fat calf than a bull, if men have more bulk, the predator would be less likely to pounce on them, which is an advantage to humans.
Much of the human mind is lagging far behind our technology, none of this applies today but women still find those traits attractive because they were a huge advantage in the past.
But aren't you essentially saying in your post yourself sir that fitness is just as important as tactics.
Yes those men are extremely fit, but then there are men in the western world who eat healthy and workout using weights and other machines, 'bodybuilders'.
A thin and lean male who uses strategy and wit like running the animal to exhaustion to avoid combat would have fared much better than a strong but clunky and slow moving man.
They'd probably prefer 'Built' and 'Ripped' over 'Ottermode'.
Unlike Aristophanes I don't believe purely intelligence matter. Some level of fitness is required to be recourceful as well.
But for some odd reason, some people would only class the African hunters in the video you shared as 'skinny'. I say they are thin but fit, the ideal level of fitness for survival in prehistoric times in my humble opinion.
12 Sep 2015, 4:17 am
