March 30, 2005

Interesting discussion on human diversity, race, sexual selection

over at Foreign Dispatches. An important point that I make there concerns the often misunderstood meaning of sexual selection, which is not choosing (selection) individuals to have sex with, but the selection of alleles which produce an attractive individual.

Of course, in human terms, we think of "attractive" as someone who elicits a sexual response, i.e., someone we want to have sex with. But, that is not what is important for sexual selection, i.e., for an evolutionary process. It doesn't make one iota of difference if you sleep with 100 women who have the "green hair" allele, as long as you choose to procreate with 1 woman who has the "blue hair" allele: it is the "blue hair" allele that gets selected in this case.

1 comment:

SpeciesProtocol said...

Hi,

I wold like to contribute to your issue Sexual Selection. I think that the why for Sexual Selection is that Sex it's the skill of speciation acquired in the process of natural selection (Eukaryotes). This implies that there aren't truly or absolute asexual species. For instance, in asexual lizards mating behaviors are still seen.

I hope that the following 4 posts came to give many of the answers that people continues struggling to give. Those posts are:

* The Truth about Species! - Part 1 (Why Sex)
* The Truth about Species! - Part 2 (Cambrian Mystery)
* The Truth about Species! - Part 3 (Inductive Nature)
* The Truth about Species! - Part 4 (Entropic Nature)

POSTS' LINK - http://nature-sucks.blogspot.com/2010/10/truth-about-species.html

By the way, sorry for my English, so I ask you to give a discount.