One of the things about human beings
that's unique is that human females are picky maters.
They're choosy.
They're also sneaky because you can't tell when they're ovulating.
And with many other female animals you know.
They have hidden ovulation, and they're choosy and they tend to choose
men who are more successful in the dominance hierarchy.
Well, there's a shock.
I mean, if you pick someone who's at the bottom of the competence hierarchy,
that's probably not going to work out very well for you.
And since women bear the burden of reproduction,
it's perfectly reasonable for them
to search out someone who's going to be helpful.
So productive,
fair, generous.
And when you think of the dominance hierarchy,
you might think, well, it's the powerful guy,
the aggressive guy, say, that rises to the top of the dominance hierarchy.
And that's not true.
It's not even true among chimps.
Like, you can get a chimp tyrant.
But then what happens is other chimps gang up on him
and tear them to pieces, and they don't do it nicely.
They don't do it nicely.
And the chimps that tend to maintain their
dominance for long periods of time have a pretty wide network of friends,
roughly speaking, with whom they engage in reciprocal interactions like grooming.
And they actually pay a lot of positive attention to the female chimps who have
their own hierarchy, by the way, and to their offspring.
So they're like baby-kissing politicians.
And so the idea that it's raw power that produces dominance is
just wrong.
It's wrong now, tyrants.
It's pretty damn unstable business
being a tyrant. There's lots of people who want to kill you.
Plus, you tend to rule over something approximating hell.
So maybe that's...
Better than being a subject in hell.
But it's not much better... Anyway,
So, what this means?
Think about this for a minute.
Imagine what I'm telling you.
Bears some vague resemblance to the truth.
I think there's quite a lot of evidence for it.
From a biological perspective. This cheesy mating thing occurs with lots of species.
There's this bird called the Bowerbird.
You got to look up Bowerbirds man. Those things are...
You just can't even believe they exist.
And so the male Bowerbird,
he makes this really complicated nest that's close to the ground.
He weaves it. It's really quite nice.
You couldn't make one.
And then he sweeps
the yard in front of the nest.
And then he runs around the forest or
flies because he has a bird, finding pretty things.
So maybe he'll find a nice collection of red leaves.
And so then he'll take the red leaves
one by one and fly back to his front yard and make a little square.
He's a bird. So it's not a great square.
But he makes a little patch of red, and he takes a look at that.
And then he goes off and finds something blue,
and he decorates.
He makes a little piece of abstract art in the front of his nest.
And a lot of male Bowerbirds do this all at the same time.
And so then the females come along,
they hop on something nearby and they kind of look at it like this, checking it out.
And if they're happy with it, well, then things proceed.
But if they're not, they fly off to someone else's piece of abstract art.
And if a male piece of art is rejected by, like, three females in a row,
he gets irritated and brushes it all off with his wing.
And then he makes another one.
It's like, God...
Well, they obviously have a sense of very well developed sense of beauty.
It's so cool.
And I guess the idea is that who knows what the hell the idea is.
The female birds like artistic males, something like that.
But if you're thinking about it
biologically, maybe it's an indication of intelligence, right?
It's a marker of intelligence.
And it's certainly the case that female humans prefer
creative men.
And no wonder, of course,
we wouldn't be creative if that wasn't the case.
So then imagine that there's two
primary forces of evolutionary selection operating on us.
And they're not really the natural world, which is what people always think,
like the environment. The animals and the trees and nature.
But it isn't nature that selected us.
It's two other things.
Well, partly. It's two other things.
So one is the dominance hierarchy.
The male dominance hierarchy is one of the primary
mechanisms of selection.
So it's like
women are faced with a hard choice.
Which guy to go after? Right.
That's a hard choice.
Well, so they do the same thing that people do with the stock market.
They outsource the cognitive problem,
the computational problem to the male dominance hierarchy.
Then they just let the male sort
themselves out, however they're going to, and then they peel from the top.
And so what that means is the dominant
male dominance hierarchy itself is a selection mechanism,
because if you fail at it, then you don't leave any offspring.
And so what that means, at least in part, is that we have adapted
to be better and better at attaining status in dominance hierarchies over.
God only knows how long a period of time.
And that doesn't mean just power.
It might mean cognitive flexibility, because you could imagine
dominance hierarchy A, dominance hierarchy, B, dominance hierarchy C.
Okay, so if you're really successful, you climb up dominance hierarchy A.
Right. But B and C.
No, if you happen to land in those, you'd just be a failure.
So then you could say
the ideal human being is someone who can climb to the top of a dominant hierarchy,
no matter what the dominant hierarchy is. We've evolved such that success across
the set of possible dominance hierarchies is the target.
And I think that's why we have general
intelligence, because general intelligence is a general problem solving mechanism.
And it's a single factor.
Even there is intelligence is a single factor.
It's not divisible, despite what people like
Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner falsely claim.
And then, from the female perspective,
females are the next gatekeeper,
and that's why they're often Mother Nature.
It took me a long time to figure this out.
Why the hell is nature feminine? In mythological representations?
It's extraordinarily common. Mother Nature.
You don't think of Father Nature.
You think of Mother Nature. It's like why?
Well, nature brings forth new forms.
So that's feminine, and nature selects. In fact, that's the definition of nature
from a Darwinian perspective. - Nature is that which selects.
Women select.
Their nature.
And that's partly why
far more men than you might think like, far more, are terrified of women because
to be rejected as a romantic partner by a woman
is to be
classified as
vaguely acceptable
life form.
No value in propagating it, though, right?
So it's a major major rejection.
And I've had dozens of clients and many,
many people write to me whose primary problem is that they're so terrified
of women, they can't even approach them very, very common.
The selection mechanisms that determine
what happens to you in relationship to the next generation, say,
are selecting you on the basis of your action and your behavior.
I would say they're selecting you on the basis of your values.
So...Because...
If you're an idiot saying you go charging after a lion and the lion eats you, then
the nature of reality, so to speak, is rendered a judgment on the value
structure that sent you down that particular path.
Right. And so...
You're being selected by natural forces as a consequence of your behavior.
And then, we can extend that argument, especially in the human case or
in the case of any organism that's also subject to sexual selection.
And human beings are tremendously subject to sexual selection.
Now, Darwin was a great believer in sexual selection.
He thought it was at least as important
as the selection of the organism by the natural environment, whatever that is.
But biologists really had a hard time with that.
They kind of ignored sexual selection for,
like, 100 years, which is quite interesting.
I think it was partly because
sexual selection implies, especially when you're dealing
with organisms that are sort of conscious like human beings.
That...choice itself is a determinant of evolutionary processes,
and the strict deterministic materialists didn't really like that,
and they couldn't really come up with an argument against it.
But they sort of shelved the whole topic for a very long period of time.
But one of the things we know,
for example, about human beings, is that females are very sexually
selective, female humans, as opposed to, say, the female chimps, which aren't.
So part of what's occurred to select human beings for the way they
are, is the choices that each gender has made with regards to action and belief.
But in many ways, more specifically, female choices.
So it's kind of interesting.
The next time you're irritated at your
boyfriend, let's say that you can just remember that untold millions of women
have chosen men so that they're exactly like he is.
And so you can't really blame them for that.
All right.
But here's the thing that's tricky, from a scientific perspective.
If it is...
Your behavior and your value structures,
if your value structures determine what you're interested in,
and how you behave and selection pressure occurs as a consequence of your actions,
then doesn't it mean that the structure of the value systems that drive your behavior
has to be regarded as true or real in some scientific sense?
Because the Darwinists basically say,
look, the best solution is the solution that you embody.
There is no higher solution than that.
And there you are embodying a solution.
So in what way...
I don't understand in what way that can't be regarded as real.
Because people think of things like value structures as epiphenomenal.
They're not real, like material is real.
But I don't get that.
I don't see how that works with Darwinian thinking because
you're interacting with each other all
the time, and you're doing that on the basis of your capacity
for action and the value systems that drive that.
And obviously those have some effect on whether or not you're selected
by women, say or by men for that matter, but also by the natural world.