I have a sad, horrible addiction to The (He)artist(e) Formerly Known As Roissy, a smalltime pickup artist who enjoys playing up how Daring and Shocking he is by saying the Truths Nobody Admits without actually saying anything remotely daring or shocking or, indeed, truthful. This is partially because I enjoy playing a rousing game of Spot the Logical Fallacy with his occasional rants.
As an example, today’s post. Warning: Heartiste is hateful, frequently triggery, and every kind of Xist you can name. Readers who are not fascinated by trainwrecks are encouraged to look at Cute Roulette instead.
In this post, Heartiste disagrees with traditional conservatives who argue that the purpose of human existence is to have children. Instead, he argues, the purpose of life is to have sex with lots of beautiful, willing women. He proves this by pointing out the revulsion that most people have to donating to sperm banks and how most people prefer having relationships instead. Therefore, evolution programmed us to have sex with beautiful, willing women, not to have children. (This is the stripped-of-awfulness version of his argument, but I trust it is fairly accurate.)
Except that this argument is conflating at least three different questions: “what do genes want us to do?”, “what is the purpose of human existence?” and “what does ‘alpha male’ mean?”
What Do Genes Want Us To Do? No, sorry, Heartiste, you’re wrong, it’s all about having children here. Genes whose carriers reproduce a lot spread; genes whose carriers don’t reproduce die out. Certain genes that lead to people having more children spread more (of course, some genes just spread because an improbable number of the people who carried a different gene had a brick dropped on their heads, which is called genetic drift). You could reasonably argue that both genes that lead to increased desire for sex and genes that lead to an increased desire for children have spread through the population. Of course, sperm banks have not been around for long enough for genes that increase one’s chance of donating to a sperm bank to spread very much and, for this reason, most people feel very little desire to donate to a sperm bank.
What Is The Purpose Of Human Existence? Well, I’m a materialist nihilist, so maybe I am the wrong person to answer this question, but I suppose I can’t solely leave it to religious people and Hallmark greeting cards. Human evolution has left us with a certain number of wants, needs, drives, and so on. Some of them helped our ancestors have children and grandchildren; some of them are side effects of things that helped our ancestors have children and grandchildren; some of them don’t have any actual deleterious effect and so managed to avoid being filtered out; some of them just stuck around because all the carriers of the competitor genes had a brick dropped on their head. These wants/needs/drives/whatever are filtered through an individual’s life experiences (parents, peers, media, nasty bosses, random encounters with shouty people on buses, etc.) to produce Goals and Desires and Meaning and Other Things That Make People Happy. And then people do those things that make them happy and other people happy, and that’s the meaning of life.
You will notice that none of this has anything to do with having more kids and grandkids. Frankly, I don’t see why the purpose of my life needs to be spreading my genes, any more than the purpose of my life needs to be making sure that some random child has as close to an identical upbringing to me as possible. What I want is the product of my genes and my environment; that does not mean that spreading my genes and my environment needs to be what I want. (Unless what I want is More People Wanting The Same Things I Want, which it is sometimes, e.g. feminism, and not other times, e.g. shopping for clothes on the clearance rack.)
What Is The Definition Of An ‘Alpha Male’? Look, you can define “alpha male” as “dude who has lots of women attracted to him” as much as you want, as long as everyone else in the conversation defines “alpha male” as “dude who has lots of women attracted to him.” But you have to stop smuggling in the “purpose of life!” thing. Lots of dudes don’t particularly care about lots of women being attracted to them. They’d rather play video games or argue about Renaissance painting or help people in developing countries, and those are also perfectly valid outcomes of genes and environment. Just because your combination of genes and environment ended up prioritizing sex with 22-year-old blonde skinny chicks over everything else doesn’t mean that everyone’s does.
Also, dude, guys who have lots of women attracted to them do not behave in the way you think they behave. Anecdatally, they tend to be kind, charming, outgoing, and respectful of boundaries, to look like their social group’s norm of attractiveness, and to do things their social group considers awesome. (Anecdatally, this also applies to women.) As for SCIENCE!, well, it shows that women tend to prefer high-dominance high-agreeableness males to any other combination (see Jensen-Campbell, L.A., Graziano, W.G., and West S. G. (1995) Dominance, prosocial orientation, and female preferences: Do nice guys really finish last? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 427-440).
Yeah. People are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Everything you actually want is already based on spreading your genes. Human values and motivations should be what want to do (it’s tautological!)
Not to mention that he ignores having ONE strongly attracted to you, which would be nice enough.
Prosocial Orientation + Dominance sounds exactly like “confidence and joy” (a la The Dirty Normal) to me.
Evolution led to humans being amazing at one thing above all – adaption to the environment, The whole gamut of wonderful human diversity is emergent from that trait. We change constantly, in dynamic interaction with every stimulus we encounter. Which happens to be really handy for surviving long enough to reproduce, but meaning that our behaviour is far more complex than being simply “for” reproduction. Anyone who holds too tightly to genetic determinism is employing reductionism too strongly, reducing to the point where the explanation fails to explain the phenomenon. As simple as possible, but no simpler – and genetics simply fails to explain learning and behaviour change during a (non super simple) organism’s life. Genetics can’t fully explain the behaviour of anything with a nervous system. (And it boggles my brain that lots of smart researchers seem to miss this and give ammunition to less smart people with nasty agendas)
Wow. I’m used to these guys saying dumb things about evolution, but usually it’s just taking an already-shaky hypothesis from an actual researcher and over-applying it/treating it like dogma. This is…a whole new level of stupid.
All of the points other people made about adaption executers vs. fitness maximizers, but also:
How fast, exactly, does Roissy think humans evolve? Let’s say that sperm donation has a modest advantage in propagating genes, compared to good ol’ fashion fucking. People who do it the old-fashioned way still have viable offspring, but people who donate sperm have slightly more viable offspring. According to Wikipedia, the first sperm donation from frozen sperm* happened in the 50s. So the offspring from that sperm donation would now be around 60 years old – old enough to have children and grandchildren. That’s three generations. In terms of evolution that’s a nanosecond. You really don’t see a gene kicked out of a population via natural selection that quickly unless it has some sort of amazingly deleterious effect.
*sperm donation happened prior to this, but there aren’t any hard numbers and it’s reasonable to assume that before long-term storage was possible, it was much rarer. Also it was apparently WAY stigmatized before the 1980s or so.
I’ve never thought of alpha males in terms of women being attracted to them. It’s more about confidence and a feeling that they speak for all men.
An interesting take I’ve seen kicked around recently is that humans are either “proto-eusocial” or truly eusocial if the definition is tweaked to accommodate our biology. For those who don’t know, eusocial species include ants, bees, termites, and pretty much anything that could be called a “hive”. True or not, it’s a fascinating lens to look at human behavior and society through. I recall another blog (I lost the link) casually noting that, in the decades since it aired, humanity’s social trajectory appears headed away from the crew of the Enterprise and towards the Borg. And with modern reproductive technologies, the possibility of becoming a true hive species seems less and less far-fetched.
I bring this up because, if we look at society through this lens, the “alpha male” pickup artist resembles instead something else – the drone male, an otherwise useless hive member whose existence is justified only by reproductive necessity, driven out of the hive to die when no longer needed. There’s something pleasingly ironic about viewing these would-be “dominant alphas” in this way.
“Anecdatally” appearing twice makes me think its a deliberate portmanteau of anecdote and data, and not just a typo?
In any case TOTALLY STEALING THAT ONE. Ta.