Your genes might also want you to signal that you don’t know who the father is so that your altruistic actions towards the child are seen as altruistic rather than selfish. It’s a just-so story, but not crazy.
Alternatively, sexual feelings might be radically genetically undetermined, less genetically determined than almost everything else about us, to partially prevent red queen’s races, runaway sexual selection, inbreeding caused by agreement with parents regarding sexual preferences, and excess conflict over fitness-irrelevant superficialities.
This combination of intensity and flexibility in a drive might make our sexual feelings radically flexible, and thus make them such a good lever for manipulating group dynamics that meme-level group selection reliably grabs onto them and adapts group sexual norms that shape our broader psychology to the group’s adaptive niche.
Your genes might also want you to signal that you don’t know who the father is so that your altruistic actions towards the child are seen as altruistic rather than selfish. It’s a just-so story, but not crazy.
Alternatively, sexual feelings might be radically genetically undetermined, less genetically determined than almost everything else about us, to partially prevent red queen’s races, runaway sexual selection, inbreeding caused by agreement with parents regarding sexual preferences, and excess conflict over fitness-irrelevant superficialities.
This combination of intensity and flexibility in a drive might make our sexual feelings radically flexible, and thus make them such a good lever for manipulating group dynamics that meme-level group selection reliably grabs onto them and adapts group sexual norms that shape our broader psychology to the group’s adaptive niche.