Self-review: It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten most of the details of the post, so it’s a good time to re-read it and get a sense of what it reads like for someone who’s discovering the content for the first time.
I still believe most of the ideas here are correct. My goal here was to write a bottom-up overview of how the basic molecular structure of DNA might “inevitably” lead to stuff like sexually-dimorphic ornaments, after a long chain of events. The point I wanted to get at was that the male/female binary, which human cultures often depict as a metaphysical fundamental principle of the universe, results from a series of pretty prosaic evolutionary constraints. Love itself isn’t quite as magical and central to the Universe as we make it out to be. This post hints at the idea, but I could have expanded more in that direction.
In hindsight, I think most people saw this as a kind of textbook explanation of the evolution of sex, and I guess this post does a OK job at this. However, it’s completely skipping over some important theories, namely the Red Queen Race and the handicap principle. Maybe I should add some links at the end. (To my defense, I did include a disclaimer about this not being a complete overview of the field.)
Self-review: It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten most of the details of the post, so it’s a good time to re-read it and get a sense of what it reads like for someone who’s discovering the content for the first time. I still believe most of the ideas here are correct. My goal here was to write a bottom-up overview of how the basic molecular structure of DNA might “inevitably” lead to stuff like sexually-dimorphic ornaments, after a long chain of events. The point I wanted to get at was that the male/female binary, which human cultures often depict as a metaphysical fundamental principle of the universe, results from a series of pretty prosaic evolutionary constraints. Love itself isn’t quite as magical and central to the Universe as we make it out to be. This post hints at the idea, but I could have expanded more in that direction. In hindsight, I think most people saw this as a kind of textbook explanation of the evolution of sex, and I guess this post does a OK job at this. However, it’s completely skipping over some important theories, namely the Red Queen Race and the handicap principle. Maybe I should add some links at the end. (To my defense, I did include a disclaimer about this not being a complete overview of the field.)