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I might, but it’s a real long shot for them to give it to an anon researcher.
The restrictions on the demeaned caste’s occupational trade that helps differentiate them.
The Curious Case of France’s Untouchable Castes
Thank you for your taste and support.
YES! Thank you! I read this essay a long time ago, and wanted to re-read it as prep here, but I couldn’t find it and had to do without.
Needless to say, I think this idea is convoluted and evolutionary psychology-y, and contradicted by at least some of the evidence presented here, but it is still great.
The gene character thing is amazing and I’m definitely going to dot that.
I answer this elsewhere in these comments, but you’re right. To my eye, the authors who framed the sexual selection view seemed to believe it was a modern trait, and that attitude is what I’m responding to.
The entire point of sexual selection is that it can happen quickly, on recently split lineages.
I actually agree that there’s no evidence or argument excluding a sexually-selected pre-Neanderthal split, but I’m basically citing what informed people like Alexander thought here.
As an aside, if you work on this topic, I’m old now but I’d really recommend getting into the study of what’s actually moved the needle on subjects like this recently, which is large scale genomic data analysis.
I didn’t read Morris for this post at all, but does he discuss permanence at all? You could imagine temporary breast enlargement during estrus that rescues his theory with no permanence. I thought Cant was the first to discuss permanence, but you’ve made me worry I might be wrong about that.
Kind remarks. I’ll think about editing it, but happy to have people discuss in the comments of course.
Yes, the Eriksson study was one of ones supporting an early draft of this analysis. I didn’t end up using it because it didn’t make much sense to do so. Size isn’t the issue here; permanence is.
Erikkson only looks at Europeans, so I don’t know about the cross-population comparison here.
EDAR polymorphism does work through plausible pathways to produce the size difference and has other drastic phenotypic effects, but yeah nothing’s proven.
You’re right re the Khoisan, and I raise this exact point at the very end of the substack series I did. This section ended up cut from the LW version.
https://goflaw.substack.com/p/on-the-evolutionary-origins-of-human-d8c?r=41a8s8
Re the sexual selection story, like you, I don’t see any reason the story couldn’t apply pre-Neanderthal split, but my read of the existing papers exploring this subject was that the authors viewed it as a modern trait, which was what I went off of here.
Incoming followup post entitled “Who lost their baculum first and how we lost it”.
Any followup would be on substack probably, not here.
What’s the Wurtz reference?
Geoffrey Miller pretty persuasively argued in his book the penis issue is a mate choice issue.
And nah these are different things. I think there’s an academic bias to lump all the sexy stuff together because we love talking about Unified Theories of Sex.
I think gorillas do as well. These ideas have never made sense to me.
I’d argue the more interesting and potentially related human trait isn’t cycle-independent sexual receptivity, but hidden estrous, which is even more uniquely human.
For either trait, I don’t know how you would assemble a gene panel for study. You can’t use GWAS results because all of these traits are fixed in modern humans. The only reason the involution panel supports this type of analysis is because of extensive and unrelated experimentation in mice.
I think Sarah Hrdy is the person who’s most carefully examined this line of reasoning.
I think a lot of the European/(East?) Asian difference you’re referring to is because of polymorphism in the EDAR gene.
It’s defined conceptually, but it seemed an appropriate short hand for a graph. Maybe it was stupid to use such short hand if it was confusing.