biology

Hypogamy The word hypergamy is being used more frequently, so much so that my spell checker now recognises it as a word. Hypergamy is a term borrowed from biology that refers to one sex’s preference for a mate who is smarter, stronger, taller, more mature, and wealthier than they are. It has been appropriated from biology by some groups in the manosphere and is now frequently used to describe human females and their preferential mating strategy for a man smarter, taller, stronger, wiser, and especially wealthier than she is. However, the opposite mating preference, hypogamy, is still not recognised by my spellcheck and I haven’t read it outside of academic essays relating to biology. Hypogamy is a preference for a mate dimmer, weaker, shorter, less mature, and poorer than oneself. While I have read and heard a lot of discussion about women and hypergamy, I don’t think that there’s nearly enough attention to men and their tendency for pursuing a lower quality mate. Indeed, it is a common complaint from women that they have to play dumb with men, play down their virtues, or even hide their wealth, so as to avoiding intimidating men who shy away from women they don’t feel they are good enough for. Men who date women taller or smarter than them usually get some mockery for this from other men, implying the ideal is to have a weaker dumber girlfriend. An obvious exception is physical beauty. This is possibly the only aspect of hypergamy that men display, except even with this most men are still more willing to sleep with a low quality woman than a woman is to sleep with a low quality man. It often surprises men when they find out that fat women report more sexual attention than thinner women. Continue reading →

david-detail Growing up I used to watch Star Trek. Both the original 1960s series and the 1980s Next Generation series feature main characters who supposedly have no emotions: Mr Spock and Mr Data. Spock considers emotions to be a weakness and actively suppresses them so as to be more logical; meanwhile Data has an apparent desire to fulfil his creator’s wish to build an android that is as human-like as possible, so Data seeks to have emotions. While as entertaining as these characters are, the series never actually explored emotions, what they are, why we have them, and what their meaning is in any depth. Rather, one gets the impression at times that the sole purpose of emotions, as far as the creators of Star Trek are concerned, is for personal amusement; they make life interesting but we don’t really need them. However, emotions are far more important than just mere novel reactions of our nervous systems to particular stimuli; they are what makes life alive beyond the organic/material level. Consider that each individual cell in your body is a living organism in its own right, additionally, the collective activity of the billions of cells that make up your entirely body is a secondary level of life, and finally the thoughts and feelings that make up what we call, for lack of a better term, “our mind” is a third tier of life built on top of the previous two tiers. But why do we have feelings at all? Continue reading →