Manosphere dudes love talking about science. Unfortunately they don’t seem quite as enthusiastic about learning the science before they talk about it. They’d rather make up their own theories anyway, especially when it comes to biology in general and evolution in particular.
Consider this theory about human evolution, posited by someone calling himself The_Meep_Lord and posted on the MGTOW subreddit a couple of days ago. Call it the “Dudes rock, women suck” theory of evolution. (I’ve left out a few passages in his text below because they were needlessly confusing — though to be fair I have also left in other passages that are equally confusing. Maybe you can figure them out; I couldn’t.)
Anyway, this theory goes as follows and begins now.
“A boy not fit for the world is destroyed or at the very least a genetic dead end,” The_Meep_Lord writes.
So men have evolved to be better and better over time.
Nothing evolves to be “better,” per se, as if there is one perfect platonic animal we’re all evolving slowly towards. An animal might evolve to be better suited to a particular ecological niche, just as humans have evolved to fit the role of the “jackass that figures out how the world works before utterly destroying it,” which really wasn’t a niche that needed to be filled.
While the girl is coddled and saved from failure.
[citation needed]
She can only be a genetic dead end if she chooses to be so.
I gather this is because Mr. Meeplord assumes that women are the only gatekeepers of sex and that guys will raw dog literally anyone who lets them. Which is not actually true.
So women just do not evolve beyond having better fertility (more kids means more of said women’s genes),
Evolution isn’t just about having babies. It’s also about ensuring that these babies grow up to be parents of a new batch of babies.
those that are a little bit better end up being more likely to be a genetic dead end. In matter of fact, those that have some traits to be better just end up being worse as they haven’t evolved all the other traits to go beyond there base instincts, the pre-programming we all have (emotions).
I have no fucking clue what he’s getting at here with the reference to “there [sic] base instincts.” As for the rest, as far as I can make any sense of it, it’s that he seems to think that “better” women end up having fewer kids. Here’s that “better” again. Parents in more developed countries do indeed tend to have fewer kids, but not because they’re genetically superior.
So the result is that even the best of women are just not that much better at all. While men are hyper diverse and getting better with each generation.
Well, not everyone can be a brain genius like you, thank god.
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Regarding the picture, I remember how delighted I was as a kid to learn that whales still have vestigial leg bones. It led to my current correct understanding of evolution, unlike your average miggie/mra.
If boys not fit for the world were destroyed, how is it that so many of them nowadays need glasses? And believe this crap? And if girls were coddled, how come there’s so much more female infanticide than male?
Implicit in all that: women and men are separate species.
Even basic animal husbandry, much less Mendelian genetics, ought to have made the OP go ‘oops! ‘ and then back to the drawing board. I don’t think even Lysenkoism was this far off plumb.
David, it does my vile ex-bio nerd heart good to see you casually saying absolutely correct things in response to fools.
In particular:
And:
Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! A blessing on your ecology tutor! The two most obnoxious and prevalent myths of evolution, and you dodged them beautifully and it does a body good.
Carry on.
“I have no fucking clue what he’s getting at here with the reference to ‘there [sic] base instincts.’ As for the rest, as far as I can make any sense of it, it’s that he seems to think that ‘better’ women end up having fewer kids.”
This could be a dig at women, but it could also be a gibe against people of middling status. As in: “Midwits are useless and bougies are dull; besides, everybody knows what happens when you teach too many people to read and write and figure and have books and papers and equations floating all over the place: lower-downs who’d rightfully be living under overpasses except that they can demonstrate a knack with a graph or a map or the alphabet start to get above themselves and rebel against their actual betters, after which society goes all to hell toute de suite. That’s when the barbarians flood in and burn the libraries; and not a moment too soon, either, because all the libraries have ever accomplished is to get the civilized people in trouble. Which is why we don’t really want any civilized people around — civilized people have a sell-by date — and why our Ideal Culture of the Future will consist of nobles, on the one hand, and beggars, on the other. We can do without these middling types who rise and fall and never know their place and without their perpetual cranky alienation, thank you very much. Don’t thank us. Express no gratitude. In the end you’ll know that we were right.” That’s industry-standard fascist thinking, and it could be that enough of MeepLord’s intended audience is familiar with it to fill in the blanks the Meeper leaves.
I’m not really arguing for the correctness of this notion; I’m extending it as a possibility. That’s all. Thanks for your time.
Back in the day, we should have required tests for people before allowing internet access.
Unfortunately, it’s too late now.
I wonder if he’s a Dr Who fan? Seriously, there’s a character called Beep the Meep; and it sorts of fits with the edgelord thing.
@jsrtheta:
Back in the day, we did. Early on, internet access was either at a university, or at a few select large companies and government agencies (DARPA, for one), if you had a position at said organization that was pretty much unobtainable without a university degree.
Which meant you had to have passed a university entrance exam, to say nothing of graduated high school.
Did that result in a better internet than we have now? Debatable. Throwing internet access open to the masses resulted in the so-called “endless September”, but on the other hand, that just means that what had occurred in seasonal pulses now happened year-round. Nothing was happening anew that didn’t happen before.
And the problem has almost never simply been uneducated people. It’s the willfully education-averse, who overwhelmingly sit on the political right and who consciously reject any information that contradicts their pre-formed views and opinions. If there is any intervention to prevent that, I’m guessing it would have to be in early childhood. As for detecting them, I read somewhere that a set of four simple parenting questions reliably revealed conservatives, but that was in a low-stakes setting where there was no negative consequence for getting the “wrong” answer. Any use of a right-wing test to screen applicants for positions of decisionmaking power and suchlike would breed efforts to circumvent such tests. A questionnaire would be met by a cheat sheet with the “right” answers (i.e., the ones that will not trigger your job application to be rejected or etc.) and so forth. Right wingers would sneak past. And they’d also whine and complain about discrimination, of course, even if it was pointed out that these tests were simply implementing a job requirement of “is not an ineducable moron”, in effect, by screening out applicants who would not be willing to accept (some) new information.
(Holds up hand) Sorry David. Nitpicking bioscience major here. Meep has presented a badly muddled hypothesis, it becomes a theory when it can, as clearly as is possible, explain real world phenomena, ideally supported by experimental evidence (covering my arse about sciences where that last bit is difficult.)
This thing about the females not evolving must be especially hard on whales, who have to go back to land to mate with their still landbound partners.
That whole thread is full of angry non sequitur dudes rambling nonsensically about Women Emotional, Men Logical.
That’s a weird statement to make in an era that has produced large numbers of men so unable/unwilling to adapt to modern life, they’re throwing tantrums 24/7 and buying guns.
At the same time, lots of men have become better by embracing inclusiveness and relating to women as human beings, but they aren’t who he’s talking about.
Does this person not get that genes within a species are shared and distributed between sexes? Or that women more frequently get more father genes than sons, and vice versa for men? (Scientific American)?
@Amtep
No kidding. I’m also wondering why there are bipedal women around.
And, considering that there are women of all sizes, skin tones, preferences and professions, I’m going to have to assume that the alleged “hyper diversity” in men says more about how and where this guy sees women and less about anything men in general actually do.
Much as I like whales, I wish we could have kept those stage 2 hippo-rats around as well. They seem pretty cool.
@ morethangeek
That sounds like the worst possible answer to the question: “How far have you got with your science project?“
Indohyus was basically a whale-pig ancestor with a deer-otter appearance and lifestyle.
Oh, they were kind of like chevrotains.
That’ll do, whale-pig. That’ll do.
“Well that escalated very very slowly.”
Been laughing at that for 10 minutes straight.
Nonsense. Star Trek: Voyager taught me that the ideal toward which humans (at least) are evolving is this:
All we have to do to get there is amplify the rate of evolution by reaching Warp 10 for a couple of seconds, and then let nature do its work. Science!
Wait. If those who are a little bit better are genetic dead ends, but those who are a little bit better are actually worse, then the problem of genetic dead ends seems to have resolved itself.
I am getting some really strong racism energy off this one. It is giving off some great-replacement/white-genocide vibes in a way I can’t really ignore.
Yes. Giant slow moving salamanders without opposable thumbs, the very pinnacle of human evolution. Thank you, Voyager, for revealing our peaceful future. 🙂
I got to give them credit, though. It’s super common and tropey to have the pinnacle of evolution be some sort of glowing energy octopus, released from the bonds of physical matter.
Or crabs.
They dodged both of those!
@Policy of Madness
Why did you have to remind me that episode existed, I had quite happily relegated it to the forgotten dusts of deep memory… every time I tried to get a friend to watch Star Trek and was like “Oh yeah, start with Voyager!” they would come back later with “So about these giant newt things… I don’t think this show is for me…”
@Big Titty Demon
The first two seasons of Voyager were really unfortunate. The pilot is great, so I was super stoked about it when it first aired, but I just stopped watching mid-second season because the episodes were so appallingly bad. I’m sad about that, because of course season 3+ is fantastic, and I missed out on it during the first run because I gave up on it during the Unfortunate Times.
A lot of (male) fans were of the opinion at the time that Voyager was bad because the captain was female, and a female captain is always going to make for sucky TV. And I couldn’t refute that at all, because Voyager was so, so, so bad.
When your ideology overrides your understanding of biology, you need to ask yourself ‘Is this ideology really worth looking a complete and total arse for?’
Clearly this bloke learned his biology in the Muppet universe, where Miss Piggy and Kermit are apparently a breeding couple, despite one of them being an amphibian, one of them being a mammal, and both of them being puppets.