Hi everyone !

Let’s start by introducing myself. I’m a psychology masters student, specialising in social psychology. I got off RP ideology about a year ago, and I feel like it’s time to actually spread the love and take care of others.

I’d like to share my knowledge with you here, the knowledge I gained from my curriculum as well as my personal culture. As I’m writing this on my phone, I can’t bother providing any source or link but most of it will be pretty basic and uncontroversial epistemology and history of science. As such, you’ll be able to easily verify everything through an honest Google search. Actually, I strongly suggest you do it as I think critical thinking is the key to effective decision making and action taking. With that said, let’s dig in.

Evolutionary theory is often summed up to this simple phrase : « survival of the fittest ». This is essentially true. But this is also pretty vague and actually not that accurate. Let’s crack this mantra open to see what’s actually going on, and how we can better understand it.

Survival, to begin with, is a tad more nuanced than we might think at first. In the context of evolutionary theory, survival means two thing. The first is actually surviving, as a singular autonomous entity. You could say that any second you spend breathing is, in this regard, surviving. You don’t have to be fucking Elon Musk, or the Lion King, to be surviving. You just have to keep breathing.

However, survival encompasses another notion, which is the ability to reproduce, the capability for genes to pass on. Again, the same logic applies, as long as the genes are able to reproduce themselves, one way or another, they are in this regard surviving. Also in this regard, you could say that donating your sperm to a sperm bank is, again from an evolutionary standpoint, reproducing and therefor surviving.

Fittest is the other keyword here, and actually where most of the confusion lies. The fitness of an agent describes its ability to accomplish a specific goal in a given restraining environment. Let’s use a metaphor to illustrate.

A given key only gets in and opens its associated lock. Try using another random key and it probably won’t get in, let alone open it. The key is the agent, its design specifics its qualities, the lock the environment or a part of it, and opening the lock the goal. If the key’s qualities allow it to get in and open the lock, we can say that the key is fitting at the task of opening the door. That’s what fitting is.

Therefore there are three major elements in fitting. The first one is the environment, the second is the agent qualities and the third is the agent’s specific goal.

The lock is the environment in the metaphor. It has X pins, organised in a given way, is Y large and Z deep, requires that every pin is pushed down to a specific point to release the lock, etc.

The key is part of the agent. As the environment, it has a set of qualities. It’s A long, B wide, has C number of indents, etc.

The goal here is to open the lock. Getting the lock opened in any way completes the objective.

Now, you probably have seen it coming at this point but, in this example, there is actually more than one way to accomplish this goal. If you got a key that gets into the keyhole and makes the barrel roll, you are pretty much set. Pat yourself on the back and crack open a cold one. If you don’t, there’s no need to desperate yet.

An obvious idea would be to force the lock. In this metaphor, we didn’t stated that the lock had to stay intact, so forcing it actually gets our objective completed. Sometimes it’s just a matter of thinking outside the box.

Another idea would be to actually get the actual key. Maybe it’s out there, you know. Maybe it’s right under the doormat. Might as well check ! Maybe it’s hanging on the belt of someone right in front of your nose.

Another idea would be to get a lock picking kit and learn how to use it. With the right set of tools, you might be able to emulate the qualities of the fitting key without having it.

Now, let’s leave the metaphor aside for a minute. In the context of evolutionary theory, and the spreading of genes, the first exemple can relate to something like a rape, or a forcefully induced pregnancy. Obviously, we don’t actually want that. Some do, and that’s actually the evolutionary hypothesis about the existence of such an ineffective strategy. I should therefore remind you that rape is a felony in nearly every civilisation which ever existed, a crime of such tremendous gravity that it usually meant a death sentence for way longer than not. I should also add as a side note that, in this regard, advocating against abortion and birth control makes this reproductive strategy more effective and is therefor actively supporting rape. If you consider using this strategy, know that you’ll basically have humanity as a whole against you, so I strongly advise you to change your mind.

Second exemple would be something akin to introspection, or reframing. I met a lot of people in my life who just had a zap, an eureka moment, and shifted the trend of their romantic life entirely. A friend of mine realised that he was gay, and that pretty much flipped his dating game upside down. Another started attending some... late night parties involving lots of leather and ropes and... well you see where this is going. We’ll come back to this at the end of the post.

Third exemple would be something akin to PUA practices. Now, full disclosure, I’m not actually against PUA as a general practice. Exploring the phenomenon of human romantic attraction rationally and levelling the playing field through education is actually a compelling idea to me. It’s very much democratic and, well, what can I say, I’m a sucker for equality, can’t help it. However, rationality is an elusive thing, so let’s go back to theory for a moment.

The methodology behind evolutionary science is fairly specific, and basically focuses on one thing : describing the environment of yesterday. The idea is that by describing the environment, one should be able to derive the constraints arising from it and therefor, determine the qualities required to overcome them. Evolutionary science is therefor pretty much half history and archeology. Let’s investigate hypergamy through this lenses.

There is actually two main way to prove the existence of a pattern of hypergamous behaviour in women. The first one is through general psychology investigation. Methodology would be something akin to sampling women, monitoring their relationship and see who they tend to date. If an experiment finds that women tend to date men of higher social status than theirs, we can say that women behave in an hypergamous way at the time of the experiment for the population represented by the studied sample. Nothing more. We can’t draw any scientific conclusion further than that, for example about the « nature » of women.

Now, if we repeat this experiment at different times, within different cultures on different populations, we might be able to draw further conclusions. However, being conclusive about the « nature » of something through this method is ultimately impossible, as it doesn’t allow to account for each and every parameter possible. It can be useful and insightful, to this I’ll agree, but it is dishonest epistemologically to draw essentialist conclusions using this methodology.

The evolutionary approach can be more helpful in this regard. Methodology in this case would be to find a prior state of the world, not too far away from ours, where women HAD to be ESSENTIALY hypergamous for their genes to pass on and effectively survive. I’m not capping stuff randomly here. Only if the trait was an absolute necessity can we say with somewhat certainty that every individual now must have inherited it. The constraint an environment sets on an agent is called evolutionary pressure, and the agents qualities offsetting this pressure an evolutionary advantage.

If the trait was only helpful for survival, things are very much more complicated. It would mean that other less optimum traits would have also had room to replicate, to a varying degree. Now, if a trait keeps being helpful for long enough, it still ends up eventually erasing every other, through long term compression. But the lower the evolutionary pressure, the relative superior helpfulness of the trait, the longer it takes to happen. If the pressure is low, if the trait only gives a slight advantage, it may take litteral eons to supersede every alternative trait and become hegemonic.

Moreover, in order for the evolutionary methodology to define the trait as essential, said trait had to be very hard to emulate. Even if the evolutionary pressure on the trait was high, even if it was mandatory for women to behave hypergamously for their genes to pass on, said trait also had to be extremely difficult to fake to be considered as essential now. It’s the same logic than before, the easier the trait is to fake, the lower the pressure to essentially have it, the simpler for other traits to pass on.

This is the reason why some scientists prefer to talk about "eliminination of the unfittest" or "survival of the fit enough". Even tho ultimately, only the optimum genes will have survived, on a day-by-day basis, a lot of sub-optimum traits keep passing on. As humans, most of us still have a vestigal tail that's very much useless and can even be detrimental sometimes. Yet because the pressure on the trait is actually low, very few people die or can't reproduce because of having a coccyx and the trait keeps passing one. Utimately it will probably disappear, yes, but very much not today.

That's why the time frame, and having a longitudinal approach, matters a lot when talking evolutionary. Let’s use an example. California is effectively burning atm, which is an environmental change. Let’s say there are two sub-species of butterflies living in Californian forests, a green specie and an ashy-beige specie. In a living, breathing forest, the green butterflies would have benefited from a certain evolutionary advantage, as they were able to hide more easily amongst the green leaves than their beige peers. But something happened, and there are no green leaves anymore. Because the environment changed, the evolutionary pressure on each trait changed as well. What was once the fittest trait is now a liability in survival, and in this example, you can expect the green butterflies population to locally decrease, while the beige population would increase.

Now, let’s say that in order to survive in an unfavourable environment, the beige butterflies developed some kind of defence strategy like a bad smell or something, and because the green ones didn’t had to, they didn’t. Beige butterflies’ predator might be able to find food easier now, in the form of green butterflies, and therefor survive more effectively, and reproduce more, further changing the environment. But said predator might also be living in the forest, which remember, burned. They might be facing other challenges themselves. Ultimately, the whole situation is pretty much chaotic and difficult to model effectively. Environments change on a daily basis, even ever so slightly, which can actually result in dramatic changes in evolutionary pressure.

On a side note, this is what "protecting the biosphere" is all about. We don't know what we're doing. It's really over our heads, way too complex. We are setting up a Shrodinger Damocles Claymore upon our heads, and we won't know when it will fall, or even if it's even there. Coronovirus is alegedly the prodcut of such a phenomenom. Urbanism pressures wild species to relocate, importing their underlying desease with them and contamining new populations. Should we have letf which ever coronavirus original bearer to their business, they would have stay in their wild forest homeland and probably never came in contact us, let alone infecting us.

Anyway, here’s another catch. Everything I just said implies perfect knowledge of said past environment. But History actually is a shit show, scientifically speaking. History is pieced together through unreliable narration and scattered and shattered artefacts. Now sometimes that’s enough. We know that people had to eat in the past. We know that they settled at some point and started cultivating the land and quite a few other things. That can be enough to draw some conclusions, or at least to speculate or corroborate other scientific elements. But those cases are exceptions, not the rule.

What happens most of the time looks like this. Researchers do a study about a behaviour using empirical methodology. They have an ungeneralisable result. They state it, explicitely or not. However, in the conversation part at the end of the study, they mention that this would be consistent with a certain conception of past constraits and evolutionnary pressure.

Finally, let’s talk actual genetics. I’m no geneticist so I’ll keep it even simpler than the rest. The latest years of research in genetics focused on a brand new exciting but uncharted field : epigenetics. Epigenetics studies the ability of the DNA to directly adapt to the environment. Concretely speaking, some genes can be « activated » or « shut-down » depending on the situation. Now, this process takes some time, as genes don’t turn themselves on and off like lightbulbs. But ultimately, your AF might be at risk of turning into a BB given the right circumstances and vice versa. Now, we could argue about whether it is directly relevant or not but this would be hardly relevant as epigenetics is a new and uncharted field. What is relevant is that it shows us how little we do actually know. For years we have been studying DNA without a single clue that such a phenomenon was happening. This should ultimately be humbling.

Let’s tackle the last part of the conversation, which is the goal aspect of the question. This part is the least controversial to me as, well, we’re here writing or reading this, meaning alive, meaning born, meaning the product of a reproductive act. Our parents probably had a reproductive drive, and they might have passed it on. Here is the thing. Our parents certainly had a sex drive. I sure have. For many years, that as well as a couple other psychological tricks would have been enough to keep human life going. Birth control didn’t exist, you had to have sexe to get your endorphins shots, next thing you know there’s a baby in the making.

However, in the few last years, more and more people are experiencing a sex drive decrease. Now, I don’t think that this decrease is essential, as the thing has been deeply rooted in our brain for ages, there’s no doubt about that. However, the mind is manifold, and wants many things. It wants food, it wants to learn, it wants to control, it wants to communicate with others and many other things. Our society is being more and more dense with opportunities to splurge on those other drives. It’s easier than ever to create a business and gain perceived increased control. You basically have access to humanity’s total sum of knowledge at your fingertips. We probably live thousand of miles away from each other you and I, and yet we are communicating. Ultimately, those drives are all helpful things for survival, selected through evolutionary pressure as well, and there is no reason to think that under certain circumstances, the mind might prefer splurging on those instead of the lion’s den that is the dating game.

Plus, the world is a messy place atm. Birth rate took a large hit during WWII, before going right back up during the Golden Years. We definitely are closer from WWII than the Golden Years today, in terms of perceived safety. Maybe it’s the perfect opportunity to reflect upon oneself and grow.

Let’s spill it. I have some experience in the romantic department. Long term relationships, short term relationships, flings, romantic shit, soft bondage shit, emotionless shit. Been there, done that. I want to believe I contributed in creating some joy in the process, and this I would be proud off. But I also created a lot of suffering, and this is ultimately the thing that sticks with me. I actually don’t remember a lot of my sexual encounters, only the few most memorable ones. But I definitely remember the pain I caused. And I can say with a 100% certainty that it was not worth it. Some people probably don’t care about that. Either they have some rationale to downplay it, or are lacking empathy, or something else. That’s not me. I do care, I can’t help it.

I started bottle-diving this year. I’m saving to buy my own bottle atm. It may sound weird, kinda esoteric, but I find solace in doing it. Lying mid water, miles away from civilisation with the depth below, the sky above and a dozen bar of pressure on the body is a weird place to be for a human on this universe. But it makes me feel good. Turns out the key was right below the doormat. I don’t know if I’ll be dating again. I sure as hell don’t feel the need too. I’m done with dating apps and SMV min-maxing. I want to learn new stuff, be helpful and get my body underwater. If I meet someone willing to do that with me, and I don’t mind them doing it, I’ll be happy. Otherwise, I’m already happy. I wish you to experience the same.

That’s it for today. If you’re interested in anything I said here, want some more information or feel something is unclear, feel free to notify me in the comments. I might come back to the post and edit it based on inquiries to clarify. If you’re on the fence about considering what I said instead of some TRP/FDS brainwash material, please consider that this amounts for maybe 2H worth of actual introductory psychology lesson, given for free, while the other guys are in here trying to make a buck out of sexual and emotional misery with their cheap programs. This should be enough said.