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KulakRevolt  8mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   3194 thread views

Feral Aryan Femininity: Blonde Women as Bioweapons

anarchonomicon.com

10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.

What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme

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I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.

Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward?

Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.

But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.

Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.

If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.

While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.

your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers

Why?

I'm having a hard time imagining why you think so. I'll try two angles but lmk if neither is what you meant.

  1. You mention "your individual genes" not making much of a difference, but humans fight as ethnic groups. The other men in your army are probably much more closely related to you than the enemies are, and share a lot of the traits which distinguish you from the enemy. So no, one soldier being a bit more courageous isn't likely to affect much, but in aggregate it's likely that one side is going to be substantially more courageous than the other, for several reasons including culture, nutrition, and, yes, genetic distinctiveness. Over enough iterations this should propagate.

  2. Maybe you think that the relatively tiny (in absolute numerical terms) genetic differences between ancestral groups can't amount to much? In fact there are plenty of single-allele mutations which have outsized effects on all sorts of things from body shape to behavior. A lot of the ones we think about most often are deleterious because those stand out more: when someone gets a nasty FOXP2 mutation and can't really engage in human-level speech, that's obvious and we go looking for the cause, which happens to be easy to spot. But suppose there were a mutation which made someone (and by extent his descendants) 20% more courageous? How would that even play out? We'd probably only know about it if it had unfortunate side-effects like also making carriers prone to violent crime or something, which seems plausible. Here's an interesting candidate, though due to the prohibitions on research into such topics set in place by today's dominant religion, we seem to know less about it today than we did fifteen years ago.

But women facing slavery are not calculating "I can still reproduce". See the play The Trojan Women, where their fates are discussed. Their children will be killed, and if they do have children by their new masters (not their new husbands) those children will always be second-class to the legitimate children, and probably also second-class in life, either slaves themselves, or even if freed, denied citizenship.

Hecuba was a queen, now she's just going to be an old woman servant in a foreign land. Her daughter is killed as a ritual sacrifice, her grandson is murdered:

Andromache's lot is to be the concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, and more horrible news for the royal family is yet to come: Talthybius reluctantly informs her that her baby son, Astyanax, has been condemned to die. The Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father Hector, and rather than take this chance, they plan to throw him off from the battlements of Troy to his death.

The women won't be lolling around in a harem like some Orientalist fantasy, they'll be put to work. There's no reason to think their owners will be particularly fond of them, after all their main value is as booty to demonstrate the warrior's status. If he wants a woman to fuck, he can probably get one easily enough. The legitimate wife, the mistress of the house, will have a lot more control over the life of the slave, and if her husband is partial to the slave, so much the worse consequences for the slave woman. A slave woman who had been high status in her old life might have some protection, but the ordinary women won't even have that.

And of course, as societies became more evolved and civilised, the economic benefits of "don't kill all the men, enslave the boys and some of the men" were evident.

Born in the last years of the 5th century BCE, Phaedo was a native of Elis and of high birth. He was taken prisoner in his youth, and passed into the hands of an Athenian slave dealer; being of considerable personal beauty, he was forced into prostitution. The occasion on which he was taken prisoner was no doubt the war between Sparta and Elis, 402–401 BCE, in which the Spartans were joined by the Athenians in 401 BCE.

Why do you assume courage is or can be a purely Y chromosome gene? Let's agree that it might be advantageous if it were, it still has to be.

No, it doesn't. Most of the genes that are activated only in men (e.g. the ones to build testes, or to synthesise dihydrotestosterone) aren't on the Y chromosome. They're switched on either directly by testis-determining factor (the product of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome) or indirectly by various other things downstream of it (e.g. testosterone levels).

Genes for the brain having different activation based on testosterone levels in gestation would be the obvious mechanism.

Ok you've added another mechanism, hypothetically, by which it could happen. That does not mean at all that it does. Many genetically determined values that are more advantageous in men or women are nonetheless determined by the genetics of both parents.

I mean, men are more aggressive and independently courageous than women, generally, and I'm pretty sure that's genetic, although I don't think I've ever seen a good study on that. Not that that's connected to the above argument, which is kinda weird.

Many genetically determined values that are more advantageous in men or women are nonetheless determined by the genetics of both parents.

I... think you might be misunderstanding me?

I'm agreeing that such genes would be passed down from both parents. Genes for how to build a penis are present in women, and can be passed down from grandfather through mother to son (or great-grandfather through grandmother and mother to son). It's just that in the mother, those genes aren't active. (There are a few genes relating to spermatogenesis that are directly on the Y chromosome and cannot be inherited through women, but not that many - and obviously, every gene that only affects women is also present in men.)

There are quite a lot of genes that are turned on and off by the sex of the individual they reside in.

(Oh, forgot another plausible means; same structure built, but activated more in men by hormone levels "at runtime".)

And, well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but "men take more physical risks" is not exactly controversial; there's a reason we're the vast majority of blue-collar criminals.

You hypothesize without proof.

Equally likely is that sex and hormones accentuate a trait in one sex.

Height works this way. A tall mother with both sons and daughters will, cetetis paribus, have sons taller than her daughters. But the sons and daughters of a tall mother will be taller than the sons and daughters of a short mother respectively (ceteris paribus).

Similarly, courage may be more present in the male than in the female offspring of a brave mother, but present in both in greater measure than in the offspring of a cowardly mother.

This would more match the folk wisdom of a Herodotus or a Tacitus, and most folk-genetics as they existed up to modernity.

You're demanding I prove someone else's claim? No, I won't. There is a reason I haven't made positive claims about the central point here, and that's that HBD is not my area of expertise. You said something specific which didn't understand biology well on a level even I could spot, and I pointed that out. I have no obligation to defend others' points about which I'm agnostic myself; go demand proof from them.

There's a problem with your Darwinian reasoning - and it has economic resonance, such that I recall David Friedman once writing about it - which is that a single man's contribution towards victory in a line battle is so minuscule as to make no difference in the battle's result, and so would neither make for a powerful behavioral incentive, nor for a powerful influence on his ability to reproduce. Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.

I think there is some Darwinian selection going on here, but it works more like this: the cost of being a coward isn't that your tribe gets slaughtered in battle, it's that your social reputation gets ruined and your fellow tribesmen shun you.

So men are selected on the basis of whether they integrate into their tribes properly, courage being a particularly valued trait, but also conformity - whatever gets you there. Courage is perhaps more of a manifestation of behavioral traits than a trait that is selected for by itself, or perhaps it is both. In any case, I think it's more likely to be intra-tribal social selection that drives gene selection in this case than inter-tribal warfare.

I'm talking about individual selection, not group selection. The exact result will vary depending on what kinds of battles you end up fighting throughout your life, but in general being courageous increases the individual's reproductive chances, not just the group's. If you flee the battle then you can't partake in the spoils of war. If you flee the battle, you may survive but the victors will steal your wives and daughters, and the next generation will be more like them than you. Thus, courage spreads even if cowards are more likely to survive.

Also, it must be said, the vast majority of violence throughout human history has been small-scale. For the majority of battles that most people have participated in, one man's individual courage does make a difference on the outcome. Skirmishes between groups of 20 men were far, far more common than battles between groups of 20,000.

Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.

This is perhaps tempered by the fact that ancient armies were recruited from segmentary lineage societies and so the winning side was closely related to one another.

Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either

Yes, this is group selection. There are good arguments that group selection's not a thing in a lot of cases. Human prehistory is probably not one of those cases; tribe extermination due to military defeat was like 10% of mortality in prehistory.

Haidt does a full defence of group selection in humans in The Righteous Mind.

Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.

Oh yeah, obviously selecting on randomly-assorted groups isn't going to get very far. But that's not super-relevant to HBD questions since human prehistory did not consist of randomly-assorted groups.

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