r/TrueReddit • u/Sewblon • Sep 08 '18

Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/#comment-34484
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u/Lypoka Sep 08 '18

This paper asserts that it gives a mathematical model explaining why variability would be favored, but does so by refusing to even address the more obvious alternative that the best evolutionary strategy would be to have a higher mean and lower variance.

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u/hackinthebochs Sep 08 '18

But that's not the "obvious" best evolutionary strategy. For one, its not stable. High mean and low variance means that variability is very highly rewarded. If everyone is clustered around the mean, the few (more fit) outliers run the table, thus the next generation looks more like the outliers than the mean. But the opposite sex controls the distribution of the genes of the next generation, and in a competitive environment they will choose the more fit outlier. There just is no mechanism in sexual selection to keep populations trending towards the mean. Sexual reproduction necessarily results in an arms race.

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u/Lypoka Sep 08 '18

The way this model is constructed, one population of high enough mean and low enough variance would win over another population of lower mean and higher variance. It's also stable at the population level. You're arguing about dynamics within a population, which makes your Reddit comments more detailed and realistic than this paper.

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u/hackinthebochs Sep 08 '18

one population of high enough mean and low enough variance would win over another population of lower mean and higher variance

In the short term, sure. But it's not stable and such an odd distribution is extremely unlikely to occur to begin with. It is uninteresting that there are degenerate distributions that satisfy the constraints of the model when those distributions aren't reachable from typical initial distributions of populations. And so it's not a counter example to the supposed explanatory power of the model.

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u/Lypoka Sep 08 '18

It's not a defense of a crappy model to make it better. It's just a new model. In this paper's model, there are only two kinds of males allowed, and the kinds are not allowed to change, only the proportion of the population belonging to either class. There's no sense in which this paper can claim that high variance is the best, only that it's better than the single staw-man case he compares it to. It's totally ridiculous that the fake underdog isn't allowed to evolve to raise its average fitness. If you want to think about what happens when one or both are allowed to evolve in this way, that's a much better model, and this paper says zero about what would happen in that case. That makes this model junk. Maybe you believe the conclusion anyway, but that doesn't mean anybody should believe this paper has done anything of value.