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Originally Posted by duga
i agree with what you said after this, but i am curious as to why you think this idea is rubbish? i was not speaking of the entire human gene pool. you are quite right that applying these ideas on such a large scale would have no bearing, but what i said certainly applies to small groups. you can see what i was saying in action with certain immunities that have been selected for in small ethnic groups. if both men and women wanted sex just as much, these immunities would have taken much longer to come about, if they ever did.
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I'm sorry if I came across as hostile. The truth is that there is a lot of biological theory behind mating strategies and some like the one I posted, although briefly summarized, is accepted as the the reason why men compete for women who act as selectors. You wrote :
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Originally Posted by duga
If everyone wanted sex, then we would overpopulate and certain negative gene pools would never be weeded out.
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This implies that we've evolved to not overpopulate and to weed out gene pools and that this explains why men are randy and women picky. All these assumptions are plain and simple wrong. Starting with the overpopulation one - under the right conditions, populations grow until they stabilize around the carrying capacity for the system. They don't stabilize because they evolve to have less sex. They stabilize around the carrying capacity because of a lack of food, diseases, stress and other things that make it harder to live in a big population. If you raise the carrying capacity of the system or lower the population size (without crashing it), the population resumes growth. It's a basic principle in ecology. Also, if you know about the theory of selfishness, you'll understand that choosing not to have sex for the good of the population is a strategy that would be exploited in nature. Basically, if you choose to not preserve your genes for the future, you won't have any kids to inherit your altruistic strategy. Generally speaking, others who don't give a rats ass about it will benefit from your abstinence from sex. It would not be an evolutionary stable strategy and would be outcompeted.
About the negative genes in the population, we care about bad genes, but for selfish reasons. Men and women are selective about their partners. Bad genes make people less attractive; we think they look ugly, smell bad, they have poor social skills - and obviously people who are really sick is not someone you'd want to have sex with.
Simply put, you want to find the partner whose genes best ensure the survival and fitness of your own genes in the future - someone nice and fit. You want to avoid the ones whose genes will lower survival and fitness for the future. However, you don't care if some other dude has kids with the people you find unattractive. If you were to wipe out negative genes from your population, then you would have to care.
An important point is evolutionary strategies are selfish while what you wrote sounds like altruistic strategies. When you then wrote :
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Originally Posted by duga
As far as the facts go, however, this is just biological fact.
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.. Well, the sentence above was also a motivator!