
Sex with someone from the future is hazardous to your health - with experiments - ColinWright
http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/06/16/sex-with-someone-from-the-future-can-be-hazardous-to-your-health/
======
ars
> When the male traveled 22 years to mate with a female, her life was cut
> short on average by 12%.

Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn't she be _better_ positioned to resist
the effects of the male? She has had 22 years worth of advances, and is
dealing with a "primitive" male.

~~~
doyoulikeworms
This makes sense.

There are two scenarios that could explain this.

One, the fact that a particular trait is present in a current generation only
tells us that it is superior relative to just _one iteration prior_ , and not
necessarily any more. There is no rhyme or reason to evolution. In fact, it is
almost an evolutionary disadvantage to incorporate traits that were once fit,
but no longer are, as it likely costs more energy, diminishing efforts against
current threats.

A non-biological example of this would be US foreign policy. We are very well
positioned to battle the Soviet Union in a Cold War turned hot. That threat is
no longer with us, but we're left with strategies and equipment that are
useful in that sort of situation. Today, our problems in the Middle East are
not helped by the fact that we have thousands of costly nukes and tanks (not
suited for urban warfare and occupation in Iraq and Afhanistan!). I'm no
military buff, but I think that this illustrates the point.

Another scenario could be that the relationship between clingy males vs.
females is much like that of a predator vs. prey[1]. Very clingy males result,
successfully, in clingy progeny, resulting in more dying females, resulting in
fewer clingy progeny, resulting in more females, resulting in clinginess being
more successful, and so on...

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation>

~~~
gaius
That's not quite true. The reason Gulf War 1, post-Cold War, was so lopsided
was that the Iraqis had Soviet equipment and training, and the desert is open
terrain just like the Steppe, and NATO had spent 40 years preparing to go
head-head-to-head with the Red Army using maneuver warfare. There are other
nations in the world that saw that and know that NATO will _dominate_ them in
any conflict even now 20 years later.

Also remember that the Russians haven't gotten rid of their nukes yet...

~~~
doyoulikeworms
I was under the impression that the US "easily" dominated Iraq's institutional
armed forces, toppling their government and "winning" (Mission Accomplished).
What we're doing very poorly, though, is occupying and policing the region,
now that we've taken care of the previous government.

In the case of war with the Soviet Union, I'm guessing that there was heavy
emphasis on dealing with nuclear war or full-scale land combat in Europe, with
the primary objective of beheading and toppling the Soviet control structure.

By contrast, in Iraq, our goal is (apparently) to occupy and subdue the entire
region, which is a different, difficult problem.

~~~
gaius
This is why I was very careful to say Gulf War 1! But the problem with Gulf
War 2 was another Cold War assumption, that was nothing to do with equipment
or tactics or indeed anything directly military: that the people of Iraq would
welcome their liberators, in the way that the people of the former Soviet-
occupied have embraced the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

~~~
doyoulikeworms
Ah, whoops. My mistake. So much for a simple example to illustrate my point :)

------
espo
There is also a link to some very kinky ducks in that article. Worth a read:
[http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/12/22/kinkiness...](http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/12/22/kinkiness-
beyond-kinky/)

~~~
yread
It's a pity the video isn't there. Or perhaps it's better - it's still too
early in the morning to see an exploding duck penis

~~~
photophotoplasm
[http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/209781-a-corkscrew...](http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/209781-a-corkscrew-
penis/)

For when you wake up a bit.

------
RyanMcGreal
I'm not sure I understand the distinction between the arms race and merry-go-
round models of male-female competition. The former concept seems to indicate
that gender dominance is a zero-sum game, whereas the latter seems to indicate
that dominance swings back and forth among the competitors. In other words,
they don't appear to be in competition.

~~~
gwern
I understood it as a question of how many strategies/antidotes are retained.
Do the males specialize in only a few poisons at any one time, and so the
females also specialize in a few antidotes, and new poisons are developed and
old ones lost? Or do males release all developed poisons up to that point, and
so the females have to manufacture all known antidotes, with no poisons being
lost when new ones are developed? (Think of a modern military; they have
fighter jets, yes, but they also still have the age-old weapons of knives and
swords.)

~~~
sesqu
That's how I understood it as well, but it seems to conflict with the
researchers not being able to pick between hypotheses. If one hypothesis has
the female growing their arsenal of antidotes, that is incompatible with the
result that past males caused more deaths in future females. Since they didn't
reject either hypothesis, neither can have been that.

------
iwwr
Yet, courtship in the yesteryears appears to have been much more involved and
complex. Are humans bucking this trend?

~~~
ars
Birth control.

Sex for a female is now free, so she is not as selective. This is bad news for
human fitness, but is not likely to change.

~~~
jasonwocky
Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control are
rocketing past us in fitness.

Increased female reproductive choice (of whether and with whom to mate) yields
an upward trend in fitness because it results in fewer, better cared for
offspring.

~~~
ars
> Ah yes, because today's demographies without easy access to birth control
> are rocketing past us in fitness.

It takes a lot longer than that, and it would be impossible to measure due to
birth control being correlated with medical care.

> ...yields an upward trend in fitness because it results in fewer, better
> cared for offspring.

The level of care to an offspring has no effect on its genes, and if anything
can mask genetic weakness by substituting extra care. So it does not cause an
upward trend for the children of the offspring.

Interestingly one trait that is being selected for is female non-sensitivity
to hormone contraceptives. Now that would be interesting to measure.

Another trait that is theoretically being selected for is behaviors that would
discourage contraceptive use (physical or hormone based), but I doubt that
that would be measurable - at least not for many more generations.

It's an interesting world we've made for ourself, I would love to see
demographics for 250 years from now.

------
spinchange
Discover's headline and use of the Terminator photo analogy doesn't make
sense. The experimental group of sea monkeys from the past were the males. The
health-at-risk females were from the present ('future')

Sex with males from the past is hazardous to females' health.

~~~
stralep
If you look at graph, both future and past male sea monkeys were disastrous to
female's health.

