👓 Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper | Timothy Gowers

Read Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper by Timothy Gowers (Gowers's Weblog)

First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try t…

The analysis here makes me think there might be some useful tidbits hiding in the 300+ comments of his prior article. I wish I had the time to dig back into it.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Our prehistoric ancestors were not doing higher mathematics, so we would need to think of some way that being on the spectrum could have caused a man at that time to become highly attractive to women. ❧

One needs to remember that it isn’t always the men that themselves need to propagate the genes directly (ie, they don’t mate with someone to hand their genes down to their progeny directly). Perhaps a man on the autism spectrum, while not necessarily attractive himself, has traits which improve the lives and fitness of the offspring of his sister’s children? Then it’s not his specific genes which are passed on as a result, but those of his sister’s which have a proportion of his genes since they both share their parent’s genes in common.
September 19, 2018 at 03:35PM

variability amongst males ❧

Does it need to be a mate-related thing? Why not an environmental one. I seem to recall that external temperature had a marked effect on the sexual selection within alligator populations such that a several degree change during gestation would swing the sex proportion one way or another. Could these effects of environment have caused a greater variability?

Further, what other factors may be at play? What about in sea horse populations where males carry the young? Does this make a difference?
September 19, 2018 at 03:41PM