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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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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.