Normally hypergamy is eugenic. That is what it is for, that is its telos, that is almost the definition of hypergamy. Yet it is very noticeable that a successful natural is frequently poor, perhaps usually poor, and often rather stupid. A loser, except he is a big winner with girls.
Consider the peacock. Glorious tails are so big and heavy that they are bad for the species, bad for the race, would be bad for clan and family if peacocks had clans and families, which they do not.  Females tend to want what other females want.
Suppose females tend to go for X, where X is initially a good indicator of health and fitness, where females selecting males on X is initially eugenic.  If other females select X, it is good to have sons with lots of X, so a female should select X if other females select X, even if X has ceased to be a good indicator of health and fitness. Selection for X tends to become more and more extreme, even if it ceases to be a good indicator of fitness. Sexual selection tends to become driven by unreasonable and rather arbitrary female fashions.
Humans and chimps murder, hunt, eat meat, and, unlike most animals, make war. The only other mammals I know of that make war are the lemming and the naked mole rat. I expect there are plenty of others that I have not heard of, but war is, for obvious reasons, a rare characteristic.  We may therefore conclude that the common ancestor of man and chimp was violent, ate meat, and made war.
War requires loyalty and comradeship. You love your comrades, you will kill for them, and risk death for them. Humans are killer apes, but our specialty is loyalty, friendship, and cooperation.
Humans are not only smart, thus good at cooperating, but have physical adaptions for cooperation. Our eyes have whites, which make it harder for us to hide and make us more vulnerable to UV damage, but makes it easier for one human to tell what another human is looking at. Our throats are modified for a wider range of sounds in ways that make it considerably easier for us to choke.  Humans are more specialized for cooperating than chimps.
The common ancestor of man and chimp lived in the jungle, but being the meanest sons of bitches in the jungle, some of them decided to wander out on the plains. Since they were the slowest sprinters on the plains, we may conclude that they were dangerous enough to take care of predators. The theory that the first of our ancestors to go on the plains were timid gentle herbivores was not very plausible even back in the days when we thought that chimps were timid gentle herbivores. If you cannot climb out of reach of carnivores, and you cannot sprint very well, what are you going to do?. A child or a female is going to stick with the males, a male is going to stick with his comrades.
Plus out on the plains, there is more meat and less fruit, more hunting, less gathering. So females are more dependent on males. So more patriarchy, more specialization for violence, more specialization for cooperative violence, and, with more patriarchy, more war.  We became smarter in the course of thousands of genocides.  Conversely, primitive humans that live in jungles tend to evolve to become more like chimps. In the jungle, females don’t need male support and can kick their kids out at four to gather for themselves. Cooperation in large groups of men is less important in the jungles, where the individual male tends to individually predate on women and children, and so humans of that ancestry are not very good at cooperative endeavors – much better than any other animal, but not as good as their plains dwelling relatives.
Large groups of males quickly sort out their status hierarchy, after a bit of status jousting that is usually too subtle for women to understand, and thereafter treat each other with respect. The private crisply salutes the officer, the officer salutes back slightly less crisply.
Women in contrast never sort out their status hierarchy, and are always plotting against each other and undermining each other, so that it is difficult for large female groups to work together.
To women, this standard smart male cooperation all looks like submissiveness, looks like being low man on the totem pole, because this stuff just goes over their heads. To her, it looks as if the officer and the private are both kissing each other’s asses, so she wants:
See the way he walks down the street
Watch the way he shuffles his feet
My, he holds his head up high
When he goes walking by, he’s my guyWhen he holds my hand, I’m so proud
Cause he’s not just one of the crowd
My baby’s always the one to try the things they’ve never done
And just because of that, they sayHe’s a rebel and he’ll never ever be any good
He’s a rebel ’cause he never ever does what he should
But just because he doesn’t do what everybody else does
That’s no reason why I can’t give him all my loveHe’s always good to me, always treats me tenderly
Cause he’s not a rebel, oh, no, no, no
He’s not a rebel, oh, no, no, no, to meIf they don’t like him that way
They won’t like me after today
I’ll be standing right by his side when they sayHe’s a rebel and he’ll never ever be any good
He’s a rebel ’cause he never ever does what he should
Just because he doesn’t do what everybody else does
That’s no reason why we can’t share a love
By and large, he really will never ever be any good, for for men to get stuff done, have to work well with other men. By and large, he is a rebel because stupid – if he was a smart rebel he would be rebelling in ways less visible and more subtle than shuffling his feet.
But if all women tend to make the same mistake, then in a woman’s interests to make the same mistake as other women commonly make, for the sake of sexy sons
Because female sexual selection for X tends to go over the top, tends to become unreasonably extreme, because females tend to select for even more of what other females are selecting for, tends to be fashion driven, selecting for men who are at the top of the male hierarchy leads to selecting for men who do not display submissive behaviors, which leads to her selecting for the rebel who shuffles his feet, when she should be selecting for the officer whose reply salute is slightly less crisp than that of the private, which leads to her selecting guys at the bottom of the male hierarchy, rather than the top.
This post inspired by the movie “Zulu”, where all the characters, British, Boer, or Zulu, were ridiculously manly except for the preacher and his daughter, and the preacher’s daughter entirely failed to notice.
An amusing just-so story, but a very long and rickety one.
Here’s an alternative. Women are suckers for musicians, poets, guys who are gifted at badinage. Durn, they scream and swoon in crowds for gifted enough musicians. So guys who are verbally and communicatively adept are very sexy.
That also explains other things, like the timing of when kids develop grammar.
And the origin of human language abilities and their incredibly rapid evolution, at least according to this story, is almost entirely sexual selection. Their utility for war and hunting was relatively incidental to their utility for seduction.
Hypergamy in this story is entirely what made us smart, and continues to.
Not really. Someone who is famous for being famous scores about as well as someone who is famous for being a musician. As, for example, the various you tube videos featuring fake celebrities.
Further, you observe that the lead character in a romance movie is frequently an inarticulate “rebel” who has no idea what he is rebelling against or where his rebellion will go to, and, even in a musical romance, never a musician.
The typical nerd is very good with words, compared to the typical natural. Nerds don’t score.
Not they are not.
Check out the standard romance fiction.
Every other male in the storyline is more verbally adept than the romantic lead, and the girl has all the zingers. She zings him, and he does not come back with a better zinger, or cleverly turn her zinger around, he just ignores it and comes back with a standard cheeseball line, what PUAs call “plowing”.
“Plowing” reflects the PUA strategy that there is no point in being clever, because girls are stupid, and in the unlikely event that they are not stupid, you are still better off treating them as stupid.
Plowing is the stacking of a bunch of rehearsed and edited verbal stories designed to show in fact just how verbally adept and mentally interesting you are while denying her the chance to probe and find out you may not be as deep as you are representing.
Haven’t read romance novels, but my impression is the strong silent type actors in movies primarily appealed to guys, like John Wayne.
Clint Eastwood.
Clint Eastwood is laconic, therefore does not display verbal agility.
If girls were impressed by verbal agility, the romantic leads in romance stories would talk more and be wittier and more entertaining. They don’t talk much, considerably less than the girl and they never seem to have a witty comeback.
Naturals are genuinely not verbally adept, and PUAs conceal their verbal skills.
The lead male in romance stories is not verbally adept. Rather, they notable for their rock hard frame. Observe the romance I linked to. The girl cuts him to pieces with witty rejections, and it does not phase him. He is untroubled, his frame is rock solid, but does not have witty comebacks. He passes shit tests by stoicly ignoring them, rather than by having clever, witty, responses that turn the shit test around.
I have better verbal skills than the average person, and I know better than to use them on girls.
In the romance I linked to, the girl has twice as many words rejecting him as he has words hitting on her, and her cutting rejections are relevant to his hits, therefore somewhat witty, while his responses mostly consist merely of ignoring her rejections and hitting on her again, therefore not witty. She conspicuously displays much better verbal skill than the romantic interest. What the romantic interest displays is unshakeable frame and the ability to retain stoic self control in the face of brutal thermonuclear shit tests.
My point re Clint Eastwood was precisely that: laconic, not verbal ability.
Therefore the people who like his films are guys.
Dirty Harry has only a few lines, and he doesn’t have a lot of groupies.
I think the romantic lead in blockbusters is always witty. De Caprio in Titanic gabs away. So does Romeo.
I don’t know from Romance novels, either what is in them (beyond your description) or what women read them for, so I’m loathe to draw sweeping conclusions. Women nowadays draw a big distinction between who they choose for their baby-daddy and who they screw, much less what they read, so I’d be wary of drawing sweeping conclusions.
Does he? I, of course, have never watched Titanic. So I googled up “De Caprio Titanic”, which brought up a pile of women recollecting scenes that gave them the hots. So then I did the same search on you tube, and the first hit was this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk6hp8sbY0c
In which he says not a word. It is not him talking that gives girls the hots. It is, like the stupid loser idiot in the “he’s a rebel” song, his body language.
Which confirms my own impression: that if I displayed my considerable verbal agility in the course of picking up women, they would just get bored and irritated. The problem is more noticeable when they are drunk, for in wine there is truth.
If you read Roissy on how to talk to women, it is in large part, “how to talk to stupid people and primitive savages”. Displaying verbal agility is clearly not a priority for Roissy.
Did you watch that youtube link? Its a music video of a love song that projects onto him even more communicative and verbal ability, not to mention musical ability, then he already displayed.
Part of my point is you are not going to establish the truth of a just-so story by giving your movie impressions, which seem to differ from mine.
If you are remotely realistic you will recognize that women substantially value verbal and musical ability in their mate choices. I’m not suggesting that’s all they value, just that it was plausibly the dominant effect in evolution of human verbal ability.
No it does not. He is not singing the song, which is just background music. Nor is he dancing to it.
You are grasping at straws. It is perfectly obvious that women are not attracted to verbal indications of intelligence.
BTW, DiCaprio in Titanic in addition to a talented wordsmith and poker player who demonstrates sophisticated and touching empathy on his first meeting, is by profession a brilliant artist. If your argument depends on establishing that DiCaprio is sexy in Titanic because of his high status position in society or his money or the deference paid to him by others or because he treats her like crap, in spite of his boorish mental abilities, your argument is in worse shape than I thought.
No he is not by profession a talented wordsmith. He is an unsuccessful aspiring artist. Nor is he a successful poker player. The character played by DiCaprio, Jack Dawson, is homeless and broke. And if his backstory had been that he was a talented wordsmith, which it was not, when he is on the Titanic, we don’t see him demonstrating any talented wordsmithing. Instead, it is all in his silent body language. He walks around like the alpha male that he is not, much like the dumb loser in the song “He’s a rebel”
Didn’t say he was “by profession a wordsmith”. That’s what’s so cool about language, it connects the words in arbitrarily controllable ways to express sophisticated concepts, and there’s skill in both crafting it and unpacking it. Women dig it when you are good at it.
BTW, if you want a real talented wordsmith, a guy who consistently crafts interesting sentence after interesting sentence, uses a blistering and utterly appropriate vocabulary, usually has interesting things to say, and spews forth a remarkable volume, I recommend Roissy. I think you are familiar with him though.
Who did not sell any books, nor demonstrate any dazzling verbal skills with the girl.
What he did was walk around with high status body language without getting hammered down.
this may be the gayest neoreactionary argument ever, and the competition is tight
Jim, you should write a book. I’m speaking from experience here. When girls would find out about mine, they’d start getting wet.
If they got wet after reading it, rather than learning that other people had read it, then I would conclude that hypergamy was eugenic in humans.
She doesn’t have to be able to read, or to understand the material, or to invest the time, to understand the existence proves I’m verbally adept.
You should try it out. In fact she won’t read it. That could work to your advantage, like stacking.
Climbing mount Everest will get you laid one hell of a lot more than writing a book.
Because those are clearly equally difficult tasks.
You can’t trust the sexual free market. Evolution doesn’t always produce good outcomes.
There’s a metaphor here for something.
Case study http://www.inquisitr.com/2195347/love-is-blind-as-ugandas-ugliest-man-becomes-father-to-8th-child-video/
Why haven’t you written about the big gay marriage ruling?
For the same reason I have not written about the sun rising in the morning.
We are necessarily getting lefter and lefter, faster and faster.
Arguably the recent ruling on Obamacare, which gave the bureaucracy authority to legislate and budget, rendering the legislature entirely superfluous, is more significant. Also taking down the confederate battle flag.
The biggest recent decision was that disparate impact applies to housing discrimination cases.
Degentrification – they are planning to move whites out of everywhere.
The future primaeval reports on current events.
http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Just place the marker over Harvard University. I’m sure Tsar Putin has already done that.
[…] pulls out his big stick: Why human hypergamy is dysgenic. As usual, Jim is magisterial: An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable […]
In the ancestral environment, any poser who sauntered around like he owned the place would quickly get a beat-down from the men who *did* own the place. Women’s instincts have not re-adjusted — they see the poser not getting a beat-down, and assume he’s the real deal.
Ha ha Dave. Great post. Adding to that, the poser-loser in today’s environment stills gets his EBT and can keep some meat on his bones so the women can’t see the emaciation of the lazy idiot-rebel of former times. In such an affluent society, all kinds of guys can run all kinds of empty cocksure poses because housing and food is free. It’s nearly all posing. Winners have to dish over 57% of their winnings to losers until no one can even tell who’s winning. Imagine the best hunters coming home and dividing up their kill 50/50 with the dumb slobs who either couldn’t be bothered to hunt or never figured out a bow and arrow. So they’re all laying around with fresh carcasses to offer the women in equal proportion. Women would have been freed up to judge attractiveness by some trifling ornamental detail like the sheen of the bone through their nose or some trinket-minded thing like that (much like how tattoos have become ‘sexy’)
Humans aren’t chips.
It took a social-revolution many thousands of years ago to put the man in charge. Primitive humans lived under Matriarchy. Patriarchy coincides with the development of agriculture. The man who had a farm could trade his food and animals for tight young pussy from the local female dominated tribes, the female leaders of which probably were often glad to send troublesome young women away. The man and the cow teamed up to get the young tight pussy back home, where the pussy could be controlled, away from meddling kith and kin of the female (including male kin who don’t take kindly to their female siblings being raped by male outsiders), and possibly near sympathetic members of your own kith and kin who would side with you against the new pussy you just brought home.
One of the more interesting myths of the ancient Matriarchy that has survived to the present day in some of the world’s remaining primitives is the myth of partible paternity. Basically the matriarchal clan woman created a lie that you could be like 25 percent the father of her child because you fucked her once. The ancient man had an idea how long women would be pregnant, but there was no way for the ancient man to confirm or deny whether or not this could be true. Maybe his matriarchal clan mother even told him he had 3 different fathers (the guys the matriarchal clan mother could sucker into believing this), so there is nothing strange at all when one of the tribal girls he fucked tells him is 1/6 the father of her recently born baby. The baby’s right pinky toe resembles his a bit, after all.
The ancient man beat the ancient woman at the social-game, with the help of the cow (the mortal enemy of matriarchy), which was arguably the single greatest revolution in human history. Those trying to turn back this revolution are doomed to failure.
[…] hypergamy is dysgenic. Related: Sex and […]
In humans the most egregious example of traits developed as a result of sexual selection like the peacock tail, are female breasts. Almost useless and for the larger ones, extremely cumbersome when doing things like running. They are the result of male sexual selection.
Regarding the Jim and Nat spat:
A few more pieces of evidence supporting Nat’s point:
PUAs Mystery and Style. A lot of their (very successful) approach is all about talk, talk, talk, be quick, funny, fluent, demonstrate personality, subtly demonstrate higher value through stories, etc.
Musicians. Even taking the celebrity factor or the on-stage factor out of it, chicks dig a guy with a guitar and a song. On the surface, nothing could be LESS laconic and macho than SINGING, but there is tons of evidence of it working.
My own experience. My verbal skills have gotten many a woman into bed. Yes, I could learn a lot from the laconic types and know when to shut up, be mysterious, etc. But my boldness, my quickness, my ability to keep the conversation moving and prevent boredom, my quick comebacks to her objections, my ability to use words to create emotional states in her, the verbal (feminine) side of my brain knowing how to relate to women better than thugs can and therefore tell her what she wants to hear, etc. These have all helped me seduce girls.
Yes, sometimes women just want the strong silent type. But you often see examples of the bold talker getting more girls than his dumb meathead friend. Charismatic charmers are good with words. Think Casanova, think Don Juan.
When women talk about an attractive guy “with a twinkle in his eye,” that implies verbal intelligence. He’s a step ahead of her, looking at her with condescending amusement. He understands what she’s saying, what she’s not saying, etc. etc. The brute who doesn’t even understand her prattle? His eyes don’t twinkle. They are dull.
Even among the thugs, the charming ones get the girls. Asshole game alone can work, but knowing how and when to use it vs. a little charm (push/pull) works even better than pure thug game.
So yes, in a fallen world, in a world of too much material abundance and feminism, the idiot thugs are procreating plenty. But verbal cleverness has long been a vector of male competition, and it has been rewarded. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t have so many movies, books, art, etc. We’d just have more gyms and tattoo parlors.
Are they? But here he tells us it is just patter, while what matters is body language.
Here is Mystery in the field. He talks to the camera slowly, with random pauses in the middle of a sentence to figure out where his sentence is going, and repeats himself unnecessarily. That is not being good with words, that is self confidence. He knows everyone is hanging on his every word, so he can pause, he can ramble, he can repeat himself.
I would have reshot, or edited out the seemingly dimwitted rambling, repetition, and pauses. He does not reshoot, presumably because it projects a confident attitude, projects the attitude he is teaching us to project. Now let us watch him hit on a girl.
At 2:56 He hits on a girl he does not intend to fuck. He just intends to use her as social proof to get the girl he actually wants. She is a pivot. He is recruiting her to be a wing girl.
Mystery: “Hello”
target: “How are you?”
Mystery gives an off the wall answer and claim of vastly higher status.
Mystery: “Magical”
Makes makes immediate kino as he answers, contacting her hand to shake it on the last syllable, so it does not matter what he says.
Compliance test: Target shakes his hand.
Target: “Nice to meet you. Aloha”
Mystery prolongs hand contact: The aloha comes out slightly mumbled, as target is slightly disconcerted by the prolonged handshake.
Mystery: “I recognize you though for some reason. How is that?”
That line is pick up 101. Totally cheeseball. (Because it works.) Has any girl not heard this line one thousand times before? Having heard it one thousand times before, she has a ready answer, and a demonstration of HER higher value – the first shit test.
Target “Because they say I look like Davis Wencas”
Mystery looks away, mini withdrawal, push pull.
Mystery “All right! Bring it on!” He calls out her shit test as a shit test.
Target, put on the defensive, protests, “No, it is what they say.” Target speaks fast, fearing to be interrupted and shot down again “They say I look like Davis Wencas? I don’t think so” She intones it as question, even though it is a statement, kind of like Maxwell Smart asking “would you believe?” after being called out in a lie.
Mystery: “Who is they?”
Target “Everybody everytime I …”
Mystery makes body language as if he is going to next her and move on to the next target, starts walking past her.
I don’t see any great verbal agility here. He is not telling stories to impress her. SHE is telling stories to impress him, and his body language reads unimpressed. All the verbal agility and story telling is coming from the girl.
His only clever line is “recognize you from somewhere”, which everyone uses all the time and every girl has heard one thousand times before.
The “magical” line is good, but he does not riff on it and represent himself as the accomplished magician that he in fact is, but instead blots it out of her mind with his kino.
He walks past her as if dismissing her, then turns as if changing his mind, (push pull, again) and proceeds to qualify her, asking her if she is good enough for him.
Mystery, interupting and dismissing her continued attempt to justify the claim that she is mistaken for some hot woman “Do you smoke” – thus challenging her to qualify herself.
Mystery does not wait for answer, makes rude gesture and turns away again,”What good you are?” so now she has to defend herself against three negs at once (stacking) without being given the opportunity to defend herself against any one of them.
Girl looks pissed, is about to walk away in a huff.
Mystery again moves away, and again turns. Again push pull. He now sits invitingly, reversing his words and body language of a moment previously, non verbally invites her to spend some time with him.
This is like using a cat toy to play with a cat – you dangle it near, then jerk it away, then dangle it near again.
Notice the occasional clumsy slip up with words “What good you are?” instead of “What good are you?” – because of course, he is wholly focused on his non verbal body language.
I don’t see any attempt to impress her with his cleverness with words, or stories in praise of himself, other than the one line “magical”, which he immediately blots out of her mind.
This is not verbal agility. This making her chase him, her qualify herself to him. It is all attitude. Or rather it appears to be all attitude. He is in fact being smart, but smart in faking attitude, not smart in showing her that he is smart.
Notice the body language when he sits. He is leaning back comfortably on his thrown, she is almost bowing or curtseying to him. He has not demonstrated verbal agility. He has acted as if he is much higher value than she is, and she bought it.
He did not tell any stories. Except for the “magical” line he did not display any verbal agility, indeed he mangled or mumbled several sentences.
What he did was stack three negs, challenge her to qualify herself, pass a shit test by calling it out, (which is the complete no brainer way to pass shit tests and recommended for that reason) and act like a cat toy interacting with a kitten, always moving close then slipping away, thus teasing her into chasing him.
Ninety percent of his act employed all the verbal skills and verbal agility of a cat toy being chased by a kitten.
Like a cat toy, he is continually in motion, moving towards her and moving away, turning towards her and turning away, luring her into chasing after him.