I thought I would list a few corrections and additions that one of these days I hope to make to my book, Exact Morality for Today.
Corrections and things I found out I should have mentioned
1. As mentioned, to the extent intra-ejaculate sperm competition exists, there is competition in ejaculate of male children between sperm more related to the child's mother and sperm more related to the child's father; and thus a female suffers from being fertilized by strong sperm. However, in future male descendants (grandsons and beyond) there is no competition in sperm between the ancestral mother's genetic material and the ancestral father's. On the contrary, in future generations the ancestral mother's genetic material benefits from having originally been fertilized by strong sperm a total amount exactly equal to the amount being fertilized by strong sperm made her genetic material suffer in the ejaculates of her sons. So overall, when both short-term and long-term consequences are considered, a female who has been fertilized by sperm successful at intra-ejaculate sperm selection will neither benefit nor suffer insofar merely as future intra-ejaculate sperm competition is concerned (I was thinking she would suffer). This was a dumb mistake I made that will necessitate a good deal of revision and more careful thought.
2. The existence of syncitia (cytoplasm bridges) between spermatocytes when they are developing ordinarily makes sperm development dictated by the diploid genome of the male, thereby according to dogma making meaningful intra-ejaculate sperm competition impossible. However, it also shows that there could be a very easy and effective way for females to encourage sperm competition. The female reproductive system could release a chemical during lustful sex that when absorbed by the male causes these bridges to disappear or become less pronounced. Since I already had posited that lustful females release chemicals that get absorbed by the male to affect spermatocyte development, this seems very plausible. Female orgasm probably does two things. Yes, on the one hand it still probably makes sperm success more random, but on the other hand, it probably also makes the female more fertile. Thus, by not being orgasmic, the lustful female can have sex without much risking pregnancy right away, which she doesn't want until her lust chemicals have had time to affect developing spermatocytes (a couple months?). Presumably, the lust chemicals also increase the fertility of sperm that have developed when such chemicals were present, so eventually, non-orgasmic lust will cause a gain in fertility of sperm that counteracts the loss of fertility implied by the female's stillness.
3. The time between crossover being determined in a sperm and the ejaculation of the sperm is to the best I can gather a little less than two months. (I somehow had in my head it was much less than this.) This probably explains much of the disdain wives have for their husbands unholy lusts for other women. Apparently such unholy lust will make holy love difficult for a whole two months. This may also have something to do with such expression as "the third time is the charm." The first time you almost succeed with a well-loved woman, it probably won't work because you haven't been holy long enough. One estrous cycle later, the same thing. But then the third time, you've got a better chance. Similarly, most people feel they should be engaged a couple months at least before they get married.
4. If a girl removed from a male can go quickly all of a sudden from one emotion to another, that is a sign that she is not under the influence of mood-altering chemicals introduced by sodomy. I think this has something to do with manic-depression. People who feel uneasy about their emotions often (to the detriment of their sanity and restfulness) change them on a dime as a way of reassuring themselves their emotions are not just consequences of depraved addictions.
5. Sadness may be associated with males discouraging crossover in spermatogenesis. A male will more likely be successful if he suppresses crossover, because of course females aren't pleased by crossover that occurs in sperm fertilizing them. Moreover, since crosses are usually harmful in the short-run, better for you to postpone them a few generations until weakly-linked genetic material is mostly separated. This can't always happen, of course, because that would imply a low average rate of crossover, which would be bad for your genes. You can't magically do something that your genes don't allow. However, it wouldn't hurt a gene to encourage crossover when you are doing better than you think your deserve while discouraging it when you are doing worse than you think you deserve. Similarly, if a female hasn't gotten what she deserves, a male might partly make it up to her by being sad along with her.
6. Just the other day it occurred to me (when I was walking down the street and a butterfly flew past me) that changes of emotion are less appropriate when a society gains much by slowly fluctuating from one generation to another. As mentioned in my book, such fluctuation can be important in encouraging morality, because good individuals are more likely to mate for characteristics that are not immediately very important. (This is why I think monarch butterflies trek back and forth between Mexico and Canada over several generations.) Butterflies are always happy, it occurred to me at the moment of that day, and I got to thinking why, and of course, it is because bad butterflies suited just to past generations should not be able to assuage their suffering via sadness. A part of me has begun to wonder whether perhaps in humans marriage/mistress sentiment fluctuates more than I thought over a longer time; i.e., whether every few thousand years the average male who has children has dozens of children, and most males born have no children. Such a climate would strongly tend to encourage mothers to be very selective of which sons they care for. I wonder whether much cruelty in females is related to things like human sacrifice which might be typical responses in societies that have too many unloved male children? But with so much diversity nowadays (thanks to travel mainly), our world needs that sort of thing now pretty much less than it ever did. But a part of me wonders whether cruelty might be extremely more appropriate (say) 5000 years from now than it is today. A cruel streak in a girl is not unattractive to me if it is clean. Of course, just being sad is a possibility much like just being happy. I can sort of see why butterflies are always happy, though. It is important for them to have much genetic mixing so that traits don't accidentally die out during the fluctuations. I suppose I shall have to figure out crows, who are always gloomy, or maybe mourning doves. Not much insight.
7. It is useful to think of beauty as being part something concrete (call it talent), and part love of talent, part love of love of talent, part love of love of love of talent, etc. Calling talent 0-love, and calling love of n-love, n+1-love, it turns out it is reasonable to weight the componenets of love so that love is geometrically distributed in beauty.; i.e., love obeys the geometric distribution with parameter p the fraction of beauty that is love.
8. I used bad information in asserting that monotremes are the only mammals who have a cloaca. There are a few placental insectivores who have a cloaca (I can't find a definite list), and the beaver has a cloaca. Of course, my anti-sodomy theory occurred to me when I was observing muskrats, animals similar to the beaver (and the duck-billed platypus, a monotreme). Perhaps beaver and muskrats (and the duck-billed platypus?) need to breed organisms in frothy muck to help them digest wood, bark, or other hard-to-digest material? If so, this might make it very important for them to avoid being addicted to the beer-like properties of these substances, lest they brew a bad mixture. Thus, the importance to these animals in avoiding addiction perhaps is so unusually great, that addictive sex might not be the terrible drawback that it is to species for whom selection for resistance to addiction is less useful. I don't have any theories about the insectivores, but I think they are mostly primitive, so their being an exception is not a big deal, perhaps.
If this theory is right, muskrats might just be the non-cloacal mammal most expert at avoiding addiction, so it's no wonder that my anti-sodomy theory was inspired by my observing these experts (who I kind of felt were silently laughing at my misery, stupidity, and naivete concerning what could make naturally just females behave so unjustly heartless).
This page created August 25, 2004.