• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1251 0

nubility; higher when both younger and older. Etc. Even the face was a reliable physical indicator. (Frank laughed.) Selection showed a preference for average features. This was asserted because students in a test were asked to choose a preferred composite; the “beautiful composite,” as created by both male and female subjects, had a shorter bottom half of the face than average, typical of a twelve-year-old girl; full lips in vertical dimension, but smaller mouth than true average. Higher cheekbones than true average, larger eyes relative to face size; thinner jaw; shorter distances between nose and mouth, and between mouth and chin. High cheekbones and relatively short lower face and gracile jaw indicated youth, low testosterone/estrogen ratio, and nullipara. Bilateral symmetry was preferred. Deviation in hard tissue reduced sexual attractiveness more than the same amount of deviation in say nose form, which could have resulted from minor mishap indicating little about design quality. Ah, Francesca Taolini’s beautiful crooked nose, explained at last!

As was “masticatory efficiency.” This was the one that had gotten Frank and Anna laughing so hard, that day when Frank had first run across the study. Sexy chewing.

In the early environment, total body fat and health were probably correlated, so fat, what little could be accumulated, was good. Now that was reversed, and thinner meant both younger and healthier. Two possible readings, therefore, EE and modern. Which might explain why all women looked good to Frank, each in her own way. He was adaptable, he was optimodal, he was the paleolithic postmodern!

Were women evaluating men as mates in exactly the same way? Yes; but not exactly. A woman always knew her children were biologically hers. Mate choice thus could focus on different criteria than in effect capturing all of a mate’s fecundity. Here is where the sociobiologist Hrdy had led the way, by examining and theorizing female choice.

Patriarchy could thus be seen as a group attempt by men to be more sure of parentage, by controlling access. Men becoming jailers, men going beyond monogamy to an imprisoning polygamy, as an extension of the original adaptive logic—but an extension that was an obvious reductio ad absurdum, ending in the seraglio. Patriarchy did not eliminate male competition for mates; on the contrary, because of the reductio ad absurdum, male competition became more necessary than ever. And the more force available, the more intense the competition. Thus patriarchy as a solution to the parentage problem led to hatred, war, misogyny, gynophobia, harems, male control of reproductive rights, including anti-abortion laws (those photos of a dozen fat men grinning as they signed a law on a stage) and, ultimately, taken all in all, patriarchy led directly to the general very nonadaptive insanity that they lived in now.

Was that true? Did sociobiology show how and why they had gone crazy as a species? Could they, using that knowledge, work backwards to sanity? Had there ever been sanity? Could they create sanity for the first time, by understanding all the insanities that had come before? By looking at adaptation and its accidental by-products, and its peacock exaggerations past the point of true function?

And could Frank figure out what he should do about his own mating issues? It brought on a kind of nausea to be so undecided.

MOST OF THE KHEMBALIS still in the D.C. area were now moving out to their farm in Maryland. The compound was nearly finished, and although a thin layer of hard snow still lay on most of the ground, spring was springing, and they were beginning to clear the area they wanted to cultivate with crops. They rented a giant rototiller, and a little tractor of their own was on its way. Sucandra was excited. “I always wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “I dreamed about it for years, when we were in prison. Now we are going to try what crops will thrive here.” He gestured: “It looks just like it did in my dream.”

“When the ground thaws,” Frank suggested.

“Spring is coming. It’s almost the