Select #MeToo

It occurs to me that the #MeToo phenomenon is possibly rooted in the natural selection history of our species. Consider cairns found the Atlantic coast of France, through to the British. These were built after the end of the last glacial maximum. The general phenomenon is that people interred in cairns were more related to each other than to the people buried nearby. There is even a cairn in Ireland in which are interred the remains of two first-order relatives. This is evidence that elites strongly preferred to breed with elites rather than their neighbors. This had been going on before the age of agriculture and armies, so what was the goal? Maintaining political connections is one possible answer, but the distances involved are so great, it is not clear how that could have been translated to any material benefit. The last possibility is that elites chose to avoid interbreeding with locals because the latter were perceived to be uglier or stupider or weaker.

If this is true, it might have gotten started back in Africa. This would have been a time when genetic diversity among humans was far greater than it is today. Within a single band would be individuals as smart as scientists living along side the equivalent of Trump supporters. It might have been the case that the smartest chose to mate with the smartest of neighboring bands, and that alone would be enough to establish a chain of associations extending great distances.

Elites would have been keen to display their mental and physical prowess to other elite families. This could have happened through sophisticated use of language and sophisticated social skills — practices still in use by modern elites. In other words, human intelligence would be subject to a second, and much more aggressive selection pressure. Elite mating exclusivity might well have been the means by which humans developed their intellectual capabilities beyond what would arise from the environmental natural selection pressure alone.

The rule would be this: elite women breed only with elite men, but elite men breed with all women they can. This has the effect of increasing intelligence level of the entire population without reducing intelligence within the elite population. In other words, any man considering himself elite would have the natural impulse to have importunate sex with women beneath his class. That would have selective advantage not only for him, but for any group which tolerated it.