I’ve been hired to critically analyze another pseudoscientific bollard from the professional misogynist Stardusk (a.k.a. The Thinking Ape): the incel-mgow argument that “fisherian runaway” proves women (read: “sluts!”) are biologically ruining men, “and it’s all their fault” (regardless of what “it” is; you can plug anything in there you like). This is yet another abuse of science by the manosphere that is so commonplace it has its own “Incel Wiki” page—which I was also hired to critique.

Since this serves as another example of how to apply critical thinking (and, conversely, how not to think like an idiot), that’s how I will approach it. I’ve deconstructed Stardusk’s misogynistic and pseudoscientific nonsense before, in “A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology and Comes Up with the Manospheric Hooker Theory of History” [Part 1] and [Part 2]. And there I already cover who that guy is and why we’re talking about him, and survey all the basic principles you need to hone in order to see through his delusional propaganda. I also link there to my many other analyses of manosphere silliness like this.

I already covered Stardusk’s video’s “thesis” of “male disposability” last time, too. So here I will only address its content as relates to fisherian runaway specifically. And since it’s really just a summary of the Incel Wiki, I will focus more on that, since it cites more sources and develops more points than Stardusk does in his video, which is more like a bad tl;dr of that article.

So here I’m just going to cut right to it and explain what’s going on.

Actual Fisherian Runaway

Wikipedia has a decent summary of the concept of “Fisherian Runaway” and its history. It’s true that the originator of this theory, the Brit Ronald Fisher, was all but literally a Nazi (which the Incel Wiki even admits in its first paragraph), but I won’t knock his theory just for that (that would be a genetic fallacy). In reality, the theory has never actually been proved, and subsequent science casts considerable doubt on it (as I’ll illustrate with links throughout here). But the most commonly cited example of fisherian runaway (which Stardusk leads with) is the peacock, whereby the peahen’s body is dull and practical while the peacock’s body acquired a (supposedly) massively detrimental art project: it’s fan of feathers, which is expensive to grow and maintain, and (supposedly) handicaps them in fight or flight. The manosphere then takes this as explaining why (human!) men have such impossible standards of male duty and beauty to meet and are doomed to evolve into gargantuan monsters (more on that below).

But contrary to manospheric imagination, “counter-selection” puts a hard limit on runaway—for example, on how large peacock fans can ever get—because animals have to still survive at that limit long enough to out-reproduce leaner competitors. But as long as the males can “pull this off,” and as long as the females consistently steer their mating choices to the winners of this detrimental race, in principle the effect will be observed: e.g. useless and detrimental peacock fans. It works only when males can thus father many children by many females (thus their higher death-rate is offset by a higher birthing-rate). This of course does not really describe humans. Peahens birth dozens of children; we struggle to get above five, and rarely do better than two. And “a few elite fathers” are not responsible for most human births. So the actual mechanism required for fisherian runaway does not exist in humans.

But manospherians are delusional. Factual reality is not their thing. They actually believe that a few elite men are birthing most kids (hard data refute this). And they believe women are somehow stuck in fisherian mate choice without actually producing the requisite number of children to sustain it. The contradiction escapes them. But to drive evolution, the choice has to actually be producing a lot of children—and human women aren’t doing that (thanks to condoms, pills, and other tech). It thus doesn’t work if women are more attracted to a certain type of man but they aren’t having those men’s children. Contrary to incels’ misogynistic fantasies, fewer than 2% of children are illegitimate, which means partnered men are fifty times more genetically successful than “men on the side.” Even in high-risk cases, illegitimacy is still typically under a third, meaning partnered men are at least three times more successful even in the worst circumstances.

So proper fisherian runaway is essentially impossible in humans. And non-fisherian sexual selection doesn’t have the negative impact needed for the manospherian’s worldview. For example, fisherian runaway could explain our large brains, but as those actually improve survival on their own, they cease being analogous to a peacock’s feathers (which are supposed to be useless and detrimental; while improving mental faculties is neither). The Incel Wiki’s authors try getting around this by citing Geoffrey Miller’s assurance (in The Mating Mind, pp. 162–63) that the human brain is “too advanced and exaggerated for the necessities of human survival,” but not only does Miller offer no evidence for that claim (it’s also the wrong claim: evolution requires only that it improve differential reproductive success, not that it be required “to survive”…you only need to be a single cell to do that), but he tries supporting it with the implausible assertion that language has no survival value apart from courtship—which establishes Miller’s judgment is garbage (and I’m not alone in that assessment).

But that’s just another data point in my conclusion that 90% of All Evo-Psych Is False. Obviously language, problem solving, cultural learning, and abstract-categorical-hypothetical (ACH) reasoning produce huge advantages to survival (as I explained before in Plantinga’s Tiger and Other Stupid Shit)—and everything else (from art to ritual) is a byproduct of that. Likewise, Miller’s not alone in speculating that some kind of sexual selection contributed to building the human propensity for art and humor (note the difference between “speculated” and “proved” here); but those then had social value apart from mate selection and thus are not relevantly detrimental. There is also no fisherian selection going on: men and women produce and appreciate art and humor equally, and without regard for the sex of the artist or even any interest in mating with them. Art and humor have independent utility, and developed from survival-relevant cognitive skills.

Conversely, counter-selection has been manifestly potent in humans, suggesting any fisherian runaway there ever was has ended. For example, hominin evolution from apes toward humans has seen a reduction in the differential size of men and women (their heights and weights got closer, not father away, and have not differentially changed since), so there cannot be any fisherian runaway toward “tallness” for example (as manospherists often claim). If ever there was, it has long since hit ceiling. Men are not getting taller (men and women’s heights have grown the same amount across all measured time), and male height variation remains bell curved, rather than skewing to “tall” (as fisherian runaway would predict; remember, all peacocks have large fans). So, women are not “running away” with these preferences, but are often mating with short men, and in fact are more typically mating with average men. So whatever genetic effect there was, is settled now.

But let’s look through the incel-mgtow reality distortion filter anyway…

Bullshit Fisherian Runaway

The manosphere version of this theory looks a lot like a Poe (and might actually be for all I know): women (all women) hunger so much for manflesh that they are horrifyingly distorting the evolution of the male body into this monstrosity…

I suspect whoever wrote this article was slyly poking fun at fellow incels making these arguments. But I checked the history log. No one fought to correct it in years of editing. So even if it’s a parody, it’s still so spot on that incels agree this is in fact what they believe. Muscled abs and chiseled jaws are useless, see. So the only reason men have them is sluts want them. And so genetic “runaway” results in men growing more chiseled jaws and muscled meatparts. And this is why incels can’t get a girlfriend.

You may think I’m joking. But I am not writing the parody here. Read the Incel Wiki page. I pretty much just summarized it. In their own words (which means, mostly, the words of that wiki’s founder), “sexual selection can lead to exaggerated physical or behavioral traits (ornament) and exaggerated preferences for these traits” and this “can potentially reduce population viability and contribute to extinction” (note the literal apocalypticism: women aren’t just janking up the male body; they are destroying the human race). They think “women’s mate choices” (but not, for some reason, men’s), “may be maladaptive, resulting in excessive emphasis on superficial courtship and selecting exaggerated anti-social traits that incite male competition,” by which they mean, conflict and violence (but not, for some reason, capitalism).

The bogus “just so’ing” of everything here with unscientific sexual selection claims is typical of manosphere pseudoscience generally, and something I refuted from Stardusk last time (especially in Part 2). The tl;dr is that female sexual selection in Homo sapiens is not this superficial nor this simplistic. Statistically, character traits matter more to women than physical (men tend to be the ones more focused on superficial physical traits); women are more variable in the physical traits they find attractive than men are; and the observed gradient is actually opposite the manosphere thesis: preferred male features, e.g. muscles, are more independently useful than preferred female features, e.g. unnecessarily enlarged breasts and narrowed waists. Indeed, a survey by Davis and Arnocky shows that studies have found no actual runaway in any human traits. Nothing that can be described as solely ornamental (like “masculine faces” in men or “pronounced breasts” in women) are very costly, or exaggerated (they aren’t maxed, and thus not analogous to the peacock’s tail), or even phenotypical (unlike peacocks, most men aren’t very tall and most women don’t have “large” breasts; moreover, height appears more regulated by environmental than sexual selection). So sexual selection might have produced some of these traits, but it can’t have been fisherian.

More importantly, humans are a social animal and dependent on culture, and, as such, cultural and social traits dominate mate choice. See Crespi et al., “Runaway Social Selection in Human Evolution,” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, for examples. As they note (emphasis mine):

Human mating systems have diverged substantially from the Fisherian paradigm, in that (a) females, as well as males, exhibit forms of sexually selected “beauty,” that may be chosen by the opposite sex; (b) mate choice is commonly more or less joint and reciprocal, with both sexes engaging in choice of a partner based on some criteria (though often with social constraints on choice); and (c) mate choice engenders relatively long-term pair-bonding, with mutual contributions to the rearing of offspring.

In short, humans aren’t peacocks. Any more than they are lobsters. And this has been pointed out before (Louis Bachaud and Sarah Johns, “The Use and Misuse of Evolutionary Psychology in Online Manosphere Communities: The Case of Female Mating Strategies,” Evolotionary Human Sciences 2023). But let’s look at how manospherians maintain their delusion to the contrary with bad logic and disinformation…

Fisking the Wiki

The Incel Wiki blames “fisherian runaway” for “breast/penis enlargement, hormone supplements, bodybuilding and plastic surgery” in men, but those are too uncommon to actually be explicable by such a global mechanism. Almost no men are doing any of those things; yet they are getting laid and having kids aplenty. There is also no evidence women aren’t doing all this even more. For example “over 98% of individuals who get breast implants are women,” not men; and not even one percent of women able, do (women even just in the first world and in the top ten wealth bracket count near a hundred million; yet only two million women worldwide have undertaken the procedure), which is far too rare to be the result of a global evolutionary driver (and there is no evidence that any of this affects actual reproductive success).

Note the questions I just asked and answered here are what any non-idiot should have asked. Are those phenomena actually common enough to reflect a global selection effect? Are they peculiar to men (or even on par with women)? Are men who eschew these things not being reproductively successful? Indeed, since you should always try to disprove a theory before believing it: Are lots of short guys having kids? If the answer is yes, then there goes your theory about fisherian runaway and height. What do you think you’ll get when you try looking for any other marker, like BMI or physical strength? Eeesh. Going the wrong way. Can’t be any fisherian runaway there, either. The manosphere theory looks like bollocks.

Another thing to check is cited sources. There you will learn how serious or lazy the author of a claim is being. Here, for example, some half or so of the sources the Wiki cites aren’t even relevant to the claim they are appended to. You’ll find articles cited in support of fisherian runaway that don’t even discuss it or only mention it in passing. You’ll find tertiary sources cited (like dictionaries or encyclopedias) where secondary or primary sources should be (like direct studies and textbooks surveying them); or they won’t be correctly described (the claim that fisherian runaway “can potentially reduce population viability” cites an encyclopedia entry that actually challenges it’s likelihood for want of clear evidence). Hence, the Wiki proffers a speculative theory of human women’s breast evolution—that is never mentioned in the article they cite for it. And the Wiki claims “women’s hourglass shaped waist is not linked to higher [reproductive success] or better health,” but cites a paper that never discusses that. So…how are we to know if these claims are even true? And why are we trusting an author who clearly didn’t even check to see if they are?

More centrally, for the claim that fisherian runaway can “contribute to extinction,” they cite three sources:

• One (a Master’s Thesis by Kendra Collins) simply cites another (a proposal regarding the Irish Elk by Ron Moen at al.), an example of “paper padding” that would get your grade dinged in college.
• Worse, that other article (the Moen study) never mentions specifically fisherian runaway (not all sexual selection is fisherian), is self-described as speculative (it only makes a proposal as to how the Irish elk went extinct; its hypothesized causal conjunction is also quite unusual and thus atypical), and would still have to be coupled with the assumption of fisherian runaway (and not some other kind of sexual selection), yet that is also reasonably disputed. Stardusk based almost his entire argument on this Moen study, citing only one other scientific source, a purely speculative article by Bailey and Moore (2012), as if it was a finding of fact (it wasn’t); and that was since refuted by Fry (2024) anyway, who concludes with “some doubt on whether” true fisherian runaway is even “a plausible outcome in natural populations” at all (indeed, even the peacock’s long tail isn’t as detrimental to survival as usually claimed, which pretty much kills the entire hypothesis).
• The third article (from The Atlantic) relates to crustaceans—which can’t have any relevance to mammals. It also never mentions fisherian runaway. It discusses a study by Martins et al. that relates to a different kind of sexual selection, one not driven by mate preference, but biomechanics (large genitals in the ostracods studied serve the mechanical function of out-competing other males in quantity and success of the sperm delivered; female choice is irrelevant).

That last article also did not demonstrate even that drove the kind of extinction the Wiki author meant. There appears to be a science literacy issue here: not only did they confuse fisherian with sexual selection (the one is a subset of the other, not a synonym), but they confused extinction of a clade with extinction of a species. What Martins et al. found was counter-selection: ostracods that went too far ended up losing; putting a ceiling on how large a penis an ostracod can have. Ostracods didn’t go extinct. They’re still thriving. If we correctly analogized this to humans, if fisherian runaway drove extinct the hominins that went too far (as it will when that counter-selection ceiling is crossed; like in Neanderthals, for example), it would leave behind the hominins who didn’t. In other words, it left behind us. Any future such event would have the same effect: humans would still be around and thriving. Even if technically they evolved into a new species (as the over-compensators died off), they’d still be Homo sapiens, and they’d still be, well, pretty much just like us. So in several ways that paper does not support any point the Wiki author cited it for.

Another thing to check is the skew-to-accuracy ratio in the text, which can measure bias over factuality. For example, compare the Incel Wiki description of fisherian runaway, with the regular Wikipedia entry: the latter is more neutral and clinical, and in result more accurate. By contrast, the Incel Wiki describes animal mating decisions in terms that credit agency and thought (which is not happening; pre-conscious animals do not think about what they are attracted to or why), thus skewing a notion toward blaming human women for their decisions and reasoning. But even human women don’t decide what they will find physically attractive (any more than men do), and as I noted in my previous articles on The Thinking Ape, unlike pre-conscious animals, human women don’t choose whom to have sex with in disregard of character or other social or mental attributes. Even a fling must be calculated in respect to whether they will be safe, physically and socially, fooling around with a particular person, and is typically calculated in respect to other enjoyments than sex, like emotional communication and sharing experiences.

Another example is how the Incel Wiki assumes that to count as fisherian, it must be that “the trait bears no advantage regarding strength, health, ability, morality or overall ‘good genes’,” which is correct as to fisher’s original formulation, but subsequent science found no support for that, and thus the model has been adjusted to still track “good genes” in some sense. This version holds that, as Wikipedia puts it, “the cost of producing the desirable ornaments is indicative of good genes by way of the individual’s vigour.” In other words, just as females must sacrifice resources to carry children to term, males must demonstrate a similar ability to thrive under similar deprivation—and ornamentation serves this function. Peacocks thus do demonstrate something reproductively useful: that they can do this.

Less viable mates will more often be killed off (the ornament overwhelms them and they are taken out by predation, accident, or disease), leaving the best stock. Since this is an inevitable outcome of any kind of fisherian runaway, strict fisherian runaway (without this corollary advantage) is actually logically impossible (the female always inherits the boosted constitution that made surviving the ornament possible, without the costs of the ornament). It thus becomes more of a semantic choice as to whether to still call it fisherian. But if we wish to talk about reality, that’s the only kind of “fisherian” runaway that there ever really is (as Henshaw and Jones put it, “Fisher’s model was never intended to be realistic,” but the manosphere argument requires that it be). Of course, there might not even be that kind of fisherian runaway (for example, as I noted earlier, with abundant links, peacock fans actually provide more survival benefits than detriments).

Another example is when the Incel Wiki cites Bateman’s Principle for its claim that “human females are more choosy,” but when you check, you find that’s not Bateman’s Principle (which has little to do with female choosiness), nor is it even true about “human females” (it’s more the other way around: “human males” are choosier, with less variability in what they consider attractive: study, study, study, study). Overall, the Wiki article just wanders through a series of armchair speculations with no cited support, and yet mixes that in with legitimate things (sexual selection is a real thing in the animal kingdom; there is a thing called “Bateman’s Principle” that has at least something to do with sexual dimorphism; and so on), and makes it all sound like it’s relating established science. It isn’t. It’s mostly just bullshit. As a critical thinker, you have to be on your guard for this. Just because things are confidently asserted in juxtaposition to science, does not make any of it even plausible, much less science.

This even leads to internal inconsistencies. The Wiki author’s entire argument is that somehow fisherian runaway credits women for men needing to be impossibly muscular to get a date, yet then says “strength and muscularity are also only weak, but consistent predictors” of reproductive success. So, which is it? Muscularity is stuck in fisherian runaway—or is at best only a weak predictor of mating success? Are women obsessed with only having sex with muscular men—or, as the author even admits the data shows, they almost don’t even care? It’s even worse when you check their source here, a study by Lidborg et al. that found “the only significant predictor was body masculinity” (note: the only one—so this is the only possible thing they looked at that could be undergoing fisherian runaway) and “effect sizes” for everything they tested “were overall small, with significant associations ranging between r = .03 and .17,” and that was only for behaviors; for actual success (reproduction), the top effect size (for body masculinity) was 0.14. A critical thinker needs to know what that just said: the effect sizes of various supposedly masculine traits ranged between 0.03 (which is near zero) and 0.17. Which is minuscule—if an effect size of zero means women are choosing at random, half choosing the trait and half not, and 0.2 means 58% are choosing the trait (and 42% not), then 0.17 means fewer than even that were; at 0.14, even fewer still (closer to 55% to 45%, just ten percentiles of difference). This Wiki author just refuted their own argument.

They then try, just as contradictorily, to argue that intelligence in men is a target of fisherian runaway. But to back this claim, they cite a study, by Gignac et al., that fails to show that. Already the fact that women are sexually attracted to a good mind refutes the claim that they are obsessed only with muscles (or even muscles at all). So the Wiki is kind of shooting its own foot here. We all agree with the observation: obviously many women factor “being intelligent” into choosing their mates, even if if were for no other reason than that it’s a hassle to manage any kind of relationship with a dummy. But the Gignac study did not show any kind of fisherian runaway here. It found that both women and men “were most attracted to a potential partner who was more intelligent than 90% of the population, but they found someone who was smarter than 99% of the population to be slightly less attractive—though still more attractive than someone with average intelligence”; likewise anyone above average. Since women were only “slightly more likely to report attraction to intelligence than men,” we are again looking at too weak an effect size to be fisherian.

It’s hard to draw any conclusions from all this anyway, as the Gignac data consisted mostly of Australian psych majors and U.S. internet workers, who are all W.E.I.R.Dos, and thus hardly useful for discerning evolutionary forces (see my discussion of this problem in 90% of All Evo-Psych Is False). But to continue correctly describing what the Gignac study found that the Wiki authors evaded: the same study, using a more qualitative measure of “sapiosexuality” (being attracted to people mainly for their intelligence), found only “1% to 8% of relatively young adults” fit that profile. Which is again too weak a signal to be fisherian. Moreover, when ranking IQ and traits they prefer in a partner, the Gignac team only compared “mean scores,” which don’t show variation (how many people didn’t select intelligence as attractive or rank it highly, we will never know—this is a significant methodological problem in the social sciences: deleting important information, which distorts the findings reported).

But even the mean scores showed the following plot:

Notice that here, on a 1 to 5 scale, we can assume 3 counts as above average and thus at least attractive (just not “the most” attractive, a distinction manospherians often fail to account for), and 4 surely counts as quite attractive. And yet we see people (men or women) are perceived (by both men and women) as more attractive even if they are perfectly average in intelligence (those who are smarter than 50% of the population meaned a score of 4) and still a little attractive even when they were quite low in IQ (those smarter than only 25% of the population still meaned a score of 3!), and the really unbright didn’t get dinged much either (those smarter than only 10% of the population, for an IQ of 80, still meaned a 2.5, and thus were rated as “average,” neither attractive nor unattractive).

This quite changes the impression the Incel Wiki was giving us. Which reminds us to always read the study. Not only will that correct our disinformation, but it will tell us how reliable our author is at relaying facts (and here, the result is “not very”). Likewise, on the ranked traits test:

Here Gignac’s mean scores put “kind and understanding” far above all other metrics—including intelligence, which only came in second. Manospherians like to hide the fact that women actually prefer genuinely good men, because often they don’t rate on that metric themselves, and they want to think far more ill of the women they disparage for “not dating them” (I found evidence of this in my previous analysis of Stardusk).

But that’s not all. Intelligence came in far second, yet even then overlapped considerably with “exciting personality,” so much in fact that, looking at the error margins, it’s actually not settled which was preferred (that or intelligence); and still, both were deemed important to attractiveness. Similarly, “easy going,” “healthy,” and “physically attractive” all more or less tied for third place. And only after that was ranked “creative and artistic,” “good earning capacity,” and “wants children,” then near the bottom fell “good heredity,” “college graduate,” and “good housekeeper,” and literally at the bottom (by far) was “religious.” Ouch. But needless to say, this is again painting far too complex a picture for any fisherian runaway to explain. The incels’ narrative is blown here. And by their own cited study.

Female Mate Choice

In his video Stardusk tries to argue even less logically than the Incel Wiki, by claiming that men’s “self-sacrificing” nature is a product of fisherian runaway (part of his bogus “disposable men” theory I debunked last time). But that makes no sense. Women are just as self-sacrificing; and neither men nor women are self-sacrificing enough to even be modeling runaway in the first place. Stardusk’s own example even proves this: he cites only one incident (needless to say, a single datum does not a proof make) where a woman self-sacrificed for her dog (which Stardusk’s theory fails to explain), causing (in Stardusk’s view) a man to self-sacrifice for her—but in fact neither happened. Neither the man nor the woman thought they were going to die (so their actions were not self-sacrificing). They were both simply acting on the universal human trait of prosocial empathy, and the man only accidentally and unpredictably died afterwards.

So even this one cherry picked example does not support any point Stardusk was trying to make with it. It instead signals to us that Stardusk is a sociopath—devoid of empathy, regarding any effort to help another in distress as a lamentable character flaw, a bad thing women “did to men” to exploit them. His other example, similarly nonsensical, is that suicide rates demonstrate maladaptive fisherian runaway—somehow (he seems in the weeds here, confusing a hypothesis of maladapted instincts with fisherian runaway, when those aren’t synonymous). As usual, everything he says about that is illogical and incorrect, ignoring all relevant data and science (see my discussion of this last time and subsequently).

The second half of the Wiki isn’t any better. Just like the concluding minutes of Stardusk’s video, it just slews a bunch of sexist bullshit about women, that any factually informed person will know is false (but the manosphere is delusional, so they don’t notice this). It starts with a completely bogus description of what is called the “sexy son hypothesis” (really, just another term for fisherian runaway). They claim this “simply states that the positive feedback loop can make women so attracted to a man’s ornament that women will readily choose a ‘sexy man’ regardless of other considerations such as his morality or paternal investment…” Except that’s all made up. They cite for this only a 1979 paper by Weatherhead and Robertson (why are they citing science that’s half a century old?) that never discusses morality, or humans, and never says anything about choice being “regardless” of other traits.

In fact that study only describes a mathematical model for polygynous animals with controlled harems (like the Great Ape and Redwinged Blackbird). Humans are polygamous (like the Bonobo and Saltmarsh Sparrow), not polygynus (if you haven’t noticed, we explore both serial and parallel partnering in both directions), and in fact are culturally more often serial monogamists (strict monogamy is so rare in humans as to be evolutionarily irrelevant); and we don’t maintain controlled harems. So Weatherhead and Robertson’s math is completely inapplicable to people. Their model also only works when men contribute little to parenting, which obviously does not describe humans. Manospherians suffer from a contradictory sexist delusion whereby all human women are secretly banging hot men on the side, and thus “human males” don’t parentally invest (hence their false belief that a Weatherhead-Robertson model would apply), while at the same time, inexplicably, are constantly complaining about women cutting them out of their role as fathers for their children (thus demonstrating “human males” are strongly inclined to parentally invest). Go figure.

But back to the study.

Weatherhead and Robertson do not argue that women in these peculiar mating systems (which humans don’t have) choose mates by their ornament “regardless” of benefits, much less regardless of their mate’s qualities “as a person” (the model doesn’t apply to people, remember?), so it won’t—and cannot—have anything to do with women ignoring a man’s “moral character” (or kindness or personality or intelligence etc.). Their model applied only to territory access. In other words, they were measuring the side benefit of a well-ornamented male controlling (and thus rendering safe and resourceful) a physical, geographical territory. This cannot exist “regardless” of the male’s ability to control that territory (by definition—as otherwise they wouldn’t, and the Weatherhead-Robertson model would fail). But note this is even further removed from humans, who are cooperative animals, and thus don’t have such things as individual savage men thrashing all who come near to control their hovel (at least not typically). Hell, even Hitler (yes, I’m going Godwin) didn’t do that—he operated within a massive social network of cooperators (a.k.a. Nazis). Manospherians have a bunch of stupid ideas about Nazis, too. But I covered that last time.

The Weatherhead-Robertson model only served to explain why polygynous harems existed (so, wasn’t explaining anything about humans), when differences in the quality of territories males control should disadvantage that (so, again, not explaining anything about humans). Less capable males, who were still capable enough to control some useful territory, would thus benefit from fisherian runaway as long as they rocked a good ornament. Even in this extremely limited application, their model is no longer of much use, because it was based on the assumption that monogamous animals exist (to mathematically compare with polygynous ones), but since 1979, that myth has been thoroughly exploded. It turns out, that assumption was false: wolves fool around, prairie voles fool around, almost every animal once believed monogamous fools around. The remaining exceptions, like vultures, are rare and unusual. This renders their comparative equations useless. Subsequent scientists kept trying to fix this problem, and have ended up with a whole system of hypotheses far too messy to be at all useful for the Incel Wiki (this is the price of pretending science ended in 1979). Needless to say, all of them refute the Wiki’s description, because they all had to port back in one or another “good genes” model (i.e. these animals’ ornaments are signaling other valuable qualities, entirely neutralizing the word “regardless”). But so did the original one they cited! They did not say a male’s abilities were irrelevant. Nor did their model apply to anything resembling humans.

The rest of the Wiki is the same nonsense I covered last time (for which you simply must read both Part 1 and Part 2). No, women did not “heavily depend on men’s provision throughout human history” (least of all any more than men depended on women’s). No, it is not the case that “only a tiny percentage of men” are “good looking enough” to get women. No, women do not naturally employ “coy waiting time” as a mating tactic. No, women do not avoid condoms with handsome men to have their babies (another claim based on a complete failure to read their own cited study, which I won’t bore you with, but tl;dr, it only measured women’s assessment of STI risk, not pregnancy, and thus did not control for the women it studied already using chemical birth control). No, men do not “have less parental investment” in their children (most fathers support or raise their kids; and evolution follows the “most”). No, men do not face harsher beauty standards than women. No, men are not becoming “more psychopathic and disagreeable to win female attention” (all real data will tell you that behavior typically has the opposite effect) nor are women “increasingly” choosing men with “cartoonishly large muscles and frame” (all real data will tell you no such partnering trend exists, even for casual sex). And no, it is not relevant that men (and indeed also women) are less choosy when children aren’t in the offing (because that’s simply obvious; most sex is for fun, not for having children).

They also don’t realize there is no “sexy daughters” model because women are “locked-in” to invest resources in their children (human women, for nine months at least; plus however many more in postnatal feeding), so the “sexy sons” model is so named because it has to account for whether comparable resources are provided by the father. In many species, including humans, it is. The reason the Weatherhead-Robertson model only works for haremed polygynies is that a male dividing resources among so many females ensures the amount of resources each female gets from the male will fall below the amount she is investing by lock-in, thus requiring an explanation for how such haremed polygynies could even evolve in the first place.

I needn’t re-explain how none of this applies to people, who don’t commonly have haremed polygynies. But I should note again (as I did last time) that incels always forget that societies exist. Humans have always been social cooperators (that’s one of the defining features of Homo sapiens as a species), and as such, they provide vastly more resources to mothers than almost any father ever could. Just count up all the roads, firehouses, police, courts, water, sanitation, education, and all the other resources societies deliver to children; then count up all the economic infrastructure aiding them, e.g. women can afford things because of complex technological economies enjoying benefits of scale and automation—and the difference in prices with and without that advantage also counts as wealth distributed to those mothers.

No man can compete with this. So the Weatherhead-Robertson model can’t even begin to apply here. This doesn’t mean a woman still can’t gain benefits from an involved father; rather, the point is, the Weatherhead-Robertson mathematical model assumes none of this other stuff exists (as it doesn’t in the wild). But, alas, it does—for humans; and always has, even back to when we were mere bushpeople, and whole villages raised children and provided rudimentary economic efficiencies. So their model doesn’t apply. (And yes, because Incels contradict themselves, they have already tried using this fact to argue the opposite point, which was what I covered in detail last time, so I won’t revisit it here. But, for example, contrary to the Incel narrative, women also pay taxes; and men also receive welfare; and even discrepancies in the amount of either have far more complex causes than any Incel narrative can sustain.)

Conclusion

No actual evidence is ever presented in Stardusk’s video or the Incel Wiki for any kind of fisherian runaway in humans; there is no plausible way there could be any real fisherian runaway in humans; and fisherian runaway is mediated by counter-selection and thus doesn’t produce the absurd results the article claims anyway. To the contrary, the article contradicts itself by claiming fisherian runaway is making men smarter rather than more muscly and at the same time making men more muscly rather than smarter, and still no evidence supports either (IQ is rising at the same rate in all sexes, and too fast and diversely for biology to be involved; and men aren’t becoming gross mutoids, but look pretty much like they always have). Nor has there been any notable rise in actual psychopathy or its behavior. Or anything else peculiar the Incel Wiki tries to claim. Women simply aren’t making the choices it claims. And neither are women’s choices having any of the results it claims. It’s just a vomit canvas of delusional pseudoscience and the complete failure to think critically or even logically. Again.