I think that the telling point is in trying to imagine Clinton giving a parallel speech on feminism. You can't. Yes, it would be a cringefest, whiny or self-serving or whatever. Not because any woman using the bully pulpit to say such things would automatically be seen as such, and not because Hillary is whiny or PC or anything. No, it would be because she isn't Obama.

We had lots of Jackson on the trail saying things about racism in America, often good and true things, but it was kinda cringeworthy too from time to time: it is clear that he isn't Obama either.

One day, I hope, there will be a female politician that can deliver a speech on gender issues like Obama's on race. But it won't be Hillary, I don't think. She is a fine candidate who I would be proud to have as president, but a speech like that one just isn't in her, sorry to say. Though I would dearly love to be proven wrong.

Truthfully, his speech made me cry, and kept me moist-eyed for the rest of the night, and I'm usually pretty hard-headed and cynical about political things. Experienced and effective or not, I think right about now we need a president who can and will keep on saying things like that to the country, and to the world.

This is an anthropological observation that far pre-dates the ev-psych boys. There is a marked and pronounced pattern of older men/younger women in pretty much every culture at every point in history; it seems to be pretty fundamental to homo sap. I'm not sure that it is driven by "women (being) biologically drawn to older men" any more than men being biologically drawn to younger women-- the same pattern is very prevalent and obvious is societies where marriages are arranged and totally out of the prospective spouse's hands, so their biological draws have nothing to do with it.

Now the ev-psych boys can go on about female fertility and male wealth and so on, and for all I know it may be true, but there are other factors too: for instance, howabout the well known and accepted fact that girls tend to mature earlier than boys. Wouldn't a young woman pretty much have to hook up with an older man to find someone her social, intellectual, and emotional equal?

calcareous, your second paragraph is correct: punctuated equilibrium says that once a species starts being very successful in terms of numbers and geographic reach, its rate of change slows (considerably, to the point of standstill). I rather doubt that humans have actually adaptively evolved much since homo sap first showed up 50,000 years ago (to be sure there is genetic drift).

But in your first paragraph, you make the old mistake of associating "primitive" and ancient with brutal and stupid. It just ain't so. Hunting-gathering societies (it actually should be "GATHERING [& hunting]" societies) tend to be rather egalitarian, and it just ain't the case that it was Ugg bashing Oogh over the head and dragging her off by her hair to rape her. For most of us anyway, the breeding part takes up remarkably little of the day, and if you are going to be stuck hanging around with a person, you are probably going to be happier if they aren't too much dumber (or smarter) than you are. Check out any highschool clique type social order.

In any case, the ev-psych boys' thinking on this one falls down on one little cold hard fact: for humans, hunting is very typically a cooperative behaviour. Any hunter that tries to go it on his own is going to be a pretty poor provider. And in most hunting-gathering societies, the highly communistic total sharing of resources, especially meat, is very striking. Marrying a good hunter ain't going to get you better fed; belonging to a group with a corps of good hunters is-- which may be why humans tend even more towards exogamy (females marry out of the band more often than males) than other primates.

(To put it in the ev-psych boys' own mentality, women in effect shouldn't be selecting individual men on their own merits, but much more on which football team they belong to. But there isn't much evidence of that, is there?)

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Amerigo, all those things you describe are not adaptive evolution. In evolutionary terms, human cultural & technological development has been so fast that adaptive selection really hasn't had a chance to work its magic anyway; it takes thousands of generations adapting through mutation to the same environment to produce change, and humans haven't had the same "environment" for more than a thousand years at a time since homo sap showed up and spread across the planet like wild-fire. The effects of disease have killed off many less adaptive immune systems to be sure, but not enough time has gone by for adaptive mutations (which is what evolution is all about) to have much effect.

Your last paragraph refers to the problem of eugenics-- that the normal (indeed core strategic) human behaviour of technologically/socially intervening in our own biology is being accelerated by technology to the point our mitigating of mother nature's bloody tooth and claw is going to cause our descendants severe problems. It is a troubling problem, but it is also Anthro's Original Sin: the first round of thinking about eugenics produced a series of escalating horrors, leading from Ellis Island to Auschwitz, so that these days physical anthropologists tend to be very gun-shy around the topic. The last few times we thought we could guess where human reproduction was leading were very very wrong and led to horrors; how can we be so sure that we have it right now?