At the end of a long life (I just turned 70) I have a chance to sit back and enjoy my pension and safety nets. How many mindless tasks have I done to make ends meet? What would my senescence be like without the ability to do nothing and be comfortable? As a baby boomer the promise of retirement was always held out to me. My grandfather made the most of his retirement. My father certainly did so. To say that I would enjoy mine more if I was still physically robust kind of misses the point. At least those women in the toll booths will probably have children to help them in their old age. Or will they? The Millinials are not very impressive yet, but as Peter Zeihan likes to point out, they are here. Not much of a Millinial population for a lot of countries. Mexican immigration to the US is largely done. The demographers can only point to Africa, a place where the cultures and societies are so primitive that modern medicine is still causing a population boom. Africa is expected to quadruple its population by 2100. I can't see how the continent could feed half that many people. Which suggests that emigration by the unskilled and unprepared will be a worldwide problem by the turn of the century. When things have been fairly stable for one's whole life, it is understandable to think such conditions will persist. But it looks to me like the change the world went through as it industrialized will be nothing compared to what is coming for the West. Old Chinese curses and all that.
I do wonder how the demographics will continue to play out. You say, "At least those women in the toll booths will probably have children to help them in their old age. Or will they?" Will their children stay near them, or will they emigrate, or merely move? That raises questions about the conditions under which we call it emigration, and when we just say they are moving. Our country is so vast that we can move across cultures (but not languages) without alerting anyone, and nobody bats an eye. And of course our country is also so powerful, and has been for so long, that nearly anywhere we want to emigrate to, we can, at least in the short term. Our options are wide open. Or rather, they have been for a long time. One of the things about being an American in the 21st century is getting hints and glimmers that doors are beginning to close.
Toxic and repetitive - sounds dreadful. I hope those young women found something better in their lives at some point. In the right setting repetitive tasks can be soothing- I am reminded of the old saying “ Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment chop wood and carry water.“ in a repetitive task your mind is often free to think as you wish. There’s a freedom in that.
Indeed. Gardening can be like this too. Also working with clay, even the work that I used to disdain when I had my own wheel and studio, commonly referred to as "production work," wherein you are aiming to create identical forms over and over. But there is meditative potential there, and also, it is difficult. In part I would disdain that because my skills as a potter were never so good that I could rarely replicate a form in shape and size perfectly.
Last night as I made dinner for and with my sons--who will be 20 and 18 years old in two short months (Bret was out of town)--I asked them each to engage in manly tasks. In part I was being cheeky, but in part accurate. I am now the primary fire-maker in the family, but I am not good with an axe, not yet. And the grill is also not my domain. So I asked them to chop some more wood for upcoming fires in the wood stove, and to grill the chicken that I had prepared or--I offered--I could just cook it inside under the broiler. We had a roaring fire and perfectly grilled chicken (along with other food cooked inside), and the manly young men were largely responsible. And those tasks that I asked them to do--to chop wood, and to grill meat--are indeed repetitive in their way, but also high stakes. There is something to be considered in the difference between high stakes and low stakes repetition as well, both of which have value.
I am pretty hopeless at splitting kindling, but good at building a fire. High stakes for me indeed. It requires my full attention. What a lovely evening it sounds like you had with your sons.
I’m reluctant to travel anymore. How are we so fortunate to have been birthed in USA - flawed and floundering as it is. My heart aches for those pink bedecked toll workers.
I had an encounter like this, but it ended differently.
A long time, when our youngest, who is now 27, was 3 and his siblings were 9 and 10, in home daycare could be found for $200/kid/month. As many parents know, day care isn't just expensive. It i a hassle. getting the kid up extra early to drop them off so we could get to our jobs on time. Then dealing with sickness, and other exceptions to the norm would regularly cause the "I handled it last time . No you didn't I did'". discussion.
I figured there had to be a better way.
I found a Au Pair matching web site, did some home work, and many interviews and eventually found a young Mexican gal (20 at the time) to live with us. She was a wonderful addition to the family.
It would appear that many families who take on Au Pairs expect some kind of domestic servant. We wanted her to look after our 3 year old while we were at work, and get the other two up early enough to get them onto the school bus. She became a part of our family. When our youngest went to Kinde garden readiness assessment he did his numbers and colors in Spanish which confused the proctors, and made me smile.
Her home town is Monetary. She had some college before she moved in with us. She continued college here in Minnesota. Her main goal in coming to America we to improve her English. In MX that can help you get a a better job.
As far as I could tell, she was very middle class for Mexico. She lives with her mother and brother, in a home they own. A very small yard, No grass. Broken glass bottles affixed atop the wall that separates their property from the sidewalk.
Our house, DEEP suburbs. We have a few acers, horses, lake shore.
We have visited her home 3 times over the years. In the beginning of our first visit I was embarrassed by the relative difference in means. Our lawn mower was worth more that their car.
She and her mom were eager to share everything they had. There was a 'meet the neighborhood friend" party Our Au Pair's friends wanted to make sure these gringos their friend was living with were OK people. They accepted me when they realized I could keep up with the tequila shots.
We visited many relatives and received warm welcomes. She took us on a couple different tours of Monterey. You probably know about the wildlife park in the mountains above Monterey.
What I eventually realized was that though we have greater material wealth, we were not their equal in relationship. They spent far more time with friend and relatives. We spent that time commuting and working. I started out being self-conscious of all the things we had. I returned home knowing I was missing something important in in our lives.
Thank you for this Ecuadorian vignette, beautifully observed. We can never really know what is going on in the head of another person, but I also often find myself wondering and imagining possible parallel lives. I lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico for a year in my teens and some of this imagery is reminiscent of that, particularly street performers at hawkers at traffic intersections.
I wrote a little piece about Shanghai from the perspective of a touring musician who can't speak any Chinese, if it's of interest.
This is true for all men-women combinations. Does a woman select a man of lower class or status than herself? No. Despite the crude truth of it, women mate-up, men mate-down. A woman has a very large investment in mating, a lifelong commitment. She's only going to open her legs for a mate of equal or better ranking than herself. She has to live with the consequences—a child—for the rest of her life. The man on the other hand can walk away, any time after mating, continue to spread his genes far and wide, or stay to form a family with the woman.
Women only choose a man of equal or better status than themselves. A man isn't going to find a woman substantially better than himself. This is what courtship is about; the woman deciding if this man is worth it, is this the best mate she can find. Is Taylor Swift going to marry the flunky roadie or the football star? What would you say if Taylor Swift was engaged to the wasted-stoner flunky-piano mover in her road show? How do you feel about that match? Who is Brad Pitt going to marry, Angelina Jolie or a makeup girl? That could go either way. Compare and Contrast these two matches: Brad Pitt & Makeup Girl vs Angelina Jolie & Roadie Dude?
It feels like you are working with some truths here, but they are still far from complete.
Some of the things that are missing from your analysis are that, in non-humans (and to some degree in humans, although we mix things up rather dramatically) there is far greater variability in male quality (and male *everything,* almost) than in female quality (and female everything, almost). Included in "everything" is not just the number of mates that males vs females tend to have (males > females), but also the effect of those additional mates on Reproductive Success (RS). That is: more mates for males means higher RS; after 1, more mates for females sometimes means no increase in RS for females at all, sometimes it increases their RS negligibly to moderately. What this means for all but the most monogamous and/or sex-role reversed organisms (see e.g. jacanas) is that females are choosy, and males are not, when it comes to making reproductive decisions.
Another way of putting this is, in general (with, again, exceptions across some species, including for humans, but we are not a complete exception, just a partial one): With regard to reproductive behavior, males put more of their effort in pre-zygotically (in the mating dance, in wooing females, in convincing them that he is definitely the one, before there is ever a zygote); and females put more of their effort in post-zygotically (having chosen a male and created a zygote, females are far more likely to engage in parental care). Again--exceptions abound the more monogamous a species tends to be (and anatomical, cultural, and behavioral evidence suggests that humans have been moving towards ever greater monogamy for a long time), and the more sex-role reversed (of which humans also show signs; see: heavy ornamentation on women in, well, our culture, among many others).
What are the metrics for "male quality" and "female quality"? In humans, they are cultural and often rapidly mutable, primarily subjective, and dependent to a great extent on one's sex. And I would go so far as to claim that your phrasing is incredibly sexist--from my somewhat indignant male perspective ;-).
When you're discussing optimum mating strategy, yes you have to use very sexist and exclusionary language.
Are you Charles going to chose to mate with someone with a birth defect? I was on the animal husbandry side, you don't breed a bad horse. Meaning a horse with bad attitude, or less than stellar physical conformity to the breed. Same with any animals.
Look back at your high school scene, was the head cheerleader going to date anyone other than the star football quarterback? She's certainly not going to date the hunched over computer nerd. This isn't a super-ego conscious decision, this is primal gut-level instinct, and there's good evolutionary reason for it.
As for quality mate material. Starts with disease free. Disease can be the cause of poor diet, or the result of poor diet, I mean in a hunter gatherer. If you're getting less protein than your peers, you're in deficiency, and it will show as more prone to disease. A fully functioning immune system is an expensive thing to maintain from a dietary perspective. Hunter-Gatherers live out on the edge, many within the clan starve to death and/or die of disease. Disease makes it harder for you to hunt and gather, makes your diet less effective if you're throwing up or having diarrhea. If you're coughing all night and not getting sleep, or coughing and scaring off game, you're slipping behind. If you have a crappy immune system to begin with, you're slipping.
If you're a female, and you live in an uncivilized clan, your sexual integrity is guaranteed only by the ability of your father, brothers, or mate to fight for you. So you'll choose the mate who can also defend you against males who would want to have their way with you.
When I kept cows, we could breed crappy low quality cattle or high quality cattle. The cost to keep a cow is the same whether they're high or low quality. Yes higher quality cows cost about 2x lower quality cows. But the calves are valued 2x, and you're going to get 8 calves out of that cow. It doesn't pencil out to breed crappy cattle, or horses, or dogs, or sheep, ...
For females—yes this is somewhat graphic—you want a straight frame or good back so she won't be crippled by pregnancy. Wide hips so that she has a larger birth canal. Large breasts which means more mammary gland material which means more milk. A round bottom which indicates better overall health and importantly higher fat quality in the milk, which is more nutritious for the baby, which leads to better brain development in the baby. Traits which men appreciate, or subconsciously choose in mates are traits which men's evolution has chosen. Because men who selected mates with these traits weaned more healthier children. This is the basis of evolution. Some men specifically did things—mostly subconsciously—that caused their off-spring to be even slightly more successful than the rest of humanity.
There we men who for some subconscious reason chose mates with narrow hips. These mates had more difficult birthing, lost babies, and or died. This reduced the number of babies successfully weaned by men who chose these traits in women. There were men who chose women with smaller breasts. Those women provided slightly less milk to their babies, and those babies were slightly less successful than the average of their population. There were men who chose women with smaller rear-ends. Those women delivered slightly lower quality milk to their babies, and those babies were slightly less successful than the average of their population.
The difference in successful weaning or unsuccessful weaning may be under 1%. But across many generations, the more successful 1% traits begin to dominate.
...Thanks for that, Michael. I'll be more careful of my choices in the future. ;-)
I'd like to point out, though, that breeding organisms for human purposes is counter to their survival absent human "husbandry", an interesting term in itself, especially in this context. Breeders of animals (or plants where frequent hermaphroditism makes sexual selection a bit trickier subject) essentially assume the female role of making the choices (absent a recalcitrant chosen female or the occasional disinterested male), although they are making choices among (or for) both sexes (where in nature the male seldom chooses, but I digress). Husbandry is a different animal(!) altogether and is an aspect of human technology where the bred organism becomes part of our extraordinarily extended phenotype (though some would argue it may be the other way round, becoming a question of who is dependent upon whom.)
Actually, to clarify, the context of my comment was the claim of "greater variability" of "quality" among males, where quality is a subjective metric among humans, but not so much among non-humans which are presumably far less subject to subjectivity. I think we have to agree on the meaning of "quality", one meaning of which can in this context seem potentially demeaning (more tricky linguistics ;-) i.e., "degree of excellence" (Webster) and probably triggered my sensitive male ego; and another meaning that refers to (ibid) "peculiar and essential character" or "an inherent feature". Among non-humans the latter definitions are salient, but among humans it is both, though in varying degrees that I think have become far more weighted to the former, the problem being that "excellence" becomes highly subject to opinion in many areas. Of course there are mysterious things going on in the subconscious that evolution has conserved for better or worse from our hunter-gatherer ancestry.
Non-humans have it a lot easier, I suppose, but on the other hand we can have a lot more fun. We can also be, and now are, a lot more destructive of non-humans, and of ourselves.
At the end of a long life (I just turned 70) I have a chance to sit back and enjoy my pension and safety nets. How many mindless tasks have I done to make ends meet? What would my senescence be like without the ability to do nothing and be comfortable? As a baby boomer the promise of retirement was always held out to me. My grandfather made the most of his retirement. My father certainly did so. To say that I would enjoy mine more if I was still physically robust kind of misses the point. At least those women in the toll booths will probably have children to help them in their old age. Or will they? The Millinials are not very impressive yet, but as Peter Zeihan likes to point out, they are here. Not much of a Millinial population for a lot of countries. Mexican immigration to the US is largely done. The demographers can only point to Africa, a place where the cultures and societies are so primitive that modern medicine is still causing a population boom. Africa is expected to quadruple its population by 2100. I can't see how the continent could feed half that many people. Which suggests that emigration by the unskilled and unprepared will be a worldwide problem by the turn of the century. When things have been fairly stable for one's whole life, it is understandable to think such conditions will persist. But it looks to me like the change the world went through as it industrialized will be nothing compared to what is coming for the West. Old Chinese curses and all that.
I do wonder how the demographics will continue to play out. You say, "At least those women in the toll booths will probably have children to help them in their old age. Or will they?" Will their children stay near them, or will they emigrate, or merely move? That raises questions about the conditions under which we call it emigration, and when we just say they are moving. Our country is so vast that we can move across cultures (but not languages) without alerting anyone, and nobody bats an eye. And of course our country is also so powerful, and has been for so long, that nearly anywhere we want to emigrate to, we can, at least in the short term. Our options are wide open. Or rather, they have been for a long time. One of the things about being an American in the 21st century is getting hints and glimmers that doors are beginning to close.
Toxic and repetitive - sounds dreadful. I hope those young women found something better in their lives at some point. In the right setting repetitive tasks can be soothing- I am reminded of the old saying “ Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment chop wood and carry water.“ in a repetitive task your mind is often free to think as you wish. There’s a freedom in that.
Indeed. Gardening can be like this too. Also working with clay, even the work that I used to disdain when I had my own wheel and studio, commonly referred to as "production work," wherein you are aiming to create identical forms over and over. But there is meditative potential there, and also, it is difficult. In part I would disdain that because my skills as a potter were never so good that I could rarely replicate a form in shape and size perfectly.
Last night as I made dinner for and with my sons--who will be 20 and 18 years old in two short months (Bret was out of town)--I asked them each to engage in manly tasks. In part I was being cheeky, but in part accurate. I am now the primary fire-maker in the family, but I am not good with an axe, not yet. And the grill is also not my domain. So I asked them to chop some more wood for upcoming fires in the wood stove, and to grill the chicken that I had prepared or--I offered--I could just cook it inside under the broiler. We had a roaring fire and perfectly grilled chicken (along with other food cooked inside), and the manly young men were largely responsible. And those tasks that I asked them to do--to chop wood, and to grill meat--are indeed repetitive in their way, but also high stakes. There is something to be considered in the difference between high stakes and low stakes repetition as well, both of which have value.
Zack and Toby have b'days in the same season? I wonder how common that is? My extended family has a LOT of b'days in the later months.
I am pretty hopeless at splitting kindling, but good at building a fire. High stakes for me indeed. It requires my full attention. What a lovely evening it sounds like you had with your sons.
I’m reluctant to travel anymore. How are we so fortunate to have been birthed in USA - flawed and floundering as it is. My heart aches for those pink bedecked toll workers.
I had an encounter like this, but it ended differently.
A long time, when our youngest, who is now 27, was 3 and his siblings were 9 and 10, in home daycare could be found for $200/kid/month. As many parents know, day care isn't just expensive. It i a hassle. getting the kid up extra early to drop them off so we could get to our jobs on time. Then dealing with sickness, and other exceptions to the norm would regularly cause the "I handled it last time . No you didn't I did'". discussion.
I figured there had to be a better way.
I found a Au Pair matching web site, did some home work, and many interviews and eventually found a young Mexican gal (20 at the time) to live with us. She was a wonderful addition to the family.
It would appear that many families who take on Au Pairs expect some kind of domestic servant. We wanted her to look after our 3 year old while we were at work, and get the other two up early enough to get them onto the school bus. She became a part of our family. When our youngest went to Kinde garden readiness assessment he did his numbers and colors in Spanish which confused the proctors, and made me smile.
Her home town is Monetary. She had some college before she moved in with us. She continued college here in Minnesota. Her main goal in coming to America we to improve her English. In MX that can help you get a a better job.
As far as I could tell, she was very middle class for Mexico. She lives with her mother and brother, in a home they own. A very small yard, No grass. Broken glass bottles affixed atop the wall that separates their property from the sidewalk.
Our house, DEEP suburbs. We have a few acers, horses, lake shore.
We have visited her home 3 times over the years. In the beginning of our first visit I was embarrassed by the relative difference in means. Our lawn mower was worth more that their car.
She and her mom were eager to share everything they had. There was a 'meet the neighborhood friend" party Our Au Pair's friends wanted to make sure these gringos their friend was living with were OK people. They accepted me when they realized I could keep up with the tequila shots.
We visited many relatives and received warm welcomes. She took us on a couple different tours of Monterey. You probably know about the wildlife park in the mountains above Monterey.
What I eventually realized was that though we have greater material wealth, we were not their equal in relationship. They spent far more time with friend and relatives. We spent that time commuting and working. I started out being self-conscious of all the things we had. I returned home knowing I was missing something important in in our lives.
Just who is the wealthy family?
Thank you for this Ecuadorian vignette, beautifully observed. We can never really know what is going on in the head of another person, but I also often find myself wondering and imagining possible parallel lives. I lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico for a year in my teens and some of this imagery is reminiscent of that, particularly street performers at hawkers at traffic intersections.
I wrote a little piece about Shanghai from the perspective of a touring musician who can't speak any Chinese, if it's of interest.
https://open.substack.com/pub/2devils/p/red-lobster?r=ga5di&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Mating strategies:
This is true for all men-women combinations. Does a woman select a man of lower class or status than herself? No. Despite the crude truth of it, women mate-up, men mate-down. A woman has a very large investment in mating, a lifelong commitment. She's only going to open her legs for a mate of equal or better ranking than herself. She has to live with the consequences—a child—for the rest of her life. The man on the other hand can walk away, any time after mating, continue to spread his genes far and wide, or stay to form a family with the woman.
Women only choose a man of equal or better status than themselves. A man isn't going to find a woman substantially better than himself. This is what courtship is about; the woman deciding if this man is worth it, is this the best mate she can find. Is Taylor Swift going to marry the flunky roadie or the football star? What would you say if Taylor Swift was engaged to the wasted-stoner flunky-piano mover in her road show? How do you feel about that match? Who is Brad Pitt going to marry, Angelina Jolie or a makeup girl? That could go either way. Compare and Contrast these two matches: Brad Pitt & Makeup Girl vs Angelina Jolie & Roadie Dude?
Consider every war-bride brought home to the US.
It feels like you are working with some truths here, but they are still far from complete.
Some of the things that are missing from your analysis are that, in non-humans (and to some degree in humans, although we mix things up rather dramatically) there is far greater variability in male quality (and male *everything,* almost) than in female quality (and female everything, almost). Included in "everything" is not just the number of mates that males vs females tend to have (males > females), but also the effect of those additional mates on Reproductive Success (RS). That is: more mates for males means higher RS; after 1, more mates for females sometimes means no increase in RS for females at all, sometimes it increases their RS negligibly to moderately. What this means for all but the most monogamous and/or sex-role reversed organisms (see e.g. jacanas) is that females are choosy, and males are not, when it comes to making reproductive decisions.
Another way of putting this is, in general (with, again, exceptions across some species, including for humans, but we are not a complete exception, just a partial one): With regard to reproductive behavior, males put more of their effort in pre-zygotically (in the mating dance, in wooing females, in convincing them that he is definitely the one, before there is ever a zygote); and females put more of their effort in post-zygotically (having chosen a male and created a zygote, females are far more likely to engage in parental care). Again--exceptions abound the more monogamous a species tends to be (and anatomical, cultural, and behavioral evidence suggests that humans have been moving towards ever greater monogamy for a long time), and the more sex-role reversed (of which humans also show signs; see: heavy ornamentation on women in, well, our culture, among many others).
What are the metrics for "male quality" and "female quality"? In humans, they are cultural and often rapidly mutable, primarily subjective, and dependent to a great extent on one's sex. And I would go so far as to claim that your phrasing is incredibly sexist--from my somewhat indignant male perspective ;-).
When you're discussing optimum mating strategy, yes you have to use very sexist and exclusionary language.
Are you Charles going to chose to mate with someone with a birth defect? I was on the animal husbandry side, you don't breed a bad horse. Meaning a horse with bad attitude, or less than stellar physical conformity to the breed. Same with any animals.
Look back at your high school scene, was the head cheerleader going to date anyone other than the star football quarterback? She's certainly not going to date the hunched over computer nerd. This isn't a super-ego conscious decision, this is primal gut-level instinct, and there's good evolutionary reason for it.
As for quality mate material. Starts with disease free. Disease can be the cause of poor diet, or the result of poor diet, I mean in a hunter gatherer. If you're getting less protein than your peers, you're in deficiency, and it will show as more prone to disease. A fully functioning immune system is an expensive thing to maintain from a dietary perspective. Hunter-Gatherers live out on the edge, many within the clan starve to death and/or die of disease. Disease makes it harder for you to hunt and gather, makes your diet less effective if you're throwing up or having diarrhea. If you're coughing all night and not getting sleep, or coughing and scaring off game, you're slipping behind. If you have a crappy immune system to begin with, you're slipping.
If you're a female, and you live in an uncivilized clan, your sexual integrity is guaranteed only by the ability of your father, brothers, or mate to fight for you. So you'll choose the mate who can also defend you against males who would want to have their way with you.
When I kept cows, we could breed crappy low quality cattle or high quality cattle. The cost to keep a cow is the same whether they're high or low quality. Yes higher quality cows cost about 2x lower quality cows. But the calves are valued 2x, and you're going to get 8 calves out of that cow. It doesn't pencil out to breed crappy cattle, or horses, or dogs, or sheep, ...
For females—yes this is somewhat graphic—you want a straight frame or good back so she won't be crippled by pregnancy. Wide hips so that she has a larger birth canal. Large breasts which means more mammary gland material which means more milk. A round bottom which indicates better overall health and importantly higher fat quality in the milk, which is more nutritious for the baby, which leads to better brain development in the baby. Traits which men appreciate, or subconsciously choose in mates are traits which men's evolution has chosen. Because men who selected mates with these traits weaned more healthier children. This is the basis of evolution. Some men specifically did things—mostly subconsciously—that caused their off-spring to be even slightly more successful than the rest of humanity.
There we men who for some subconscious reason chose mates with narrow hips. These mates had more difficult birthing, lost babies, and or died. This reduced the number of babies successfully weaned by men who chose these traits in women. There were men who chose women with smaller breasts. Those women provided slightly less milk to their babies, and those babies were slightly less successful than the average of their population. There were men who chose women with smaller rear-ends. Those women delivered slightly lower quality milk to their babies, and those babies were slightly less successful than the average of their population.
The difference in successful weaning or unsuccessful weaning may be under 1%. But across many generations, the more successful 1% traits begin to dominate.
...Thanks for that, Michael. I'll be more careful of my choices in the future. ;-)
I'd like to point out, though, that breeding organisms for human purposes is counter to their survival absent human "husbandry", an interesting term in itself, especially in this context. Breeders of animals (or plants where frequent hermaphroditism makes sexual selection a bit trickier subject) essentially assume the female role of making the choices (absent a recalcitrant chosen female or the occasional disinterested male), although they are making choices among (or for) both sexes (where in nature the male seldom chooses, but I digress). Husbandry is a different animal(!) altogether and is an aspect of human technology where the bred organism becomes part of our extraordinarily extended phenotype (though some would argue it may be the other way round, becoming a question of who is dependent upon whom.)
Actually, to clarify, the context of my comment was the claim of "greater variability" of "quality" among males, where quality is a subjective metric among humans, but not so much among non-humans which are presumably far less subject to subjectivity. I think we have to agree on the meaning of "quality", one meaning of which can in this context seem potentially demeaning (more tricky linguistics ;-) i.e., "degree of excellence" (Webster) and probably triggered my sensitive male ego; and another meaning that refers to (ibid) "peculiar and essential character" or "an inherent feature". Among non-humans the latter definitions are salient, but among humans it is both, though in varying degrees that I think have become far more weighted to the former, the problem being that "excellence" becomes highly subject to opinion in many areas. Of course there are mysterious things going on in the subconscious that evolution has conserved for better or worse from our hunter-gatherer ancestry.
Non-humans have it a lot easier, I suppose, but on the other hand we can have a lot more fun. We can also be, and now are, a lot more destructive of non-humans, and of ourselves.