Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

Take a look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf

On page 2, it says (in discussing Special Case 1): "If sex A is relatively selective and will mate only with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1"

However, if you look at the histogram in Figure 1, it's clear that if sex A mates with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then sex A is choosing most desirable mates who happened to be part of the subpopulation B1.

That is, as diagrammed in the histogram, variability is not a function of the population any more, since the red rectangle noting 'B1' with desirability 3 to 4 is no longer variable. It would be absolutely incorrect to say that "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1".

In other words, it's like saying:

"In Sack 1, I have a mix of of blueberries and watermelons. Sack 1 is varied in fruit size, and has a high variability. I've sorted them by size, and taken the most largest fruit and put them in Sack 2. Now Sack 2 is full of variable sizes of fruit, since it came from Sack 1, which had high variability."

(EDIT: to be clear, I think the above sack example is incorrect; I'm illustrating the logic in which the paper seems to be incorrect, according to my understanding.)

This paper is arguing that in addition to sexual selection's first order directional effect, there's an overlaid second order effect on variability, and the argument makes sense. Male reproductive success is already highly variable, because male gametes are cheap. Some males end up being disproportionately successful, e.g., Genghis Khan. From a gene's point of view, being hosted in Khan was winning the jackpot.

If you have a number of male offspring, some of them will be evolutionary "duds" no matter what. If you increase the variability in reproductive success of your male children, then some of them will be less reproductively successful and others will be more successful. But there's an asymmetry: "duds" are already duds and can't be made less successful, but on the other side of the curve, by increasing variability, you increase the likelihood of a jackpot.

The effect doesn't apply to female children, since a female mammal cannot have 200 offspring in her lifetime, but a male mammal certainly can.

(Your fruit analogy is inapt, since fruit in a bag don't reproduce among themselves and regress toward the population mean.)

By now, the response pattern from the activist camp to inconvenient manuscripts should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention. If attempts to silence authors pre-publication don't work, and if post-publication censorship ends up being ineffective, the activist rhetorical tactic of last resort is blatant misrepresentation of a manuscript's contents. They're loathe to use this tactic, since it costs them massive credibility every time they plainly lie about something everyone can read, but it's still better (from their POV) than cognitive dissonance.