When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

You're getting a lot of crap, but I kind of empathize with you. Socializing and getting girls has never come easily for me. But you're sort of giving off a helpless vibe, and I think there's probably a lot you can do if it's important to you.

You're SOL on your height, but your muscle mass is quite malleable with pretty low effort. I work out for two hours a week, one hour on Saturday (upper body), one hour on Sunday (lower body and core). I don't look like an nfl linebacker, but it gets me to the athletic end of the dork spectrum at least. I'm betting you can find two hours a week to spare. If it doesn't take, you might have low testosterone, which is easily fixed medically (by taking testosterone, ie anabolic steroids... kind of extreme, and for the record, I don't take them myself, but if you actually have low t it seems somewhat reasonable to me.). Even if you don't want to work out, I don't think being short and skinny is a huge barrier to getting girls. Many of my friends fit this description and haven't had trouble. If that describes you, you may have other problems. If you've left unsaid that you're overweight, that's a lot harder to fix than muscle mass. Probably worth one good attempt to slim down, it works for some people, but doesn't for a lot of others. You may have to live with it.

Which brings me to... social skills. They really are skills. It comes naturally to a lot of people, but if it's unnatural for you, you CAN get better if you try. It takes a lot of effort, but if it's important to you, put some real effort (and time) into it.

Females are not as irrational in their preference for tall muscular men as you seem to think. Tall men make more money on average. So do good looking men. Why? There's two sides to any business: making shit and selling shit. I'm guessing you're good at the making part. Selling is just as important. People like to be around attractive people. Sucks for the non-beautiful, but just a fact of life. But you know what? They also like to be around funny, confident, and friendly people. And you can do something about that.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the perceptions warped by "media" are those of people who judge female psychology from lack of digital interaction with their app profiles and pop evolutionary psychology in forums populated by sexually frustrated men, not those of women having the amount of sex they want despite none of the men they meet having the wealth, looks and/or charisma of their favourite film and sport stars.

That's why it's called a bachelors degree.

If they fly worse, does it mean their capacity for survival declines?

There are some things that seem odd about this author's terminology.

> ...the evolutionary mechanism behind this novelty is not adaptation by natural selection, in which only those who survive pass on their genes, allowing the species to become better adapted to its environment over time. Rather, it is sexual selection by mate choice...

In natural selection, it is only individuals which mate which pass on their genes -- surviving is no good if you don't mate! It is my understanding that sexual selection has been classed as a variety of natural selection. If the species sexually selects itself to a point of maladaption, it goes extinct -- just as if it was maladapted to its environment for any other reason. Notably, these birds are not there: they still seem to be okay.

> In the absence of direct costs to the choosers, the population will not be saved by natural selection. Because the cost is deferred, the whole population can ease further and further into maladaptive dysfunction, generation by generation.

This seems to be treating natural selection as a game of one round, or describing a situation where there is almost no capacity for variation in the species. But if it's really true, that the species is in a kind of dead-end, where the most successful mates are the most maladapted, and there is little capacity in the genome to remedy this situation -- as the females could develop a different standard of attraction, or the males some other method of attraction -- then the effect of natural selection would be to extinguish the species. This is, in some sense, how "progress" is made in natural selection -- as much by elimination as anything else. This leads us to:

> Instead of ensuring that organisms are on an inexorable path to self-improvement, mate choice can drive a species into what I call maladaptive decadence...

It has been said by many more well informed than I am, that there is something specious about an "inexorable path to self-improvement" with regards to animals. Animals become more adapted to their environment; but they don't become "better animals" since a change in the environment leads them to be worse adapted. The subtlety is that, traits may be gained, and then lost, and both were "better": to gain fur as the earth cooled, and to lose it again as the earth warmed.

And finally I must ask, where has the author shown the birds are maladapted? They fly awkwardly, sure -- but what difference does it make for them?