A different sort of competition, yes. Not necessarily more competition.
WRONG. The complexity of our social environment is one of the things that pushes forward intelligence. You need it in order to outcompete your neighbour. This is why, for instance, dogs are smarter than domestic cats. They live together more, and therefore need to outsmart each other in competition.
As you yourself say, man is our best ally.
When it suits him.
Our social environment has vastly reduced the amount of competition between individuals.
I'm sorry, but that's just plain ignorance on your part. The more social we become, the more fierce the competition gets.
Relatively few of us fail to live to breeding age, and when we do fail, it isn't because another human gave us a hard time.
You're still incorrect. You are still most likely to be cuckolded or killed by your own species, and you'll have to compete for the most desirable partners. It is true that we're likely to live longer now, but that wasn't always the case, and when reaching breeding age is no longer an issue, you're still competing for quality and quantity of offspring. Hermaphrodites would still find themselves being outcompeted on both those counts.
Assertion is not a viable stand in for proof. The more fundamental the system, the less likely it is to change - the more fundamental the system, the more likely the change will be lethal, or lead to a non-viable organism.
Wait until I present the model of what happens when hermaphrodites have to coexist with males and females, and who wins that mating game very quickly.
It was not decided a lot earlier than the existance of humans, or there would be no earthworms. Or hermaphroditic plants (of which there are many).
How ridiculously petty of you - how earlier is "a lot", pray tell? Okay, how about "somewhat earlier", then.
Yep, because you are acting as if you don't. If you know this, you cannot simultaneously claim that the experiment has been tried.
Nope, you're posing, and attempting to use theory where it doesn't apply. If you can't see the difference between a gender-determined mating strategy and a spine, I can't help you.
Problem - the fact that game theory says it would be advantageous in no way guarantees that nature will try that route. Again, you seem to be ignoring the fact that nature does not try every possible experiment.
You're getting mixed up - the game theory says it's DISADVANTAGEOUS, therefore even if it did exist, it wouldn't for long if there were males and females about to outcompete it. Despite the fact that it probably did (given that we have hermaphrodites of the non-fertile variety living and breathing with us today).
In order to discuss it existing for humans (and why it doesn't) you must also discuss the change, because the change would be required for it to exist.
Even if it did exist, it wouldn't for long. The genes would become extinct very quickly. Just wait for a few hours and I'll show you why.
No, let us not make that assumption. It is not at all certain to have happened. There is no fossil or other evidence of which I'm aware to suggest it did.
Okay, let's not. Let's just accept the fact that even if they did exist, the wouldn't be able to hold their own in the mating game for more than a handful of generations before hermaphrodite genes were wiped out in favour of male and female ones.
Ever heard of personification? Genes are mindless. They have no will, and have no way to choose to stop the experimentation.
YES, I have. I took a shortcut to explain a point. Despite their lack of intelligence, genes often default to "selfish" ways, because the other ways tend to result in their inexistence.
They take a random walk. If that random walk does not bring them through a place where the experimentation stops, it doesn't stop, because they are stuck with the mechanic handed down to them.
Yes. And in this case they're not "doing it for the species" - that was your personification which I was shooting down.
Again, assertion is not proof. Show me a fully functional vertibrate hermaphrodite, or evidence of one. Otherwise, your suggestion is just that - a suggestion without support.
I can still say it's naive of you to suggest that that particular experiment was never tried.
Also, "somewhere down the line" is not adequate. If you go far enough back down the line, the situation becomes different enough to be irrelevant. What didn't work then may or may not work now.
Your argument that it probably never happened isn't adequate either.
So called "hermaphrodism" among humans is generally the result of chromasomal anomaly, rather than gene mutation. The same anomalies that causes a human to have ovarian and testicular tissue in one individual also ensures that the rest of the reproductive system is non-functional.
Notice another thing - most all of the genetic ingredients are already hanging around. That makes the possibility of a mutation into a fertile hermaphrodite all the stronger - perhaps not with humans, but somewhere along their line of ancestors.
I'm saying that having two sexes is as much a spandel as having a skeletal system. Species are not free to abandon their ancestral traits willy-nilly. They are generally stuck with the basics of their ancestral form, upon which they can make some modifications. You are stuck with a skeletal system, four limbs, and two sexes in your species, simply because changing them is too darned unlikely or difficult.
No, they're not free to abandon them "willy nilly", but given enough time you can make some major changes - gender characteristics included.
Games theory and competition don't enter the picture before the trait exists. It is naive to simply assume that the trait automatically has come to pass merely because you imagine it. Nature has limits that your imagination does not.
It's also naive to assume that hermaphrodites haven't been tried and failed, and instead just assume that they've probably never come into existence, which is why they don't exist. Hermaphrodites and circumstantial sex changes and part-time sex, part-time asex are OLD, OLD, OLD inventions in the evolutionary arsenal. To assume that they've never been tried and been found wanting at some signficant evolutionary turning point in the human ancestor species family tree (going back to proto-mammals, or probably even long before, "large land-dwelling creatures", who knows) is probably wishful thinking.
There's a major problem with games theory. It assumes you know all the rules. The rules for a simple system are occasionally tractable.
The sexual mating game
is a simple system. A impregnates or fertilises B. Half each of A's and B's genes survive to the next generation in each offspring so produced, and it proceeds from there as a sort of tree.
For complex systems, it's generally impossible to know all the rules, making games theory analyses weak. Earthworms are behaviorally simple things. Vertebrates are not. Mammals even less so. Humans (or fantasy humanoids) have the most complex and flexible behavior patterns ever seen. Unless you're Hari Seldon, you don't have a games theory solution for humans
I'm not Hari Seldon, but I'll present one to you in a few hours.