The reproduction numbers aren't purely hypothetical, it's based in DNA studies - http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men

The reproduction numbers aren't purely hypothetical, it's based in DNA studies - http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/ http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anyt... And a lifetime of observations tell me that men in general are greater risk takers and more competitive. I cannot prove my thesis with 100% rigor, but it's the best explanation of the facts that I've got. It's kind of embarrassing to me that whenever these issues come up on forums like this, people immediately start getting into amateur evolutionary psychology. There's never going to be perfect data on either side that proves any of this. We'll never know for sure how much of the male/female divide is genetic or environmental. Neither sociology nor psychology is a Popperian science. So all we can do is combine knowledge of what science might apply, personal observations, stories from others, personal experimentation, readings from histories, etc, and make a judgement. In a word, we use Phronesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis