5 ms·

> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chan

> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/

6nf 8y ago
Not sure who is downvoting you, this seems to be correct?
- Arnt 8y ago
  Rather dubious. He says three things: a) Only 16% etc b) most people mate now c) due to religious etc The first is well backed up. The second, not so much, it depends on community (look up the number of childless people in, say, Milan). The third, WTF? Mixing up facts with WTF like that attracts downvotes.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    I think the first one is the only relevant one in this case anyway
  - iguy 8y ago
    > The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      > A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague". I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having children then walking away when the going gets tough.
      - iguy 8y ago
        OK, I exaggerate a little! And the modern states have indeed retreated from this role... but still outlaw keeping a harem of five -- as must have been common if 16% of the men had almost 100% of the women.
      - pixl97 8y ago
        Hmm, you may be underestimating the moderating effect women commonly have on men. >The results showed that married people had lower cortisol levels overall than single or divorced people, and also that they had faster cortisol declines So, there are measurable effects occurring.
    - kasey_junk 8y ago
      You are making a fairly obvious mistake here in conflating timelines. Widespread “state sanctioned monogamy” is a very recent phenomenon but the genetics results you are basing from have to do with very long time frames. There are loads of plausible ways monogamy arose as a virtue that needn’t have to do with changing that ratio & there are loads of ways that ratio could have come about without societies filled with “angry young men” This is a fairly obvious set of bad reasoning. Either you’ve not paid much attention or you are arguing in bad faith (likely to further some worldview).
      - iguy 8y ago
        No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to massively unequal concentrated power. Kings who could command the labour of thousands. There's a giant bottleneck there in how many men reproduced. And we started on building organised societies, including organised religion, around then too. It seems clear to me that these are partly about finding ways to counteract such tendencies, ways to make people work together better. We needn't invoke virtue, merely that societies with less internal friction & more work from everyone were better at clobbering their neighbours. Now I may be wrong about this story, surely there are other explanations. But it's not "WTF" material.
        kasey_junk 8y ago
        Wide spread state sanctioned monogamy as a norm is a couple of hundred years old. All 3 of the Hebrew based religions for instance don’t have the requirement and quite the opposite have polygamy as part of their basic texts. Before approximately the Victorian age the idea of monogamy from a reproductive position would be seen as odd. States have other ways to handle their angry young men. A common one from history (the Bible is rife with it) was using them to slaughter some other states young men & enslave the women.
        iguy 8y ago
        > Before approximately the Victorian age No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen. Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-Laslett.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La... I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign. Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Only 16% contributed to the subsequent generations. There is a difference.
TomK32 8y ago
Looking at my grandfather's generation, two of his brothers fell in the war, another two never had children of their own at died of old age in the same (big farm) house they were born and living all their life. math checks out.
- hef19898 8y ago
  Anectodes are bad samples, just saying...
pjc50 8y ago
"16%" does not appear in that paper, and it's arguing based on inherited chromosomes: inherently that's going to be confounded by deaths in childhood or childbirth, etc.
pgsandstrom 8y ago
You are quoting the paper in a dishonest way. Did you get 16% from this? > Using human-chimpanzee dX/dA and human diversity data from genome-wide surveys we obtained estimates of α between 2.7 and 5.9, again assuming β between 1 and 1.4 and a range of ancestral population sizes
bhouston 8y ago
There was also genocides and wars. On Reddit today it cites Ghenis Khan's army as killing 40M. Thus if true it was "unfit" to be an enemy of Ghenis Khan in an evolutionary sense.
User23 8y ago
> Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy Most men. Most women have always mated.

6nf 8y ago

Not sure who is downvoting you, this seems to be correct?

Arnt 8y ago
Rather dubious. He says three things: a) Only 16% etc b) most people mate now c) due to religious etc The first is well backed up. The second, not so much, it depends on community (look up the number of childless people in, say, Milan). The third, WTF? Mixing up facts with WTF like that attracts downvotes.
- 6nf 8y ago
  I think the first one is the only relevant one in this case anyway
- iguy 8y ago
  > The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    > A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague". I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having children then walking away when the going gets tough.
    - iguy 8y ago
      OK, I exaggerate a little! And the modern states have indeed retreated from this role... but still outlaw keeping a harem of five -- as must have been common if 16% of the men had almost 100% of the women.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Hmm, you may be underestimating the moderating effect women commonly have on men. >The results showed that married people had lower cortisol levels overall than single or divorced people, and also that they had faster cortisol declines So, there are measurable effects occurring.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    You are making a fairly obvious mistake here in conflating timelines. Widespread “state sanctioned monogamy” is a very recent phenomenon but the genetics results you are basing from have to do with very long time frames. There are loads of plausible ways monogamy arose as a virtue that needn’t have to do with changing that ratio & there are loads of ways that ratio could have come about without societies filled with “angry young men” This is a fairly obvious set of bad reasoning. Either you’ve not paid much attention or you are arguing in bad faith (likely to further some worldview).
    - iguy 8y ago
      No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to massively unequal concentrated power. Kings who could command the labour of thousands. There's a giant bottleneck there in how many men reproduced. And we started on building organised societies, including organised religion, around then too. It seems clear to me that these are partly about finding ways to counteract such tendencies, ways to make people work together better. We needn't invoke virtue, merely that societies with less internal friction & more work from everyone were better at clobbering their neighbours. Now I may be wrong about this story, surely there are other explanations. But it's not "WTF" material.
      - kasey_junk 8y ago
        Wide spread state sanctioned monogamy as a norm is a couple of hundred years old. All 3 of the Hebrew based religions for instance don’t have the requirement and quite the opposite have polygamy as part of their basic texts. Before approximately the Victorian age the idea of monogamy from a reproductive position would be seen as odd. States have other ways to handle their angry young men. A common one from history (the Bible is rife with it) was using them to slaughter some other states young men & enslave the women.
        iguy 8y ago
        > Before approximately the Victorian age No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen. Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-Laslett.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La... I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign. Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Only 16% contributed to the subsequent generations. There is a difference.

TomK32 8y ago

Looking at my grandfather's generation, two of his brothers fell in the war, another two never had children of their own at died of old age in the same (big farm) house they were born and living all their life. math checks out.

hef19898 8y ago
Anectodes are bad samples, just saying...

pjc50 8y ago

"16%" does not appear in that paper, and it's arguing based on inherited chromosomes: inherently that's going to be confounded by deaths in childhood or childbirth, etc.

pgsandstrom 8y ago

You are quoting the paper in a dishonest way. Did you get 16% from this? > Using human-chimpanzee dX/dA and human diversity data from genome-wide surveys we obtained estimates of α between 2.7 and 5.9, again assuming β between 1 and 1.4 and a range of ancestral population sizes

bhouston 8y ago

There was also genocides and wars. On Reddit today it cites Ghenis Khan's army as killing 40M. Thus if true it was "unfit" to be an enemy of Ghenis Khan in an evolutionary sense.

User23 8y ago

> Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy Most men. Most women have always mated.