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Mothering is about propogation of 50% of your genes. Your interests aren’t fully aligned. In many situations, it makes sense to kill or get rid of children, in
by mruts 8y ago
Mothering is about propogation of 50% of your genes. Your interests aren’t fully aligned. In many situations, it makes sense to kill or get rid of children, in order to improve the chances of future offspring.
Moreover, if the child is a girl, their reproductive skew is very low: it’s highly unlikely she will produce more than 15 offspring in her entire life. So it might make sense to sell your girls, and keep your boys.
Why, you might ask? Because in an ideal world, each boy could potentially have thousands of children.
This, of course, is unlikely but we can look at history to just see how reproductively successful a man can be. Genghis Khan in all likelyhood had thousands of children.
- sytelus 8y agoYou are missing the point here, may be. Man could not be reproductively successful without women. If a boy has thousands of children, there needs to be corresponding women who can carry them.
- kaybe 8y agoI can't find the numbers right now, but if the child is a girl the probability of her having children at all are substantially higher than for a boy. (Of course, the boy can have more, but historically many didn't have any.)
- mruts 8y agoWhich is why it makes sense to spend more resources on boys than girls. Girls are less sensitive to resources in regards to reproduction. For every extra calorie given to a boy vs a girl, the amount that it will increase the number of offspring he/she will have is more for the boy. Of course, like you were saying, many more men than women will not be able to reproduce at all. This why we have 50/50 sex ratios. The girls mitigate or hedge the risk from boys.