When the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe forty-five thousand years ago as relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, about three women reproduced for every man. But with the advent of agriculture, this changed drastically. The need to secure territory and a complex division of labor created highly stratified societies in which a relatively small number of men could monopolize the land, resources, and power needed to support and maintain families. By about 6000 BC, the ratio of females reproducing versus males had risen to a staggering seventeen to one, and in the Middle Ages a single leader like Genghis Khan or Augustus the Strong could father hundreds of children. Indeed, polygamy has long been the norm in many societies around the world, and even where it has been banned by law, the tendency of high-status men to cycle through successive younger wives and mistresses has long meant that it continued in practice. Recent centuries have seen a more reasonable reproductive ratio of four to one, but no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that of all the men who have ever lived, the majority of them have left no trace in the human gene pool.
He claims,
in a broader sense, war has functioned as a disposal mechanism for a society’s excess men.
. . .The same logic that keeps women and their sexuality under jealous guard and treats them as a prize to be awarded is also what casts the majority of men into a Hobbesian struggle for that prize—ensuring continued reproduction of a social order governed by a predominantly male elite. Contrary to both traditionalist conservative myth and popular feminist narrative, for most of history patriarchy was not a privilege one benefited from simply by being born male, but a brutal racket in which millions of men destroyed each other and the world around them for the benefit of a fortunate few.
Gendler offers an interesting analysis of the problem of superfluous men, and he offers the usual American Affairs swipe at “neoliberalism,” but he does not really suggest any solutions.
But I wonder if our current social unrest can be ascribed to male childlessness. Is there not also a trend toward female childlessness, and are its implications not at least as serious?
“When the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe forty-five thousand years ago as relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, about three women reproduced for every man.”
Similar claims are often made, but we don’t know this is true and it is probably false. What we know (I think) is that most men did not succeed in getting any direct descendants into our current population, but this of course does not mean that they failed to have children. Does it seem unlikely that hunter-gatherer elites would succeed in preventing 3/4 of men from reproducing, surely these men would revolt and win especially since hunting/war at the time would require almost all adult men to be able to use violence.
” By about 6000 BC, the ratio of females reproducing versus males had risen to a staggering seventeen to one,” This should strike you as absurd. Why would 15/16 men have gone along with this?
A slight advantage in the Y chromosome from some men could, over a long enough time, explain the results.
I have to say, I agree that this doesn’t seem believable. I haven’t read the whole article, but the quote above says that the reproductive ratio has been four to one in recent centuries. This certainly does not square with my genealogical research into my own family (which mostly covers about the last two or so centuries).
You should read the references. It was supposedly done through DNA analysis. Using computational genetics a bottleneck specific to the Y chromosome occurred in the past, and the inference made is that few males contributed to the genetic line during that period.
Yes, I’ve read about such bottlenecks, and extreme cases like Genghis Khan, but the claim here seems to be that it’s always that way, not just the occasional bottleneck.
Yes, and again in the references is the explanation. The 17:1 came from an extreme bottleneck. But outside of that extreme period it still shows a consistent trend of a several-fold higher ratio of female to male ancestors across a long timescale.
> What we know (I think) is that most men did not succeed in getting any direct descendants into our current population,
It’s worse than that. The claim is probably a garbling of statistics about howany Y-chromosome lineages have survived into the present compared to mitochondrial ones.
That is, it’s not counting how many men left descendents by but how many of them left left descendents through a purely male line. Daughters and granddaughters don’t count.
Hmm. I don’t know the subject well enough to know if that’s right, but it certainly sounds plausible.
The famous anthropologist Margeret Mead once stated that the hardest challenge in any society was “What do you do with the men?”
In our time, the quirky but interesting George Gilder wrote a book in the 1980’s called Sexual Suicide. He stated that if we offer job opportunities and greater benefits to single women — which seems like the decent thing to do — this will lead to greater criminality and violence from superfluous men.
American prisons are filled today with superfluous violent men. And there is no war or colonial imperialism that will put them to use.
Sexual Suicide was actually published in 1973, part of the ferment around changing sexual roles. It made quite a splash. However, respectable opinion considered it “right wing” and “anti-feminist”. GNXP readers will probably be shocked to learn that the publisher was Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company
“American prisons are filled today with superfluous violent men.”
Not from the perspective of their genes, which are doing fine.
Having lots of economically superfluous violent men is a problem that can be dealt with. Having lots of elite men and women be genetically superfluous is not. If the standard is “replacement levels of fertility”, then most of them already are genetically superfluous.
On average, American men who have ever been incarcerated tend to have slightly higher fertility rates than men who have never been in contact with the criminal justice system due to what is euphemistically termed “catch up” fertility, which means they aren’t getting anyone pregnant while in jail, but tend to make up for lost time. Dark Triad is thing. All of this has predictable consequences.
If you are not cool with those consequences – maybe because they are incompatible in the long term with your society’s ability to keep the lights on or defend itself from those which can – then you’re going to need some kind of ‘racket’ substantially more effective than the current state of affairs in order to keep those tendencies in check.
Dealing with crime and criminals is a 100% solved problem which we simply choose not to solve. Dealing with fertility issues is much harder, and totally impossible when any adult-level discussion is socially-illegal.
Here are two cases in point:
George Floyd has five children. Jacob Blake (shot in Kenosha WI) has six children.
My first response, as a sheltered white liberal, was “Why do the mothers agree to have children that they must know will not be supported? Are the mothers being coerced?”
Those are probably poor questions, but it does show the huge gulf between different sectors of America. In my sector, women often postpone even the thought of children until they are in their thirties – when it is sometimes too late, and that is sad. If I mentally review all my relatives and acquaintances, I know of no one under 50 with more than two kids.
All children have potential, but somehow this may not end well.
What do you do, socially, when men have large families but do not support them
Perhaps you don’t know many evangelicals?
My friends list is somewhat bifurcated between urban cosmopolite singletons/DINKs and regular churchgoers of a traditionalist or evangelical bent. Among the latter, 3 kids is quite common even where both parents have graduate degrees. Large families are also a socially-acceptable way to flaunt wealth in some communities where that is otherwise somewhat frowned upon.
My relatives are all Jewish.
Israeli Jews have lots of kids, and Orthodox Jews have a ton of kids…..but upper middle class American Jews seem to have quite a few gay children, and others who wait until their 30’s to start a family.
Jewish fertility is the most interesting of the entire world.
They contain both some of the lowest, secular diaspora Jews, and the highest (secular) TFR in the world (Israelis).
I suspect that of all peoples Jews prove the adage that leftism is demographic death. Without them I might think it was conservative religiosity (not just religiosity, because leftist Christianity has low TFR). But amongst secular Jews the TFR gap is astronomical between their right wing ethno nationalist (Israeli) and left wing (market dominant minority) sects. So obviously ethno-nationalism/being in a majority are important to successful secular TFR amongst the high IQ.
The local prison in Baltimore featured all of the female guards running some kind of criminal operation for an increased man who was fucking them.
Coerced…well, they had the keys to the cell, but they wanted to be coerced.
Interesting story, nonetheless. However, looking around society (or in the mirror), I don’t get the impression that I’m looking at the descendants of a concentrated group of elites (warrior types, geniuses, astute collectors of resources). As a student of evolution, and sexual selection, it is easy to see how there would be disparities among men in numbers of offspring, extreme in some cases, however, the gene pool has been much less selective than this article suggests.
The typical Tibetan is descended from people who were exceptionally good at thriving at high altitudes. Until nearly all of them were ‘exceptional’.
Even with very strong and consistent selection for a particular trait, it takes a long time for the average expression in a population to move a standard deviation or so. And of course it’s much, much more complicated than that in actual human affairs.
Nevertheless, if a population is showing some consistent trend, that means on average that a disproportionate amount of the procreation descends from individuals who are exceptionally endowed with that trait, and it may even be that the truly exceptional individual in one generation is still below average from the perspective of much later generations.
Handle:
“it takes a long time for the average expression in a population to move a standard deviation or so” : The article implies severe selection pressure, with very few males reproducing—-the shift would have been significant. Contrary to what you’re saying, though, admittedly there has been a significant relaxation of this pressure over very recent history, if it did indeed exist.
” it may even be that the truly exceptional individual in one generation is still below average from the perspective of much later generations”: That’s not how evolution works! If the selective pressure persists, as the thesis of the article insists, then future populations have a higher prevalence of the sought after traits! Reproductive fitness says so!
Mr. Kling is correct that the author offers no solution. The last paragraph is a trashing of all conservative/libertarian socio-economic positions, among them that incels should support “redistribution.” I don’t see how a guy meeting a woman in a bar would win her over with, “Hey, I got an increase in my welfare check this week” or “The new CEO is only making 15 times what I make.”
I’ve never encountered a libertarian or conservative saying incels should support redistribution, and few who support increased redistribution themselves.
Is there not also a trend toward female childlessness, and are its implications not at least as serious?
Seems more serious; “hand that rocks the cradle”, etc.
Group selection is pooh poohed; but I can’t help but think that men are wired for cooperative warfare on behalf of sisters and female cousins.
The biggest problem these days is not childlessness per se, but rather negative selection for intelligence due to the inverse correlation between intellect and birth rates. See Idiocracy for a cinematic representation of what this negative selection could entail.
IQ only has a negative impact on fertility if one is a leftist. The problem is eliminating leftism.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/lib-cons-tfr-30-43-iq.png
Do we even know that men *want* to have children as much as women do? If women are just more willing to mate with men that already have children with other women than men are to mate with women that already have children with other men, then wouldn’t that by itself lead to imbalanced fertility ratios without Hobbesian struggle?
This “Hobbesian struggle” characterization seems to reflect a male perspective. A woman might view this data as reflective of how much tougher the dating market is for single moms than for single dads, especially when those single dads’ children live with their moms.
Historically, women have been the primary childcare providers, and still are. They have limited capacity in terms of how many children they are willing to have but more flexibility for non-exclusivity: they don’t care as much that their mates have children with other women so long as those other women take care of those children. Men don’t face capacity constraints: they can have many children with many different women so long as those women take care of the children. Men do, however, place a higher value on exclusivity: they don’t want their mates to mate with other men because that will take away childcare capacity from their own children.
Really?
Out of the 40-odd guys you can remember from high school, only 10 fathered children?
Does that sound right?
Yeah, not plausible.
Won’t the guys you can actually remember from school disproportionately be the ones likeliest to have kids, as opposed to the guys who were completely forgettable?
Let’s pick a target. Is the 1950s state of things the goal (nearly everyone gets married, has kids, goes to church, relative peace and stability) or is it an abnormal time and place that is hopeless to strive for.
What solutions you seek depend a lot on how you answer that question. I believe the main point of The Bell Curve was that Charles wanted to persuade people to continue aiming at that goal rather then the reservation solution.