August 21, 2007
What percentage of your ancestors were men?
John Tierny in the New York Times:
The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.
“It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences,” he said, and continued:
For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 07:54 PM | Permalink










Comments
"For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe."
He seems to think they had a choice in the matter. Unaccompanied women were not free to even walk the street without being considered by society and the law to be prostitutes. Of course that was in England in the 19th century but in most socieies there have been limited categories of women, few of whom were free to travel at all.
The idea that women played it safe instead of being relegated to limited human spheres through the abuse of civil law and threat of violence is laughably ahistorical.
Also, although it is not my favorite concept because people fall back on blaming it too easily, patriarchy is not characterized as a conspiracy but as an all encompassing cultural system. It is also characterized by feminists as a system that hurts men too.
Posted by: ellenbrenna | Aug 22, 2007 12:01:30 PM
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