just look at all the cults founded essentially to get their founders laid.
That worked out well for the founders; not so well, I’d argue, for most of the followers.
Your pool of actual mates (with whom you have sex, let alone with whom you have children) is typically much smaller than Dunbar’s number, but your pool of potential mates is typically much bigger—especially in modern large cities. A bigger pool means people can find more individually suitable mates (i.e. different people value the same prospective mate differently). It also means greater chance of mating for those with low prospects (you can find others who also have low mate-value, and you have a bigger pool to just get lucky with).
Are there actual fitness calculations that tell us at which sizes ingroup mating tends to be a winning strategy?
Of course if the group is preselected on a basis of e.g. sharing rare sexual fetishes then it’s going to be successful. But if it’s preselected for e.g. supporting an outlawed political cause, I would by default assume a disrtibution of sexual preferences that is broadly similar to that of the general population. (Exceptions certainly exist, like political causes related to reproductive rights.)
That worked out well for the founders; not so well, I’d argue, for most of the followers.
Your pool of actual mates (with whom you have sex, let alone with whom you have children) is typically much smaller than Dunbar’s number, but your pool of potential mates is typically much bigger—especially in modern large cities. A bigger pool means people can find more individually suitable mates (i.e. different people value the same prospective mate differently). It also means greater chance of mating for those with low prospects (you can find others who also have low mate-value, and you have a bigger pool to just get lucky with).
Are there actual fitness calculations that tell us at which sizes ingroup mating tends to be a winning strategy?
Of course if the group is preselected on a basis of e.g. sharing rare sexual fetishes then it’s going to be successful. But if it’s preselected for e.g. supporting an outlawed political cause, I would by default assume a disrtibution of sexual preferences that is broadly similar to that of the general population. (Exceptions certainly exist, like political causes related to reproductive rights.)