“Some tribes”? The evidence in the human genome suggests that the majority of all the men who made it to sexual maturity apparently died without offspring; their womenfolk rejected them in favor of their tribes’ alpha bad boys. That puts the 40 year old virgin a lot closer to the norm of male experience than we realize:
Genetic Evidence for Unequal Effective Population Sizes of Human Females and Males
(First, my apologies to Will and Divia for the unpleasantness of this subthread topic.)
The evidence in the human genome suggests that the majority of all the men who made it to sexual maturity apparently died without offspring; their womenfolk rejected them in favor of their tribes’ alpha bad boys
The former claim there is evidence for. For the latter claim (“their womenfolk...”) there cannot today exist evidence in the human genome, since we don’t know what “alpha bad boy” would look like in a genome. The latter claim scarcely rises to the level of “speculation” — I’d call it “drama”.
Since we know that war and kidnap-rape are major activities of young men in many societies in situations resembling the ancestral environment (see Pinker 2011), it seems that we should expect the discrepancy to be due to young men killing each other and kidnapping and raping young women. Rape is a lot less effective of a reproductive strategy than it once was, thanks to such social innovations as criminal prosecutions and abortions.
(On the other hand, perhaps by “alpha bad boy” you actually meant “murderer, rapist, and slaveholder” whereas I took it as meaning “seducer”?)
I initially had the parent upvoted, but I retracted it on learning that the grandparent comment is speaking from experience, and since I have the same experience, it’s difficult not to believe.
“Some tribes”? The evidence in the human genome suggests that the majority of all the men who made it to sexual maturity apparently died without offspring; their womenfolk rejected them in favor of their tribes’ alpha bad boys. That puts the 40 year old virgin a lot closer to the norm of male experience than we realize:
Genetic Evidence for Unequal Effective Population Sizes of Human Females and Males
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/11/2047.full
(First, my apologies to Will and Divia for the unpleasantness of this subthread topic.)
The former claim there is evidence for. For the latter claim (“their womenfolk...”) there cannot today exist evidence in the human genome, since we don’t know what “alpha bad boy” would look like in a genome. The latter claim scarcely rises to the level of “speculation” — I’d call it “drama”.
Since we know that war and kidnap-rape are major activities of young men in many societies in situations resembling the ancestral environment (see Pinker 2011), it seems that we should expect the discrepancy to be due to young men killing each other and kidnapping and raping young women. Rape is a lot less effective of a reproductive strategy than it once was, thanks to such social innovations as criminal prosecutions and abortions.
(On the other hand, perhaps by “alpha bad boy” you actually meant “murderer, rapist, and slaveholder” whereas I took it as meaning “seducer”?)
I initially had the parent upvoted, but I retracted it on learning that the grandparent comment is speaking from experience, and since I have the same experience, it’s difficult not to believe.