Why Most Men Lost the Reproduction Competition and Will Continue to do so.

 

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.  Karl Marx

Let's start with a truism that few people have really contemplated, that is, we are all descended from polygamy.  Someone might respond: "Say what? How can that be? I don't have any polygamists in my ancestry." Well, maybe not in the sense of Abraham and Isaac with multiple wives living together, that might, or might not, be the case. But wait, in zoology polygamy is defined as a male mating with multiple females.  And in that sense, yes, we all descend from polygamists.

While it may be uncomfortable to consider, in our genetic history, we have twice as many females. That is due to the fact that over 80% of women in the history of humans gave birth to at least one child while only 40% of males did so. How does that add up? I will present how this was, how it is today and why it will become even more lopsided in the near future. For starters:

*  Yes, more powerful, or more wealthy and even men who were not, but were highly charismatic were able to practice polygamy.  In the western world you would have to go back to pre-Roman or pre-Christian days, but many men had more than one wife. Those men who did not marry at least one wife are not our ancestors.

*  Even after Christianity interpreted that men should only have one wife, many men of status or wealth had mistresses. These women were akin to concubines prophets had in the Bible, in which they often had children, but did not have official status in regard to inheritance. Still, the children inherited their father's DNA and gave him extra genetic descendants, while other men in that era had no children.

*  Of course war often decimated male populations.  After the US Civil War, many areas of the rural south had a high surplus of women as opposed to men.  While polygamist arrangements must have occurred secretly, it was far more common for men who were widowers, even in advanced age, to marry young women and start a new family.  This may be the reason that in the south, up until recent years, older men and younger women marriages were more common than in the north. In my own ancestry, I had a grandfather who became a widower. At 63 he married a 24 year-old and had three children in addition to the 17 he had earlier. 

In WW2 some areas of the European Soviet Union lost nearly all young men. After the war, Stalin considered polygamy as a solution, but instead opted for a program to encourage young women to find good men in their communities, preferably married and good fathers, to impregnate them.  A system of daycares was established to help the single mothers manage.  The birth rate after the war rose and it was higher than in modern Russia today. 

*  And let us not forget divorce.  There are a lot of men, most famous of which is Donald Trump, who has children with all the wives he married.  No, not polygamy, technically, but for his average to work out (number of children per men in the USA today) he replaced 2 men who never reproduced.  We all know women who married, or not, but had two or three kids with their first male partner. Then the relationship broke up, and she remarried in her 30s or 40s. Her second male partner helped raise her children but never had any offspring with her.  

Of course, there are always cases of wives having affairs, getting pregnant, and never informing their husbands as well. 

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So now we can see how the 80-40 genetic rule took place.  But what about today?  Marx's comment about reproduction becoming capitalistic in form is developing right before our eyes.  For starters, men like Elon Musk is famous for having children with multiple women (and who knows how many he has created in all?). Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, has over 100 children.  And these are the famous men engaging this scientific approach to reproduction. There are many men around the western world who donate sperm and, in addition to their own children, have maybe 6, 8, 12 or even more biological children. Let's say a man donates sperm and produces 12 children. In almost all western nations, there are 1.5 or less children produced to every male in the younger adult population.  That means our hyothetical sperm donor has replaced, just in donor children, 8 men who will never reproduce. 

With the collapse of marriage in many western nations, by the 2030s most women will be single and childless.  Many socio-economic variables, including hypergamy, which is today associated with wealth, but not exclusively, are contributing to this, but that is beside the point. Women who have finances, but never find a man they want, will, if they want children, be forced to turn to sperm donors. Ironic that capitalism led to women wanting "it all" and wanting a man who fit all their superior characteristics, but that most will only get such a man at a sperm bank that paid, yes capitalism, for him to leave his DNA for her to make some babies.  Marx may have not been all that great at creating a working economic system, but he did get some aspects of economics and its effects on family dynamics right. 

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