From The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature:
>In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.
>As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.
>In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.” The connection between sex and power is a long one.
One suspects the celibacy assumption says more about we who assume rather than the ancient societies of whom we assume. This is a kind of inter-millennial sexism. If a single king could have relations with hundreds of women, why can't a (presumably professional) woman have relations with hundreds of men? In such a top-heavy situation, she would have found plenty of willing customers! Sure, we are prejudiced against prostitution, but lots of ancient societies weren't.
A single woman is unlikely to have produce a statistically significant number of children. This is not about the act of sex but about actual reproduction.
> Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others.
The other hypothesis that I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males. There's this article that gets submitted on HN once in a while which elaborates on this but I can't find the link right now :( (edit: here it is http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)
At least if we look on this from perspective of evolutionary theory of sex[1], which states that males are subject of natural selection and it is the main reason behind inventing sex differences in evolution. Unsuccessful males are cheaper to population than unsuccessful females, so there are less unsuccessful females and more unsuccessful males. From ETS perspective this reasearch an evidence of evolution, if there are no differences in reproductive ability between males and females, than evolution is stalled. But we see such a difference, than it is possible that evolution is goes. And probablity of it is bound to likelyhood of ETS to be true.
The rules in societies like these would have been akin to the rules in islam/sharia. A woman is only allowed one partner, only men are allowed multiple partners (men may never even as much as see some of their women/concubines, and you'd be surprised how common that is), and getting caught (or even suspected in most cases) with another results in extra-painful execution.
These societal rules are self-propagating because men can't break them since they're denied access to women by physical obstacles (walk around in a middle eastern muslim village and you'll understand why, although it's sort of visible in many movies).
Women can't break this since if any woman or group of women tries to they get gang raped in the street.
In case you're wondering families will not divide inheritance but will choose (or even adopt) a favorite son who'll continue the business. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest get kicked into the street (happens, though).
There is a ton of "illegal" sex in these societies though because there are masses of women who are technically the property (that's what it boils down to, may be called married, but even in muslim societies where it technically is marriage they don't bother saying a woman is married, they just say she's "this guy's") of a man, but haven't so much as seen the guy for years, so if almost any man can get close to them it probably isn't too hard to convince them to have intercourse.
Walking around in these villages, one thing becomes very obvious : this is not the way to go about creating a peaceful society.
ETS speaks nothing about societies or their rules. ETS was invented by studying animals and plants and it stick to genotype and phenotype distributions while explaining role of sex in evolution.
And I do not like the idea to speculate about societies and how to build them properly starting from some evolutionary reaserch. It is different levels of abstraction. It is complex to do it right, while stretching your mind over several levels. It needs a broad knowledge, high intelligence and a lot of time spent in thinking and discussing matters with others highly intelligent and broadly educated.
Look, between evolution theory and sociology there are physiology, neuroscience and psychology. There are a lot of progress lately in psysiology and neuroscience, but psychology almost 150 years struggling to become an empirical science. There are some progress, but it is not convincing. Also I'm not sure that psysiology and neuroscience progress is sufficient to talk about brigde between theory of evolution and sociology. There are tremendous amounts of work for scientists ahead, which must be done before we can start to reason about society from evolutionary perspective.
>it would be one of the first instances that scientists have found of culture affecting human evolution
In that case, scientists must have been very much not looking indeed. Someone give me a coherent explanation, please, of how cultural patterns could possibly ever avoid affecting the composition of the next generation.
Perhaps the economic leverage of agriculture was lucrative enough to increase dominance by the owner's male lineage. I.E. providing food to starving women from your dad's crop could get you laid more than the hunter gatherer next door.
I recall reading an economic study on polygamous societies in the Middle East that concluded the same thing about why women would be ok with it. Financial security.
Edit: I find it annoying that I'm getting downvoted for just saying I once read an article that studied similar phenomena. To be clear, I think polygamy is a horrible thing, especially in countries where women have far from equal rights. That doesn't mean that the circumstances that make it systemic shouldn't be studied.
Edit 2: I realize that I didn't particularly contribute anything enlightening to the conversation with this comment either. In that case, downvote away. :)
Polygamy shows up routinely in peasant societies when there is a severe shortage of men, for example after a war, or when economic hardship causes many young men to leave looking for work, or when severe poverty makes a large proportion of young men unable to afford a family.
The young women left behind have few good choices for husbands, and so are forced to choose (or have the choice made for them by their parents) between becoming spinsters (i.e. not marrying and living alone or with their parents into adulthood), or becoming an older man’s second wife (or third, etc.). This causes all kinds of resentment between the multiple wives and often leads to abusive relationships, but is still arguably a better outcome for some of the young women than being stuck unmarried in a context where supporting yourself as a single person is extremely challenging.
Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].
“Lots of men have lots of sons, by chance. But what normally doesn’t happen is the sons have a high probability of having lots of sons themselves. You have to have a reinforcing effect[1]”. You need to have a prolific breeder spread out over a large geographic area whose sons are also more likely to have many kids.
> Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].
You mean one of the most prolific rapists. But since he was a "person of color" (yellow) and many of his victims were white, I doubt his statues will be toppled any time soon.
Is it fair to say that in these societies, most women got to pass on their genes, whereas most men except for select few didn't? Thus men were the ones to be selected from on a genetic level?
I would posit this was a "winner take all" outcome compounded by economics and biology. High infant mortality, as well as the high risk of death from even a simple infection or injury, would be enough to reduce the number of males in a population, to concentrate means into the hands of a few. Then, the progeny of these hardened or simply lucky few would be better insulated from disease or injury than other males, perpetuating the cycle.
One thing to note is that the last ice age finished about 12k years ago, and human reoccupation of very large tracts of asia, north america and europe could not have been over night. Large areas (for example the UK north of London) were under ice sheets, but much larger areas would have been tundra and frozen dessert [1]
Additionally there would have been huge inundation of the coastal areas that were previously human occupied.
The creation of new opportunities and the chaos of the disruption of old settled communities may simply have meant that there was a multi-generational selection for successful adventurous cowards!
We went from hunter gatherers living in small mobile communities, to much larger settled agricultural communities. Agriculture supports far bigger populations leading to the first cities and settled nations with kings.
I'm not an expert, but the idea is that mutation rates indicate age. If a bunch of people have a particular pattern, but they're all a little bit different to the same degree of difference, you can figure out how old that pattern is.
Presumably the changing bits must be in junk DNA otherwise mutation rates would be affected by selection pressure.
It doesn't mean that it was one man and seventeen women reproducing at the time, it means that male parentage at that time was a much stronger factor in whether descendants from the line survived to the modern day than female parentage.
That would still make one wonder about the other 16 guys and why the survival rate of their seed was so diminished vs the 'alpha male' in the group.
The unequal structure of society that naturally comes about from capitalism, an unevenness that has become even more prominent in modern mixed-economies where heavy state intervention in the economy is combined with market ideology, seems to have been far more extreme and socially destructive back in the stone age when we were all 'living off the land' and not exploiting resources to support a consumer centric culture...
So much of the "naturalist fallacy" and "appeal to nature" is based on a misunderstanding or idealized view of nature.
The Stone Age, even the Bronze Age wasn't a capitalist society. Wealth and power were derived from military might and traditional roles, not ownership through capital investment by private enterprise.
It could also mean the family unit was structured differently. E.g. five brothers taking care of dozens of wives sounds more viable than one man being able to survive 17 women :p
My theory is it had to do with hunting in that era. Animals were big, all you had was a stone tipped spear and if you got injured there was nothing anyone could do for you. I'm sure death and debilitating injuries came early and often.
It was late I misread that. But it's still the neolithic era, there wasn't mass agriculture or urbanization yet. And competing tribes and the advent of warfare would have played a role.
From The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature:
>In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.
>As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.
>In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.” The connection between sex and power is a long one.
Well written. Pretty much the same story of rulers, kings and emperors of 10th to 19th century India. Or China.
Indian palace life and architecture,for example, were built around the availability of unending lines of concubines for the Shah!
One suspects the celibacy assumption says more about we who assume rather than the ancient societies of whom we assume. This is a kind of inter-millennial sexism. If a single king could have relations with hundreds of women, why can't a (presumably professional) woman have relations with hundreds of men? In such a top-heavy situation, she would have found plenty of willing customers! Sure, we are prejudiced against prostitution, but lots of ancient societies weren't.
A single woman is unlikely to have produce a statistically significant number of children. This is not about the act of sex but about actual reproduction.
Haha it's late my brain stopped working for a moment there...
I would be very interested in your sources about the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa.
Everything but the last sentence is a quote from the book stated in the first sentence.
> Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others.
The other hypothesis that I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males. There's this article that gets submitted on HN once in a while which elaborates on this but I can't find the link right now :( (edit: here it is http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)
I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males.
You speak as if in the past tense, but 95% of workplace deaths are men.
Which is a convenient belief if you're a ruler who wants to ensure a surplus of women for yourself.
"Seen as..." should always prompt the follow up question: by whom?
> but I can't find the link right now :(
Are you thinking of this: http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
Oh yeah, that's the one! https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20there%20anything%20good%2...
>men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work
That is how I interpret the article.
That farming centralized power due to being able to store food. So it gave rise to feudal societies that could indenture workers and mass armies.
So, the evolution of human goes.
At least if we look on this from perspective of evolutionary theory of sex[1], which states that males are subject of natural selection and it is the main reason behind inventing sex differences in evolution. Unsuccessful males are cheaper to population than unsuccessful females, so there are less unsuccessful females and more unsuccessful males. From ETS perspective this reasearch an evidence of evolution, if there are no differences in reproductive ability between males and females, than evolution is stalled. But we see such a difference, than it is possible that evolution is goes. And probablity of it is bound to likelyhood of ETS to be true.
I wander, what the selection factor is?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodakyan%27s_evolutionary_the...
The rules in societies like these would have been akin to the rules in islam/sharia. A woman is only allowed one partner, only men are allowed multiple partners (men may never even as much as see some of their women/concubines, and you'd be surprised how common that is), and getting caught (or even suspected in most cases) with another results in extra-painful execution.
These societal rules are self-propagating because men can't break them since they're denied access to women by physical obstacles (walk around in a middle eastern muslim village and you'll understand why, although it's sort of visible in many movies).
Women can't break this since if any woman or group of women tries to they get gang raped in the street.
In case you're wondering families will not divide inheritance but will choose (or even adopt) a favorite son who'll continue the business. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest get kicked into the street (happens, though).
There is a ton of "illegal" sex in these societies though because there are masses of women who are technically the property (that's what it boils down to, may be called married, but even in muslim societies where it technically is marriage they don't bother saying a woman is married, they just say she's "this guy's") of a man, but haven't so much as seen the guy for years, so if almost any man can get close to them it probably isn't too hard to convince them to have intercourse.
Walking around in these villages, one thing becomes very obvious : this is not the way to go about creating a peaceful society.
ETS speaks nothing about societies or their rules. ETS was invented by studying animals and plants and it stick to genotype and phenotype distributions while explaining role of sex in evolution.
And I do not like the idea to speculate about societies and how to build them properly starting from some evolutionary reaserch. It is different levels of abstraction. It is complex to do it right, while stretching your mind over several levels. It needs a broad knowledge, high intelligence and a lot of time spent in thinking and discussing matters with others highly intelligent and broadly educated.
Look, between evolution theory and sociology there are physiology, neuroscience and psychology. There are a lot of progress lately in psysiology and neuroscience, but psychology almost 150 years struggling to become an empirical science. There are some progress, but it is not convincing. Also I'm not sure that psysiology and neuroscience progress is sufficient to talk about brigde between theory of evolution and sociology. There are tremendous amounts of work for scientists ahead, which must be done before we can start to reason about society from evolutionary perspective.
Well, they are making the assumption that one woman "mated" with one man only.
If you drop that assumption, and take "sperm competition" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_competition) into account, other scenario's than "wealth-and-power" are possible.
Such as: groups of hunter gatherers had frequent orgies, but due to "sperm competition", a few of the man fathered all children.
>it would be one of the first instances that scientists have found of culture affecting human evolution
In that case, scientists must have been very much not looking indeed. Someone give me a coherent explanation, please, of how cultural patterns could possibly ever avoid affecting the composition of the next generation.
They probably meant chronologically.
Blonde hair just off the top of my head, no pun intended.
Perhaps the economic leverage of agriculture was lucrative enough to increase dominance by the owner's male lineage. I.E. providing food to starving women from your dad's crop could get you laid more than the hunter gatherer next door.
I recall reading an economic study on polygamous societies in the Middle East that concluded the same thing about why women would be ok with it. Financial security.
Edit: I find it annoying that I'm getting downvoted for just saying I once read an article that studied similar phenomena. To be clear, I think polygamy is a horrible thing, especially in countries where women have far from equal rights. That doesn't mean that the circumstances that make it systemic shouldn't be studied.
Edit 2: I realize that I didn't particularly contribute anything enlightening to the conversation with this comment either. In that case, downvote away. :)
Polygamy shows up routinely in peasant societies when there is a severe shortage of men, for example after a war, or when economic hardship causes many young men to leave looking for work, or when severe poverty makes a large proportion of young men unable to afford a family.
The young women left behind have few good choices for husbands, and so are forced to choose (or have the choice made for them by their parents) between becoming spinsters (i.e. not marrying and living alone or with their parents into adulthood), or becoming an older man’s second wife (or third, etc.). This causes all kinds of resentment between the multiple wives and often leads to abusive relationships, but is still arguably a better outcome for some of the young women than being stuck unmarried in a context where supporting yourself as a single person is extremely challenging.
A plausible theory as to why this can happen.
Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].
“Lots of men have lots of sons, by chance. But what normally doesn’t happen is the sons have a high probability of having lots of sons themselves. You have to have a reinforcing effect[1]”. You need to have a prolific breeder spread out over a large geographic area whose sons are also more likely to have many kids.
Maybe 8,000 years ago something similar happened.
[1]https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...
> Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].
You mean one of the most prolific rapists. But since he was a "person of color" (yellow) and many of his victims were white, I doubt his statues will be toppled any time soon.
Is it fair to say that in these societies, most women got to pass on their genes, whereas most men except for select few didn't? Thus men were the ones to be selected from on a genetic level?
I would posit this was a "winner take all" outcome compounded by economics and biology. High infant mortality, as well as the high risk of death from even a simple infection or injury, would be enough to reduce the number of males in a population, to concentrate means into the hands of a few. Then, the progeny of these hardened or simply lucky few would be better insulated from disease or injury than other males, perpetuating the cycle.
Why do you think infant mortality would affect men but not women?
It's a well known fact in human biology. Just a couple links on the reasons why:
"Researchers uncover several reasons why boys are 'weaker sex'"
https://www.upi.com/Researchers-uncover-several-reasons-why-...
"Why is infant mortality higher in boys than in girls? A new hypothesis based on preconception environment and evidence from a large sample of twins."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23151996/
>It's long been known slightly more boys are born because fewer survive...
Ok, but this accounts for a few percentage ponts difference, not 17 to 1.
Right; economics probably exaggerates what is already a biological reality.
Horses have breeding statistics like that, with a herd stallion. Did humans go from herd mode to something else 8,000 years ago?
One thing to note is that the last ice age finished about 12k years ago, and human reoccupation of very large tracts of asia, north america and europe could not have been over night. Large areas (for example the UK north of London) were under ice sheets, but much larger areas would have been tundra and frozen dessert [1]
Additionally there would have been huge inundation of the coastal areas that were previously human occupied.
The creation of new opportunities and the chaos of the disruption of old settled communities may simply have meant that there was a multi-generational selection for successful adventurous cowards!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...
We went from hunter gatherers living in small mobile communities, to much larger settled agricultural communities. Agriculture supports far bigger populations leading to the first cities and settled nations with kings.
Curious but in some arab countries this still applies, so they kept this ancient fact. Also this research conclude many male deepdown fantasies.
>> By analyzing diversity in these parts, scientists are able to deduce the numbers of female and male ancestors a population has.
Can anyone explain more on this? Specifically how is the time axis worked out from a study of present-day volunteers?
I'm not an expert, but the idea is that mutation rates indicate age. If a bunch of people have a particular pattern, but they're all a little bit different to the same degree of difference, you can figure out how old that pattern is.
Presumably the changing bits must be in junk DNA otherwise mutation rates would be affected by selection pressure.
A non-expert guess: As more generations have passed, fewer common pieces of DNA are inherited and found in the same population?
Still, samples from 450 people seem like too small a number of achieve a good estimate.
Sounds like those "one man", "17 women" scenarios were some kind of utopia for men with harems
Makes you wonder about the other 16 guys, though
It doesn't mean that it was one man and seventeen women reproducing at the time, it means that male parentage at that time was a much stronger factor in whether descendants from the line survived to the modern day than female parentage.
That would still make one wonder about the other 16 guys and why the survival rate of their seed was so diminished vs the 'alpha male' in the group.
The unequal structure of society that naturally comes about from capitalism, an unevenness that has become even more prominent in modern mixed-economies where heavy state intervention in the economy is combined with market ideology, seems to have been far more extreme and socially destructive back in the stone age when we were all 'living off the land' and not exploiting resources to support a consumer centric culture...
So much of the "naturalist fallacy" and "appeal to nature" is based on a misunderstanding or idealized view of nature.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Naturalistic_fallacy
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Appeal_to_nature
The Stone Age, even the Bronze Age wasn't a capitalist society. Wealth and power were derived from military might and traditional roles, not ownership through capital investment by private enterprise.
If that's what you got from my comment then you must have misread it.
It could also mean the family unit was structured differently. E.g. five brothers taking care of dozens of wives sounds more viable than one man being able to survive 17 women :p
That's still a disproportionate ratio of males to females
My theory is it had to do with hunting in that era. Animals were big, all you had was a stone tipped spear and if you got injured there was nothing anyone could do for you. I'm sure death and debilitating injuries came early and often.
8k years ago is 6k BC which is well into the agricultural era. Just look at the picture at the top of the article, or read the very first sentence.
It was late I misread that. But it's still the neolithic era, there wasn't mass agriculture or urbanization yet. And competing tribes and the advent of warfare would have played a role.
RedPill men already know this.
A woman would rather share an Alpha than be stuck with a beta.
Do a test and ask you girlfriend/system/random woman:
Would you rather spend 5 minutes with Brad Pitt/Clooney/Her fav sexy Alpha or 50 years with her dream beta.
The answer is always laughter and blushing because you both know what the answer is.
The same question, asked to a man, does not give back the same type of answer.
Would you please stop creating accounts to post flamebait to HN? That's trolling, and we ban accounts that do it.
Is it trolling?
The top article is promoting/explaining polygamy and I'm giving you a real world example that hits home
This isn't /r/incels
Simple really.
Agriculture --> War
Single men --> Soldiers
Observe Islam during its early expansion. Soldiers get virgins in heaven as a result of sacred martyrdom.