Premarital sex: An economic model of its rise and de-stigmatisation
voxeu.org
voxeu.org
These views aren't worldly at all. We should keep that in mind.
Once upon a time, making love to a woman meant spinning the pregnancy wheel. In this metaphor, you get a 10% chance of a baby if you have sex with a maiden fair (it can go as high as 1 in 3 if both parties are very fertile, i.e. teenagers), times the 70% failure rate, times her chances of establishing you were the father (depends on her status, your status, and if your looks are distinctive; call it %50), times 50% because you are only giving it half of its genes. So, overall, you are getting a ~1.75% increase in presence just by having sex. You stood an equal chance of ruining her life, of course.
Right now we are probably going to see people like sex less and less as time goes on, because the payout in pleasure does not match the new equation, which takes abortions, contraceptives (but also DNA tests), into account. Now it looks more like this:
- odds she can become pregnant (10%)
- odds she can prove you're the dad (0-100%, 0 if she's married and in on the con, 100% if she has the means and determination for a DNA test. Depends on the situation, but can be determined beforehand.)
- odds the pregnancy fails or is prevented (70-100%, again depends on whether protection is used, she is pro-life, or pro-choice, or whatever. Possible to determine beforehand.)
- genetic contribution (50%)
We get to 0-5%, but the main difference is that now a lot of factors can be determined beforehand. An affair with a married woman gets you a %5 increase in presence a time, topping out at 50% per child who, again, you won't be responsible for. We're essentially talking free points here. On the other hand, a college student you met at an abortion rally is probably not going have that baby.
Over time, the first scenario is going to be more desirable than the second, but this will become harder with time as married men demand DNA tests of their children. Eventually, sex will become about cuddling and intimacy, rather than the sufficient condition for reproduction for men.
I would say you'd have had a greater chance of ruining her life than of ruining your own -- while the father may remain unidentified, the mother generally cannot >_>
It seems to me that the article linked to in the post makes a fairly compelling economic case that sexual promiscuity will continue to increase in the future. IMHO, that's a good thing. :-)
Yes. It's the Red Queen effect here; your mind works with incentives that one must not be able to permanently conquer. If happiness is too easily attained with fake thrills, you end up with contented humans who don't reproduce as much as the ones who find it harder to be happy and therefore work harder to make more babies.
I agree the free love thing is great, and it will remain vestigially for a long time, but it isn't going to be driving reproduction like it was before the twentieth century.
I agree the logic is a little tortured, but that's evolutionary biology for you.
It's somewhat plausible. Individuals and couples who like sex more than average may be more likely to forgo having children to avoid negatively impacting their sex lives.
The obvious point that you're missing is that evolutionary status and social status are pretty much unrelated things. Evolutionary status is how many descendants you have in the far future. Social status is what society thinks of you.
In our evolutionary past the cost of being "ruined" was access to fewer resources, which lead to a decreased survival rate for you and your kids, and decreased prospects for future children. Today the result of out of wedlock pregnancies is more descendants since we all have sufficient resources for basic survival. The result is an evolutionary pressure towards avoiding the effective use of contraception, and for enjoying sex.
This happy state is, of course, unlikely to remain for an evolutionarily significant time. The simple reason for that is that the continuation of this state will result in exponential growth in human population, leading to resource exhaustion and a Malthusian nightmare. (Current projections appear to show a halt to exponential growth due to economic and societal pressures. But that won't last more than a few generations as birth control creates a very strong evolutionary pressure for avoiding the effective use of birth control. Even modest success at that will reignite exponential growth.)
IMHO whether we look at his from an individual motivation perspective, or from an evolutionary biology perspective, it looks to me like either perspective predicts greater, rather than lesser, promiscuity.
From an individual motivation perspective, increases in the effectiveness and convenience of contraceptives and improvements in preventing/curing STD's increase an individuals motivation and desire to have sex by reducing the potential for any negative consequences (ie, disease or unwanted pregnancy).
On the other hand, from an evolutionary biology perspective, the people who will successfully reproduce are either 1)those who are purposely planning to have children, 2)those who don't use contraceptives regularly or properly, and 3)those who have frequent enough sex that the slight percentage of contraceptive failure catches up to them. :-) In all three cases, but particularly in the second and third, those individuals who enjoy sex and have it frequently are much more likely to pass on their genes than those who don't enjoy it and don't have it regularly.
Hence, I would say that the evolutionary pressure to enjoy sex and seek it out will continue as it always has, relatively unaffected by our modern medical advances. :-)
Source: http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/439351/marriage-holds-the-...