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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Some people from former Yugoslavia mentioned that during the war all women clustered around the few men that had means for survival and who led gangs or were involved in all kinds of shady business bringing in resources. I guess the effect described in the article is similar.

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It's similar to the entirety of human history, minus the last little bit. The notion of most men finding female partners is a relatively recent development. Throughout most of our history, most men haven't procreated. There was a story posted here a while back that cited DNA analysis to show that humans have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Apparently, the historical averages are around 80% of females that reproduced and only around 40% of males that did. It sounds like we experienced a brief period of middle-class prosperity that made that phenomenon far less pronounced and we're now seeing a regression back to the norm.

I'm not making a value judgment or saying we should want this disparity, just pointing out that throughout our history, it's mostly been this way.

It would be interesting to see studies on this. Intuitively this makes sense - in times of societal breakdown, the ability to violently compete for resources will return as a key signal of fitness

I hate to sound this much politically incorrect but women in these times of social unrest and upheaval turn into resources themselves and this clustering, as you described it, would be more of involuntary and less of at will.

This doesn't mean that women in these situations wouldn't tend to gravitate toward the most power male with the largest resources in the pack but in most case it's the other way around.

Which is really more politically incorrect to say, that women are basically looking for a man to provide for them, or that, more or less, pimps are survivors?

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