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Comment by dsq | Hacker News Reader

Nature creates superfluous number of males (since one male ususally has most of females, like in a pride of lions, or a sultan's harem). Therefore those unattached males, who are still too young and inexperienced to fight the old ones, wander around 'seeking their fortune', usually leading to their quick demise in all sorts of places.

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> Nature creates superfluous number of males

A rather astounding statement. Selective pressure should result a ratio appropriate for a given species of plant or animal. It’s not my field, but I haven’t seen any literature suggesting any such thing, nor do I know of any country full of sultans.

E.g. most chickens (about 2/3) that come out of their egg are male. But a flock only allows maybe 1 adult male for every 5 females, with the surplus murdered by other chickens. So almost all male chickens are superfluous in that sense. It is still selective pressure which makes chickens have 'too many' males, because apparently those chickens/flocks have created more of themselves.

Same for lions, btw, although I don't know about their sex' birthrates.

Birth sex ratio of chickens is naturally 1:1.

You can do weird things with temperature to affect those birth rates, but the ratio will not reach as high as 2:1 as far as I know.

> Same for lions, btw, although I don't know about their sex' birthrates.

If you don't know the rate how can you say it's true?

By definition there is some sort of distribution of male/female cubs and there is presumably some sort of distribution of pack sizes. But apart from the victorian-inspired documentaries that talk about juvenile male ronins being chased from the pack I don't really know the dynamics, and I doubt anyone but a specialized community does. Where I live in Palo Alto the distribution of lone mountain lions that show up in town seems, anecdotally, to be predominantly female.

Humans are a good example: slightly more males are born but within the range of about 20-50 years of age, the sex ratio is 1:1. Humans have been basically* monogamous throughout recorded history and for whatever reasons that might be it would select for this birth ratio wouldn't it.

* Sure, there are plenty (well, a few percent) of kids whose father is not the male in a given hetero "couple" but it's the couple phenomenon itself that matters here.

> > Nature creates superfluous number of males

> A rather astounding statement. Selective pressure should result a ratio appropriate for a given species of plant or animal. It’s not my field, but I haven’t seen any literature suggesting any such thing, nor do I know of any country full of sultans.

This is not actually true. The math works out that there is usually an even ratio between males and females, and that this is even the case in tournament species (where one male is able to mate with multiple females.) The thing to understand is that in this hypothetical, it wouldn't be a country full of sultans, but a country full of would-be sultans. A very different proposition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle

Interesting. Technically it doesn’t contradict my statement, as 1:1 must be some sort of Panglossian survival ratio :-). But of course you twigged that that wasn’t what I was thinking at all at all, which is what makes your comment so interesting.

But it takes a lot of effort to make offspring, so none of them would be of a “surplus” sex. I must say that I’m surprised that the 1:1 ratio survives in schooling or herding species in which a large proportion perish. I suppose it’s insurance against an unfortunate loss of all males. There’s probably an interesting maths PhD in there someplace.

Superfluous is roughly synonymous with 'unnecessary' and that seems to be the confusion here.

Extra males are unnecessary. They exist, but could easily not exist and that wouldn't present major issues for the species

Yes, thank you. I was sloppy with my phrasing. The idea is that it takes only a small number of males to procreate the next generation, so the rest of the males are a kind of surplus that can be diverted, to fighting for example.

I was careless in my phrasing. What I should have said was that only a fraction of the males in a generation are necessary for fathering the next generation, and that all the other males can be diverted to other tasks or simply left to fend for themselves.

...Why does it matter whether the demise was quick or slow, with the group or apart from it? They still leave the same number of bones, don't they?

I would imagine because the male bones would then be more scattered, whereas female bones more concentrated, giving you a better chance to come upon a male's bones. Not sure the speed of demise is relevant.

If my kids scatter toys all of the living room, I'm much more likely to step on one or more of them, then if they were in a neat pile (speaking from experience).

That does not seem a reasonable exploration - all it means that we'd find female bones more rarely but when we do find them, there would be a whole cluster of them, recovering many specimens at once - it's not like paleontologists stop with "ah, we took one set of bones from here, we'll leave the rest lying around); so the total amount should still be the same.

Fair enough. Could be the size of the area, lack of resources, and bad luck until suddenly a jackpot?

For all I know, maybe the bones at camp are used to make soup… /shrug

An animal dying suddenly in a landslide would be more likely to leave a fossil than one who has been killed and eaten.

The environmental conditions that are good for the formation of fossils are not the sort of conditions that are good for living a long and peaceful life. Outcast males are the ones more likely to be wandering around in those sorts of places.

Fossilization is really rare and the conditions that enable fossilization usually involve being quickly buried under something.

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