Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

The perennial older male age is because men are fertile longer than women so statistics would tend to this pattern over a large enough population.

There's power asymmetry, people are monsters and sexual predation is rampant but there's also biological feasibility at play here.

To demonstrate, let's say that we have an imaginary equalityville where for every age pairing and sex act, there is an exactly equal one with the ages swapped - as in mathematically perfect equality.

In equalityville occasionally 45 year old men sleep with 35 year old woman. But every time, a 45 year old woman sleeps with a 35 year old man, coincidentally, at the exact same time, doing equal things, in another part of town.

However, 45 year old woman give birth rarely. Let's say it's 1/99th the rate of the 35 year olds.

So there's

1000 45 year old women with 35 year old men resulting in 10 births

1000 45 year old men with 35 year old women resulting in 990 births

Now we're going to calculate the average age based on the babies.

Women (990 * 35 + 10 * 45)/1000 = 35.1

Men (990 * 45 + 10 * 35)/1000 = 44.9

And thus we get our paradox because we're counting by live births. So long as there are age delta pairings past some set of constraints, the male average will drift upward.

It'd be interesting to normalize for that. This is probably doable since actual fertility statistics are well studied.

Older men have had time to climb the social ladder and amass resources and status, a corollary for power. These equal higher odds of survival for offspring.

Younger women are more fertile.

There's nothing more to it than that. This dynamic has existed for so long it's part of our DNA now via sexual selection.

That assumes nuclear families raising children under capitalism - that's a culturally specific western view of the past maybe 200 years. There's many other modalities over the entire globe and 250,000 years. The premise and the conclusion of your statement is unsupported unless you can demonstrate those assumptions consistently holding in most societies over a quarter million years.

I'm talking about becoming the tribal chief or one of the other leaders. Nothing to do with nuclear families, quite the opposite.

Now you're assuming there's a social hierarchy where someone can exercise sexual indiscretion as some kind of reward and where the social customs encourage such a behavior, which also must be demonstrated. Again, if we aren't talking about hard biology like menopause, puberty, fertility and stillbirth rates, things get dicey. Things can dip into eisegesis quickly.

No, I'm assuming two modes:

One were women were treated as sexual resources to be taken and controlled

Another with more free will.

In both cases, sexual selection would lead the offspring of those that aligned with the dominant male and his group, through free will or coercion, to have greater survival odds due to the dominant male's ability to control or capture resources, or fend off danger.

If you're aware that a majority of stone-age societies practiced communism without hierarchies for several tens of thousands of years to offset this sexual selection, I'd be interested to hear about that period of history.

Sure. There's a famous recent book about it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

Regardless what you think of the text, even the most stubborn critics agree the classical claims lack critical support.

You don't have to assume communism. A world requiring lots of labor to do basic things with lots of diseases and death being common is alien to us. I don't realistically need to worry about wild animals, water access, food availability, or succumbing to unfortunate weather.

DNA studies show that human population may have been as low as 2,000, on the brink of extinction 70,000 years ago.

This time period is so vast we're talking neanderthals and a bunch of other hominids.

It's a wildly different structure. There was lots of diversity. I assumed no social structure in my claims and showed that regardless of social structure, that pattern would arise as an artefact of the biology of childbirth.

If you can demonstrate the delta is larger than biologically expected, then you have something to back structural claims. But that's you know, actual academic work that would take a month or twenty. We aren't going to resolve that here. The childbirth argument was the easy one.

And yet https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk

source?

It's linked right below the image: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/christian-rudder-datacl...

Those metrics are culturally specific and the dataset of okcupid is limited to people who go on okcupid and volunteer answers to such questions. It's a classic case of participation bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias (see "Alf Landon wins in a landslide" for the famous example).

The takeaway here is that straight single middle aged men who chase after woman, are on ok cupid looking for them, and who fill out this survey, are on average, looking for younger women.

Those results cannot be seen as representative of the general population based on the methodology used here.

It gets worse. Similar to the Alf Landon flaw, this could simply be exposing the demographic makeup of the site. Perhaps men think there's a promise on okcupid of younger women so it self-selects for those proclivities. Perhaps women think there's a different promise so they come accordingly.

You have to extricate that. Otherwise, it'd be like going to a gay dating site, running a survey and then come out with some earth-shattering ground-breaking claim of 100% of men saying they prefer intimacy with other men. I mean, duh, look who you're asking.

That's not to say these results don't hold generally, they might. But this is not evidence supporting that.

Why do you mention middle aged men when that graph contained men of all ages.

Where's the paradox? Live births drive evolution afterall. Wouldn't such a massive survival difference start to show up in mate age preferences getting "coded" into our genes?

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