The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
> We believe MIT deserves further investigation, and, with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study—males and females, with and without alcohol—in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting.
Typically extremely reproductively successful men like Chengis Khan take enormous risks to get the power and status that leads to high reproductive success. Unfortunately we are all descended from those men.
Why not? Do you think that this:
> Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species)
Is the only answer applicable to "Why to males take more risk than females?"
Also, evolution is likely not precise enough to have evolved accurate intuitions about the fitness value of all possible risks. We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
>"What gain do colourful feathers on birds really have except to draw attention"
When drawing attention gives you a disproportionate advantage to attracting a mate vs. attracting a predator, it's a very important (and non-neglible) gain.
>We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
I don't think this negates the point. Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution. I can say there's a distribution of individual player height in the NBA, but that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions about height having generalized value at the population level regarding the chances of making it to professional basketball.
Humans have no natural predators, so one side of the equation is zero, and the other non-zero.
> Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution.
Yes, and there is directionality in risk-taking as well. Discoveries, fortunes and high-value mates all require risk taking.
Even risks that appear to have negligible or even zero fitness value, like extreme sports, have netted many people valuable sponsorships or YouTube fame and fortune.
Evolution is not precise and simply cannot capture the full nuance of a concept like "status" in human culture, therefore it has permitted a broad distribution of risk taking.
You do realize you contradict yourself here, right?
You’ve essentially said “This activity that amasses stays and resources has negligible fitness value.”
That only makes sense if you think status and resources don’t impact fitness/survivability. You might be confusing inherent value with signaling value. Driving a Ferrari doesn’t give me any additional inherent fitness. But it does serve as a potential signal for status, which can confer added fitness in practice. Signals can be wrong, of course, while still giving an advantage.
I'm pointing out your contradiction, because extreme sports are exactly the same kind of behaviour which is the subject of this article, and that you classified as negligible or zero value before it exploded in popularity.
The point being that a wide latitude of risk seeking behaviour allows people to find new and unexpected success modes, even if they at first appear to convey little benefit and incur considerable risk.
Of course, you want an adversarial network that's difficult to trick, otherwise the training will produce suboptimal results.
I don’t think it’s fair to represent an edge case, “noteworthy for being different” type species as being just one example out of many. As far as I’m aware the behavior exhibited by sea horses is extremely rare, and I recall it being highlighted as such in, at least, The Selfish Gene. Can you think of other examples?
There are other behaviours in the sea, and they are in general so different to mammals that we can consider them as alien.
I would even say mammals are the edge case, just by virtue of having a fewer number of species than fish, arthropods, insects, and almost any other clad.
You are simply more used to mammals, to the point it seems the only natural behaviour.
I don’t see egg laying species behavior as being very representative of the game theoretic patterns in childcare species behavior, though.
Ditching after birth vs raising the young is clearly such a massively important game theoretic dimension that it likely substantially determines the workable ranges for most other dimensions. How can we make conclusions across such separate subspaces of organism game space?
In my first year at college we were all set an essay about why human females invest lots of resources preening and enhancing their appearance, while across nature females normally put almost no effort into their appearance, and males are the ones with the bright colours.
This is an enormous area of study with thousands of papers published. Sexual selection is incredibly important. Especially as modern human evolution is driven almost entirely by sexual selection.
It’s worth understanding how sexual selection works.
My comment tries to give the PCA to what contributes to males taking more risks than females within the human species. This isn't a hypothesis - there have been a lot of studies which have shown human males to engage in risk-related behaviors when other females are present. It's also supported by other male-dominated species as well - the males have one single 'alpha' male which females choose to mate with -- but that 'alpha' male will need to take more 'risks' and be more aggressive in order for him to be in such a position in the first place. I'm not sure what you're expecting me to also list out in a hacker news discussion, but this is the best I can do. If you feel like you have counter-arguments -- feel free to post them and I'll be happy to take a look at them and reconsider my position OR post studies which show that you're wrong. Cheers.
Hence there are plenty of males who got the former, but not the latter.
No. But from a quick search, it sounds like there are ~~100 different genes believed to be involved in risk tolerance. Vs. the extremely simple A/B/O inheritance of blood types.
Whether or not the risky behavior is due to single alleles or complex interactions between multiple genes is a different argument than whether risky behavior is inheritable.
Man is useful to protect the offspring but is not required.
Men can father more babies than women. Which means that a male who sacrifices himself for the community indirect ensures his siblings survive, via brothers and sisters (cousins...) while a female who sacrifices herself ensures less children for the community - not a big deal now, when when infant mortality was high all women needed to be pregnant or nursing a baby from the teens until menopause or the population would shrink enough to kill the village off.
Men can father babies with many women, which means women can select the best male. A man who does something stupid and survives often gets the attention of the women and thus is allowed to pass his genes on. (woman can have more than one partner for their babies, but only one at a time will get her pregnant). Some stupid things are useful for the village as well - if you destroy a different village that is land you can then take for your own village, if you succeed in killing the lion you ensure that lion won't attack the village. Thus for a women encouraging men to try stupid things is a good reproductive strategy by rewarding them with babies is a smart move (as a bonus the man who succeeds may have better genetics that caused the success)
There are probably more. And this deserve real study as opposed to people like me on a forum making logical things up. I'm not sure how to do such a study though.
I think we’d have a much more peaceful world if we’d evolved from crocodiles or something peaceful like that.
Remember, in any perspective on the differences of sexes, there's no control; no human being has ever been raised outside of human society and very few have ever been raised outside of male-dominated societies.
One female can have about 10 babies. Regardless of how powerful she is. One male can father hundreds. The genetic rewards are there for males only. That’s why it’s only males that take crazy risks to get access to hundreds of women.
And who tends to hold positions of power isn't necessarily 1:1 with who tends to take the most risks, in fact, most of our leaders are usually prone to putting themselves in less danger than those they govern.
If I said Dutch people are taller than Spanish people you wouldn’t start talking about your one tall Spanish friend as a way of disproving my argument.
Something is making you clutch at straws to try to disprove the argument that biology causes patriarchy.
On the second point. Leaders take risks to get into the leadership position. That’s why the lower ranks are taking huge risks.
In most of the other mammals leadership is orthogonal to mating success. For example a pride of lions is a matriarchy. The lionesses are in charge. However there is only one mature male in the pride he mates with all of the lionesses.
Other males will take extraordinary risks to kill that male and take his pride.
Right, that explains why we can't know what % heredity contributes. It doesn't explain why we should assume that % to be small.
That's exactly what cross-cultural studies do. The evidence is pretty suggestive.
It's perhaps easier to see why risk-taking behaviour is less common in females, though. In a sexual species each female is required to carry at least two children, on average, to merely replace the current population (it's also beneficial if she survives the final birth). The loss of a single female is therefore quite significant. A population with more risk-taking females would be less successful than one with less.
There has to be a positive expected return for the genes of the individual that takes the risks.
If it’s beneficial to not take risks then populations will be full of individuals who play it safe.
The first observes 1,000 students over 20 days at a single bus station in Liverpool. The second observes a single crossing point near the university.
Yes, there are memes about clueless men, but there are also memes about clueless women - in fact, we have an entire genre of "blonde jokes" about them - which, note, are 99% about blonde women, not blonde men. The fact that these memes exist doesn't mean that society treats men(or women) as clueless generally.
The reason this happens is due to risk-taking behavior. Males take way more risks than females do - and you can find other studies which confirm this (i.e. for example this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470490800600...). When I read the Northcutt explanation for this I laughed -- it makes absolutely 0 sense and I can't believe that someone expanded energy in proposing this. It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.
At an individual level, the incentive may be social esteem/bragging rights, or it may be based on a calculation of greater risk = greater reward = more resources = more mating options, etc. It’s not that males are “selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool”, but that there’s some incentive and/or lack of disincentive to be more risk-taking.
Male risk taking behavior is more attractive to other males.
Of course it isn't true literally every single time, but it's certainly true on average. There is a strong correlation between a man being respected by many other men, e.g. high status among his peers, and that man being a stable reliable provider.
If their is a famine, who gets cut off from the communal source of food first? The man all the other men like, or the man none of the other men respect? If the company is shedding dead weight who is more likely to get laid off? Who gets the best reviews from their colleagues and is most eligible for promotion? In all cases, the man most respected by other men has an advantage. Such men are desired by an larger than average portion of women. This in turn creates a reinforcing dynamic where women see a man being desired by women and in turn desire him for themselves more. This in turn causes even more men to respect him.
Tldr it's good to be respected. And because respect begets more respect, it doesn't even necessarily matter how the respect was initially seeded. Having others witness you being respected is at least as important as doing something actually worthy of respect.
That's not the hypothesis the way I heard it - men are more expendable to society, but it's really a stretch to conclude that because men are more expendable, they make decisions with this knowledge in mind.
I mean, really - there's no logic linking the two.
Women are not expendable and thus society did not incentivize them to do these high-risk things. But men are, so societies created various social incentives to facilitate high-risk endeavors - honor, social esteem, medals, hierarchical rank, wealth, fame, etc. Many died doing so, but the ones that succeeded and survived reaped these various rewards and got to mate, producing heirs with similar risk-taking characteristics and capabilities from both nature and nurture.
In the past, groups with women that were more risk averse would do better on average when the group was decimated and needed to repopulate.
Groups with women that took too many risks didn't survive.
So, now we have more risk aware women.
Risk taking for men didn't have that of an impact and might even have proven beneficial (e.g., Genghis Kahn, etc.)
Just my assumption...
I read it as an artifact of natural selection and natural selection does not work "with this knowledge in mind".
It is, but note that someone suggested the very same thing below.
Anyone who has ever been out their front door knows why men take more risks - it's because riskier behaviour gets them laid more often, with more different women.
Being the top-dog amongst your male peers gets you more women. To get to the top-dog spot you need to take a ton of risks (challenging existing leaders, creating your own subgroup, learning new skills, etc).
> According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.
> there can be little doubt that Darwin Award winners seem to make little or no real assessment of the risk or attempt at risk management. They just do it anyway. In some cases, the intelligence of the award winner may be questioned. For example, the office workers watching a construction worker demolishing a car park in the adjacent lot must have wondered about the man’s intelligence. After two days of office speculation—how does he plan to remove the final support to crash the car park down safely?—they discovered, on the third day, that he didn’t have a plan. The concrete platform collapsed, crushing him to death and flattening his mini-excavator.
A study about Darwin Awards worthy of an Ignobel Prize.