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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Man is useful to protect the offspring but is not required.
I think we’d have a much more peaceful world if we’d evolved from crocodiles or something peaceful like that.