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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.

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This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.

Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.

Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.

The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.

I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.

Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.

At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.

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