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Comment by Fuxy | Hacker News Reader

Makes perfect sense to me. If you look at our culture now there is always that one male all the females in a group tend to go for.

Same for males there's always that 1 mega hotie you want to meet.

The only difference is even average females can have any guy they want while the same doesn't apply to guys.

The advent of agriculture gave females the ability to support their children more easily without the help of males and the more desirable males could have more offspring with so much food available.

Basically less females had to settle for second best to have offspring.

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> Same for males there's always that 1 mega hotie you want to meet. > The only difference is even average females can have any guy they want while the same doesn't apply to guys.

I'd rather say that the major difference is that while there is no (or very little) opportunity cost for a male that mates with the top woman and the next 100 women as well, there is a big opportunity cost for a female regardless of which male she chooses, so she is much more motivated to choose the top male.

Right. This is not a new theory. It's well known that evolution tends to favor polygamy where females are more selective and males are more promiscuous.

What's interesting is that this apparently started after agriculture rather than before. I had previously thought that maybe hunter gatherers practiced polygamy but it faded away as we become more agricultural.

Also 17 females to 1 male is pretty absurd. Even if you look at cultures that practiced polygamy in recent history it wasn't to that extent. And even when it was practiced, it wasn't necessarily common except in the very upper class, so the average female to male ratio would have been more reasonable.

We can only speculate to what degree this might have shaped our (recent) evolution. That's a huge selective pressure on males to have traits that would lead to them being the local king or whatever they were. And everyone alive today would be descended from those people.

>I had previously thought that maybe hunter gatherers practiced polygamy but it faded away as we become more agricultural.

I would have thought otherwise, there is very little incentive for you to labour for the tribe if you have no skin in the game, so to speak. So they would give you a wife otherwise, why fight for them? Why hunt? Why do anything to benefit anyone other than yourself? Since you have nothing to lose, you can even steal from them since no one you care about suffers.

> What's interesting is that this apparently started after agriculture rather than before.

Well, the effects become much more pronounced after agriculture.

> Also 17 females to 1 male is pretty absurd. Even if you look at cultures that practiced polygamy in recent history it wasn't to that extent.

17:1 ratio in females vs. males having descendant lines surviving to appear in modern DNA doesn't imply 17:1 female:male polygyny.

Heck, the reverse (women having multiple partners, especially a higher-station one with better prospects for having offspring and having them succeed in youth and a lower-station one with worse prospects later, perhaps after the previous one died) could contribute to this, though polygyny is probably part of the explanation.

Agriculture created surplus which meant that someone could feed a larger family.

If you are a hunter gatherer you need to be a very good one to support more than one wife, even if you are the chief.

With surplus generated by agriculture, spare time can be spent innovating to increase the surplus. Inequal skills in building a personal surplus - whether by conquest, investment or thrift - means that some people get richer. Richer men gain power and are able to not only attract more females but rewrite the rules to make it so.

A few generations of this and you change the population considerably.

>lead to them being the local king or whatever they were

Or lead them to "steal" secret reproductions? There's only "one" king, but there could be more than 1 "illegitimate" fathers.

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