Some counterevidence for human sociobiology

taw

I love seeing counter-evidence for everything. I estimate that while most of my beliefs are true (otherwise I wouldn't believe them in the first place), a small percentage is almost certainly completely false - and I don't really have any reliable way of telling the two apart.

Indiscriminatingly looking for counter-evidence for all of them can be very rewarding - the ones that are true are much more likely to sustain the assault of it than the ones that aren't. Yes, I might ignore counter-evidence of something that's false, or accept it for something that's true, ending up worse off, but it seems plausible that on average it should improve quality of my beliefs.

For example some of the standard beliefs about human sociobiology that seemed to be extremely widely held here are:

Men have lower chances of having any kids than women
Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

Charting Parenthood: Statistical Portrait of Fathers and Mothers in America disagrees with them.

It's true that young men are less likely to have children than young women, but it reverses at old age, and total chance of having children during lifetime is - for people over 45 - 84% for men, and 86% for women. As some of childless men might still have children between 45 and their death (quite a few according to data), but almost no woman will, the difference must get smaller by the time of death, or it might even reverse. This is pretty convincing evidence against a major gender difference in chance of having children, at least as far as modern America is concerned.
The chance of having children is highest for people between 100% and 200% of poverty line (poverty line, not median income, these are all poorer than average people). For women going either lower or higher reduces chances of having children considerably. For men getting poorer reduces chance of having children considerably, while getting richer reduces it but only slightly. However - younger people are much more likely to fall below poverty line, and men tend to reproduce later, so even that can easily be an artifact of age-income relationship. The data is fully compatible with both poverty and wealth being negatively correlated with chance of having children in both genders.

These are not direct tests of sociobiological claims, so what we have is not exactly what we would like to, but I find them to be quite convincing counter-evidence. My belief in these sociobiological claims is definitely lower than before, at least as far as they concern modern world, even though I can imagine more focused studies changing my mind back.

More counter-evidence for things we commonly believe here, sociobiological or otherwise, welcomed in comments.

For example some of the standard beliefs about human sociobiology that seemed to be extremely widely held here are:

Men have lower chances of having any kids than women
Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

Charting Parenthood: Statistical Portrait of Fathers and Mothers in America disagrees with them.

It's true that young men are less likely to have children than young women, but it reverses at old age, and total chance of having children during lifetime is - for people over 45 - 84% for men, and 86% for women. As some of childless men might still have children between 45 and their death (quite a few according to data), but almost no woman will, the difference must get smaller by the time of death, or it might even reverse. This is pretty convincing evidence against a major gender difference in chance of having children, at least as far as modern America is concerned.
The chance of having children is highest for people between 100% and 200% of poverty line (poverty line, not median income, these are all poorer than average people). For women going either lower or higher reduces chances of having children considerably. For men getting poorer reduces chance of having children considerably, while getting richer reduces it but only slightly. However - younger people are much more likely to fall below poverty line, and men tend to reproduce later, so even that can easily be an artifact of age-income relationship. The data is fully compatible with both poverty and wealth being negatively correlated with chance of having children in both genders.

More counter-evidence for things we commonly believe here, sociobiological or otherwise, welcomed in comments.

Voted up because I like the attitude you show in your first two paragraphs.

However I think that you misunderstand the claims that you argue against.

Men have lower chances of having any kids than women

The obeservation underlying this is that that the average person has three times as many female as male ancestors. But every child has one male and one female parent. So the average male ancestor of now living people must have three times as many decendants as the average female ditto.

This might be because genocides were carried out by killing all men in a population, so that the women were forced to marry the conquerors. Or because two thirds of males that were born in some era were killed as children. Or because there was a tradition were some men killed other men's children, so that the surviving children had fewer fathers than the children that were born.

But in any case there was something going on that is not caught by your statistics. And the simplest (and nicest) explanation is probably that women got to choose who they had sex with, and some men were more attractive than others.

So why does your statistics say differently? I see two explanations off the top of my head. 1) Marriage, or in other words rationing of partners. Today each man marries one woman, and then other women are expected to marry another man and have at least one child with their husband. 2) Contraception, people have fewer children when they don't want children nowadays.

Also, I expect that if that study would talk about biological fathers rather than social fathers you would get different results.

Richer people, especially men, are more likely to have kids, and have more kids

Rich and rational people have as many children as they want, not as many as they would have had in the past.
See above about marriage. When many women could have the same man without being shamed more attractive men would have more children relative to others. Rich men are ceteris paribus more attractive than others, and that difference was probably bigger when normalcy for both men and women were on the limit of starvation
The "poverty line" is not really relevant in an evolutionary context. Being "above the poverty line" in America today means being inconceivably wealthy in the terms that were normal 200 years or more ago. Genetically we have not changed much in a couple of centuries.
Wealth in the modern sense is not really relevant either. The kind of property that would count in your survey has not been around long enough to make any significant changes to the human genome.

Also, I expect that if that study would talk about biological fathers rather than social fathers you would get different results.

That's probably an important point, since some studies have claimed that a pretty enormous number of social fathers are not their kids' biological fathers.