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Manfred comments on Differential reproduction for men and women. - Less Wrong
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Hm. This is also, kind of, a question about polygamy - maybe we could find the data that way. But then, isn't the monogamy vs polygamy debate still quite unsettled? If we just look at current societies, then according to wikipedia polygyny isn't near common enough to produce a 2:1 ratio. Or for example in the hunter-gatherer Maori tribes, the chiefs sometimes took two wives (one chief even had three), so logically another man didn't reproduce, but that's not even close to being 80% of women having kids with 40% of men.
Most of the data understandably only looks at acknowledged relationships.
Yup. So what sort of data could either support or make unlikely a 50% cuckoldry rate among ancestral societies? I'm not sure that even a genetic study would give good answers, so we may have to go with indirect evidence.
What's the cuckoldry rate now? Ooh, I found a blog post on it by Razib Kahn (just by googling "cuckoldry," actually). He also links to a paper that finds a bit of a decrease in "nonpaternity rates," and attributes it to widespread birth control (makes sense).
Here is a list of paternity studies. The best study is the modern German study because there was very little selection bias. But there are several surname studies showing <2% nonpaternity rates over centuries. Unfortunately the list lacks citations, though there are some in the comments.
How would you balance cuckoldry compared to other factors like getting killed? What are the rates of sterility for men vs. women in various eras?
Thanks for the Khan link. I'd heard a 10% cuckoldry rate myself, but he's got evidence that it's more like 1.5% to 5%.
I don't think current societies are a representative sample. To take one important difference, traditional warfare typically resulted in the victors killing of the men and taking the women as concubines/extra wives.
Right. That's why I also looked up the indigenous people of New Zealand, who were hunter-gatherers until pretty recently. And who still had monogamy as the norm, except for the chiefs, who had ~1 concubine. If you think that other hunter-gatherer societies (preferably close to ancestral population densities) would be different, then how about you do the research :P
Sorry, I meant traditional in the sense of pre-modern. Look at the Trojan war for an ancient example. Frankly some versions of this were happening as recently as WWII.