I have realized I don't understand the first thing about evolutionary psychology. I used to think the selfish gene of a male will want to get planted into as many wombs as possible and this our most basic drive. But actually any gene that would result in having many children but not so many great-great-grandchildren due to the "quality" of our children being low would get crowded out by the genes that do. Having 17 sons of the Mr. Bean type may not be such a big reproductive success down the road.

Since most women managed to reproduce, we can assume a winner strategy is having a large number of daughters but perhaps for sons the selfish gene may want quality and status more than quantity. Anecdotally, in more traditional societies what typically men want is not a huge army of children but a high-status male heir, a "crown prince". Arab men traditionally rename themselves after their first son, Musa's father literally renames himself to Musa's father: Abu-Musa. This sort of suggests they are less interested in quantity...

At this point I must admit I have no longer an idea what the basic biological male drive is. It is not simply unrestricted polygamy and racking up as many notches as possible. It is some sort of a sweet spot between quantity and quality, and in quality not only the genetic quality of the mother matters but also the education of the sons i.e. investing into fathering, the amount of status that can be inherited and so on? Which suggests more of a monogamous drive.

Besides to make it really complicated, while the ancestral father's genes may "assume" his daughters will be able to reproduce to full capacity, there is still a value in parenting and generally quality because if the daughter manages to catch a high quality man, an attractive man, her sons may be higher quality, more attractive guys, and thus her sons can have a higher quantity of offspring and basically the man's "be a good father of my daughter" genes win at the great-grandchildren level!

This kind of modelling actually sounds like something doable with mathemathics, something like game theory, right? We could figure out how the utility function of the selfish gene looks like game-theoretically? Was it done already?