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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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?
As I understand it, humans are on the spectrum between have maximum number of offspring with low parental investment and have a smaller number with high parental investment. There are indicators (size difference between sexes, size of testes, probably more) which puts us about a third of the way towards the high investment end. So, there's infidelity and monogamy and parents putting a lot into their kids and parents abandoning their kids.
Humans are also strongly influenced by culture, so you also get customss like giving some of your children to a religion which requires celibacy, or putting your daughters at risk of dowry murder.
Biology is complicated. Applying simple principles like males having a higher risk of not having descendants won't get you very far.
I'm reminded of the idea that anti-oxidants are good for you. It just didn't have enough detail (which anti-oxidants? how much? how can you tell whether you're making things better).
Or cultural variation is mostly determined by genetic variation. It's hard to empirically distinguish the two.
You can do historic comparison. 500 hundred years ago people in Europe acted very differently than they do today. On the other hand their genes didn't change that much.
It is even theoretically possible? If there are causal influences in both directions between X and Y, is there a meaningful way to assign relative sizes to the two directions? Especially if, as here, X and Y are each complex things consisting of many parts, and the real causal diagram consists of two large clouds and many arrows going both ways between them.