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Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men, the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that difference, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Anything-Good-About-Men.pdf
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Anything-Good-About-Men.pdf
For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.
For men, sailing off into the unknown may be risky, but if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from men who made the risky voyage & came back rich, & gpt a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
Women minimize risks, men take chances. Ambition & competition matter to men (in offspring) more than female. Creativity was necessary, to help individual men stand out. For many men, there would be few chances to reproduce, so they had to be ready for every sexual opportunity.
Most women have a few children, few more than a dozen. Many fathers have more than a few, some men several dozen, even hundreds of kids. In terms of the biological competition to produce offspring, then, men outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners.
For women, being lovable is key to attracting the best mate. For men, it's a matter of beating out lots of other men even to have a chance to mate. Nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.
Genghis Khan had more than a thousand children. He took big risks & conquered most of the known world. No woman, even if she conquered twice as much territory as Genghis Khan, could have had a thousand children.
Genghis' blood runs through a large segment of today’s population. Few men can achieve greatness, but for those, the gains have been real. We are descended from those great men much more than from other men. Remember, most of the mediocre men left no descendants at all.
