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Of Penguins, Paleolithic Gender Ratio and White Fertility

Observing the reproduction of emperor penguins in March of the Penguins got me thinking.  Did paleolithic white males suffer a similarly high mortality rate during winter?  If so mating-age gender ratio may be the most under-rated controller of white fertility.

The emperor penguin and paleolithic europeans… is there a similarity?

Perhaps—if you consider the difficulty of reproducing in harsh environments.  Of course, not all winter-adapted creatures are subject to the extreme conditions borne by the emperor penguin of the antarctic ice flows but keep in mind that humans were subject to enough environmental pressure to evolve technological culture—something unique among animals.  Moreover, among the strongest selective pressures posited for human evolution are fatal accidents suffered primarily by males.  This is similar to the emperor penguin’s extraordinarily high male mortality rate suffered due to the difficulty of gathering calories for the young.

Such gender-selection against reproductive-age males produces an abundance of reproductive age females.  Now the emperor penguin isn’t unique in having an abundance of reproductive age females due to high male mortality—but in most other species the result would simply be larger harem sizes for the males.  Not so for the emperor penguins who are subject to ecologically imposed monogamy.  Male provision for young among emperor penguins is as critical as female provision.

The combination of high female to male ratio with ecologically imposed monogamy results in something quite rare among the animals:

Female emperor penguins fight over males during courtship season but males do not fight over females.

Now, consider the possibility that paleolithic whites, subject to both of these same conditions—high male mortality rate combined with ecologically imposed monogamy of environments low in food calories—may have evolved simlar adaptations. 

The result would be lower competence for sexual competition among white males.

If you, among whites, then simultaneously import ethnies coevolved with environments with either lower male mortality rates (for example ethnies long coevolved with cities or other trade route bottlenecks) or more available food calories (say subsaharan Africans) while decreasing male mortality rates at the same time as you make food calories more abundant—you have the potential to dramatically disrupt reproductive cycles among those whites.

This hypothesis needn’t explain all aspects of lowered fertility among whites but it does seem to fit the data rather well.

If true there are 4 basic means of counteracting this drag on white fertility:

  1. Increase the rate at which males fight single combat to the death.  (This may have been the origin of northern European laws instituting holmganga as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing).
  2. Increase the rate at which whites fight major wars (such as WW II).
  3. Increase the female to male birth ratio through gender selection fertility technology.
  4. Increase the degree to which whites are subject to harsh frontier environments such as arctic, oceanic or perhaps space habitation.

Posted by James Bowery on Tuesday, December 20, 2005 at 10:55 PM in Anthropology
Comments (7) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Søren Renner on December 21, 2005, 01:16 AM | #

Interesting. Wow.

Posted by Søren Renner on December 21, 2005, 01:39 AM | #

Your idea is related to KMD’s observation that Europeans are relatively non-ethnocentric and his hypotheses about how that evolved.

Posted by JRM on December 21, 2005, 02:39 AM | #

The result would be lower competence for sexual competition among white males.

If you, among whites, then simultaneously import ethnies coevolved with environments with either lower male mortality rates (for example ethnies long coevolved with cities or other trade route bottlenecks) or more available food calories (say subsaharan Africans) while decreasing male mortality rates at the same time as you make food calories more abundant—you have the potential to dramatically disrupt reproductive cycles among those whites.

I think the argument works best within a Northern European/Southern European context considering Southern European’s long lead in developing cities and having higher population density.  I am less sure about other ethnicities because I am not sure how much choice females had in their mates.  That is, arranged marriages replace the need to compete for female attention with the need to compete for social status.  Related, but different concepts. 
Nonetheless, I think it is very insightful.

Posted by John S Bolton on December 21, 2005, 08:36 AM | #

Including NEAsians in the comparison might make NEuro’s look like aggressive pursuers.

Posted by James Bowery on December 21, 2005, 09:21 AM | #

Including NEAsians in the comparison might make NEuro’s look like aggressive pursuers.

True enough.  Now is there any reason to believe the NE Asians had a higher female to male ratio and/or lower caloric availability in their paleolithic EEA?

Are there recorded observations of, say, the Buryata or Inuit which might shed light?

Posted by JB on December 23, 2005, 03:10 AM | #

If we had a strong culture with a racial conscience it would compensate for our innate weaknesses. it worked until the age of the mass media

Posted by John S Bolton on December 23, 2005, 03:24 AM | #

There might be two relevant concepts being incorrectly downgraded here: ‘relative fertility’ and ‘cross-subsidization’, as across high genetic distance.

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