Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
The commonly cited figure that only 40% of ancestral men reproduced versus 80% of women is likely an overestimate of male reproductive skew, according to Stewart-Williams, because humans have unusually high levels of biparental care.
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At 43:45 · chapter starts 42:18
Why are men more aggressive, more risk-taking, more interested in casual sex? Stewart-Williams traces all of these to a single upstream cause: variance in offspring number is greater in males. In many species, some males can sire vastly more offspring than any female can produce, while many males sire none. This creates intense selection pressure on males to compete for status, resources, and multiple mates. The famous 40/80 statistic — that only 40% of ancestral men reproduced versus 80% of ancestral women — comes up, and Stewart-Williams pushes back: he thinks the male reproductive skew in humans was actually lower than in most mammals, precisely because humans have unusually high biparental care. He explains why a 50-50 sex ratio is evolutionarily stable even when one male can theoretically service many females, using a clean parental-investment argument. Bateman's original principle and Trivers' extension to all forms of parental investment — gestation, birth, nursing, and beyond — are outlined clearly.
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