[hobofan]

> And what causes the extra risk-taking by men, though?

Probably Testostorone

> Male reproductive success is heavily tied to being able to successfully acquire economic and sociopolitical resources.

That has only been true for something between a few thousand years to maybe a hundred years (when true upwards mobility was established). So as much as I like to think that humans can overcome their inner animals, it can't be ignored that a lot about us is governed by traditional evolution (which movea much much slower than our social systems).

Trying to place blame here on either sex in the current social system is not really productive here. Trying to place blame on women, who had (and in some places of the world still don't have) little/limited say in their choice of reproductive partners up until a few generations ago, is historically short-sighted at the least.

[belorn]

> Probably Testostorone

No. When accounted for gender Testostorone do not have a correlation to risk taking for men.

> traditional evolution

One of the research findings among primatologists about 50-70 years ago is that female choice has a significant impact. That "little/limited say in their choice of reproductive partners" is actually not that little or limited, but simply different compare to male primates. The research on prehistorical human behavior is also extreme speculative, so great caution to attribute anything specific down to it.

[hobofan]

How are arranged marriages (as they still exist now) not "limited choice"?

[belorn]

What are you talking about? Baboons, macaques, gibbons, great apes, capuchins, howlers, or squirrel monkey do not conduct arranged marriages, nor marriages at all for that matter. Looking at evolution and how it formed us and we find very little of arranged marriages.

Arranged marriages also limits men and women equally (the definition is the bride and groom are selected by individuals other than the couple themselves) so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make in the first place.

[hobofan]

> It could easily be argued that women are "responsible" for this via setting up the incentive structure that men responded to in the ancestral environment.

I was saying that this argument by ThrustVectoring doesn't hold true, as neither men nor women (at least not the bride or the groom) made the partner choices themselves.

[busterarm]

Just to pile on with what you said to the parent...

For most of the thousands of years we've had something like marriage, it was a privilege of the upper class anyway. Marriage served as a means to preserve political power.

If you don't have any political power, you weren't getting married.

[ThrustVectoring]

Arranged marriage was not a feature of the ancestral environment that these traits evolved in; that practice came about later.