[SamBam]

Evidence?

Take just the easiest to measure of those factors, wealth. Per your hypothesis, wealthier men should have more babies. Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies?

In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and number of babies. Both globally [1] and in the US [2]. There is some data that you can seek out that will suggest the trend is reversed in some first-world countries in the past couple of years, but that's no where near enough time to draw conclusions.

Is there real evidence that men with greater "health" (besides the obvious, of, say, having a crippling disease) or "reputation" have more children?

I'm sorry, but this sounds like "women only chose alpha males" junk to me.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

[JumpCrisscross]

> Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies?

Broadly, yes--wealthy people have more kids than poor people [1]. The confounding variable is market opportunity: when opportunity is high, the opportunity cost of kids goes up, which causes wealthier people to have fewer kids.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10427476/

[SamBam]

That study is hardly strong enough to make that statement that firmly. "Broadly," only if you exclude all of the Western world, and much of the rest of the world as well.

The study cites a dozen or so papers saying:

> Within contemporary Western populations, wealthier, higher status men tend to have lower fertility. In low and middle-income countries where populations are at different stages of this transition, women in wealthier households have fewer children on average. Over the course of the fertility transition, wealthier families also reduce their fertility earlier and more dramatically than the rest of the population.

They then essentially do a big regression analysis to say that if you take your material wealth and your education together, which they call your market opportunity, there is a strong negative relationship between that and fertility. Then if you take that same material wealth and your agricultural wealth together, there is a weaker positive relationship between that and fertility. So basically agricultural wealth (land and livestock) may be weakly correlated with having more kids, but other kinds of wealth aren't.

(And that's ignoring the fact that the chi-squared analysis said that their model was a poor fit anyway, but they hand-wave that away by saying that that's probably just because they had too much data.)

Finally, and importantly, the original statement by GP was that there was a sexual selection that favoring rich men. That is, that rich men would be selected by women and have more children. This study does not address that at all, as it measures household wealth, household education and number of children per woman, not per man.

[ninetyninenine]

Per my hypothesis I never said wealthier men should have more babies. Birth control is a factor here.

Women do marry and prefer richer men. Hypergamy is scientifically true, you can look it up if you want. But birth control changes the outcome even though hypergamy is an influencing factor.

In addition I said health and reputation are factors. So a man with good health but low wealth has one positive factor in his favor.

I feel your entire reply is rude and over the top. Calling my statement junk is not conducive to discussion.

[SamBam]

Ok, fair enough, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that it sounds a lot like stuff that people who push fairly sexist stuff say.

The thread is about evolution, and sexual selection in the context of evolution generally implies having an evolutionary fitness. I missed the part about birth control, since then we're not really talking about whether sexual selection is having a role in human evolution.

In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring.

I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?

[ninetyninenine]

>In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring.

This inverse is caused be birth control and economic circumstance. For the poor person, more kids means more kids on the farm to work. So the poor person chooses to have more kids via not using birth control.

For rich people in rich areas, more kids equals more college tuition to pay. So the rich person chooses to have less kids via using birth control.

That's what causes it. I'm too lazy to cite sources but this comes from anthropology 101 it's textbook stuff. And like most anthro stuff the studies are qualitative, so take from it what you will.

>I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?

Just google it. I hit a result here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

It's even in the wikipedia. It's also quite obvious if you've interacted with a lot of women before.

Look I know there's this woke movement that likes to cover up a lot of the dark stuff surrounding human behavior. Men and women have dark sides and this is just one of the darker things about women: Hypergamy. I think the thing that makes it more intriguing then the dark side of men is that culture and society basically masks this fact about women.

You see the double standard here? You can call men dumb and into boobs and butts and physical pleasures but to even mention something superficial about women you became all reactive about it like it's sexist. Men ARE into boobs and butts, that's just a fundamental truth and it's not sexist. Neither is this. It's also obvious.