Parental investment by sex on ifaluk

Trivers and Willard (Science 179;90-92, 1973) predict that where investment by parents in good condition increases the fitness of sons more than that of their sisters, while the opposite is true of parents in poor condition, parents with much to invest will favor sons, while those with little will favor daughters. Patterns of parent-child association on Ifaluk atoll are consistent with this prediction.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26325/1/0000412.pd

Can evolutionary psychology explain reproductive behavior in the contemporary United States?

Can evolutionary psychology explain human behavior in postindustrial societies? Critics point out that, contrary to its prediction, wealthy men in contemporary societies do not have more children than poor men. I replicate Pérusse’s (1993) finding with a large, representative sample and demonstrate that, while they do not have more children, wealthy men nonetheless have more sex partners and copulate more frequently than poor men. They would therefore have achieved greater reproductive success in the ancestral environment without effective means of contraception. Throughout human history, wealthy and powerful men of high status have had a greater number of mates and produced more children than poor and powerless men of low status (Betzig 1986). In ancient civilizations, kings, emperors, and sultans maintained large harems of hundreds and thousands of virgins, and local chiefs and noblemen kept several wives or concubines, while at the same time countless poor men in the countryside died mateless and childless (Betzig 1993). And these wealthy and powerful men of high status invariably left a large number of descendants. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Emperor of Morocco from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century

Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences

We report the sequences of 1,244 human Y chromosomes randomly ascertained from 26 worldwide populations by the 1000 Genomes Project. We discovered more than 65,000 variants, including single-nucleotide variants, multiple-nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, short tandem repeats, and copy number variants. Of these, copy number variants contribute the greatest predicted functional impact. We constructed a calibrated phylogenetic tree on the basis of binary single-nucleotide variants and projected the more complex variants onto it, estimating the number of mutations for each class. Our phylogeny shows bursts of extreme expansion in male numbers that have occurred independently among each of the five continental superpopulations examined, at times of known migrations and technological innovations

Why men commit crimes (and why they desist)

Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) claim that the relationship between age and crime is similar in all social and cultural conditions and that no current sociological or criminological theory can account for this similarity. We introduce the new field of evolutionary psychology and extend Daly and Wilson’s (1988) work on homicide to construct a general theory of male criminality, which explains why men commit violent and property crimes. The theory can also explain the age-crime curve. It might also account for some empirical anomalies such as why physically smaller boys are more delinquent, and why violent criminals desist more slowly. In their highly influential 1983 article “Age and Explanation of Crime, ” Hirschi and Gottfredson claim that the relationship between age and crime is invariant across all social and cultural conditions at all times. In every society, for all social groups, for all races and both sexes, at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other analogous, risktaking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off during middle age. Figure 1 presents the typical age-crime curve ~Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983: Figures 1, 5