Sometimes I meet guys, and they’re a bit shy around women… Anyway, I’ve now been told the craziest bit of evolutionary nonsense since somebody recommended I read Sperm Wars.

He says, and I quote:

“About 50,000 years ago, humans used to live in small tribes of around 50 people, so everyone knew everybody else. It would be very unlikely that you would encounter another group, because the nearest one would be several weeks travel away.

Therefore, there would be about 25 females that you could mate with, all of whom knew each other. But, some would be too sick / old / young / etc. to be able to reproduce, and that would leave about five possible female mates.

If you were to approach one of them and she rejected you, everybody would know about it. And the tribal leader would get the other 23 guys to take you into the woods and kill you, to prevent any further attempts by you to weaken the gene-pool, with your weak genes.

Or if he didn’t do that, every female would now know you are undesirable, so they would not mate with you. The nearest tribe would be several weeks travel away. You would now effectively be sterile, and you would not be able to pass on your genes.”

He believes that because of this fear, some sort of genetic memory has perpetuated through the Human race and that’s why he feels nervous meeting women.

Now, I understand that people can convince themselves of some pretty crazy stories; maybe that a rabbits foot or a four leaf clover will help them become more fortunate etc. And I’ve known people attribute all kinds of miraculous things to the power of positive thinking. But this is plain wacky! It doesn’t help him in a Personal Development sense, and it seems more like an excuse that will only encourage him to stay shy around women (and probably guys too).

Aside from the highly doubtful question as to whether genetic memory exists or not, firstly, my friend seems to be judging ancient events using a modern perspective, which is always a very dangerous thing to do, since people then would have had vastly different views from modern times. This is even the case if one looks back at society only a hundred years ago.

He seems awfully knowledgeable about the living conditions of primitive man, even though I haven’t seen research as certain, in academic literature.

And furthermore, he assumes that females are always monogamous, when in fact the time difference between the sex act, the girl showing pregnant, and the birth of the baby would certainly not have given any clues to a primitive man as to who had caused, or even why this event even had happened.

Also, modern genetics was only discovered relatively recently by Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), so that rules out any possibility of these tribesmen even contemplating a gene-pool.

Next, this leaves a number of BIG questions unanswered:

• Do we really know what people thought 50,000 years ago?
• Do all women really have the same taste in men?
• Were ancient tribes obsessed with social climbing? Research into primitive cultures usually suggests that it’s often a group of tribal elders who would have controlled the actions of the group, not one man.
• In many very poor societies, marrying off a daughter would be a good thing; the family would have one less mouth to feed, and the remaining males may be seen as more useful to support the parents in old age. Certainly, marriages have been used in more recent history to forge allegiances between families.
• If these other 23 guys aren’t going to get laid, what’s their incentive to take you out and give you the Flintstone equivalent of a concrete overcoat? Should a leader be as tyrannical as described, the answer would surely be for the 23 guys to remove him from power, and enact some other form of government.
• Why should they kill someone and thus reduce the population by 2%; therefore losing an extra pair of hands for growing crops, hunting animals, defending the tribe or worshiping the gods etc.?
• If you were killed, then surely any Genetic memory (assuming it even exists) would end with you, and therefore not be perpetuated through to modern times.
• In the unlikely event that he were to be correct, and somehow only one man had access to impregnate all the females; modern genetics tells us that inbreeding depression would result, and the tribe would suffer:
  • Elevated incidences of recessive genetic diseases
  • Reduced fertility and sperm viability
  • Increased congenital defects (Cryptorchidism, Heart defects, Cleft palates)
  • Fluctuating asymmetry (crooked faces, uneven eye placement and size etc)
  • Lower birth weight offspring
  • Higher neonatal mortality
  • Loss of immune system function

Further, if the tribal women were in control, and somehow could detect a male’s ‘superior’ genetics, and thus refuse to breed with the ‘inferior’ males, as in some type of primitive controlled breeding program. Then the genetic directional selection would highly favour those males deemed to be more attractive, with the resulting problem that very soon all the genetic variation for these traits would be used up, and all the individuals would become extremely similar. History tells us that this has never been the case.

Breeders of domestic animals found this out when they put their breeding programmes into practice – They imposed strong artificial directional selection on cattle to improve milk yield, or on chickens to improve egg production. But within a few generations all individuals were much the same and no further improvements could be made. If this were true of sexual selection among human females, then there would be no point in the females exerting any choice at all.

I think a much more likely, and much simpler suggestion would be that when he was little, his parents would tell him things such as “Don’t talk to strangers!“, “People you don’t know might do bad things to you!”. All of which is sound advice for a small child, and will certainly keep that child safe; but now that he’s grown up, it’s not as much use, and in fact has become a limiting belief that he just needs to unlearn.

Posted by Jonathan as History, Sociobiology at 11:58 PM BST

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