For those who didn't make it to the end, it's worth noting that there's a fair bit of tongue in cheek in there.
> We believe MIT deserves further investigation, and, with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study—males and females, with and without alcohol—in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting.
I feel like the paper lacks a discussion about why males are more likely to take risks.
Typically extremely reproductively successful men like Chengis Khan take enormous risks to get the power and status that leads to high reproductive success. Unfortunately we are all descended from those men.
Presumably the presence of risk-taking males is advantageous to the species as a whole. If our species was asexual each individual would have to be fairly risk averse as any individual lost is lost breeding capacity. But in a sexual species a lost male is fine and happens all the time. Just losing males is, of course, pointless but presumably the advantages brought by the successful ones outweighs any disadvantages brought by the unsuccessful ones. This seems to be true when you look at unsuccessful males who just tend to sit out on the sidelines or whither away in silence rather than actively leech on society while successful males can be great leaders, innovators, visionaries etc.
It's perhaps easier to see why risk-taking behaviour is less common in females, though. In a sexual species each female is required to carry at least two children, on average, to merely replace the current population (it's also beneficial if she survives the final birth). The loss of a single female is therefore quite significant. A population with more risk-taking females would be less successful than one with less.
The existence of gay people is a good example of something that can evolve in a population despite drastically lower chances of being passed on genetically.
I don't feel like there needs to be a discussion on 'why' they take more risks. Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species). In other species (like sea-horses) - the females actually compete for males since males are the ones that expand way more energy in raising / producing children... (i.e. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html).
I don’t think it’s fair to represent an edge case, “noteworthy for being different” type species as being just one example out of many. As far as I’m aware the behavior exhibited by sea horses is extremely rare, and I recall it being highlighted as such in, at least, The Selfish Gene. Can you think of other examples?
I would not paint it that way. For fish, it is often the case the male takes care of the eggs, and the females are free of any responsibility.
There are other behaviours in the sea, and they are in general so different to mammals that we can consider them as alien.
I would even say mammals are the edge case, just by virtue of having a fewer number of species than fish, arthropods, insects, and almost any other clad.
You are simply more used to mammals, to the point it seems the only natural behaviour.
Yes, I suppose you’re right that I am only considering “species who raise their young after birth”.
I don’t see egg laying species behavior as being very representative of the game theoretic patterns in childcare species behavior, though.
Ditching after birth vs raising the young is clearly such a massively important game theoretic dimension that it likely substantially determines the workable ranges for most other dimensions. How can we make conclusions across such separate subspaces of organism game space?
If you don’t think there needs to be a discussion then don’t engage.
In my first year at college we were all set an essay about why human females invest lots of resources preening and enhancing their appearance, while across nature females normally put almost no effort into their appearance, and males are the ones with the bright colours.
This is an enormous area of study with thousands of papers published. Sexual selection is incredibly important. Especially as modern human evolution is driven almost entirely by sexual selection.
It’s worth understanding how sexual selection works.
The same to you. If you feel like you're best contribution to tell someone to 'not engage' - then you should look at not engaging at all yourself :)
My comment tries to give the PCA to what contributes to males taking more risks than females within the human species. This isn't a hypothesis - there have been a lot of studies which have shown human males to engage in risk-related behaviors when other females are present. It's also supported by other male-dominated species as well - the males have one single 'alpha' male which females choose to mate with -- but that 'alpha' male will need to take more 'risks' and be more aggressive in order for him to be in such a position in the first place. I'm not sure what you're expecting me to also list out in a hacker news discussion, but this is the best I can do. If you feel like you have counter-arguments -- feel free to post them and I'll be happy to take a look at them and reconsider my position OR post studies which show that you're wrong. Cheers.
If you’re only thinking about it for long enough to come up with a single hypothesis, and then confidently declaring that you have the correct answer, I’d suggest maybe thinking about it for longer than a moment :)
It's not a single hypothesis. If you want me to write an essay on hacker news on all the behavioral differences between males and females - it's tough luck :) If you have counter-arguments - post them so I can refute them. Cheers.
Surely you must realize that your comments here and above are ... simply not convincing? You say "we don't need to think about it", then give your own simplified explanation (which is mostly likely not a sufficient one) and then refuse to explain further, just doubling down on "my idea is right".
I edited my comment thanks to you. If you have refutations or other arguments - feel free to write about them in LONG detail and I'll do my best to get back to you. Otherwise the explanation I provided above is the best I could do given the circumstances.
The article's main thrust is a focus on risks that have negligible gain. So in that context your argument reads, "they have more to gain from a risk that has negligible gain."
Negligible gain can still be enough to distinguish oneself. What gain do colourful feathers on birds really have except to draw attention.
Also, evolution is likely not precise enough to have evolved accurate intuitions about the fitness value of all possible risks. We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
I disagree. It's a self-contradictory point. I was being charitable to call it "negligible" considering the article also refers to the gain as "non-existent."
>"What gain do colourful feathers on birds really have except to draw attention"
When drawing attention gives you a disproportionate advantage to attracting a mate vs. attracting a predator, it's a very important (and non-neglible) gain.
>We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
I don't think this negates the point. Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution. I can say there's a distribution of individual player height in the NBA, but that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions about height having generalized value at the population level regarding the chances of making it to professional basketball.
> When drawing attention gives you a disproportionate advantage to attracting a mate vs. attracting a predator, it's a very important (and non-neglible) gain.
Humans have no natural predators, so one side of the equation is zero, and the other non-zero.
> Just because the there is a distribution in the value doesn't mean there isn't a statistically significant directionality of that distribution.
Yes, and there is directionality in risk-taking as well. Discoveries, fortunes and high-value mates all require risk taking.
Even risks that appear to have negligible or even zero fitness value, like extreme sports, have netted many people valuable sponsorships or YouTube fame and fortune.
Evolution is not precise and simply cannot capture the full nuance of a concept like "status" in human culture, therefore it has permitted a broad distribution of risk taking.
>Even risks that appear to have negligible or even zero fitness value, like extreme sports, have netted many people valuable sponsorships or YouTube fame and fortune.
You do realize you contradict yourself here, right?
You’ve essentially said “This activity that amasses stays and resources has negligible fitness value.”
That only makes sense if you think status and resources don’t impact fitness/survivability. You might be confusing inherent value with signaling value. Driving a Ferrari doesn’t give me any additional inherent fitness. But it does serve as a potential signal for status, which can confer added fitness in practice. Signals can be wrong, of course, while still giving an advantage.
> You do realize you contradict yourself here, right?
I'm pointing out your contradiction, because extreme sports are exactly the same kind of behaviour which is the subject of this article, and that you classified as negligible or zero value before it exploded in popularity.
The point being that a wide latitude of risk seeking behaviour allows people to find new and unexpected success modes, even if they at first appear to convey little benefit and incur considerable risk.
So your point is that the v types of behavior displayed by Darwin Awards have the potential to be widely remunerated by society one day? So, things like pointing a gun at your head and pulling the trigger to prove that it’s loaded? I guess I’m not quite as cynical about society and classify those as not just differences in degree, but also differences in type.
Except that a lot of risky male behavior doesn't impress most women. Maybe it impresses other risky-behaving men though, and the respect those risky-behaving men show the risk taker translates into more desirability from women.
It may not impress women, but there are lots of studies which show that men expand a lot more energy in engaging risk-related behavior when other females are around. Whether this is biologically adaptable or not may be a question which needs to be probed further, but risk-related behavior and competition have been closely linked in humans...
I think it's far more likely that thousands of years of human society have encouraged and rewarded risk-taking behavior in men, and discouraged and punished it in women.
Remember, in any perspective on the differences of sexes, there's no control; no human being has ever been raised outside of human society and very few have ever been raised outside of male-dominated societies.
Our closest relatives Chimpanzees are patriarchal. Humans are patriarchal. It’s probably genetic.
One female can have about 10 babies. Regardless of how powerful she is. One male can father hundreds. The genetic rewards are there for males only. That’s why it’s only males that take crazy risks to get access to hundreds of women.
Our closest relatives Chimpanzees are not particularly close relatives. Most human societies tend to be patriarchal, but some have not been.
And who tends to hold positions of power isn't necessarily 1:1 with who tends to take the most risks, in fact, most of our leaders are usually prone to putting themselves in less danger than those they govern.
I’m curious why you bring up the rare cases of matriarchal societies as a way to disprove the general thrust of the argument. The existence of a few matriarchal societies doesn’t disprove my argument that biology makes us patriarchal.
If I said Dutch people are taller than Spanish people you wouldn’t start talking about your one tall Spanish friend as a way of disproving my argument.
Something is making you clutch at straws to try to disprove the argument that biology causes patriarchy.
On the second point. Leaders take risks to get into the leadership position. That’s why the lower ranks are taking huge risks.
Historically they have always been at risk of losing their position. Often that means death or other severe personal cost. Leadership among primates is very risky.
In hominids leadership is linked with male mating success.
In most of the other mammals leadership is orthogonal to mating success. For example a pride of lions is a matriarchy. The lionesses are in charge. However there is only one mature male in the pride he mates with all of the lionesses.
Other males will take extraordinary risks to kill that male and take his pride.
Because we have easily observed societal norms that have to account for some percentage of the difference, without measuring differences absent those norms we have no conceivable way to know that hereditary traits contribute to any percentage of the differences.
Because many historical cases of what were thought to be fundamental differences between the genders turned out to be strictly socially informed. I think it's more likely that the current suite of stereotypes is also incorrect than that we just happened to finally get it right.
I disagree that stereotypes really vary over time or space as it seems like you're implying. Many of the gender stereotypes today are more or less the same as they were 2000 years ago, either here or on the other side of the world.
Are you sure? A trivial search on Google scholar suggests scientists have identified specific genes that may be responsible for risky behavior. (A very cursory look seems to implicate genes that alter dopamine pathways, which, to a layperson, would make sense since dopamine is heavily involved with motivation.)
No. But from a quick search, it sounds like there are ~~100 different genes believed to be involved in risk tolerance. Vs. the extremely simple A/B/O inheritance of blood types.
I think you're moving the goalposts here. The original claim was that high-risk behavior isn't reliably inherited. You gave blood type as an example of an inheritable factor, but there are many other inheritable factors beyond blood type. The fact that we can identify not just inheritable factors but specific genes related to risky behavior clearly undermines your point.
Whether or not the risky behavior is due to single alleles or complex interactions between multiple genes is a different argument than whether risky behavior is inheritable.
My theory is that because of the sperm/egg relationship, survival of men is less critical to the survival of the species, so men are programmed to do more risky things, and the ones that survive are more fit.
Men can father more babies than women. Which means that a male who sacrifices himself for the community indirect ensures his siblings survive, via brothers and sisters (cousins...) while a female who sacrifices herself ensures less children for the community - not a big deal now, when when infant mortality was high all women needed to be pregnant or nursing a baby from the teens until menopause or the population would shrink enough to kill the village off.
Men can father babies with many women, which means women can select the best male. A man who does something stupid and survives often gets the attention of the women and thus is allowed to pass his genes on. (woman can have more than one partner for their babies, but only one at a time will get her pregnant). Some stupid things are useful for the village as well - if you destroy a different village that is land you can then take for your own village, if you succeed in killing the lion you ensure that lion won't attack the village. Thus for a women encouraging men to try stupid things is a good reproductive strategy by rewarding them with babies is a smart move (as a bonus the man who succeeds may have better genetics that caused the success)
There are probably more. And this deserve real study as opposed to people like me on a forum making logical things up. I'm not sure how to do such a study though.
If you die but protect your brothers offspring that makes your bother more fit. You share a lot of DNA with your brother so even though you (presumably) don't have kids, your death ensured your DNA survived.
Your genetic influence will probably dilute over the generations and in response to environmental and cultural factors. Also, with randomness at play it may not make much of a difference after all. Properly assessing this empirically seems like a statistical nightmare.
Do Darwin Awards look at all of humanity or only a subset of it? Maybe there is a cultural component to behavior. Maybe there are cultures which don't treat men as idiots. How can anyone assert that men are genetically stupid without controlling for culture?
Yes, there are memes about clueless men, but there are also memes about clueless women - in fact, we have an entire genre of "blonde jokes" about them - which, note, are 99% about blonde women, not blonde men. The fact that these memes exist doesn't mean that society treats men(or women) as clueless generally.
You can see it here on this discussion, or even in general on HN. It is taken as a given that men are hard wired to optimize for getting laid and all their behaviors follow from that. It's like culture is irrelevant and humans are resigned to act out their genetics.
Haha...I'm surprised to find this on HN. Just to comment on a note made in this study: "While MIT provides a parsimonious explanation of differences in idiotic behavior and may underlie sex differences in other risk seeking behaviors, it is puzzling that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks—simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for “bragging rights.” Northcutt invokes a group selectionist, “survival of the species” argument, with individuals selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool."
The reason this happens is due to risk-taking behavior. Males take way more risks than females do - and you can find other studies which confirm this (i.e. for example this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470490800600...). When I read the Northcutt explanation for this I laughed -- it makes absolutely 0 sense and I can't believe that someone expanded energy in proposing this. It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.
There was at least one hypothesis floating around a while ago that males take more risks because they’re expendable to society, but females are not. If a society is decimated by a famine, disease, war, etc, it can be repopulated with just a few males, but requires many females. Thus males evolved to be more risk-taking and females more risk-averse.
At an individual level, the incentive may be social esteem/bragging rights, or it may be based on a calculation of greater risk = greater reward = more resources = more mating options, etc. It’s not that males are “selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool”, but that there’s some incentive and/or lack of disincentive to be more risk-taking.
Not necessarily .. We worship fearless idiots who jump in wingsuits into rocks. Death cult lifestyle defiantly is not selected for via social hierarchy.
Of course it isn't true literally every single time, but it's certainly true on average. There is a strong correlation between a man being respected by many other men, e.g. high status among his peers, and that man being a stable reliable provider.
If their is a famine, who gets cut off from the communal source of food first? The man all the other men like, or the man none of the other men respect? If the company is shedding dead weight who is more likely to get laid off? Who gets the best reviews from their colleagues and is most eligible for promotion? In all cases, the man most respected by other men has an advantage. Such men are desired by an larger than average portion of women. This in turn creates a reinforcing dynamic where women see a man being desired by women and in turn desire him for themselves more. This in turn causes even more men to respect him.
Tldr it's good to be respected. And because respect begets more respect, it doesn't even necessarily matter how the respect was initially seeded. Having others witness you being respected is at least as important as doing something actually worthy of respect.
In a famine.. the man who believes in a ordered hierarchical society with laws are worthless. Family clans and crooks is what survived. Example: Africa, or the collapse of the ussr
Who's talking about laws? I am talking about reputations. Men who lack the respect of others get kicked out of their family klans, among other things. And while a few crooks may rise to the top (USSR), most get beaten to death by angry mobs.
> There was at least one hypothesis floating around a while ago that males take more risks because they’re expendable to society, but females are not.
That's not the hypothesis the way I heard it - men are more expendable to society, but it's really a stretch to conclude that because men are more expendable, they make decisions with this knowledge in mind.
I mean, really - there's no logic linking the two.
The logic may work via negation or inversion. Eg there is individual disincentive for both women and men to engage in high-risk behavior. But societies still needed a class of people to go out and hunt game, defend society from lions or opposing armies, or other higher-risk ventures, despite the individual disincentive to do so.
Women are not expendable and thus society did not incentivize them to do these high-risk things. But men are, so societies created various social incentives to facilitate high-risk endeavors - honor, social esteem, medals, hierarchical rank, wealth, fame, etc. Many died doing so, but the ones that succeeded and survived reaped these various rewards and got to mate, producing heirs with similar risk-taking characteristics and capabilities from both nature and nurture.
> It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.
It is, but note that someone suggested the very same thing below.
Anyone who has ever been out their front door knows why men take more risks - it's because riskier behaviour gets them laid more often, with more different women.
Being the top-dog amongst your male peers gets you more women. To get to the top-dog spot you need to take a ton of risks (challenging existing leaders, creating your own subgroup, learning new skills, etc).
If only more academic papers were written so clearly and engagingly:
> According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.
> there can be little doubt that Darwin Award winners seem to make little or no real assessment of the risk or attempt at risk management. They just do it anyway. In some cases, the intelligence of the award winner may be questioned. For example, the office workers watching a construction worker demolishing a car park in the adjacent lot must have wondered about the man’s intelligence. After two days of office speculation—how does he plan to remove the final support to crash the car park down safely?—they discovered, on the third day, that he didn’t have a plan. The concrete platform collapsed, crushing him to death and flattening his mini-excavator.
> We believe MIT deserves further investigation, and, with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study—males and females, with and without alcohol—in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting.