The Most Underappreciated Fact

 	 About Men

 	Here’s a riddle for you: What percentage of our ancestors were men?
 	It’s not a trick question, and the answer isn’t 50%. True, perhaps half of all the humans who were ever born were male, but that’s not the question.
 	We’re not asking about everyone who ever lived. We’re asking about everyone who lived and who also has a descendant alive in the world today.
 	While you ponder that, let’s consider life among the herds of wild horses. Males and females are born at about the same rate, and as youngsters their lives are similar, but when they reach adulthood their paths diverge. The mating season is in the summer, and when the females are old enough, they are soon busy with the reproductive process. The alpha male horse in each herd—the most powerful adult male who has risen to the top of the hierarchy—will be checking them out and, if they are fertile, will be having sex with them. They become pregnant and create offspring.
 	Each summer thereafter, the mare’s story is about the same. She stays in the herd with the others as the alpha male works his way through them.
 	When it’s her turn, she submits to intercourse. (It doesn’t seem very gentle or romantic by human standards, but probably human standards aren’t really relevant here.) Over the years, she’ll have a fair number of offspring, mostly sired by different stallions, depending on which male has won the coveted top spot that year.
 	Now consider the life of the male horse. As he approaches adulthood, he definitely does not find older females seeking him out to initiate sex with him. He starts to desire sex with the females, old or young or inbetween, but he quickly learns that sex is forbidden to him. The females belong to the alpha male, and if he starts to flirt, he risks being beaten up rather severely by the alpha male.
 	Assuming there is enough food, the young male then has plenty of
 	energy but cannot put it into sex. Instead, he puts it into playing rough, competitive games with the other young males. Over time, it becomes clear which of them are the strongest and fiercest competitors.
 	Every male is descended from mostly alpha males. Occasionally a lesser male can manage to copulate and make a baby, but these are exceptions, and the line of ancestors consists mainly of the alphas. This is important to keep in mind: Every horse is descended from those that fought their way to the top of the male hierarchy. The competitive drive that propelled alpha males to the top is passed on to the next generation. As the blood of dominance heats in his veins, the young horse begins to hanker to become the dominant male himself. After he has bested his peers and playmates, at some point he will challenge the alpha male to a nasty fi ght. If he loses and survives, he may settle into a minor role on the periphery of the herd.
 	If he wins, he takes over and becomes the alpha male.
 	Most male horses will never be the alpha male. They may never have sex at all, let alone reproduce. True, there is a bit of surreptitious hanky-panky, such as if a female consents to have a go with him when they are out of sight of the alpha male. But most females would rather have the alpha male as a mate: After all, her own offspring will be stronger and faster if its father was the strongest and fastest one rather than an also-ran. So consensual sex is fairly uncommon for these also-ran males. As for nonconsensual sex—what humans call rape—well, there may be a bit of that once in a while. In general, though, the fate of most males is to live in nearly total celibacy and to be a biological dead end.
 	And what about the strong and lucky one that becomes the alpha male?
 	For that summer, he is the king, and he can have all the sex he wants.
 	It’s not all fun and games, however. He has to fight to stay on top, and so as long as he wears the figurative crown he has to be ready, almost at a moment’s notice, to have strenuous and dangerous battles with challengers, at a time and place of their choosing, and over time these battles will wear his body down.
 	Moreover, he knows the other males don’t stop wanting sex just because he defeated them once. Maintaining his harem requires constant vigilance.

 	He has to be ready to run the other males off and make sure the females stay together where he can watch them. He hardly sleeps that summer. He eats prodigiously to keep up his energy for the huge demands of sex, combat, and guarding.
 	By the end of his summer of love (to put it politely), he may be physically exhausted, perhaps so severely he will never recover. If he is exceptionally strong, and if there are not too many challengers, he may be able to repeat as alpha male next year and even in rare cases manage a third summer. But that will be all. The young challengers keep coming, and eventually one of them will take his place. After this, he is reduced to a humble, celibate life among the loser males. He had his brief season of glory, and it is over.

 	Counting Ancestors

 	Let’s return now to the question of what percentage of our ancestors were women. Yes, each baby has one mother and one father, so each baby’s parents were 50% male. But some of those parents had multiple children, and not necessarily always with the same partner. Every baby’s parents are 50% male, but you can’t extrapolate from that to conclude that today’s human population has an ancestry that is 50% male.
 	The correct answer has recently begun to emerge from DNA studies, notably those by Jason Wilder and his colleagues. They concluded that among the ancestors of today’s human population, women outnumbered men about two to one.
 	Two to one!
 	In percentage terms, then, humanity’s ancestors were about 67%
 	female and 33% male.
 	To illustrate how this could be possible, imagine a desert island at the start of time with just four people: Jack, Jim, Sally, and Sonya. Thus the population is 50% female. Let’s assume Jack is rich and handsome, while Jim is poor and unattractive, so Jack marries both Sally and Sonya. Thus, Jack and Sally’s baby, Doug, has ancestors who are 50% female (i.e., Jack and Sally). The same can be said for Jack and Sonya’s baby, Lucy. But if you take Doug and Lucy together, their combined ancestors are 67% female (because their total ancestors are Jack, Sally, and Sonya).
 	Most people are surprised to hear that humankind today had twice as many female ancestors as male ones, because they thought it would be ?
 	closer to 50:50. When experts hear about this, they are surprised too, but often for the opposite reason: They thought the imbalance would be even more severe. That is, they thought it would be maybe 75% to 85% female.
 	Probably it was more severe through much of history, and especially prehistory. In many animal species, close to 90% of the females but only 20% of the males reproduce. The way the human population has ballooned in recent centuries means that most people who ever lived are either alive today or were alive recently, and in modern times the rule of monogamy has spread over large parts of the globe. In past eras, when polygamy (one husband, multiple wives) was the norm, the reproductive imbalance would have been even more severe. Hence whatever conclusions we draw about the differences between men and women based on the two-to-one ancestor difference are probably understatements.  If we had done the research even just a few centuries ago, the ratio might have been three female ancestors to every male one, or four to one.
 	What does it mean that we are descended from twice as many women
 	as men? It can be explained like this. Of all the people who ever reached adulthood, maybe 80% of the women but only 40% of the men reproduced. Or perhaps the numbers were 60% versus 30%. But one way or another, a woman’s odds of having a line of descendants down to the present were double those of a man.
 	Also, crucially, the majority outcome is different—the most common outcome of normal life. Most women who ever lived to adulthood probably had at least one baby and in fact have a descendant alive today. Most men did not.  Most men who ever lived, like all the wild horses that did not ascend to the alpha male’s top spot, left behind no genetic traces of themselves.
 	That’s a stunning difference. Of all humans ever born, most women became mothers, but most men did not become fathers. You wouldn’t realize this by walking through an American suburb today with its tidy couples. But it is an important fact. I consider it the single most underappreciated fact about the differences between men and women.
 	In Chapter 3 I mentioned that the crucial differences between men and women are more likely to be found in terms of what they want (motivation) than in their abilities. The dramatically greater proportion of women among our ancestors provides a vital basis for understanding some of these motivational differences. To appreciate these, it is necessary to consider exactly how evolution works.

 	How Nature Measures Success

 	Darwin’s theory of evolution has long dominated the study of biology, but lately it has come to exert a powerful influence on psychology as well.
 	Psychologists have had to accept the fact that many behavioral tendencies are hard-wired, and that usually means they have been stamped in by the evolutionary processes.
 	To be sure, debates rage in many areas as to how much of behavior is a direct result of innate tendencies versus how much depends on what your mother made you do, what you copied from your peers, what you saw on Oprah, and other aspects of socialization and learning, as opposed to being prompted by your genes. It is increasingly fashionable to explore how innate and environmental factors work together, which, after all, is the essence of this book’s approach to understanding how culture exploits men.
 	But if evolutionary theory is right about anything, it is right about reproduction. Making babies is at the core of it. Hence, when we talk about what produced success at making babies, we are likely to be on grounds where nature outweighs nurture.
 	The term “survival of the fittest” is often erroneously repeated as a one-line summary of Darwin’s theory. The phrase was actually coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. More important, though, it has now become regarded as misleading. Survival has come to be regarded as secondary by the recent generations of evolutionary theorists. Reproduction is the key.
 	It’s all about reproduction. The bottom line in natural selection, which drives evolution, is reproducing., Actually, even that isn’t even quite precisely right. Oak trees produce thousands of acorns every year, but not all of them become trees, and many that start growing don’t survive to make more acorns and more trees.
 	The real bottom line is making new babies who will succeed in making more babies. If you do that, you are a success in evolutionary terms at passing along your genes, regardless of how long you live.
 	Followed to its extreme, we can look at the world population of humankind today as the result of evolution. Many people have walked the Earth in the past couple hundred thousand years. Some of them passed along their genes, which continue to be reproduced in today’s population.
 	Others were dead ends. Either they didn’t have children, or their children died before reproducing, or their grandchildren did.
 	Looking back across the entire history of the human race, and taking nature’s criterion of success as passing on your life to others, we can say that most of the men were failures. Most of the women were successes.
 	Being male goes with biological failure in a way that being female doesn’t.

 	Facing Different Odds

 	The difference in reproductive success is crucially important. It provides a powerful basis for understanding why men and women act differently.
 	Remember, if evolutionary theory is right about anything, it’s right about reproduction. That’s the core of the theory. Nature will most favor traits that lead to success at reproducing. But for thousands of years, men and women have faced vastly different odds and problems in reproducing.
 	The psychology of men and women, at least as set up by evolution, thus starts from very different prospects. Nature made life to seek to create more life. On this basic task, women faced good odds of success, whereas men were born to face looming failure.
 	We are descended, obviously, only from the women and men who succeeded, that is, the ones who passed on their genes. But men and women had to take different routes to success. It would be wrong to say it was easy for women, because childbirth and nursing placed heavy demands and took their toll. Nonetheless, throughout human history, women have seen the odds in their favor, while men have seen the odds against them.
 	Nature molded the psyches of men and women accordingly.
 	That’s a powerful basis for saying that men and women are built to want different things, in different ways.
 	The men and women who lived before us may not have thought about it in those terms of success and failure, but nature was choosing among them by whether they succeeded, and today’s humankind is descended from the men and women who succeeded at passing on their genes. Today’s humanity therefore has the traits that went with success at reproducing.
 	These traits would be different by gender.
 	For a woman, the path to success seems to have been fairly straight.
 	There was little reason to take chances or strike out on her own. There was no reason to try to separate herself from what everyone else was doing. At most, the ancestral woman wanted to make herself more desirable so 	she could choose a high-quality partner. Her concern, seen from the pitiless perspective of nature, would be about what her children will be like and how well they will be cared for. It wasn’t about whether she would have children at all. The odds were generally good that she would have some.
 	Thus, most women who ever lived faced relatively favorable odds, and their psyches were correspondingly adapted to these favorable circumstances. Play it safe, be like everyone else, and there would be sufficient chances to become pregnant. She just had to choose a good offer, such as a man who could and would provide for her and the children.
 	Life has handed you a good thing; don’t blow it. That’s nature’s message to women.
 	Therefore, crucially, there was no need for nature to instill particular traits in a woman to increase her chances of having a baby. Nature didn’t have much need or opportunity to select among women in favor of traits that promoted having babies, because most women had babies. No extra drive, no special motivation, was needed.
 	In contrast, the average man was destined for reproductive oblivion.
 	The option of playing it safe and doing like everyone else would have been a foolish one. Most of the men would fail to reproduce, and if you failed to surpass them, you would fail too.
 	That’s why we are descended from playing-it-safe women and risk-taking men. Later in the book we shall have occasion to consider questions like, why was it so rare for fi fty women to band together to build a ship and sail off into unknown seas to explore? The fact that men instead of women did this is a cause of gender differences in wealth, power, and other things, as we shall see. But remember the most underappreciated fact. From the perspective of nature and evolution, reproduction is the bottom line.
 	Women who sailed off into unknown parts were probably less likely than others to pass on their genes. It would be foolish for women to take such chances. They might drown or be eaten by cannibals or succumb to strange new diseases. Instead, stay home and act like the rest of the women, and you will get to have your babies.
 	But for men the calculus was different. For the man to stay at home and play it safe was not playing it safe, because the average man was not destined to reproduce. Yes, many men who sailed off to explore unknown seas ended up drowning, or being eaten by cannibals, or dying from disease, and they lost their gamble. But gambling was still the best strategy perhaps, because staying at home for them also meant losing. Some men did come back from their travels rich enough to improve their chances of getting a wife or two and supporting a pack of youngsters.
 	You can argue, philosophically, which life was preferable: to stay at home, safe and reasonably comfortable, go through life, not reproduce, and die peacefully, versus go out into the world and risk much and suffer, yet, as one of the lucky ones, come home rich, take a wife or two, and have sons and daughters. But which life is preferable is not the point. People today are descended from the men who did take the gamble (and who won). The psychology of men who live today, to the extent it has any genetic or biological basis, leans toward the highly ambitious man.
 	To put it another way, risk-taking for women meant giving up a relatively sure thing for an uncertain chance. That is foolish. Risk-taking for men meant giving up a sure loss, exchanging definite failure for possible failure. Viewed in terms of the biological criterion of reproduction, it made sense for men to take risks and for women to avoid risks.
 	Crucially, today’s men are descended disproportionately from those enterprising winners! The ones who took it easy and stayed home generally did not pass on their genes, and so today’s male population has no trace of them.
 	Before we start feeling sorry for men, let’s look at another implication of the most underappreciated fact, which underscores the conclusion that men were bred to risk more than women.
 	Losing is one side of gambling. The other is winning. There are differences between men and women in terms of what makes winners. Yes, men have less to lose by taking chances in life, but they also have more to gain.
 	(Remember, we are speaking of winning and losing by nature’s measure, namely creating offspring.)
 	After all, every baby ever born had a mother and a father, at least in the biological sense. If plenty of men had no babies, then plenty of other men had high numbers of babies, indeed more than the average woman. The underappreciated fact works both ways. If a man’s odds of having any children were only half those of the average woman, that also means that our forefathers averaged twice as many children as our foremothers.
 	As usual, men go to extremes. In terms of number of children, most women have at least one, and relatively few women have more than, say, a dozen. (Indeed, if you only count the children who survive to bear grandchildren, probably few women in prehistory and ancient history had more than half a dozen.)
 	In contrast, there are plenty of men at the extremes. As we have seen, many men have no children. Others have far more than the most prolific women do.
 	Genghis Khan was one of the greatest conquerors in world history.
 	He built an army that subdued much of the known world. He is also said to have had hundreds of children, probably well over a thousand. Great risks and exertions went into his conquests, and indeed at several points in his life it looked as if he would die young and have no children whatsoever.
 	But he persevered and passed on his genes very effectively.
 	We can debate why no women have achieved what Genghis Khan did, why none have even come close. Perhaps our Imaginary Feminist will grumble that there was some kind of “glass ceiling” holding nomadic Mongol women back. But the evolutionary theorists have a more plausible answer: There is no reason for a woman to take such risks and sacrifices.
 	Even if a woman did conquer the known world, she could still have only maybe half a dozen babies. (If she spent as much time on horseback and in battle as Genghis Khan, it would have been quite difficult to make time for even half a dozen pregnancies!) There was no payoff for trying for more.
 	It is simply impossible for a woman to have a hundred babies. It is possible for a man, and some men have done it.
 	Thus, the most underappreciated fact—that we are descended from twice as many women as men—means two things. Men have been the big
 	losers AND big winners, in ways that women generally were not. To the extent that the human mind and its pack of wants and needs was shaped by evolution based on reproduction, men are less likely to play it safe. Nature pushed men to play big games for big stakes.

 	The Impulse to Do Better

 	Picture two boys bicycling down the same deserted lane, or skiing down the same slope, or swimming next to each other in the same pool. Just by chance, they end up next to each other, going in the same direction at about the same speed. What happens? Each one quickens his pace a little.
 	Both of them wonder whether the other is seeing this as competition, for in the past, sometimes when someone caught up to you, he yelled something as he passed you, signifying that he thought he had triumphed over you. So you were alert to it.
 	Two girls, not so much, I think.
 	During the writing of this book, I spent a few weeks at an obscure resort in Aruba, where I have gone for many years. When I became a windsurfer, I learned that Aruba has among the most reliable winds in the Western Hemisphere. I spent three weeks there, mostly writing my books and papers, but taking an intense two- to three-hour break every afternoon to head out on the water for some high-speed, delicately balanced, physically exhausting but exhilarating sailing.
 	Mostly people just go back and forth on the water. Every so often, however, one finds oneself next to another windsurfer who is going in the same direction (directions are constrained by the wind) and at about the same speed. This happened to me several times. Invariably, both I and the other guy (it was never a woman) would notice each other and start to tighten up our sailing, engaging in an impromptu race. We would turn at some spot toward the end of the general area, often waiting for the other to turn also, and then race back the other way. The other fellows were usually more skilled sailors than I was, at least in the sense that they had mastered the fancy turns that I never learned. Still, for just going straight ahead, you don’t need turns, and I do fairly well when I get going.
 	It felt juvenile, and it was. The challenge brought out the boy in us, even though all of us were men over forty and in some cases, we were both closer to sixty. There was a difference. When I was young, I would have mainly wanted to surge ahead and win, but in adulthood I enjoyed it most if we were fairly evenly matched. The fun was in trying to coax every ounce of speed out of your board and sail, and in feeling the thrill of hurtling across the water with only nature’s power and your own strength and skill, with another surfer doing the same a few yards away. The wind has gusts and lulls, there are waves and other things to cope with, yet you try to maintain a speed comparable to a fast bicycle on land.
 	Later on, we stopped to chat good-naturedly about the unofficial racing, about who had had the advantage under which circumstances and so forth.
 	We had indeed both known we were racing against each other.
 	That evening, back at the resort, I asked the women windsurfers
 	whether they did impromptu racing. They said no. They thought it was
 	some kind of silly male competitiveness thing. They just wanted to enjoy the feeling of movement.
 	I suspect they are typical. Can you imagine two fifty-year-old women out on the water, noticing each other, and automatically trying to speed up, to outdo each other? Can you imagine that as one spots the other, she pulls in harder on the sail, yanks the mast back, leans out farther backwards over the water, straining her body harder in the attempt to make her board fl y over the water faster than the other woman?
 	Let us suspend value judgments for a moment. This impulse to compete, to try to best the other at some physical task, seems to come more naturally to the male than to the female of the species. Assuming both men and women have sound reasons for feeling the ways they do, why might that difference exist?
 	These days, the natural impulse to want to outdo one’s rivals is usually described as another sign of why men are inferior, this silly automatic competitiveness about little things, like which boy can skip a fl at stone over the water with the most skips.
 	But that is what it means to be male. It has its roots in the most underappreciated fact. Most men who ever lived have been genetically erased from the human population. The men who didn’t care about outdoing other men, who were content to take it easy and go along easily and let others push ahead (the way many women are content)—those guys did not reproduce. The men who pushed ahead were more likely to reproduce, and today’s men are descended from them. To leave offspring, you had to outdo other men.
 	Women did not face those long odds. To the extent that women competed with each other, they competed to get a better versus less desirable mate. And they did this not by besting other women at physical tasks, but by being more beautiful and sweet and lovable than the others.
 	The relentless competitive urge is one difference we notice about the sexes, and I certainly concur with the general impression that the relentless male competitiveness can be downright annoying. Women seek to make friends and make others feel good and get along. All that is much nicer than trying to outdo each other on every little task that comes along.
 	But men are descended from men who did manage to outperform other 	men. The sad fact, as we have seen, is that the nice guys often did not pass on their genes. The men who competed ruthlessly managed to get to the top of the hierarchy, where they could have their pick of the females (and maybe have several). They produced sons (and daughters). The nice guys who were pleasant and easygoing and who didn’t care so much about outdoing the other men achieved less, attracted fewer females, and left behind fewer descendants.
 	We saw in the first chapter that pretty much everybody likes women more than men. My theory is that women really are more lovable than men.
 	Men can be lovable too. After all, most men do persuade women to love them. It’s just they don’t always want to be lovable. For women, being liked and loved is a top priority most of the time. Men would like to be liked and loved, but they have other goals too, and sometimes those other goals take priority. Men want to fight their way to the top.
 	Don’t get me wrong. Women would like to be at the top of the hierarchy also. It’s just that when there is a choice between being nice and lovable as opposed to battling one’s way to the top, women are more likely to choose being nice and lovable, whereas more men would opt for fighting to the top.
 	All of this, I suggest, is rooted in our evolutionary history, especially the most underappreciated fact. Women had babies whether they fought their way to the top or not. Being lovable is what enabled women to have better quality babies. In contrast, men had more babies and better quality ones if they fought their way to the top. Being lovable may have mattered for men too, but not as much.

 	Striving for Greatness

 	Humans are not wild horses, but then again they are not completely different either. The female horses all had their babies, and the more nurturing and loving they were, the better their babies flourished. For the male horses, being loving and nurturing led nowhere. Being rough, aggressive, and ambitious mattered. The male horses that had those traits, along with physical prowess, were the only ones who sired offspring.
 	The next generation inherited the traits that made for reproductive success. For the females, being attractive, healthy, and, yes, loving and lovable were the traits that were passed along to the offspring. For the males, the vital traits were strength, aggressiveness, and ambition.

	Earlier we mentioned Genghis Khan. By some estimates, the majority of babies born in central Asia today have in their veins some of the blood of this one remarkable man. Imagine that: the majority of those millions of people are descended from one individual. No woman of his era could possibly have achieved that.1 But a man could do it, if he fathered enough children who had a sufficiently good start in life to reach the point of having their own children.
 	For a man to achieve that much of a biological impact on a large population many centuries after his life, what traits did he require? He had to be immensely ambitious, talented, and successful. He had to be willing to take tremendous risks and undergo severe hardships while pursuing them.
 	Also, obviously, he had to like having sex with many different women.
 	Had he been content with monogamy, his offspring would have numbered no more than his wife’s. To produce a giant brood, he needed to copulate with hundreds of women. And to have the opportunity to do that, he had to be immensely successful in social, political, and economic terms. Such success, in turn, required considerable talents and powerful motivations.
 	(And no small measure of luck. But there is no gene for luck.)
 	What, then, do today’s baby boys in central Asia get from their genetic link to Khan? Perhaps they inherit some talent and ability. But as I have said, the ability differences between men and women are small.
 	Instead, let me emphasize that what they inherit from their world-beating ancestor is a pattern of motivation. Genghis Khan strove for greatness. Even after he had achieved enough wealth and power to live comfortably, he continued to pursue conquests. He led his armies on further marches. They roved out of Asia into Europe and the Middle East.
 	The historical time of his life coincided with the Crusades. The European Christians had battled the Arab Muslim forces of the Middle East to an approximate standstill, where the capabilities of the two sides were fairly evenly matched, producing a delicate peace. The Mongols rollicked 	through this and so far outclassed both sides that neither could begin to compete with them. At least not by her own efforts. I do realize that everyone descended from Genghis Khan is also descended from his mother. Exploring the implications of this peculiar loophole will lead to considerations that are even more politically incorrect than the rest of this discussion.

  	Being nominally Christian, the Mongols sized up the opportunities and made the Pope an offer that they would conquer and subdue the entire Holy Land—something Christians had tried and failed to do for generations—and turn it over to the Roman Christians to administer, provided they acknowledge Mongol supremacy and pay a nominal tribute.
 	The Pope’s men debated the offer but could not accept Mongol Christianity because it deviated in various minor ways from their own current theological opinions. They also did not quite want to admit that the Mongols were a superior power. So they refused.
 	The Mongols sent a raiding party into Georgia, south of Russia, just to explore what was up there. The Georgians responded by mobilizing their entire nation’s power, their greatest knights and warriors, led by their king, all of whom came out to defend their nation’s sacred honor and faith and home turf against these barbarian raiders. The Georgian nation’s finest knights were obliterated in a single battle. Genghis Khan wasn’t even there, although his troops fought the way he had taught them. His military tactics so far surpassed that of the Westerners that a raiding party with no particular objectives could easily dominate the best that the Europeans could produce.
 	My point with all of this is that natural selection has imbued human males with one motivation that is stronger in them than in the females of the species. Striving for greatness is one way to describe it. Perhaps that is one small but important part of what today’s central Asian boy babies inherit from Genghis Khan and many others like him.
 	In each man, in some small way, there is has a hankering to be great.
 	When you are young and formulating your life’s ambitions, you perhaps dream of exceptional greatness. As a boy you may seek to outdo others at little games and races. In adulthood, a man seeks to find something he can do better than the others who are nearby. He dreams, perhaps, of outdoing them all, of scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl or of winning grand awards or of producing an invention or founding an organization that earns him millions of dollars. He may settle for circumscribed greatness, such as finding something he can do better than his colleagues at work.
 	Some day, he thinks, there will be applause for him. People will speak of him with respect and appreciation. They will recognize that he attained something unusual, extraordinary, remarkable, and they will look up to him. If reproduction drives the unconscious hankerings, then perhaps at some level he imagines that when he reaches his pinnacle of greatness, women will flock to him and smile and take him to bed. For his ancestors, that was the difference between fathering a bumper crop of babies versus ending life as a mostly celibate dead end. For today’s man, the link to reproduction has been severed. Monogamy and other factors ensure that less successful men can have children, while even the most successful men, because of the monogamy laws, may have only one or two. Perhaps ironically, or as a spiteful victory of culture over nature, today’s downtrodden, unproductive, and feckless men often produce more children than sophisticated, wealthy, well-educated, successful men.
 	Of course, individual men don’t regard making babies as their overriding goal, even if evolution has molded them to do things that happen to produce more children. Biology has not made men want children as much as they want sex. Biology managed to get men to participate in reproducing the species by making them desire sex, regardless of babies. Acting on that inclination, men have invented ways of having sex without making babies (another victory of culture over nature!). Successful men do not necessarily want to have a hundred babies, but they often do want to have sex with a hundred women. And the culture they have created cooperates.
 	Today’s highly successful men have multiple sex partners (perhaps not a hundred, though some do), but often they carefully avoid having a bumper crop of babies. Indeed, the norms and laws that promote monogamy mean that successful men must conceal their sexual dalliances, and toward that end preventing pregnancy is vital.
 	So natural selection and the tough reproductive odds have ensured that modern men are descended, not necessarily from men who wanted to have dozens of babies, but from men who wanted to achieve greatness and rise above other men. The men who lacked the impulse to seek greatness did not pass on their genes very successfully. As a result, the passion to seek greatness flows in the blood of today’s men.
 	Women reproduced regardless of whether they strove for greatness.
 	The women who did not strive for greatness had just as many babies as those who did. If anything, striving for greatness has often demanded (and still demands) a dedication to work and career that is difficult to reconcile with having a large brood of children. Hence, that passion for greatness may not be as deeply ingrained in the psychology of today’s women.
 	The motivational difference in terms of striving for greatness is the main point of this chapter. The final sections develop various implications of it.

 	Traded-off Traits

 	Many different motivations can be understood on the basis of the most underappreciated fact. Risk taking has already been mentioned. Men have less to lose and more to gain, and so nature favored risk-taking men more than women. The riskier the career, the greater the preponderance of males. You see relatively few women going into high-risk careers such as politics, racing cars, professional gambling, and investment banking. It is quite difficult to think of a high-risk career that attracts substantially more women than men.
 	Creativity is another approach. Men need to find ways to stand out.
 	Following along the standard path may lead to biological failure, and we are descended from more of the men who sought a new angle, a different approach, a novel strategy.
 	In the last chapter, we pondered the difference in creativity. Men and women seem to have equal creative abilities and creative potential, at least when they are tested. Yet somehow, throughout history and all over the world, men seem much more passionately driven to create than women are. My best guess is that this reflects the result of the most underappreciated fact. Something deep inside a man, the product of centuries of evolution, nudges him along to try to create something new and different—and not only to create it, but to use that creation to make his mark in the broader society, to set him apart from and possibly above other men. After all, he is mainly descended from the men who did succeed in rising above others. The men who, like women, may have had creative ability but did not feel any deep passionate urge to make something different were less likely to pass on their genes. Actually being creative, as in producing something new and remarkable and wonderful, enabled the men to gain respect and status and to attract the interest of women, and so being creative improved their success at reproducing.
 	Competition and ambition are also important, as is aggression in the broader sense of being aggressive in pursuit of goals. Women may compete for the best mates, but they are not really competing against each other as to whether they will be able to have any babies at all. Every man faces extinction. He competes against other men to get to the top, where wealth and status are to be had. Nature instilled that drive in him, because wealth and status attract women. Irrespective of procreation, gay men and men who do not want children still may have plenty of ambition to rise to the top.
 	And it never really ends. A man can always get richer and more powerful. Usually, at least in principle, he can have more babies too. The men who were content to reach a certain moderate level of success and to have a child or two may have kept their line of descendants alive, but the men who kept striving and became ever richer and more powerful—and
 	fathered ever more babies—were generally much more prolific at attracting women and leaving offspring. Today’s population is descended disproportionately from that sort of man.
 	So ambition is likely to be more pronounced in men than in women.
 	Women didn’t need ambition in order to reproduce. Men did. Or at least, all else being equal, men with ambition left behind more children than men who lacked ambition. More of today’s men are descended from the forefathers with ambition.
 	The sex drive is another likely consequence of the most underappreciated fact. Nature built men to live with the reality that they very well might not reproduce at all. Hence, it became crucial to capitalize on every opportunity. A young man who refused an offer of intercourse on a chance meeting with a comely lass in the woods might have passed up his only chance to have a child.
 	Those concerns don’t apply to women. Mostly, women throughout our
 	history could expect to have many more opportunities for sex than they needed to produce babies. (This is still true today, for those who may not have noticed.) For a woman, the game is about finding the best quality mate, someone with good genetic quality and who will stick around to support her and the children.
 	She doesn’t need to be biologically wired to leap at every opportunity for sex. He does. Or at least, having that sexual eagerness would likely pay off in terms of more offspring. It might help him beat the odds and avoid extinction. Or it might give him an additional child or two on top of his legitimate heirs. Either way, being easily aroused would be a biologically rewarded strategy for men much more than for women.

 	Why Men Go to Extremes

 	The most underappreciated fact may have something to say about the
 	pattern discussed in the opening chapters, namely that men go to extremes more than women. Nature plays the dice more with men than women.
 	Men are nature’s playthings, nature’s guinea pigs.
 	This argument is speculative. I have discussed this with various experts and mostly they think it is likely somewhat true, though it is far from a proven fact (and genuine experts tend to be quite cautious about making statements beyond what is definitively known).
 	Here’s one reason men may be more likely to be genetically extreme
 	than women. Think of a mutation, that is, a novel and unusual combination of genes, as an experiment: trying out a new trait to see how it fares. That’s what drives evolution. Inevitably, most of these experiments are failures.
 	Unlike human experiments, which are carefully planned and thought out, nature’s experiments are designed at random, just producing a new genetic combination to see what happens. Evolution is very much about hit-or-miss trial and error, and there are many more errors than successes, more misses than hits.
 	The optimal vehicle for a genetic experiment would have two characteristics. If the experiment is a failure, it should be quickly eliminated from the gene pool, so that the bad mutation doesn’t contaminate the species for many future generations. On the other side, if the experiment is a success, ideally it should spread quickly through the gene pool.
 	Put more bluntly, if the mutant is a loser, it should have no babies, and if it is a winner, it should have lots of babies, who in turn should have lots more babies. I say “should” in terms of what will yield the best results for the species and gene pool. (There is no moral “should” here.)
 	Males are much better suited for this role of nature’s guinea pig than females. Remember, a woman can give birth only about once a year, whereas a man can father many different children in the same year.
 	Meanwhile, many males have no offspring, while most females do have at least one child and usually more than that.
 	Consider the wild horses again. The dominant male that summer has sex with all the females. The females have one foal each. He has a whole crop of them. The other males in the herd have none, or almost none.
 	A few years in the future, when that summer’s crop of foals is grown to adulthood, that stallion’s sons compete for the top position, and the winning son gets to have sex with all the stallion’s daughters. His other sons are again left out.
 	To make the point extra clear, suppose there were four mutants in that crop of newborn horses: two sons and two daughters. One of each is superior to all the others, maybe stronger or faster, more good-looking, and with better hearing. The other two mutants are biologically inferior specimens to all the others: weak, sickly, stupid, unattractive, partly deaf.
 	The superior son, boosted by his advantage, has a better-than-average chance to win the competition to become the alpha male. As a result, he will have sex with all the females. Hence the next generation in that herd will all have his traits, including those that made him a superior specimen. The loser son will most likely not have sex at all. His mutation will die with him. In this way, the next crop of foals will be superior to the previous one. Due to nature’s experiments with the males, the genetic quality of the herd will have improved.
 	Now consider the two mutant daughters. The superior daughter will have one foal that summer. But so will the inferior one. The genetic quality of the herd will not change much.
 	Put in terms of nature trying out experiments, the experiment with the sons brought about significant progress in the species: the superior trait quickly spread through the group, while the inferior trait was flushed out of its gene pool within one generation. But the experiment on the females failed to produce change. Both the superior and the inferior trait survived into next generation.
 	Maybe, over many generations, the female experiment would work out
 	too. At some point, the superior female might have more babies than the inferior female. But the results are far more powerful and immediate with the male. For that reason, perhaps, nature prefers to experiment on males.
 	This difference could explain the male extremity pattern. Nature rolls the dice more aggressively with males than females, because it is easier to capitalize on wins and cut the losses.

From: Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men by Roy F. Baumeister