Game assumes that women evolved sexual preferences for alpha males (however defined). Unfortunately, this argument assumes that female choice actually mattered for most of human history. However, if men's actions alone decided reproductive outcomes, women simply could not evolve advanced sexual preferences. My recent reading supports the argument that female opinion or choice exerted little or no effect on reproductive outcomes, leaving Game a largely peripheral strategy for achieving sexual success. The whole Sexy Son argument underpinning Game is largely neutralised by the overwhelming evidence from history, genetics and archaeology. Let us proceed to that evidence...
This article suggests that Ghengis Khan is the ancestor of 1 in 12 asiatic males, via conquest and harems:
GENGHIS KHAN has been identified as the most successful alpha male in human history, according to a book by an Oxford geneticist.
The Mongol emperor inseminated so many women in his 40-year career raping and pillaging across Asia that he created a pool of at least 16m male descendants who today carry his Y, or male, chromosome.
British men are now being offered the opportunity of genetic testing by Oxford scientists to see if they have inherited Genghis’s “super-Y”, which conferred such power on its originator.
Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of Adam’s Curse, a study of the Y chromosome, believes recent migration could have spread a few of Genghis’s super-virile progeny as far as the British Isles.
Sykes, who runs Oxford Ancestors, a commercial enterprise that analyses people’s DNA and traces their geographical origins, said: “Genghis Khan was probably the most successful breeder of males ever, and there is every possibility that men here will carry his chromosome.”
The Y chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son and, in the 13th century, Genghis’s empire stretched from Mongolia to Afghanistan, Russia and Iran.
Oxford scientists took samples of male DNA in 16 locations across Asia and found the same Y chromosome in 8% of the population.
The idea that the chromosome could come from Genghis appeared to be confirmed by the finding that it was carried by a third of the Hazara tribe, which lives on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tribe has always claimed to descend from Genghis.
The Mongol ruler was born into a local clan that had lost most of its influence by the time he was in his teens. He set about rebuilding a power base that grew into a 200,000-strong army of legendary brutality.
Entire cities were slaughtered while the Mongol hordes looted their way across Asia. But while Genghis allowed his commanders their pick of the material spoils, he demanded the women were brought to him for systematic rape or to serve as concubines.
By the time of his death aged around 65, Genghis’s empire stretched from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf.
His four legitimate sons appear to have continued the family tradition of sexual excess and empire-building, as did two of his grandsons: Kublai Khan conquered southern China and founded the Yuan dynasty of Chinese emperors and Batu sacked Kiev and invaded Hungary and Poland.
Their dissemination of Genghis’s chromosome no doubt helped to make it the most successful in history, which is why it appears to be carried by more men on the planet than any other version.
Researchers have also established an apparent link between frequency of sexual intercourse and the birth of sons, which is why Genghis would have produced more male progeny. More boys than girls are born in the first year of marriage when couples are assumed to have more sex.
Other studies have found that frequent intercourse raises testosterone levels, increasing the chances of the Y chromosome being successful.
This link suggests why the Y chromosome is comparatively lacking in variance – Stone Age males competed violently for women, allowing only a small minority of males to mate:
A group of Linearbandkeramik people at Talheim, Germany were previously found to have died at the same time, probably in a massacre, and the authors were able to ask some searching questions of their skeletons. The isotope signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon, which gave information on diet and childhood region, showed up three groups which correlated with hereditary traits (derived previously from the analysis of the teeth). In the local group, there were many local children but no adult women, suggesting they had been selectively taken alive at the time of the massacre.
This review of Jonathan Gottschall's The Rape of Troy, argues Homer’s Iliad reflects inter-male competition for women during the Greek Dark Ages:
His primary concern is with Homeric society, referring ‘not so much to Homer’s fictional construction as to a specific scholarly reconstruction of the real world from which the epics emerged’ (3). In his first two chapters he synthesises classical and archaeological scholarship to build up a persuasive case for reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as offering a reflection, magnified up to the epic scale, of the society in which the poems were composed. Crucially, this is not the society of Mycenaean Greece itself, with its palaces and treasures signifying rich cities and kingdoms. Instead it is that of Dark Age Greece, an impoverished world of small tribes led by chiefs more like the big men of other pre-state societies than the kings of most translations of Homer. It is a world too of pervasive male violence. In his third chapter, which draws heavily on evolutionary psychology and comparative anthropology, Gottschall argues that this violence is directed above all toward the goal of reproductive dominance in a polygynous society.
The next three chapters concentrate on the epics themselves. Chapter 4 points out the crucial significance of conflicts over women in Homer: the Trojan war itself, fought over Helen; the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseis that triggers the events of the Iliad; the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors, which marks the crescendo of the Odyssey. Beyond these specific fights over specific women, Gottschall notes the pervasive references in the epic to raiding for women and the culmination of the siege of Troy in the mass rape and enslavement of the Trojan women. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the premium on status among Homeric men and the ways in which the ‘mating preferences’ of women in Homeric society reinforce the culture of male violence ‘through an active system of sexual and reputational rewards to men with powerful bodies, combative dispositions, and courageous spirits’ (117).
Gottschall makes a crucial mistake: the mating preferences of women had no bearing on mating outcomes. Men competed for women in Homeric society, the outcomes deciding male reproductive success. Female choice had little to do with it. The strongest males would gather a harem of females and rape them. Simple as that. At no point does female preference have any influence on events whatsoever. As with the German neolithic massacre, men fought and the conquerors raped the women.
And this piece discusses why prehistoric Indo-European invasion of Europe replaced indigenous male populations while leaving female populations relatively intact:
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml
As it is complex and aimed at scientists, I present the meat of the argument below:
A lot of maternal lineages (mtDNA) also appear to be of Paleolithic origin (e.g. H1, H3, U5 or V) based on ancient DNA tests. What a lot of people forget is that there is also no need of a large-scale exodus for patrilineal lineages to be replaced fairly quickly. Here is why:
Polygamy. Unlike women, men are not limited in the number of children they can procreate. Men with power typically have more children. This was all the truer in primitive societies, where polygamy was often the norm for chieftains and kings.
Status & Power. Equipped with Bronze weapons and horses, the Indo-Europeans would have easily subjugated the Neolithic farmers and with even greater ease Europe’s last hunter-gatherers.If they did not exterminate the indigenous men, the newcomers would have become the new ruling class, with a multitude of local kings, chieftains and noblemen (Bronze-Age Celts and Germans lived in small village communities with a chief, each part of a small tribe headed by a king) with higher reproductive opportunities than average.
Gender imbalance. Invading armies normally have far more men than women. Men must therefore find women in the conquered population. Wars are waged by men, and the losers suffer heavier casualties, leaving more women available to the winners.
Aggressive warfare. The Indo-Europeans were a warlike people with a strong heroic code emphasising courage and military prowess. Their superior technology (metal weapons, wheeled vehicles and warhorses) and attitude to life would have allowed them to slaughter any population that did not have organised armies with metal weapons (i.e. anybody except the Middle-Eastern civilizations).
Genetic predisposition to conceive boys. The main role of the Y-chromosome in man’s body is to create sperm. Haplogroups are determined based on mutations differentiating Y-chromosomes. Each mutation is liable to affect sperm production and sperm motility. Preliminary research has already established a link between certain haplogroups and increased or reduced sperm motility. The higher the motility, the higher the chances of conceiving a boy. It is absolutely possible that R1b could confer a bias toward more male offspring. Even a slightly higher percentage of male births would significantly contribute to the replacement of other lineages with the accumulation effect building up over a few millennia. Not all R1b subclades might have this boy bias. The bias only exist in relation to other haplogroups found in a same population. It is very possible that the fairly recent R1b subclades of Western Europe had a significant advantage compared to the older haplogroups in that region, notably haplogroup I2 and E-V13.
Replacement of patrilineal lineages following this model quickly becomes exponential. Imagine 100 Indo-European men conquering a tribe of 1000 indigenous Europeans (a ratio of 1:10). War casualties have resulted in a higher proportion of women in the conquered population. Let’s say that the surviving population is composed of 700 women and 300 men. Let’s suppose that the victorious Indo-European men end up having twice as many children reaching adulthood as the men of the vanquished tribe. There is a number of reasons for that. The winners would take more wives, or take concubines, or even rape women of the vanquished tribe. Their higher status would guarantee them greater wealth and therefore better nutrition for their offspring, increasing the chances of reaching adulthood and procreating themselves. An offspring ratio of 2 to 1 for men is actually a conservative estimate, as it is totally conceivable that Bronze-Age sensibilities would have resulted in killing most of the men on the losing side, and raping their women (as attested by the Old Testament). Even so, it would only take a few generations for the winning Y-DNA lineages to become the majority. For instance, if the first generation of Indo-Europeans had two surviving sons per man, against only one per indigenous man, the number of Indo-European paternal lineages would pass to 200 individuals at the second generation, 400 at the third, 800 at the fourth and 1600 at the fifth, and so on. During that time indigenous lineages would only stagnate at 300 individuals for each generation.
Based on such a scenario, the R1b lineages would have quickly overwhelmed the local lineages. Even if the Indo-European conquerors had only slightly more children than the local men, R1b lineages would become dominant within a few centuries. Celtic culture lasted for over 1000 years in Continental Europe before the Roman conquest putting an end to the privileges of the chieftains and nobility. This is more than enough time for R1b lineages to reach 50 to 80% of the population.
The importance of male physical prowess in procuring sex is illustrated in the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive. Film director Adam Kesher drives home to his mountaintop mansion to find his wife in bed with a low class, southern bad-ass. When he tries to deface her jewelery in revenge for his cuckolding, Mr Muscles breaks his nose and kicks him out of his own house. I recall an interesting post on Roissy's blog about the possibility of physical confrontation in pursuit of sex. The post and its responses ended in some confusion, with fighting being accepted as the only option in certain situations, however honed an individual's Game. Speaking bluntly, the schizoid, high-IQ males frequenting Roissy's Blog are certain to come off second-best in physical confrontations with embodied lower-class males (hence their confusion). After all, few middle class Anglosphere males have had a full one on one fight with another male since puberty, so 'fight' really means 'a beating', as in Mulholland Drive.
In sum, Game can be handily undercut by physical prowess, even in a modern context - let alone twelfth century Mongolia. Roissy and other Game experts persistently refuse to address this fact, a telling omission. Within a limited context, their prescriptions have value; beyond the middle class world, they have none. This is subliminally adumbrated by the British lower-class word for middle-class males: 'wankers' (masturbators). Middle class males are thus pithily denigrated as males reduced to masturbating by virtue of their limited physical prowess in intra-male competition for females. Doubtless there is truth in this assessment: middle class, intelligent males across the Anglosphere perpetually lament their sexual disenfranchisment before lower-class, animalistic sociopaths who 'get more ass than a toilet seat'.
If I were a betting man, I would say that Game represents 20% of sexual success, at best. Coercive male power provides the remaining 80% of variance, both historically and in contemporary society. As I argued in my previous New Year post, the evidence suggests that most women find sex revolting. This sexual indifference is exactly what we would expect if female sexual choice never 'evolved'. Never having 'mattered' throughout reproductive history, female sexuality never 'evolved' since there no reason for it to do so.
Males continually project masculine logic onto female sexual preference since male sexuality is eminently logical - men like youth, large breasts, small features and long legs because those are reproductive advantages. Unfortunately, females never had to evolve such clear-cut, logical preferences since intra-male sexual competition obviated such developments. In sum, female sexual choices are illogical because they lack any coherent sexual instinct - which explains the reproductive success of thugs, bums, retards and other male misfits and the relative sexual failure of the intelligent, articulate and successful. It also explains why most 'alpha' theories of Game are unsuccessful in practice, and often confuse sheer physical prowess for complex psycho-sexual traits like confidence and 'social-dominance'.
Though intra-male competition might have been harsh for non-warrior males, at least it ensured the relative fitness of human populations. For evidence of the genetic and social anarchy attendant on allowing inchoate female sexuality free reign, just look around any post-feminist Anglosphere society.
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