Polygamy simulation

Not sure if polymath is on this forum, but I know a lot of guys object to polygamy on the basis that some men will have to go without wives. That just isn't true. So I made a simulation, and ran it with various parameters for 1000 years at a time. The results were interesting, but in every case, even in the extreme situation that every man had 2 wives, there was no shortage of women. Even though the male birth rate was 5% higher than the female birth rate. How is this sleight of hand performed? It has to do with the time element. When you have a system of many interacting particles, it can be hard to predict how they will act over time. Like with Chaos research, only putting in the parameters and letting the system run, will tell you what it will do. Oh, and the details: on average, men got married at age 40. But it was to young women, not women their age.

Source code available if anyone wants to run the simulation themselves, tweak different parameters, and see which factors are the most important.

Code:

(define maxwives 2)
(define male-age-of-death 72)
(define female-age-of-death 79)
(define male-age-of-majority 18)
(define female-age-of-majority 16)
(define female-age-of-menopause 42)
(define female-age-of-widowhood 60)
(define male-birth-ratio (div (add 1 1.05)))
(define average-number-of-children-per-woman 2.7)

female-age-of-widowhood is the age after which a women doesn't remarry if her husband dies. I took this from the Bible; after age 60, the congregation supports the widows, but before that age they are expected to remarry.

The simulation made some simplifying assumptions, as for an ideal world. Everyone lives a full lifespan; no premature death. Marriage is until death; noone ever feels a need for divorce. There are no out-of-wedlock births; all sex and births are within a marriage. I could add those things in, but even in its simple state, the complex behavior of the system is interesting to watch. Population demographics aren't easy to predict, and not possible to model with calculus and linear equations.

 

I didn't even take this into account:

The simulation didn't take that into account; maybe it should. The quote was taken from this excellent article on the topic, citing historical facts in support of my simulation:

Polygyny And The Beta Apocalypse Fantasy | https://artisanaltoadshall.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/polygyny-and-the-beta-apocalypse-fantasy/

The takeaway from the 0.3592 ratio is this: after the age of 40, a man will produce twice as many daughters as sons. Science. If most men marry after 40, you can see how a surplus of women is to be expected. Forbidding polygamy would be outright cruel to the women.

 

One of the key factors is birth rate; boost the birth rate from "barely replacement" 2.7 children per woman, and put it at 8, where it has been for various times in history. The Average man would only have to wait until age 30 to get his 2 wives. Also, a population of less than 100 would jump to 25000 within 150 years. Remind you of the Amish?

 

Here's my simulation:

 

Surely the guy with 2 wives would be the miserable one?

 

If someone else has the military power to tell you how your women will be distributed, you've already lost.

 

I think both the notion that every man can be a winner, as per Mycroft, and the notion that for some to win other must lose out, are true. We need to be real careful with some definitions and some implicit assumptions.

For all men to be polygynous, eligible females must outnumber eligible males. There are some possible ways this can obtain.

1. Steady population growth, with men dating women in the next generation.
2. High male death rate.
3. Low male birth rate.

I don't think 3. will obtain automatically if men have children later. The data looks like stupid. But it can obtain through intervention. E.g. dropping baby boys off a steep cliff. Clearly both 3. and 2. involve a huge number of men losing out romantically... but at least they aren't around to suffer for it.

Condition 1. works well for some time. The problem is that indefinite growth is not possible. Nor is it desirable. At some point you must reach a population equilibrium, and at that point you're back to lots of men losing big. I'm guessing Polymath is working from this assumption implicitly.

Here's where it becomes important to be real particular about definitions. What is "every man", who are these "some men" who must fail? See, even if it's impossible for the global population to grow, it's always possible for *a particular sub-group* to grow, by displacing their neighbours. As long as this is *your* group, you and all your buddies are fine. At some point this sub-group too will fail to grow, but again it's possible for elements within it to separate and keep growing. I'm guessing this is the implicit assumption Mycroft is working with.

Clearly, it's still the case that globally many men must fail. The failure of the men whose breeding group is displaced is even worse than merely failing to find a mate. Question is, do you even care? I don't. Even if I happen to be on the losing end. To me this is just the inevitable nature of biology on display. Is it wrong? Is the nature of nature wrong? Nonsensical.

 

Lorien, well written post, but incomplete. Your ignoring the big 4th option: men marry later in life than women do. This creates the needed surplus of (marriageable) women. I ran the simulation with a steady-state, non-expanding population. Every man got two wives. It is true, expanding population means men get to have their marriages earlier in life. But even in steady state population, polygamy doesn't have to create any losers. It is the time element; everyone leaves it out of their logic because the interactions of people over time are complex and not easily amenable to logic or calculus. In my simulation, every man really meant EVERY SINGLE MALE EVER BORN. Because there was no sickness, no infertility, no early death. Also no abortions or infanticide. None.

There are lots of tricky logic problems out there that become easy when the time element is brought back into it. There are no more losers under polygamy than under monogamy. I kept the simulation as close to reality as possible; made the conditions as unfavorable to polygamy as reality allowed; and it still comes up roses. If you want the source code and play with the simulation yourself, message me.

 

Young men want pussy. Deny them => revolution.

Your simulation would be interesting if you factored in the increasing girl birth rate with patriarchal age.

A large proportion of men must be reproductively selected against or else the species collapses under mutational load. The kindest implementation of this would be a 1-child policy for each loser and his unfortunate wife.

Not very kind to the wife. So have to make it clear that the loser is way better than his wife.

This is the best argument for not allowing women to speak in Typed: Pimps up, hoes down.

Male fraternal affection is the reason not to allow fags to speak.

Imagine a civilization that recognizes those dealt a losing genetic hand are still part of the team, and can still win by extended kin advancement. Many men must play the lesser part. If they still pull for the team... well, that sounds unstoppable.

 

There are good reasons why not every man should have more than one (or even that many...) wife. The purpose of my simulation is to demonstrate that even if every man had 2 wives, every male would still get married. With that suitably demonstrated and proven, other simulations can be prepared, taking into account hypergamy, SMV, MMV, etc.

As for mutational load, it leads to infertility and early death, so dysgenics would weed themselves out. In a natural SMV situation, suitably restrained hypergamy and patriarchy (noone wants a loser son-in-law) would stop it from going that far.

PS: after pointing it out, I did factor in the increasing birthrate of girls after age of 40. To my surprise, it didn't change the results much. Enough men under the age of 40 were breeding, the effect didn't make much difference.

 

An interesting simulation would be to add in SMV rankings; every marriage would drop a mans MMV by 1 point. Also a man's MMV would change over his lifespan, peaking at 35, as it does today. It would be much more work to make such a simulation effective; the really interesting stuff happens at decent population sizes. In my simulation, things slow to a crawl when the population reaches 10,000. I think I know a way to speed it up to potentially hundreds of thousands, but that relies on the fact the current simulation is so simple.

 

Denying pussy to young men isn't revolution against the system unless the patriarchs are old and weak and stupid. It is to some degree, War. Aggressive war against outsiders, fighting for that precious MMV, territory and resources. Overall, good for the health of the tribe. Also, did you ever read the story of the elephants without fathers? In a patriarchal society, the patriarchs keep a damper on the young men. Without a news media constantly whipping up men's hormones, they can be damped and sexual energy can be channeled. This was a well known effect in the Victorian times, they called it "sexual sublimation". Scientific revolution anyone? The Arab world had things pretty well handled until the internet and smart phone blew the lid off everything.

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men | http://thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/in-the-absence-of-fathers-a-story-of-elephants-and-men/

 

I don't believe that the female-weighted birth phenomenon has a negligible effect in a society where old patriarchs keep breeding to impotence.

 

Ah, I see what's going on. E.g. if only men 40-70 are eligible to be married, whereas women 20-80 are eligible, the number of eligible women are double that of men, even with a constant generational size. The big trade off is that everyone has to be a huge loser early in life, in order to win big later.

I don't see the benefit of that but... sure, it's possible.

 

So essentially, this is just a proof of concept, rather than a solid argument in favor of polygamy. Each man waits until he's middle aged to marry, then he later marries another elderly woman after her husband dies. That way, each man and each woman gets two marriages, but they are "staggered" so that the woman's second marriage coincides with her first husband's death while the man's marriage periods overlap. I mean, technically it works, but when I hear polygamy, I think of men having multiple marriages and women not having multiple marriages. That isn't what is going on here. Your idea is more like a glorified swinger culture.

 

polymath, you have to run the simulation yourself. Each man waits to age 40, but gets two YOUNG wives, close to the age of 18 (or younger). Maybe one 16 year old and one 24 year old. Etc. Occasionally a man marries a widow older than that.

 

How do I run it? Do I need a Lisp compiler?

 

Lisp interpreter. Download newLisp. newLISP - Home | http://newlisp.org/

 

Ok guys, source code here: [newLISP] #!/usr/bin/newlisp ;;; marriage-age-gap-simulation.lsp Copyright (c) 2016 Myc - Pastebin.com | http://pastebin.com/h2p2yyp2

To the run the code, you need to use Linux or BSD. Save it in a file, then do

Code:

chmod +x filename.lsp; ./filename.lsp

to run it.