(urth) Wolfe: Misogynist Or Realist?

[Daniel D Jones]

On Friday 20 October 2006 01:01, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> Adam Thornton wrote:
> > On Oct 19, 2006, at 7:33 PM, b sharp wrote:
> >>  And timidly suggest the answer
> >> is....chivalry?  For what other reason (again won't get into
> >> biology) can we
> >> as a society consider men to be more expendable than women?
> >
> > Chivalry *is* biology.
> >
> > One guy can impregnate thousands of women.  A woman can bear a
> > lifetime maximum of, what, maybe 20 or 30 children?
>
> I'll bite: Why protect one woman and her children if there are thousands
> more for you to knock up?

There weren't thousands more.  Our biology was defined through  thousands of 
years of living in small tribes where survival of the self and of the tribe 
was constantly in question.  The environment we've lived in since the rise of 
civilization has had little effect on our biology.  It's an eyeblink on the 
evolutionary time scale.

In a small tribe, if most of the men get killed, the few remaining can serve 
to produce just as large a next generation as if nothing had happened.  If 
most of the women get killed, the tribe is almost certainly dead.