> we don't need all the men. We only need a tiny percentage of men.Relevant: A single male galapagos turtle sired 800 offspring, single-handedly (well, I guess it wasn't his hand) saving his species from extinction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/world/americas/diego-tort...
> Also occupations used to be much more hazardous so many more die working.
Right. Females are precious (in the eyes of genetics) because they are wombs for the next generation. Because maturation takes time, total reproduction throughput is mostly limited by number of females.
This raises the natural question then, why don't most species simply produce way more females than males? Some do, but most don't and the reason is fascinating [0]. There's almost an iterated prisoner's dilemma thing going on where producing fewer of one sex opens up potential genetic exploitation by producing more of the rare sex and over time, that leads to a stable roughly 1:1 equilibrium.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
So, species tend to produce lots of males but don't really need them. What to do? It seems like the evolutionary answer is to treat them as expendable wildcards. Make them bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and more willing to take risks. Some of them will stumble on to new discoveries that benefit the herd, or die protecting the tribe. Many will simply die from misfortune, but no matter, they weren't needed anyway. There's plenty of sperm to go around.
Through most of human history, this kinda sorta worked out OK because there were enough competing warlike tribes, deadly predators, unexplored territories, and risky occupations to soak up all of these genetically extraneous dudes. But we keep making the world safer and safer and now we are finding out that our culture no longer effectively knows what to do.
It seems like, for many men, the answer is to escape into a simulated world that gives them the challenge, risk, and potential (virtual) reward that they crave. Notice how almost all of the widely played videogames by young men are violent and war-like, or at least sports, itself a ritualized simulation of combat.
And, from that light, the incredible backlash of Gamergate where some men attacked women for daring to criticize or even participate in their videogame world makes a little more sense. They felt they had no place left on Earth where they could be a man and not feel like a failure.
> The days of bundling laggers up in a red coat and sending them off with a musket to make the queens empire a bit larger appear to be coming to a close.
Actually, it was just last year that the US ended the longest continuous war it has been in for its entire history. I've noticed that almost every US President seems to become more hawkish once elected. When I feel like putting on my tin-foil hat, I sometimes imagine the newly elected candidate getting a briefing from security officials. "We've run the simulations over and over, and if we don't have some kind of military conflict to act as a pressure release valve for this surplus of angry, disillusioned men, the end result will be revolution in the US."
I don't really believe that, of course, but sometimes...