Forum: Story Ideas

That's the most popular trope, yes. But why not a reversal?

Sure, it does need some more scaffolding, unlike the classic that can be "easy explained" with excessive male mortality by constant violence while womenfolk are seen as spoils of war and saved, more or less. But let's be real, that's not very realistic setup either.

However... when we go into setups this contrived, I don't really see what the post-apocalyptic angle adds there. Isolation and lack of easily accessible alternatives? One do not need to "destroy the world" to set that up.

So this as well could be a space station, or warrior monks order, or whatever. The *local* gender imbalance towards excess men could be easier explained by migration. Young men are coming from all around here for... reasons. Locally sourced females cannot keep the pace with this rapid growth, thus this system of sheltered upbringing and competitive group marriage is set up.

But why not a reversal?

Because women are the bottleneck for human reproduction.

Because it makes long term survival of the species implausible.

If you kill 90% of men without killing any women, leaving 10 women for every man, one man can impregnate 10 women within a short time span. The losses can be replaced in a single generation.

With an overall death of 90%+ of the population but leaving 4 women for every man, you still have the conditions for rapid population growth.

If you do the reverse: 1 woman can not produce children any faster with 10 men as potential fathers than she could with only a single father.

The population will further collapse to what it would have been with only one man surviving for each woman who survived.

A reverse harem is a potentially interesting idea, but it's just not sustainable on a population wide basis.

Okay. TL;DR: human population growth in large timescales is entirely constrained by cultural/economic/ecological factors and NOT biology or initial population size.

Yes, women are the reproductive bottleneck, but actually... if we drop any (realistically always present) restrictions of economics/logistics there's not so much of a bottleneck, ever. If reproduction starts at 15 and every woman has a child every 18 months until she's 45, that's 20 children per woman. It's absolutely realistic, in single instances, some women had have way more children than that. Besides, her younger child and older great-grandchild could be same age. So it's faster than flat geometric, it's exponential growth. Sure, a woman pushed in such a role of a baby machine can't be very productive in other areas, but if she's provided by ten men on average, I can't see why not.

Now, with those parameters, reproductive age 15 to 45, a single child on average every 18 months, 50/50 newborn gender balance, I have run a mathematical simulation.

(My question then was: if first Earth envoy ship sent to an alien planet finds human population into billions living alongside said aliens as pets, what's the minimum of how long ago was the original abduction of seed humans, ignoring cloning or other mass reproduction methods?)

I was profoundly shocked by the results I saw.

Starting with 10 young girls destined to be operating in this regime (and nominal 10 boys, although that's a number irrelevant to the outcome), and all their female offspring following the same lifestyle, the total population have a chance to break first billion within 200 years!

You read that right, 10 girls aged between 10 to 16 (I had first insemination mid-fifteen, baby born after sixteenth birthday) can produce a billion humans within two hundred years. Theoretically, technically. In a land of spherical cows, but that's the potential of human race.

There's quite a spread, because the sex of the first children matter A LOT, but I got no results under 600k in several dozen runs, and a result as high as 1.3B.

The population a hundred years in is ~140k..200k -ish already.

Sure, such populations would be absurdly young, but my parameters assumed they're provided for by an outside force, so it wasn't a problem that up to 100 million out of those 1.2 billion people are the year #200 newborns while there's only 3.8 million women past 45.

I ignored infant mortality and, even more noteworthy, had no mortality of reproductive age women for simplicity (then sharply jumping to 5% yearly after 45, while mortality of males whose age I didn't track individually was flat 2% per year).

Interesting enough, do you know what would happen if we allowed girls as young as 12 to have sex in this scenario?

With reproductive age 12 to 42, the population of year #200 is... 6 to 10 billion !!!

The "age of consent" has tremendous impact on maximum possible population growth rates.

Reproductive age 18 to 42 (16 children, firstborn after 19th birthday) gives 200 year population between 60 and 120 million. Elimination of the 4 earlier childbirth slots give population growth decrease by the factor of hundred. Even just moving the reproductive age three years up reduce population by a factor of ten.

Short comment re: ten women as mothers of the human race. GENETIC DRIFT.

Yes, not a show stopper, but it is a serious constraint.

Yes, women are the reproductive bottleneck, but actually...

You missed the main point. All else being equal, where the number of men exceeds the number of women, you won't get a higher reproduction rate than if there was only one man per woman.

Once N men is => N women, you can not increase the rate of reproduction by adding more men.

The is no reproductive advantage in pushing women to take on more than one man.

Look at 4 scenarios. Assume for the sake of argument that all the other factors you mention are identical across all 4 scenarios.

X of one sex and Y of the other where Y = 10X.

1. Y women, X men, monogamy is maintained. Only X women have the opportunity to reproduce.
2. Y women, X men, polygamy is adopted. All women have the opportunity to reproduce.
3. X women, Y men, monogamy is maintained. X women have the opportunity to reproduce.
4. X women, Y men, Polyandry is adopted. X women have the opportunity to reproduce.

Polygamy provides a reproductive advantage where the number of women exceeds the number of men by a wide margin.

Polyandry (reverse harem) yields zero benefit.

I completely agree with you that the actual number of men at starting point is technically irrelevant for the population growth, as long there's a few. But you missed the point that as long the available women can have as many children as they possibly could, you can boom your population into billions within a couple centuries if only you can keep up with this unlimited breeding directive.

And, actually, if all you have is ten underage girls, you want all their ~200 eventual children to have, ideally, an unique father each for the maximum genetic diversity going forward. That's where excessive male population comes in very handy in a re-population scenario, actually. They're also quite helpful in providing for the breeding program females, and the absurd flock of toddlers they will produce in very short order.

Ah, I see your point now, perhaps. You seem to imply that if there's more that one girl per 10 men, then those "excess" girls won't have chance to reproduce. That's... extremely rigid reading of the conditions.

If only 4 out 10 boys competing for each girl gets a chance to reproduce, it goes without saying there's no extra girls.

If the conditions will change away from 1 to 10 imbalance in general proportions, the culture will adapt. But currently, for reasons unknown, they have this 1 to 10 imbalance as a starting condition, that's a given. There's no extra girls that could be left unmarried, because there's 6 unmarried guys per every girl married to four guys already.

Yes, that's quite logical. Then you only need the total imbalance to be 1 to 4 or slightly over, perhaps 1 to 5. Still very skewed for a long term culture to be developed around it.

In observable societies whereas there's deficit of females, it is typically created by girls having very low social standing and prestige, and thus male offspring is prioritized leading to extra mortality of infant girls, and often girls of any age due to violence against them. We usually talk about a percent or few in those, and yet it creates observable tensions. While female excess is observed due to excess male mortality by reckless behavior including but not limited to substance abuse.

There's also a probably unprovable claim that resource constrained and/or aggressive societies will (somehow naturally) birth extra males, while prosperous peaceful society extra females, but if such bias exists, it's even smaller than the above, and usually can be explained by the above better (as it often correlate).

However, some of the same female-poor countries practice polygamy instead, exacerbating the deficit further.

Historical examples of polyandry are rather connected with circumstances whereas men travel for extended periods at some regularity, while women keep the household visited by several husbands present serially, seasonally or otherwise intermittent and rarely if ever meeting being home at the same time, although there's option of resident house husband who steps aside for the traveling co-husbands when they visit. The best known example of this kind was in Himalayas, but some arctic societies had something roughly similar (although with their traditions to offer sex to guests as simply hospitality, it's not so clear). And yes, the same traveling men may in turn have a couple wifes, each in different mountain valleys or seaports...

You seem to imply that if there's more that one girl per 10 men, then those "excess" girls won't have chance to reproduce. That's... extremely rigid reading of the conditions.

Um no. I'm assuming that all the girls get to reproduce in any excess men scenario. But there's no reproductive advantage at a society level for polyandry over monogamy.It doesn't matter how many men are fathering the children, it doesn't affect the number of children one woman can produce.

For the sake of it, I replaced calculation of newborn girls in a quarter (with is my clock tick for this) from RANDBETWEEN(0,Newborns) to ROUNDUP(Newborns/10,0) to simulate this strange world where's there's only slightly better than 10% chance for a (fertile) girl to be born. (Note, it makes a bit optimistic scenario, were first offspring of the original lot are all girls, so it's a jumpstart, but I was too lazy to look up how to make a biased random in excell.)

I see year #200 population in 100k+ range from the same initial 10 girls nevertheless, so it's a flat reduction as might be expected.

For the example, starting with girls aged 11,12,13,14,15,15,15,15,16,17, the first quarter of year #200 has population of 110,135 people, of those 1,185 newborns (4,714 under one year old), 96,476 total males, 13,659 fertile females, of those only 668 past childbirth age. Female age structure by age nice and nearly linear, per quarter, 0-5 years ~120, 5-10 year old ~100, 13-16 year old ~85 fertile girls per quarter.

Keeping it up for another 120 years, the year #321 break 2 milion mark with 2.07M people by the end of the year, of those 86k newborns that year, ~1.8M total males, ~250k fertile females, of those 12.5k past childbearing age, and 123k under the age of 18, so about half.

Seems entirely sustainable, even this society is extremely young at its extreme. I don't track age of men, but we can assume there's roughly same proportion as females at any age, so the population is supposedly supported by around 900k men over age of 18, of those probably 90k over age of 45.

They might even consider to start slowly winding down the 20 children per (fertile) woman policy at this point. Remember we talk about initial population of 10 girls plus unspecific number of men, but it equals nominal population of 20, now two million, so 100,000× expansion in 320 years.

On another note, the bloated numbers of males ignored, it's a rough estimate of average two surviving daughters per woman, and it's ~500k-ish population in 320 years from our initial nominally 20.

They might even consider to start slowly winding down the 20 children per (fertile) woman policy

The problem for the OP is that polyandry vs monogamy makes zero difference in achieving 20 children per fertile woman.

On the other and with the more usual scenario of more women than men,

Assume 4 fertile women for every man. If monogamy is maintained, only 1 in 4 women will have the opportunity to reproduce at all. Thus to achieve 20 children per female across the entire population of women, each woman who has a man would have to produce 80 children. Not so feasible now. is it.

On the other hand, I said above, turn it around to 4 men for ever fertile woman and the result under both monogamy and polyandry is the same.

It's not a problem. The excess men cam be used for whatever excess. The population will grow at a rate of daughters per woman regardless.

The OP have them, for whatever reason, and relatively few females, and want maximum population growth (we assume). It makes perfect sense to assign multiple men to each girl in those conditions, for both economic and genetic reasons.

It's not a problem. The excess men cam be used for whatever excess.

Right, but the OP is using as a justification for population wide polyandry, and it just doesn't achieve that.

It appeases the excess men, a little. If you have only 6 unmarried guys per every girl married to 4 guys, it's supposedly slightly easier to keep order than if you had only one married man out of every ten.

As an added benefit, it spread genes a little more fairly in the supposedly very much limited population.

Just WHY they have this extreme gender imbalance is the main question. Maybe 8 out 10 girls are born infertile and/or badly deformed, and this system only depicts those identified as fertile. Maybe they have steady influx of young men from some other region (possibly, one whereas extreme and aggressive polygamy is the norm of the land?).

Whatever the reasons, the solution isn't at all unreasonable.

Kind of like bees.

well, no. Although (domestic and similar) worker bees are female, they are sterile - only the queen can lay eggs (except in a special circumstance). If the queen is lost from a hive, and there are eggs or sufficiently immature larvae, these can be fed 'royal jelly' by the workers to have them develop into a queen; if not, only then will workers develop (due to missing pheromones normally emitted by the queen) to lay eggs, however all bees developing from these eggs are male, and only fertilise other nests/hives queens in those queen's single mating flight. AFAIK the situation is similar in ants and social wasps, as well.

So, bees have one female (queen) to many males (the drones); the majority don't count (the workers)

However, speaking about the domestic honey bee, in the matting flight the bee queen is getting a gangbang. I assumed Matt referred to that situation, and thus decided not to comment on it.

She can have several dozen partners in her matting flight, and she's ripping genitals out of every one of them in the process (killing them). Moreover, in theory, and in extremely rare occasions in practice, bee queen can repeat the matting flight. There's nothing technically stopping her to do so at will, however, most of the time she's way too heavy to flight (but she's dropping weight occasionally, such as to fly with the swarm -- first swarm of the season always fly with the old queen) and if she's running out of stored sperm she could repeat the matting flight anew too. But in practice, in most cases the working bees committee that actually run the hive will have her killed and replaced for being inefficient long before that.

Working bees are stuck in pre-puberty because she's only feed the "milk" for first three days of the larvae stage, and "hard" food (a pollen derived substance) after then. The queen larvae is fed exclusively the "milk" the entire time, and thus develops three times as fast and grow significantly larger. And yes, any open working bees larvae can be promoted into a queen in an emergency, with minimal downsides if it's done within the first three days when they are still feed with milk all the same, although even then she's somewhat uncomfortable growing up in extended regular cell and not purpose build queenqueen-size cell, and thus may be less productive than a queen grown in swarming mood of the hive, or for the "quiet" replacement. If the larvae had already switched foods, the queen would be increasingly bad quality with each passing hour before the promotion, but it is still possible with relatively satisfactory results for at least a day or maybe even two.

The "milk" secretes to young working bees, and normally they would feed it to the queen or some larvae (one can feed up to 5 working bee larvae, or up to 2-3 drone larvae; it takes all milk of multiple bees to feed one queen larvae). If there's no queen, there's also no young, open larvae, and the bees who secrete the milk start to consume it themselves and thus go through puberty. However, since they have been underdeveloped as larvae, they only grow a small number of egg tubes and are unable to get inseminated, they don't have necessarily mechanism for that. So they can only lay relatively few drone eggs.

If this happens to this extent, when the eggs being laid, the hive won't accept any new queen as long as there's any such egg-laying bees present, and while it in theory possible to correct such a hive, the economic way in practice is to destroy it by simply shaking it all out on the ground at a distance from the other hives. The workers will fly away, and be accepted in other hives, while the egg-laying ones can't fly any more, and won't be accepted in other hives even if they could.

And yes, unlike for some of the ants where the queen(s) have significant degree of control through diverse set of pheromones, in beehives the queen is rather an instrument of the collective, controlled, if anything, by the gang that feeds the queen. With in turn has a mood influenced by humidity&temperature within the hive, availability of honey&pollen reserves, amount of free space within the hive, but most crucially, by the amount of total unassigned "milk" available, with in turn is a function of population size and growth rate, with in turn is function of the productivity of the queen (a good one may lay amount of eggs exceeding her own weight everyday, for weeks on end).

While in ideal conditions, to her, a bee queen can live up to five to even seven years, in practice, a large hive will wear her out in three, and replace on their own. Intense industrial beekeeping change queens every other year, exactly in bid to avoid this natural replacement to happen (as the replacement may not be clean desired variety, but a hybrid) and also suppress development of the swarming mood (as that reduces productivity of the hive significantly).

Nah. More then six is excessive, and hard to keep track, even if you rename them for weekdays. But that assume one wants to maintain relationships with each, or any. But if not, the exact number is somewhat irrelevant.