By PUZZLED
Updated: Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:22:29 UTC

For many centuries the distribution of human male genes within European societies was largely structured by the practice of monogamous marriage. Unreliable contraceptive practices made fertility postponement hard to maintain, prompting most couples to marry in their mid to late twenties and thus start their reproductive careers.

Marriage rates were therefore higher than today and marriage took place relatively earlier, with a majority of males becoming monogamous husbands and fathers.

The advent of modern contraception has had two well documented effects on this traditional marriage and fertility pattern.

Firstly, it has encouraged ever greater postponement of fertility. Secondly it has encouraged the rise of co-habitation rather than marriage and the emergence of serial short term, uncommitted, sexual relationships.

Demographically speaking, modern contraception appears to have increased the incidence of both childlessless and illegitimacy. The implication of this on female lives is widely discussed but actually both of these effects have a far greater effect on the distribution of male genes than female.

On one hand,the monogamous married male has never been more likely to remain childless, as couples postpone fertility ever longer or entirely forgo it.

Conversely, the unmarried male has never been more likely to have fathered a series of children by different women through short term sexual relationships.

The opportunistic, polygamously minded male has never had it so good, spreading his genes through a kind of irregualr concubinage as loosely affliated women bear and raise his children for him; while the faithful committed male who enjoys a long mongamous relationship with one ever-postponing woman runs the risk of writing himself out of the gene pool altogether.

Is the nice guy doomed to extinction?

TAGGED: FAMILY/FRIENDS/COLLEAGUES, GENETICS, SOCIETY