Response to Arctotherium

On 2025 January 21, Aporia Magazine published “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma” by Arctotherium. Unfortunately, there’s multiple problems with the reasoning in this article. Blithering Genius of Expanding Rationality helped me write this response.

First, any statistic on marriage isn’t very informative, since it confuses the legal institution with pair-bonded relationships. The legal definition has changed over time, and become increasingly irrelevant. Even if it’s difficult to find stats on the breakdown of the male-female pair bond, it should be noted in the essay that marriages technically aren’t necessary to have or raise children, even if they can be beneficial. Marriage statistics are shown all throughout the article.

Second, the sexual prisoner’s dilemma is between individuals, not all males vs all females. Let’s consider this quote by Arctotherium:

Society isn’t based on the “collective interests” of one sex in opposition to the other. The sexes don’t have separate interests as collectives. It would be more accurate to say that a person’s sex determines the individual interests that they have. If anyone disagrees, then they should point out what these “collective interests” are and how they’re “collective” for each sex.

A society can make it easier or harder to arrange cooperation. A society can’t create a defect/cooperate scenario. That doesn’t make sense. A society could make it easier for one side to defect, but that would have effect of the deal being harder to arrange.

Traditionally, a marriage is a cooperative and monogamous relationship between a man and a woman that’s intended to raise children. Historically, married couples often had to compete against other married couples for their own well-being and the success of their children. Men cooperate with women just as much as they cooperate with men, and whether or not cooperate or defect depends on the circumstances.

Arctotherium also says:

It’s true that women essentially evolved to be owned by men. However, collective male power is not necessary to force women to marry men. The average man is taller and stronger than the average woman, so individual men could easily dominate individual women if they want to. Once again, the sexes don’t have collective interests stacked against each other.

This quote also assumes that marriage contracts are disadvantageous for women, which isn’t necessarily true. From a purely biological perspective, the utility of marriage to a woman depends on how many children the marriage produces. Most cultures traditionally valued having lots of children, and parents often went through great efforts to arrange marriages for their children, with the hopes that said marriages would generate lots of offspring. It seems that Arctotherium is confusing reproductive success and what he intuitively views as “oppression” against women.

Third, a male defecting from a female means that he abandons her and her offspring, rather than providing protection and support. Given that this doesn’t happen in “defect/cooperate societies”, the wording for identifying such societies is misleading. It seems that “defect/cooperate society” was intended to simply mean a society where it’s easier for men to divorce their wives on male-favorable terms, if they want to (i.e. the male can keep the children, all the wealth, etc). But even in the event of a divorce, it wouldn’t be adaptive for males to raise the children by themselves if they could have the wife do that instead (for free). So it’s not clear how that “defect/cooperate society” is a meaningful distinction, from a purely biological perspective.

Fourth, we should be skeptical that the so-called modern cooperate/defect society scenario is a valid categorization as well. It’s true that the dynamics of mating, marriage, and divorce are biased towards women’s preferences these days. However, this ignores how a historically significant chunk of society is just incels and virgins. A minority of men are getting a lot of sex and love, while many men remain sexless and loveless. It’s not clear how or why an abnormally high population of incels and femcels should be labeled “cooperation” or “defection”. It just doesn’t make sense to extrapolate outcomes from these individual scenarios onto societies using these concepts.

Also see: Dating & Marriage Links.

Fifth, there are also many people who have successful relationships while choosing to not have any offspring at all. Even if people can manage to have cooperative romantic and sexual relationships, reproduction is not guaranteed. So, the sexual prisoner’s dilemma is not sufficient for understanding human reproduction, as the article title implies.

I’d argue that these descriptors are over-exaggerations. Third-world economies are less poor than we think they are, since GDP doesn’t accurately measure economies. It’s also not clear how poorer societies are less capable of collective action. Most Western societies currently have governments that actively harm the people’s interests, and the people haven’t been able to do much about it. Wouldn’t it follow that Western societies aren’t capable of much (of a specific kind of) collective action either?

Right-wingers need to stop saying “affirmative action”. demographic quotas are a superior term.

There’s simply no predictive or explanatory power to be gained by shoehorning the individual sexual prisoner’s dilemma onto society. It also entails multiple false equivocation fallacies. In general, things tend to balance out in most societies, because you can’t really have a power imbalance between men and women. Each needs the other. A society can make the pair bond easier or harder to achieve, but it can’t create a defect/cooperate situation between the sexes. That’s a possible individual outcome, not a collective outcome.