If we're going to see life as DNAs way of making more DNA, Genghis Khan's mother did just as much reproducing as his father.
I absolutely agree with you about that, and in fact, the genes that made Genghis Khan reproduce so wildly may have even come from his mother. They may not have been linked to sex at all, and might be expressed equally in his male and female descendants.
None of which changes the conclusion, though, which is that if there are any sex-linkages (either by presence on the Y chromosome or by preferential expression) amongst the genes controlling risk (reproductive risk, especially), then they will tend to accumulate in such a way that the high risk male genes are much more strongly selected for than female ones (which will be mostly neutral if they're not deleterious).
Put another way, the "risk-seeking" phenotype is not the same as the "encourage male offspring to be risk-seeking" phenotype, and while the former is only beneficial to male genes, the latter is beneficial to everyone's. And the end result is that male risk seeking is encouraged in the gene pool in many ways - in fact, what you've suggested is that the social reasons that male risk-seeking is encouraged are actually quite strongly selected for individually, which puts the conclusion on even stronger genetic grounds (as opposed to what comes up often as the more PC theory, that it's just an accident of history that society decided to bring up males that way, not an evolutionary imperative).
The stuff about bonobos is quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. They have a quite different power structure that makes things very unusual (almost inverted, in many ways), and it's very interesting to see that increased reproductive variance there is not linked to dominance, but to keeping a good position within the female hierarchy. It makes very clear the point that while a lot of (human) male traits may be evolved in order to increase reproductive variance, those traits do not necessarily achieve that goal (or any positive goal) in general, but only within the context of our other evolutionary peculiarities. As usual, it's difficult to evaluate anything in a vacuum.
I absolutely agree with you about that, and in fact, the genes that made Genghis Khan reproduce so wildly may have even come from his mother. They may not have been linked to sex at all, and might be expressed equally in his male and female descendants.
None of which changes the conclusion, though, which is that if there are any sex-linkages (either by presence on the Y chromosome or by preferential expression) amongst the genes controlling risk (reproductive risk, especially), then they will tend to accumulate in such a way that the high risk male genes are much more strongly selected for than female ones (which will be mostly neutral if they're not deleterious).
Put another way, the "risk-seeking" phenotype is not the same as the "encourage male offspring to be risk-seeking" phenotype, and while the former is only beneficial to male genes, the latter is beneficial to everyone's. And the end result is that male risk seeking is encouraged in the gene pool in many ways - in fact, what you've suggested is that the social reasons that male risk-seeking is encouraged are actually quite strongly selected for individually, which puts the conclusion on even stronger genetic grounds (as opposed to what comes up often as the more PC theory, that it's just an accident of history that society decided to bring up males that way, not an evolutionary imperative).
The stuff about bonobos is quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. They have a quite different power structure that makes things very unusual (almost inverted, in many ways), and it's very interesting to see that increased reproductive variance there is not linked to dominance, but to keeping a good position within the female hierarchy. It makes very clear the point that while a lot of (human) male traits may be evolved in order to increase reproductive variance, those traits do not necessarily achieve that goal (or any positive goal) in general, but only within the context of our other evolutionary peculiarities. As usual, it's difficult to evaluate anything in a vacuum.