Can Evolutionary Psychology Explain Reproductive Behavior in the Contemporary United States?

Can evolutionary psychology explain human behavior in postindustrial societies? Critics point out that, contrary to its prediction, wealthy men in contemporary societies do not have more children than poor men. I replicate Pérusse’s (1993) finding with a large, representative sample and demonstrate that, while they do not have more children, wealthy men nonetheless have more sex partners and copulate more frequently than poor men. They would therefore have achieved greater reproductive success in the ancestral environment without effective means of contraception. Throughout human history, wealthy and powerful men of high status have had a greater number of mates and produced more children than poor and powerless men of low status (Betzig 1986). In ancient civilizations, kings, emperors, and sultans maintained large harems of hundreds and thousands of virgins, and local chiefs and noblemen kept several wives or concubines, while at the same time countless poor men in the countryside died mateless and childless (Betzig 1993). And these wealthy and powerful men of high status invariably left a large number of descendants. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Emperor of Morocco from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century,