Need Help with Answering a Biology and Evolution-related Question for a Fictional Story?

Men play a small role in reproduction. Once they impregnate one female, they are ready to impregnate another. From an evolutionary point of view it makes sense to be able to fight off other suitors and not have much of an interest in nurturing. If you could have fetuses raised in chemical vats, then you change the evolutionary pressures on men and women.

You are creating an alien race and trying to apply terrestrial biology and evolution to it. As the saying goes, you can’t get there from here. What if there was a dormant weakness in male genes that caused them to die off at or before birth (or even slightly afterward) more frequently than females so there were less males? Not all males, obviously, but enough that it impacted the balance of male/female in the species? In a situation like that females would naturally become the hunters as well as the gatherers, the rulers, the protectors and the aggressors. Males could still do all the things they can do now, but there would be far fewer of them so they would be less likely to rise in numbers to positions of power.

If I were you, I would not want to give away my story concept in a public medium.

You’re free to invent your own rules for biology and evolution. Long, detailed explanations in your story are not necessary; they would probably not hold most readers’ attention.

Check out this Scientific American article about Bonobo Sex and Society.
The females rule the roost and have replaced acts of aggression with sex.
I imagine your mythical inhabitants might share the same characteristics and traits.

From a story perspective, I’d encourage you to be VERY CAREFUL with perfection. Perfection in fiction is boring. Flawed people are interesting and make for character growth, conflict and good stories.

One evolutionary principle to keep in mind is Kin selection. Also the reason men would go to war is because one guy can father many babies so if a bunch of men get killed in battle your tribe (i.e. the collective gene pool) is still in good shape. but if a female dies that’s a much bigger loss for the tribe in terms of creating new tribe members.

For example, if you had two tribes that each included 20 fertile men and 20 fertile women. Tribe A has the men fight for their village and tribe B has their warrior-women fight. After the battle each side loses 10 of their warriors. Now Tribe A can still make 20 babies between the 20 women and 10 surviving men, whereas tribe B can only produce 10 babies because there are only 10 fertile women for the 20 guys to impregnate. Over time, which tribe is going to survive to produce more tribe members?

@LostInParadise – How would biogenetically synthesizing living organisms in chemical vats help with solving my issue?

@seawulf575 – I’m not trying to create an alien race using our biological science. I’m trying to create a realistic alternate history in which women were subjected to different evolutionary pressures that lead them to develop in a similar manner to their male counterparts.

Your idea about a male birth defect sounds promising. Does something like that exist in real-life?

@LuckyGuy – Sooooo… if the human race was built on a monogamous foundation as opposed to a polyamorous one, my idea becomes possible? Is that what you’re getting at?

@BB8ISGREATMATE , If women no longer needed to carry their child then their role in childbirth is equivalent to that of men, and they could evolve similar characteristics.

@gorillapaws – When I say perfect, I don’t mean perfect in the sense of “This fictional character is unlikable and unrelatable because he/she is fallible”, but rather in a biological sense.

As for your point about evolution. Uhhhhhh… yeah. That’s my problem here. How do I go against evolution’s logic for making women weaker than men in a way that makes sense?

@LostInParadise – Ahhhh ok. That makes a lot more sense now. Still, I said that I didn’t wanna use technology to explain this, so while this is a great suggestion for a Sci-Fi story, I’m afraid it doesn’t really fit with MY story. Thanks so much for trying though.

@BB8ISGREATMATE “How do I go against evolution’s logic for making women weaker than men in a way that makes sense?”

You need to fabricate some mechanism that makes men more scarce than women in a pretty extreme way such that the survival of fertile males is critical for the tribe. Maybe there’s an environmental hazard. In most men’s Y chromosome there’s a gene that reacts in a fatal way (maybe it’s an element in the local water that prevents the metabolization of sugar?). There’s a rare mutation that some men have that does not include this gene.

That’s an interesting approach. Why not eliminate the comparison through afflicting the males with some contagion rendering them weaklings?