Is God a silverback?

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Protective, omnipotent, scary and very territorial. The monotheistic God is modelled on a harem-keeping alpha male

Imagine a Martian zoologist, visiting Earth and observing Homo sapiens for the first time. He, she or it would see a species of primate that differs from the others in many ways, all of them involving our complex cultural, intellectual, linguistic, symbolic and technologic lifestyles. But looking at us through a zoologist’s lens, our observer wouldn’t be especially impressed. To be sure, we have some distinctive anatomical traits (mostly hairless, bipedal, big brains, non-prognathic jaws, unimpressive teeth, and so forth) but being unique isn’t itself unique. Every species is special in its own way.

Among our catalogue of not-so-special traits would be the fact that men are on the whole larger than women: about 7 per cent taller and 15 per cent heavier, with this difference somewhat greater when it comes to muscularity. Also notable: men outnumber women when it comes to lethal violence by a factor of roughly 10:1, a differential found not only cross-culturally among adults, but even recognisable among young children (as a proclivity for violence).

Given these facts, our zoologist would strongly suspect that these humans are paradigmatic harem-holding mammals, notwithstanding the fact that, in the Western world at least, monogamy is the designated standard. In our sexual dimorphism (physical and behavioural male-female differences), we fit the normal polygynous profile for all other animal species. This profile arises as a result of sexual selection, whereby males compete with other males, and more fit males garner a payoff of enhanced reproductive success via an increased number of sexual partners.

This diagnosis of polygyny would be enhanced if the observer visited a high school: girls are physically and socially more mature than same-age boys (to the consternation of both). This pattern, known as sexual bimaturism, is also a polygyny give-away, if rather a counter-intuitive one. In order to reproduce, women undergo considerably more physiological stress than do men; they must nourish an embryo in utero, give birth and then lactate. By contrast, men need only produce a few cubic centimetres of semen. One might expect that males would mature sexually earlier than females since so much less is required of them, but this is not the case. In polygynous species, males must participate in fierce same-sex competition if they are to reproduce at all. Woe betide a male who enters the reproductive arena when too young, small, weak and inexperienced. Just as the degree of sexual dimorphism maps very closely upon the degree of polygyny (average harem size) in a species, the extent of sexual bimaturism is also strongly correlated with the extent to which males compete with each other for access to females. Humans fall into the moderate polygynous part of that spectrum.

Read more: https://aeon.co/essays/how-monotheists-modelled-god-on-a-harem-keeping-alpha-male?