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10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.
What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme
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Notes -
I really have to say: a man wrote this.
Won't sleep with any man who asks: frigid prude Protestant schoolmarm Will sleep with any man who asks: BDSM slave girl (Gor, I hear you calling!)
This is a male idea of female psychology. Why would women prefer death to slavery, he wonders. Well gee, could it be that being a slave in the house of your conqueror, with his legitimate wife and family over you, was a pretty shitty experience? At the best, grinding hard labour for life. At the worst, she goes all Clytemnestra on you.
Why would women go along with the idea of sacrificing themselves? Well, why do men? Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward? Why better a dead lion than a live dog? Why the idea that dying in bed in old age was the worst fate of all?
If you're soaking in the attitudes of your culture and society all your life, you'll adopt them. The pretty slave girls who didn't leap up and volunteer survived, but the status went to the girl who did. Same with the warrior.
As to the rest of it, that there was only one pretty girl per generation and all the other women were ugly, in the ritual sacrifice societies, I have to laugh at that. Oh yeah, Miss Universe is the one pretty girl who wins the contest and all the other girls are uggos. Ritual sacrifice societies also permitted or winked at giving substitutes - maybe you provided a slave, or bought a child off a poor family, instead of your own child. Maybe in time you substituted animals, or symbolic sacrifices. The Aztecs were bloody maniacs because they sincerely believed that the world would end without the shedding of blood to maintain the weakened gods and enable them to keep creation going. They weren't sacrificing people for eugenic purposes. Sure, part of the flower wars was to keep subject and tributary chieftains weakened and subordinate, but they also needed vast amounts of bodies for sacrifice. And the end result was that they made themselves so hated, when the Spanish turned up, the other tribes supported them to bring down the Aztecs.
I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.
Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.
Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.
There's a problem with your Darwinian reasoning - and it has economic resonance, such that I recall David Friedman once writing about it - which is that a single man's contribution towards victory in a line battle is so minuscule as to make no difference in the battle's result, and so would neither make for a powerful behavioral incentive, nor for a powerful influence on his ability to reproduce. Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.
I think there is some Darwinian selection going on here, but it works more like this: the cost of being a coward isn't that your tribe gets slaughtered in battle, it's that your social reputation gets ruined and your fellow tribesmen shun you.
So men are selected on the basis of whether they integrate into their tribes properly, courage being a particularly valued trait, but also conformity - whatever gets you there. Courage is perhaps more of a manifestation of behavioral traits than a trait that is selected for by itself, or perhaps it is both. In any case, I think it's more likely to be intra-tribal social selection that drives gene selection in this case than inter-tribal warfare.
Yes, this is group selection. There are good arguments that group selection's not a thing in a lot of cases. Human prehistory is probably not one of those cases; tribe extermination due to military defeat was like 10% of mortality in prehistory.
Haidt does a full defence of group selection in humans in The Righteous Mind.
Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.
Oh yeah, obviously selecting on randomly-assorted groups isn't going to get very far. But that's not super-relevant to HBD questions since human prehistory did not consist of randomly-assorted groups.
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