History Goes to the Cowards

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Everybody alive is descended from a coward. Somebody in every generation of your line ran, hid, ducked out, failed the draft board physical, kept his head down through somebody else's war, or married a widow whose first husband never came home. That person lived long enough to make babies, and you are the result. The heroes are in your family tree too, in the thin part of it. Descendants come from the living. A man's line continues in proportion to how long he stayed alive and in reach of a mate, and standing in front of bullets is a poor way to extend either. History books record names, battles, and last words. They do not record who actually fathered the next generation. The two lists have never matched, and the second list is the one you are standing on.

The lizards keep three kinds

Male side-blotched lizards come in three hereditary types, and Barry Sinervo and Curtis Lively worked out the game in Nature in 1996. Orange-throated males are aggressive. They hold ground, keep harems, and take females from weaker males. Blue-throated males guard one or two females closely and fight off thieves. Yellow-throated males look like females, hold no ground at all, and sneak into the orange males' harems to mate while the owner is busy fighting. The three types beat each other in a circle, like rock-paper-scissors, and the cycle has run for millions of years. No type wins for good. No type dies out.

Biologists call the yellow throat's method an alternative reproductive tactic. Bluegill sunfish have sneakers who dart in and fertilize eggs over a nest-holding male's shoulder. Young coho salmon come back early as small jacks and steal spawnings from the big fighting males. Subordinate chimpanzees take females off on consortships where the alpha cannot see. Baboon males cultivate patient friendships with females and collect paternity the troop's tyrant never audits. The barroom word for the tactic is coward. The scientific word is tactic. The animal is the same animal, and he is in every lineage that has lasted, because a species made only of fighters is one bad season from gone.

What the wars did to the breeding pool

David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford, published The Blood of the Nation in 1902 (full text). His argument: war takes a country's tallest, strongest, bravest young men and kills them, and the men the army rejected, exempted, or never reached stay home and father the next generation. Jordan was a eugenicist. His movement went on to build sterilization laws and immigration bars, and that record is ugly and belongs in any honest account of him. His observation about the draft stands separate from his program, and nobody has refuted it since. Conscription selects for exactly the traits the recruiting poster praises, and then it spends them.

France lost about 1.4 million soldiers in the First World War. Britain's 1921 census counted 19,803,022 women and 18,082,220 men in England and Wales. The newspapers called the gap the surplus two million, meaning women for whom there were no husbands left. The Second World War was worse. Elizabeth Brainerd's work in the Soviet archives puts the ratio of men to women among Russians in their twenties at .91 in 1941 and .65 in 1946. Tony Judt's Postwar counts some twenty million more women than men in the Soviet Union. Two out of three German men born in 1918 died in Hitler's war. In the Berlin suburb of Treptow in February 1946 there were 181 men for every 1,105 women aged nineteen to twenty-one.

The dead were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old. A hero who had a child at all had him in a year or two of leave and letters, and then his breeding was over, at the age when most men's is starting. The widows were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen too, and they had the rest of their lives in front of them. The rest of their lives did not stay empty. Brainerd's Russian data show the war cohorts of women marrying less, divorcing more, and having more children outside marriage. Those later children had fathers. The fathers were the men who were still there. Every child a war widow had after 1945 was fathered by a man who had not died a hero, because the heroes were unavailable for the work.

America lost about 400,000 men, a small fraction of the Soviet and European toll, and the American Baby Boom was fathered largely by the sixteen million servicemen who came home to the GI Bill and a marriage market that rewarded them. The size of the survivor's advantage tracks the size of the catastrophe. Small war, small advantage. Stalingrad, enormous advantage. It is a ratio, and ratios do not care about anybody's glory.

The second choice inherits

Put yourself in the position of a desperate second-tier man in 1913, or 1943. The best thing that can happen to you is a war. The war takes the handsome, studly, first-choice men away and kills a large share of them, and your competition goes into the ground in Flanders or Ukraine. You come home, or you never left, and you are the first choice in a world where the first choice is gone. You marry the widow or the sweetheart of a better man and you raise a family and your genes go forward and his stop at a name on a wall. Internet forums tell this as a conspiracy, a revolt of the betas arranged by elites. There is no evidence anybody arranged it. Jordan described the machinery in 1902, and the machinery runs by itself every time a country sends its best young men to be killed in batches.

I will put a speculation on the table and label it as one. I made this up, and I am sharing it with a wink. Russia and Ukraine are feeding their most willing men into the Donbas now, season after season, the same sieve Jordan described, running on both sides at once. A country that spends its heroes this way ends up governed and populated by the people who declined to go. Whether that makes the country weaker, more compliant, easier for its neighbors to dominate, I do not know. The demographic part is not speculation. The men dying there are the men least replaceable in the breeding pool, and the men replacing them in the pool are the ones who stayed.

The hero's genes travel in a survivor's house

The standard objection is kin selection. W. D. Hamilton showed that a man who dies saving his brothers still passes on his genes, because his brothers carry copies of them. Richard Dawkins built The Selfish Gene on that arithmetic. The arithmetic is correct, and it changes less than it appears to. The brothers have to survive, marry, and raise children for the dead man's genes to arrive anywhere. They often raise his children too. A hero's sacrifice reaches the future inside a living relative's household, with a living relative doing the feeding and the school fees and the forty years of showing up. There is no other route. Every lineage alive today passed through the households of people who stayed alive.

Bravery paid a mating dividend too, under the same condition. A surviving hero came home with status, and status got him a wife and often several children. The dividend was paid to the survivor. A dead man's glory got spent by his family, on his family's marriages and rations. The medal impresses the room only while the man wearing it is breathing.

The quiet substitutions

Armies are the loud sieve. Marriage has a quiet one. Researchers call it paternal discrepancy: a child whose raising father is not the biological father. Bellis and his co-authors reviewed the world's studies in 2005 and found rates between 0.8 and 30 percent, with a median of 3.7 percent. The spread depends on who got tested. Kermyt Anderson's comparative work found that among men with high confidence in their paternity, measured nonpaternity runs about 2 percent. Among men who already doubted enough to demand a test, it runs about 30 percent. Larmuseau's team matched Y-chromosomes against four centuries of Flemish family records and found extra-pair paternity of 1 to 2 percent per generation, steady since the late Middle Ages. One or two percent sounds like nothing. Compounded over twenty generations it puts a quiet substitution in roughly one patriline out of four. Most old surnames are, somewhere along their length, a social arrangement wearing a bloodline's name.

The law has always known this and has always chosen not to look. The common law presumption of legitimacy declares that a child born to a married woman is her husband's child, and the declaration closes the question. France goes the whole distance. Private paternity testing there is illegal outside a court order, punishable by a year in prison and a fine of €15,000, and the French Council of State defends the ban as preserving the peace of families. A republic looked at the test, understood exactly what it would find, and banned the test. Every legal system makes a version of that choice. A society that audited every cradle would be auditing the ground under its own house.

The current internet rumor takes the 30 percent figure, the rate among men who already doubted, and reports it as the rate for everybody. It is a copy with no original, and men who hear it price it the way they price any signal, on arrival, without an audit. The measured truth, about 2 percent among men who trust their wives, is news a marriage can absorb. The rumor tells a young man that a majority of children are not their fathers', and a man who believes that has a reason to skip marriage and children entirely. The substitution rate never emptied a nursery. The rumor about the substitution rate empties plenty. I wrote about this machinery in Nobody Believes That Story, and it runs here too.

The count

Coward is a word from the story side of the books. The census side has other words for the same men: the prudent, the exempt, the rejected, the deserter, the 4-F, the second choice who turned out to be the only choice. Your ancestors are mostly those men, and so are mine. I have written in this space about my own professional cowardice, and I meant it the way an accountant means things. The heroes got the glory and the names on the walls. The cowards got the future. Everybody you have ever met is standing in it.

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