If your average guy had as many children as was physically possible during his lifetime, how many kids are we talking? No use of artificial insemination and assuming the guy had a full time job and everything. Assume that every woman the guy impregnates decide to have the kid and that paying child support isnt a factor.
I heard a few months ago WNYC’s podcast Radio Lab, where they mentioned the story of looking at men’s Y chromosomes, and tracing back genetic errors, to see who’s related to who (you get your Y chromosome data strictly from your father, so ideally it should be an exact copy, but any error gets replicated onwards). In Asia and the Middle East, this one particular mutation kept showing up, and from the rate that it had changed (or whatever they do), the researchers could tell that it was about 1000 or 1200 years old.
But the problem was, a normal male, after that much time, could be expected to have about 800 male descendants. This guy, whoever he was, produced about 16 million descendants. A serious over-achiever.
Then they looked at the pattern of the locations where these men lived, and have pretty much decided that the one prolific guy was Genghis Khan himself.
Assuming good fertility and a limitless number of different women, it would be easy to have sex with 3 or 4 women a day pretty much for a whole lifetime. In any one year without birth control, 85 out of 100 of those women will get pregnant.
So (4365).85=1241 a year.
Assuming he starts at age 15 and goes to age, say…70, we’re looking at 68,255 crotch spawn.
85/100 in one year is not 85% for a single “event.”
You also have to take into account that women are not fertile 365 days a year.
The conception rate for unprotected intercourse for a woman is 85% annually - that already takes her fertility cycle into account. Of course, there’s no information on how many times most couples have sex in a year to get that number, or to know how often our hypothetical man is being put to stud with the same woman, but those are the best statistics I could come up with. Feel free to propose another way of working it out.
Don’t forget to factor in the possibility of twins, triplets etc, and if this is a managed project, we can schedule things so that the intercourse occurs as near to the moment where the women are most likely to be fertile.
CurtC You mean I could be…Genghis Chowder, ruler of all Asia if not the world.
I allus knew I was special
That’s just the theory, though. Where can I volunteer to take part in an experiment?
Ooh, good point! Now it’s just bloody impossible to predict, isn’t it? That 85% number is for all women over a year, which would include lots of coincidentally non-fertile sex, as well as women with reduced fertility and the outright infertile.
So I’d say that 68,000 is the minimum, and if we have a few hundred basal thermometers and fertility charts, we could totally take off from there. But it’s probably best we don’t let all those women co-habit, since if their cycles do line up, we’re going to have one exhausted dude on our hands for three days a month! (Yes, I know the jury is out about menstrual cycles synching up between roommates.)
Huh. I remember being told in high school social studies (history) that men were extremely expendable, reproductively speaking, and that’s why the overwhelming majority of cultures have a “protect the women and children” rule, and why military service is overwhelmingly male, historically. You only need one guy to repopulate a village in a pretty short time, if you have enough fertile women.
You got it pretty much right. Story here.
Your calculation automatically assumes that the hypothetical man is being “put to stud with the same woman” exactly once, whereas it’s a pretty good bet that most couples have sex more than once. Which is what Snarky was pointing out.
From this site, we have: “According to medical reports, the incidence of pregnancy for one-time unprotected sexual intercourse is 5%.” Since your calcultion is for a one-time event, replace your 85% with a 5%: (4365).05=73 a year, or 4015 in a lifetime.
The Guinness Book of Records, as I recall, lists some monarch who sired over 200 children by his various wives.
OK, so help me with the math, 'cause we might make this work with this info you found, but my statistics class was a long time ago…
Most women are fertile 3-5 days a month. So the chances of a woman being raped WHILE on her fertile days is about 10%, right? (30 days a month, 3 days of which are fertile - 10% chance that any one day at random is a fertile one.) And it’s just those 10% who account for all of those pregnancies. After all, no one is going to get pregnant if she’s raped on an infertile day. The other 90% of rape victims drag the pregnancy chances down to that 5%.
So…this is where I get lost again. How do we figure out the chances of a pregnancy resulting from intercourse on a fertile day? What would the percentage of rapes resulting in pregnancy if we eliminated those 90% who aren’t fertile at the time of their rape? We’ll have to assume for the moment that rapists are not disproportionately raping fertile women.
Since we’re trying to maximize our numbers, we can finagle it so that our brood mares are fertile at the time of intercourse, which means it will be higher than 5%, I just don’t know how to figure out how much higher.
We should assume that the women chose to be with him willingly because raped women get pregnant at lower rates than non-raped women due to the stresses involved in rape.
Do you have a cite for this? I’ve heard conflicting accounts as to whether it’s true.
But wouldn’t this be his full-time job?
You also have to figure that while a women can only get pregnant 3 days a month, but sperm can also live in her body for a number of days so the window is opened even further.
Realistically you could have thousands.
Where do you get the 85% likelihood of pregnancy thing? You are only really likely to get a woman pregnant when she is ovulating. Most of the time she is not ovulating. Then your sperm also has to make it to the egg and not get caught in the mucus wall of the Uterus and Felopian tubes. I don’t buy the 85% chance at all. I have had sex without condoms many times and only gotten a girl pregnant once, when I decided I was ready to have a kid with someone.