This is programmed:

Researchers have long shown links between father involvement and daughters’ sexual behavior, with the standard explanation attributing that influence to shared genes that impact both a father’s behavior and relationships and his child’s problem behavior, including engaging in risky sex and affiliating with delinquent peers. But a new study led by a University of Utah researcher and published online in Developmental Psychology suggests that even though genes likely play a part, they may not be the whole story. By using pairs of sisters who spent differing amounts of time living with their fathers, the study was able to control for inherited genes and environmental conditions, such as socioeconomic status or religious background, to isolate the effects of fathering quality on daughters… The study compared the outcomes of older and younger full biological sisters who experienced the divorce or separation of their parents while growing up, and thus spent differing amounts of time living with their fathers. In divorced/separated families (including those in which the parents never married), the parents stopped living together before the younger sister turned age 14. Biologically intact families provided a control group in that the sisters in these families each lived with both parents into adulthood. The age difference between sisters in each group was at least four years. The researchers theorized that in divorced/separated families, a father — and how he behaved — was likely to have exerted a stronger influence on an older daughter than a younger daughter since older daughters systematically received larger “doses” of dad’s behavior. That proved to be the case, for better or worse. The study found that older sisters with greater exposure to their fathers were strongly influenced by the quality of fathering they received. When fathering was high quality, parental monitoring was increased and older sisters were less likely to affiliate with sexually risky peers during adolescence compared to their younger sisters. The opposite effects were found for older sisters who spent many years living with a low-quality father.

First what I find amusing is these researchers already subtly assume that the r-strategy is inferior. Those who follow it are less happy and less successful, so we need to understand how to make these daughters more K-selected. Deep down, all of humanity knows r-selection is inferior – and r/K Theory is everywhere.

So to return to the study, if Dad is following an r-strategy, by taking off after mating and not investing heavily in rearing, his daughter will go r-selected as well. This is what evolution favored, and as evolution cut away that which did not work, she programmed this response into the human machine. If those humans who survived and reproduced best had been the ones where when dad took off, the daughters who best reproduced were the ones who went super-monogamous, then that is what you would see. But r/K doesn’t work that way, and evolution recognized that in writing our code.

Interestingly there was some research a while back which showed that this did not apply if a father was killed. There the researchers hypothesized that the family would establish an idealized picture of the lost father, and this would simulate the presence of the father in the children’s lives. Maybe that was the mechanism, maybe not, but however it works you can see how fine the programming of our human machine became after eons of selection. Even with as massive a stimulus as a father’s removal from the family, the machine can differentiate the subtle indicators that indicate whether the broader environment is r-selection or K-selection, and adjust our programming accordingly.

A lot of this gets lost in our human perceptions that logic, and reason, and “emotional effects” are what are running things in a sort of random fashion, unique to each individual. But more and more I see the species as a whole molded, as if by a sculptor who cut away everything that is unneeded. What was left is a perfectly programmed reproducing machine that can adapt itself to the environmental resource availability in real time. Of greatest wonder is how all of this programming can be encoded in a little string of just four alternating chemical molecules linked end to end, and further modified by the little molecules attached to them.

Of course in r/K, one of these two programmed machines enjoys pleasure by haphazardly producing a lot of whatever crap they can produce while eating resources as quickly as they can with no eye on the bigger, long-term picture. Meanwhile the other machine eschews pleasure to focus intensively on only producing small amounts of carefully crafted quality and greatness, while trying to consume resources as efficiently as possible.

r/K explains a lot about the directions our society takes.

Spread r/K Theory, because even your genes know what is going on