Lab-Made Babies Won't Solve the Fertility Crisis

The manosphere is full of distortions and caricatures about the science of evolutionary psychology: alpha males who dominate sexual activity, enabled by online dating apps; women whose sole interest in men is their capacity to provide financially; men whose only interest is in large numbers of very young sexual partners; women who marry men as providers (betas) but then have affairs with alpha males, and so on. 

Alas, sometimes, evolutionary psychologists themselves seem to actively enable these caricatures. A recent paper by Mads Larsen and colleagues published in Politics and the Life Sciences illustrates this tendency. While the authors make some valid points about sex differences, their psychological understanding needs to be supplemented with knowledge of the current empirical realities of marriage and the family in rich developed countries.

Individualistic Reproduction

Larsen and colleagues argue that extremely low fertility rates in developed societies—despite women’s continued desire for children—are due to the interaction of women’s economic empowerment, the availability of effective contraception, and evolved sex differences in mate preferences. These factors in combination have increased the tendency of women to reject the least desirable men as long-term mates, leaving many women (and men) unable to find a long-term partner. 

The authors further suggest that dating apps exacerbate this dynamic: a small number of attractive men receive disproportionate attention, while many women are inundated with offers from men they find undesirable. At the same time, dating apps enable the most attractive men to “play the field” and not commit to the women they date. Reliable contraception facilitates both men and women following short-term mating strategies, which leaves many without a committed long-term partnership. Because women can now support themselves and their children independently—through either their own earnings or welfare provisions—the need for male parental investment has declined, further incentivizing women to follow a short-term mating strategy where they seek the most attractive male partners with “good genes” rather than male partners who would be reliable long-term providers. 

Their rather startling conclusion is that the best way to increase fertility rates in modern societies is to facilitate childbearing outside of long-term partnerships. They write: 

If post-pair bonding nations like Norway are to significantly raise their fertility rate, we believe politicians must be far bolder and more innovative, and consider preparing for the future by funding limited experiments to boost - and learn what is required to motivate - single parenthood.

They propose policies such as expanded support for single parents, round-the-clock child care for women, and Brave New World-type solutions such as “state sponsored surrogacy for single men who want to become fathers” and “artificial wombs” to allow childless men to have children without female help.

What the Authors Get Right

At the core of Larsen and colleagues’ argument is that there are sex differences in mate preferences, a point which has merit. The finding that women are choosier about partners than men, on average, is well documented in the evolutionary psychology literature. The reason for this is that female fixed biological costs in pregnancy, childbearing, and child raising are much greater than male fixed biological costs. Because of this sex difference, over time, women who were careful about choosing their mates—by choosing men who were both willing and able to parent their children—were more likely to have surviving offspring, leading to greater choosiness and a preference for reliable providers. Additionally, their argument that the economic empowerment of women in developed countries is making it more difficult for low-status men to find long-term mates also has some validity. 

The empirical evidence shows that most men and women today still find each other useful as long-term mates, and those who are successful at keeping a mate are the most likely to have children.

What the Authors Get Wrong

Beyond these points, however, the authors’ argument falters—largely because it overlooks contemporary sociological realities.

First, in all developed societies today, it is the highest-status men with the most financial resources who are most likely to marry and have children, and the least likely to divorce. This research on data from the U.S. shows that men in the highest income category are about 57 percentage points more likely to ever marry than men in the lowest income category, and about 37 percentage points less likely to divorce. Moreover, contrary to the manosphere claim that such men are merely income-providing “betas” whom women settle for while pursuing affairs with “high genetic quality alphas,” data from online dating sites show that it is highly educated, high-income men who attract the most attention from women, and thus presumably would be best able to follow a short-term mating strategy if they chose to do so. If dating apps truly created unlimited opportunities for high-status men to avoid commitment, as some authors suggest, these men should be the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce. In fact, the opposite is true. The strategy of maximizing the number of sexual partners appears to characterize only a relatively small and atypical minority of men. Further, this evidence also suggests that women are using dating apps primarily to pursue long-term, reliable mates, and are not switching to pursuing short-term mates to the extent Larsen and colleagues argue.

Similarly, it is now the highest income young women with the most access to resources who are most likely to marry and have children (and they tend to marry high-income men). Assortative long-term mating is well-established, and the trend has become more pronounced in the last 50 years. By the authors’ logic, women with their own resources should be least likely to marry and stay married because they would be best able to live independently, but this is not what we see.

Second, declining fertility and marriage rates cannot be attributed to women’s empowerment alone, a point that Larsen and his coauthors themselves acknowledge. Other factors—including rising housing costs, cultural shifts, and widening educational gaps between men and women—play substantial roles. Public policy matters as well. For example, in Sweden as documented by Martin Kolk, the transfers to women who have children enable them to take family leave and stay home to care for their kids. It does not enable women to work more hours, as women with the most children work the least hours over the course of their lifetimes. High-status women are more likely to marry and have children, but this is largely because they enter motherhood with stable, high-status careers they can retain after having children, thanks to generous parental leave policies. This is government subsidization of female employment, which leads to more women working than would otherwise be the case. At the same time, these benefits in practice tend to advantage higher-status couples, effectively redistributing resources upward and likely exacerbating the difficulties lower-status men and women face in forming stable unions. 

Female selectivity and unequal mating outcomes for lower-status males are not novel phenomena but longstanding features of human societies.

Third, there is little evidence that one of their proposals for low fertility—“more generous support to women wanting to solo parent”—would be effective at raising fertility rates. Even in societies where state support for single parents is most generous, such as in contemporary Scandinavian countries, lower-status women are more likely to forgo childbearing altogether than to have children outside stable partnerships. If women generally favored raising children independently with genetically “desirable” partners, such patterns would be unlikely to emerge. 

Further, the promotion of single parenthood is a poor solution to low fertility because substantial evidence shows that stable, two-biological-parent families provide the best outcomes for children on average, including lower mortality, higher educational attainment, and greater adult earnings. 

Finally, Larsen and colleagues’ historical argument is also problematic. They suggest that arranged marriages in pre-industrial societies mitigated mismatches in mate preferences by overriding female choice. However, arranged marriage is primarily associated with agricultural societies, a relatively recent phase in human history. For the vast majority of human evolutionary history, both men and women likely exercised choice in selecting partners. Indeed, the very existence of female choosiness implies that women historically had the agency to select mates; without such agency, there would have been no basis for this trait to be selected. Female selectivity and unequal mating outcomes for lower-status males are not novel phenomena but longstanding features of human societies.

Men and Women Still Need Each Other

Thus, although sex differences in the choice of partners is a psychological reality, and women’s economic empowerment likely has promoted less marriage and lower fertility than in previous eras, Larsen and colleagues’ scenario of men and women pursuing short-term mating strategies as the primary reason for extremely low fertility overlooks the realities of marriage and parenthood in most developed societies. In fact, it is the men and women who are best able to pursue a short-term mating strategy and live independently without a long-term partner who are most likely to marry and have children.

The empirical evidence shows that most men and women today still find each other useful as long-term mates, and those who are successful at finding and keeping one are the most likely to have children who will be successful. The increased individualization of reproduction that the authors recommend is an unwelcome dystopian solution that is unlikely to be successful at improving reproductive outcomes at either the individual or societal level.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).

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