There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.
Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
The word around the home office was that Guojun wanted to have as many children as possible to increase the odds of one of them becoming the President of the United States. In addition to Jefferson, several of his kids were named after former U.S. Presidents—a mix of Democrats and Republicans—or prominent foreign leaders. Song told me that, if Guojun had been born in the U.S., he might have wanted to run for President himself.
…If anything, the trafficking rumors seemed to distract from the uncomfortable fact that Guojun’s industrialized approach to family-making was perfectly legal—and, among well-heeled élites, increasingly popular. In the United States, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has sired at least fourteen children with four different women; “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he reportedly texted one of the women, “we will need to use surrogates.” Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of the messaging platform Telegram, who has described the propagation of his genes as a “civic duty,” has conceived six children naturally, fathered more than a hundred through sperm donations, and drafted plans to grant all of them access to his multibillion-dollar fortune. In China, the video-game billionaire Xu Bo recently issued a statement, in response to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, saying that he has conceived more than a hundred children through surrogacies, with twelve of them carried out in the U.S.
We know that there are men who have casual sex with many women and do not care if they leave behind a trail of many fatherless children in their wake. But there is something really weird about men who deliberately set about a planned program of fathering as many children as they can. Some of them may provide financially for them but they do not seem to be driven by normal paternal feelings. There is clearly something else going on.
While Khan undoubtedly had many children through his wive, mistresses, and rape victims, one should not be too impressed by the number of his descendants since simple geometric progression means that anyone who lived at that time had a good chance of having a lot of descendants now because of simple geometric progression. For example, if someone had two children, and they each had two children, then in two generations there would be four descendants. If that pattern continues, then in N generations, there would be 2N descendants. So in ten generations, there would be 1,024 descendants and in 20 generations there would be about one million descendants. If you wanted to get a head start, like these people seem to want to do, and had 32 children of your own, then it would only reduce the number of generations required to reach those big numbers by five, hardly worth the effort.
There are more sophisticated calculations of ancestry that I discussed earlier in a series of posts back in 2006 (see here, here, here, and here). I argue that there is an 80% chance that I am a descendant of the Egyptian pharaoh Narmer, who lived around 3100 BCE. But so is everyone else who is alive now., so I am not special. However, you can use that little bit of information to impress your friends at parties, provided they do not understand how geometric progression works.
A lot of Christian fundamentalists also have massively huge families, like the infamous Duggars who only stopped breeding when the wife’s body started miscarrying and giving birth too early, but there’s a whole bunch of those families--many of whom had their own tv shows on TLC and other sensationalist channels. As we know Papa Duggar was also not very concerned with the welfare of the children he kept creating, notably more interested in covering up the fact that the oldest son was molesting his own sisters plus a variety of unpaid babysitters.
Also, great trivia bit about being a likely descendant of Pharoh Narmer. That’s something fun to casually drop at a gathering (LOL).
I would naively assume people who are that obsessed about having more offspring would also be concerned about keeping the Earth a habitable place for their descendants. Knocking out Earth’s life-support systems one by one and threatening humanity with extinction would seem to counter that goal.
But then I remember they’re selfish assholes. They want to have the last word in a childish argument, even if in the end no one can remember what that argument was or even the context in which it happened.
@1 Katydid
For Christianity it’s a little more immediately existential. The numbers are going down, and Christians know they can’t convince enough people to convert. It is critical for the survival of their moldy old world religion that they outpopulate and indoctrinate instead.
There have been cases of fertility doctors fertilising clients eggs with their own sperm, rather than with the mother’s partners sperm. The idea that so many of these men have that their off-spring will co-operate with the father’s desires -- Guojun’s ‘future USA President’, Musk’s ‘legion’ -- always amuses me, it merely proves how little they know about children and how individual they are from the very start.
As discussed above, for some it is pure male conceit and vanity, wanting to propagate their own superior genes. That the progeny are ill-cared for and not as likely to live to grow up is less important than the seed-sowing.
For white US billionaires (lookin’ at you, Musk) and many christians, it is preservation of the superior white race (we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.) Musk openly thinks that, to deal with the challenges and tech of the future, the intelligence of the ruling class must remain high, and so they must be white.
Surprise, surprise, there’s a big overlap here with the Epstein set: The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science
[Emphasis original]
This also overlaps with some of the stuff PZ’s been posting about Brockman and the people he cultivated.
There is a Netflix documentary, “The Man with 1000 Kids” about a Dutch sperm donour who (rarher recently) fathered many hundreds of kids world-wide (but many of them in the Netherlands, with some of them unkowingly in the same neighbourhoods). If you are interested I recommend you watch the docu, I think it is very good and gives a lot of space to the victims. If you do not want to watch the whole docu but are interested, there is also a Wikipedia article about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Jacob_Meijer
The whole story is fascinating but also quite grim.
There is a frog species where the male frog swims around with the fertilised eggs embedded in its back. This is a solution that would discourage reckless propagation (imagines Elon Musk stumbling around with a dozen embryos growing out of his back).
Can’t recall where, but I read someplace that some subset of Chinese emperors systematically set about propagating prolifically, such that they not only had large harems but also a crew of doctors to track periods and calculate which uteri were most likely to make full use of the imperial semen (astrologers helped out, I feel sure).
This supposedly got to the point where some emperors complained of their heavy fertilization schedules; no doubt lots of courtiers had ample incentive to remind them they owed it to Heaven to propagate their ancestral seed, rather than to, say, bother with details of the palace treasury.
Such a system seems unlikely to last for long: even the relatively monogamous dynasties of Eurasia suffered from too-many-heirs-fighting-over-the-throne syndrome, and just maintaining the royal cousins in style befitting their rank reportedly costs (e.g.) Saudi Arabia a pretty penny. (The Ottoman Turks had a fix for that: most new Sultans, on taking the crown, immediately had all their brothers executed.)
If those billionaires had any brain cells, they should invest heavily into research of successfully cloning primates, so far a *big* hurdle no one has solved.
Also, they should have stem cells taken from their bodies and stored in frozen nitrogen while waiting for a scientific breakthrough that will make a ‘The Boys From Brazil’ scenario feasible.