And yet study after study, not only in humans but in many animals describe the female sex to be the choosy one and the males to heavily compete (even in mortal combat) for a chance for sex.

And yeah we are not antelopes, we are big apes.

>We are not antelopes

On the internet, nobody knows you're a gnu.

You’re right that there are multiple factors, but you also can’t discount the role of phenotypic brain “firmware”.

Yes, science reveals inconvenient truths. It tells us that we’re responsible for climate change, and it also tells us that our brains come pre-loaded with a wealth of routines shaped by millennia of evolution.

Can’t just accept some results and pretend others aren’t also well-supported. Well-supported scientific findings are what they are.

Societal factors do exist, but are often overstated or don’t bear a scientific foundation. A lot of social sciences have done real harm to scientific progress and the field of evolutionary psychology.

Birth control and women's rights, and marrying for love[1] are fairly new (within the last 20-100 yrs) and limited to a handful of countries.

We just don't have data on how humans behave when such huge reprodutive variables change. Seeing how a single generation responds isn't a long enough time period, because children accumulate the social norms of their parents.

1. https://www.livescience.com/37777-history-of-marriage.html

We do have data on this. In the modern educated industrialised environment intelligence reduces fertility.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...

> How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited — With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren

> Using newly available polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive ability, this paper investigates the possible presence and causes of a negative association between IQ and fertility in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study sample, an issue that Retherford and Sewell first addressed 30 years ago. The effect of the polygenic score on the sample’s reproductive characteristics was indirect: a latent cognitive ability measure, comprised of both educational attainment and IQ, wholly mediated the relationship. Age at first birth mediated the negative effect of cognitive ability on sample fertility, which had a direct (positive) effect on the number of grandchildren. Significantly greater impacts of cognitive ability on the sample’s fertility characteristics were found among the female subsample. This indicates that, in this sample, having a genetic disposition toward higher cognitive ability does not directly reduce number of offspring; instead, higher cognitive ability is a risk factor for prolonging reproductive debut, which, especially for women, reduces the fertility window and, thus, the number of children and grandchildren that can be produced. By estimating the effect of the sample’s reproductive characteristics on the strength of polygenic selection, it was found that the genetic variance component of IQ should be declining at a rate between −.208 (95% CI [−.020, −.383]) and −.424 (95% CI [−.041, −.766]) points per decade, depending on whether GCTA-GREML or classical behavior genetic estimates of IQ heritability are used to correct for ‘missing’ heritability.

This whole thread is about mate selection, not child production

I don't really know about antelopes, but the human side is well documented on multiple fronts. Women have to be much more selective than men, just because they are biologically aren't capable of having as many babies as men.

Also you can just try a dating site using an average looking man and average looking woman and get similar results to this experiment:

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...