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Parenting Rewires the Male Brain
sciencehabit writes: "Cultures around the world have long assumed that women are hardwired to be mothers. But a new study (abstract) suggests that caring for children awakens a parenting network in the brain—even turning on some of the same circuits in men as it does in women. The research implies that the neural underpinnings of the so-called maternal instinct aren't unique to women, or activated solely by hormones, but can be developed by anyone who chooses to be a parent."
Well to be sure accumulation of assets was a big deal, but there are people who posit other, not necessarily mutually exclusive, reasons that farming societies invented the concept of chastity outside of marriage. One compelling argument is that they used it as a form of birth control.
From what evidence we have we can see that starvation was relatively rare in hunter-gather societies, but it was really common in farming communities, especially when there were more mouths to feed than the land could support. The lords needed some way to make sure that the population couldn't rise above what the land was able to support, so they used marriage, especially church-sanctioned marriage, as a way to control the peasant population. According to Dr. Wyman only 40% of people in medieval Europe were married(Sorry for the zip, lecture #9 is the one that lists this info if you are interested, fascinating course overall). The landlords simply controlled the church who in turn controlled marriage. Civilizations have been using marriage, and the taboos of sex outside marriage, to control population for eons.
Monstar L
I had the luck of finding a husband who cared about me keeping my job. That meant sharing of the parental duties, except the obvious ones like breastfeeding. I noticed that not only his parental instinct was at least as developed as mine -- and getting better with each subsequent child, but also that he is more comfortable than me in this parenthood thing. The reasons being:
1 - he's more sure of himself than I am, because society taught him to.
2 - he gets less hen-pecking and judging that I do. With our first-born, family would let me know that I "was doing wrong", and I'd believe it (see number one). But a caring father is like a super-hero here and does not get that much crap. And also can find better company (but that's just here where I live I guess as I heard horrible things from other dads). Also random people compliment him for being so involved with our kids.
3 - he can lift 2 kids at the same time
Just remember time discounting and the generally shoddy statistical intuitions of humans: While I don't doubt that your assessment is correct (I don't have the data, you do, and in any case I'm willing to agree for sake of argument), you have the sex first, sometimes even without consequence(I forget the exact stats; but some combination of failure to fertilize and early-stage spontaneous abortion keep even unprotected sex during fertile periods from leading to recognizable pregnancy 100% of the time, and the odds fall further in lower fertility periods) and then have to deal with kiddo later.
Given that humans tend to markedly discount future costs, and do basically every horrible thing imaginable to statistical judgements, it may well be simultaneously true that your assessment of overall cost over time is correct and laziness(in combination with poor assessment of risk-discounted future costs, and/or short term lapses in judgement caused by the relative attractiveness of futzing with a condom or hot animalistic fucking) leads people to keep having kids where a less-lazy approach would more rigorously apply preventative measures.