We visited my brother in law, David Blunt, at his fire station in National City, CA. Very proud of him.
Casey Jacobsen Comes From A Male Dominated Family, Has Above Average Physical Attractiveness, And Has Fairly High Status, But His Unattractive Wife Has Only Given Birth To Girls. I Wonder Why? because Males From Male Dominated Families Who Have High Status Tend To Have Male Sons (Male Descendants That Can Inherit Their Status And Wealth And Thus Achieve Greater Reproductive Success). However, Something Is Offsetting This Tendency. Maybe It's Casey's Above Average Looks Combined With The Couple's Meager Income. I Don't Know, But Read Below!
What a joke.
"For billionaire fathers, the odds of having a boy are 65%... in favorable conditions, such as where the parents were high status or food was abundant...parents produce more sons. But in less favorable conditions...parents produce more daughters"
...the generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH) leads to the prediction that physically more attractive parents are more likely to have daughters than physically less attractive parents. The gTWH proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success more than the male reproductive success are more likely to have daughters. Physical attractiveness, while advantageous for both boys and girls, is even more beneficial for girls than for boys. Men prefer beautiful women for both long-term and short-term mating, whereas women prefer handsome men only for short-term mating (casual affairs and one-night stands), not for long-term mating, for which other traits, such as wealth and status, become more important. Thus the gTWH predicts that physically more attractive parents are more likely to have daughters than physically less attractive parents...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200902/boy-or-girl-what-determines-the-sex-your-child-i
The hypothesis states that wealthy parents of high status have more sons, while poor parents of low status have more daughters. This is because children generally inherit the wealth and social status of their parents. Sons from wealthy families, who themselves become wealthy, have, throughout most of evolutionary history, been able to expect to have a large number of wives, mistresses, and concubines, and produce dozens or hundreds of children, whereas their equally wealthy sisters can have only so many children. So wealthy parents should “bet” on sons rather than daughters.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200902/boy-or-girl-what-determines-the-sex-your-child-ii
The idea behind the new hypothesis is the same as that behind the old one, but it extends the idea to many other factors besides the family’s wealth and status. The new hypothesis suggests that if parents have any trait they can pass on to their children that is better for sons than for daughters, then they will have more boys. Conversely, if parents have any trait they can pass on to their children that is better for daughters than for sons, then they will have more girls. Parental wealth and status are just two of the traits they can pass on to their children that are more beneficial for sons than for daughters, but there are many other factors.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200902/boy-or-girl-what-determines-the-sex-your-child-iii
Beautiful women have greater mating success than less attractive women, and handsome men do better than less attractive men. But beautiful men and beautiful women tend to do “better” in slightly different ways.
Physically attractive women tend to do well both in long-term and short-term mating; men prefer beautiful women for both. In contrast, handsome men tend to do well mostly in short-term mating. Women seek out handsome men for short-term mating (possibly to get good genes for their children by being impregnated by them but then passing the resulting offspring off as that of their unsuspecting husband) but not necessarily for long-term mating, for which other qualities like the man’s resources and status become more important. In fact, as I explain in a previous series of posts (Why handsome men make bad husbands Part I, II), physically attractive men may not make desirable long-term mates, precisely because other women seek them out for their short-term mating and thus attractive men are less committed to their long-term mates. So physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women’s reproductive success than to men’s. The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200902/boy-or-girl-what-determines-the-sex-your-child-iv
While men in general are more unrestricted in sociosexuality than women, within-sex variance in sociosexual orientation is much larger than between-sex variance. Due to the sexual asymmetry in reproductive biology, unrestricted sociosexual orientation could potentially and dramatically increase men’s reproductive success, while it is likely to decrease women’s. Men with unrestricted sociosexual orientation can impregnate a large number of women simultaneously, and, even without male parental investment, some of the resultant children are likely to survive to sexual maturity. In contrast, women with unrestricted sociosexual orientations can have no more children than their restricted counterparts with one regular sex partner, and are unlikely successfully to secure male parental investment from the fathers of their children because none of the men can be reasonably sure of their paternity.
BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, MALES INHERIT WEALTH AND ESPECIALLY STATUS FROM THEIR FATHERS (WELL, THAT IS MALES WHO HAVE FATHERS, SO MOST OF YOU BLACKS ARE EXCLUDED FROM THIS INHERITANCE*). READ BELOW (IT DIRECTLY APPLIES TO YOUR LIVES).
"My Grannie Died She Ain't Leave Nuttin'...My Daddy Died Nigga Fuck 'im!" - Nic Witta Cannon Left To Fend For Himself!
Favored The Son! They're A Poor Family And Typically Poor Families Have More Daughters And Favor Daughters, But This Poor Family Favored The Son. The Caption In The Picture Above This Picture May Explain Y!
This has a curious consequence. It means that the most successful thing a man or a woman can do is beget a legitimate heir to a wealthy man. Logic such as this suggests that philanderers should not be indiscriminate. They should seduce the women with the best genes and also the women with the best husbands, who therefore have the potential to produce the most prolific sons. In medieval times this was raised to an art. The cuckolding of heiresses and the wives of great lords was considered the highest form of courtly love. Jousting was little more than a way for potential philanderers to impress great ladies. As Erasmus Darwin put it:
Contending boars with tusks enamel'd strike,
And guard with shoulder shield the blow oblique;
While female bands attend in mute surprise,
And view the victor with admiring eyes.
So Knight on Knight, recorded in romance,
Urged the proud steed, and couch'd the extended lance;
He, whose dread prowess with resistless force,
Bless'd, as the golden guerdon of his toils,
Bow'd to the Beauty, and receiv'd her smiles.
At a time when the legitimate eldest son of a great lord would inherit not only his father's wealth but also his polygamy, the cuckolding of such lords was sport indeed. Tristan expected to inherit the kingdom of his uncle, King Mark, in Cornwall. While in Ireland he ignored the attentions of the beautiful Isolde until she was summoned by King Mark to be his wife. Panic-struck at the thought of losing his inheritance but determined to save it at least for his son, he suddenly took an enormous interest in Isolde. Or at least so Laura Betzig retells the old story.
Betzig's analysis of medieval history includes the idea that the begetting of wealthy heirs was the principal cause of Church-state controversies. A series of connected events occurred in the tenth century or thereabouts. The power of kings declined and the power of local feudal lords increased. As a consequence, noblemen gradually became more concerned with producing legitimate heirs to succeed to their titles, as the seigneurial system of primogeniture was established. They divorced barren wives and left all to the firstborn son. Meanwhile, resurgent Christianity conquered its rivals to become the dominant religion of northern Europe. The early Church was obsessively interested in matters of marriage, divorce, polygamy, adultery, and incest. Moreover, in the tenth century the Church began to recruit its monks and priests from among the aristocracy.
The Church's obsessions with sexual matters were very different from St. Paul's. It had little to say about polygamy or the begetting of many bastards, although both were commonplace and against doctrine. Instead, it concentrated on three things: first, divorce, remarriage, and adoption; second, wet nursing, and sex during periods when the liturgy demanded abstinence; and third,"incest" between people married to within seven canonical degrees. In all three cases the Church seems to have been trying to prevent lords from siring legitimate heirs. If a man obeyed the doctrines of the Church in the year 1100, he could not divorce a barren wife, he certainly could not remarry while she lived, and he could not adopt an heir. His wife could not give her baby daughter to a wet nurse and be ready to bear another in the hope of its being a son, and he could not make love to his wife "for three weeks at Easter, four weeks at Christmas, and one to seven weeks at Pentecost; plus Sun-days,Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—days for penance or sermons; plus miscellaneous feast days." He also could not bear a legitimate heir by any woman closer than a seventh cousin—which excluded most noble women within three hundred miles. It all adds up to a sustained attack by the Church on the siring of heirs, and "it was not until the Church started to fill up with the younger brothers of men of state that the struggle over inheritance—over marriage—between them began." Individuals in the Church (disinherited younger sons) were manipulating sexual mores to increase the Church's own wealth or even regain property and titles for themselves. Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, following his break with Rome, which followed Rome's disapproval of his divorcing the son less Catherine of Aragon, is a sort of parable for the whole history of Church-state relations.
Indeed, the Church-state controversy was just one of many historical instances of wealth-concentration disputes. The practice of primogeniture was a good way to keep wealth—and its polygamy potential—intact through the generations. But there were other ways, too. First among them was marriage itself. Marrying an heiress was always the quickest way to wealth. Of course, strategic marriage and primogeniture work against each other. If women inherit no wealth, then there is nothing to be gained from marrying a rich man's daughter. Among the royal dynasties of Europe, though, in most of which women could inherit thrones (in default of male heirs), eligible marriages were often possible. Eleanor of Aquitaine brought Britain's kings a large chunk of France. The War of the Spanish Succession was fought solely to prevent a French king from inheriting the throne of Spain as the result of a strategic marriage. Right down to the Edwardian practice of English aristocrats marrying the daughters of American robber barons, the alliances of great families have been a force to concentrate wealth.
Another way, practiced commonly among slave-owning dynasties in the American South, was to keep marriage within the family. Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has shown how in such families more often than not men married their first cousins. By tracing the genealogies of four southern families, she found that fully half of all marriages involved kin or sister exchange (two brothers marrying two sisters). By contrast, in northern families at the same time, only 6 percent of marriages involved kin. What makes this result especially intriguing is that Thornhill had predicted it before she found it. Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in parallel.
Thornhill went on to argue that just as some people have an incentive to use marriage to concentrate wealth, so other people have an incentive to prevent them from doing exactly that. And kings, in particular, have both the incentive and the power to achieve their wishes. This explains an otherwise puzzling fact that prohibitions on "incestuous" marriages between cousins are fierce and numerous in some societies and absent in others. In every case it is the more highly stratified society that most regulates marriage. Among the Trumai of Brazil, an egalitarian people, marriage between cousins is merely frowned upon. Among the Maasai of East Africa who have considerable disparities of wealth, such marriage is punished with "a severe flogging." Among the Inca people, anybody having the temerity to marry a female relative (widely defined) had his eyes gouged out and was cut into quarters. The emperor was, of course, an exception. His queen was his full sister, and Pachacuti began a tradition of marrying all his half sisters as well. Thornhill concludes that these rules had nothing to do with incest but were all about rulers trying to prevent wealth concentration by families other than their own; they usually excepted themselves from such laws.
This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation. For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end. No other currency counts in natural selection.
When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat, we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings. People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money or power or security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs. But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are. Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.
David Schmitt Retweeted
Parents were more likely than their daughters to choose an unattractive, but wealthy mate for the daughters, but they also tended to shy away from a wealthy plus attractive mate. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bjop.12319 …
Why? because The Wealthy, Attractive Male Will Have More Mating Opportunities With More Females And Thus A Greater Likelihood Of Deserting The Daughter (The Daughter He Married). I Just Repeated The Last Sentence In The Passage Above!
There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male-hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men's wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbor's wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes,the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, plows and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.
Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much. Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man. It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard. Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes.
Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Ridley, p. 239-244
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200909/the-scientific-fundamentalist-chip-the-best-block
In the course of the neo-Darwinian revolution of the 1960s and1970s, Britain and America each produced a grand old revolutionary whose intellectual dominance remains secure to this day. John Maynard Smith and George Williams, respectively. But each country also produced a brilliant young Turk whose precocious intellect exploded on the world of biology like a flare. Britain's prodigy was Bill Hamilton, whom we have already met. America's was Robert Trivers, who as a Harvard student in the early 1970s conceived a whole raft of new ideas that proved far ahead of his time. Trivers is a legend in biology, as he is the first ingenuously to confirm. Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, he divides his time between watching lizards in Jamaica and thinking in a redwood grove near Santa Cruz, California. One of his most provocative ideas, conceived jointly with fellow student Dan Willard in 1973, may hold the key to understanding one of the most potent and yet simple questions a human being ever asks: "Is it a boy or a girl?"'
If you include Barbara and Jenna Bush, daughters of the forty-third president of the United States, it is a curious statistical fact that all the presidents have between them had ninety sons and only sixty-three daughters. A sex ratio of 60 percent male in such a large sample is markedly different from the population at large, though how it came about nobody can guess—probably by pure chance. Yet presidents are not alone. Royalty, aristocrats, and even well-off American settlers have all consistently produced slightly more sons than daughters. So do well-fed opossums, hamsters, coypus, and high-ranking spider monkeys. The Trivers-Willard theory links these diverse facts.
Kobe Bryant Vanessa and I are beyond excited to welcome our 3rd baby girl, Bianka!! For some reason we can only have girls!
Kobe Is A Wealthy Black Male (A Rich Nigga) With High Status And Males With Wealth And The Accompanying High Status Tend To Father Males (Their Female Mates Tend To Give Birth To Boys) Because They (The Wealthy Males) Typically Have Higher Testosterone Levels Due To Their Higher Status And Thus Influence Their Female Mates To Acquire Higher Testosterone As Well, But This Doesn't Seem To Be The Case With Kobe. Something About His Genes Or His Wife's Genes Are Counteracting (Offsetting) This Higher Testosterone Of His Leading His Wife To Give Birth To Females. Maybe It's Her Above Average Level Of Attractiveness.
Males That Attract A Lot Of Women And Have SEX With Them Tend To Produce More Male Offspring Who Inherit This Attractiveness Trait (This Trait Which Leads To Greater Reproductive Success), But Again, Something About Kobe Or His Wife Is Counteracting This Genetic Tendency (The Genetic Tendency For An Attractive Male Like Kobe To Have Male Offspring) Because The Couple Has Only Had Girls. I Wonder What That Something Is.
Trivers
and Willard realized that the same general principle of sex allocation,
which determines the gender of nematodes and fish, applies even to
those creatures that cannot change sex but that take care of their
young. They predicted that animals would be found to have some
systematic control over the sex ratio of their own young. Think of it as
a competition to have the most grand-children. If males are polygamous,
a successful son can give you far more grandchildren than a successful
daughter, and an unsuccessful son will do far worse than an unsuccessful
daughter because he will fail to win any mates at all. A son is a
high-risk, high-reward reproductive option compared with a daughter. A
mother in good condition gives her offspring a good start in life,
increasing the chances of her sons' winning harems as they mature. A
mother in poor condition is likely to produce a feeble son who will fail
to mate at all, whereas her daughters can join harems and reproduce
even when not in top condition. So you should have sons if you have
reason to think they will do well and daughters if you have reason to
think they will do poorly—relative to others in the population.Males That Attract A Lot Of Women And Have SEX With Them Tend To Produce More Male Offspring Who Inherit This Attractiveness Trait (This Trait Which Leads To Greater Reproductive Success), But Again, Something About Kobe Or His Wife Is Counteracting This Genetic Tendency (The Genetic Tendency For An Attractive Male Like Kobe To Have Male Offspring) Because The Couple Has Only Had Girls. I Wonder What That Something Is.
P. D. Mangan Therefore, said Trivers and Willard, especially in polygamous animals, parents in good condition probably have male-biased litters of young; parents in poor condition probably have female-biased litters. Initially this was scoffed at as farfetched conjecture, but gradually it has received grudging respect and empirical support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxHtSYORIEw
UFM.edu - Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior
UFM.edu - Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior
2:32 - 5:55
Consider the case of the Venezuelan opossum, a marsupial that looks like a large rat and lives in burrows. Steven Austad and Mel Sunquist of Harvard were intent on disproving the Trivers-Willard theory. They trapped and marked forty virgin female opossums in their burrows in Venezuela. Then they fed 125 grams of sardines to each of twenty opossums every two days by leaving the sardines outside the burrows, no doubt to the delight and astonishment of the opossums. Every month thereafter they trapped the animals again, opened their pouches, and sexed their babies. Among the 256 young belonging to the mothers who had not been fed sardines, the ratio of males to females was exactly one to one. Among the 270 from mothers who had been fed sardines, the sex ratio was nearly 1.4 to 1. Well-fed opossums are significantly more likely to have sons than poorly fed ones.
The reason? The well-fed opossums had bigger babies; bigger males were much more likely to win a harem of females in later life than smaller males. Bigger females were not much more likely to have more babies than small females. Hence, the mother opossums were investing in the gender most likely to reward them with many grandchildren.
Opossums are not alone. Hamsters reared in the laboratory can be made to have female-biased litters by keeping them hungry during adolescence or pregnancy. Among coypus (large aquatic rodents), females in good condition give birth to male-biased litters; those in poor condition give birth to female-biased litters. In white-tailed deer, older mothers or yearlings in poor condition have female fawns more often than by chance alone. So do rats kept in conditions of stress. But in many ungulates (hoofed animals), stress or poor habitat has the opposite effect, inducing a male-biased sex ratio.
Some of these effects can be easily explained by rival theories. Because males are often bigger than females, male embryos generally grow faster and are more of a strain on the mother. Therefore, it pays a hungry hamster or a weak deer to miscarry a male-biased litter and retain a female-biased one. Moreover, proving biased sex ratios at birth is not easy, and there have been so many negative results that some scientists maintain the positive ones are merely statistical flukes. (If you toss a coin long enough, sooner or later you will get twenty heads in a row.) But neither explanation can address the opossum study and others like it. By the late 1980s many biologists were convinced that Trivers and Willard were right at least some of the time.The most intriguing results, however, were those that concerned social status. Tim Clutton-Brock of Cambridge University studied red deer on the island of Rhum off the Scottish coast. He found that the mother's condition had little effect on the gender of her calves, but her rank within the social group did have an effect. Dominant females were slightly more likely to have sons than daughters.
Clutton-Brock's results alerted primatologists,who had long suspected biased sex ratios in various species of monkey. In the Peruvian spider monkeys studied by Meg Symington, there was a clear association between rank and gender of offspring. Of twenty-one offspring born to lowest-ranked females, twenty-one were female; of eight born to highest-ranked females, six were male; those in the middle ranks had an equal sex ratio.
But an even greater surprise was in store when other monkeys revealed their gender preferences. Among baboons, howler monkeys, rhesus macaques, and bonnet macaques, the opposite preference prevailed. high-ranking females gave birth to female offspring, and low-ranking females give birth to male offspring. In the eighty births to twenty female Kenyan baboons studied by Jeanne Altmann of the University of Chicago, the effect was so pronounced that high-ranking females were twice as likely to have daughters as low-ranking ones. Subsequent studies have come to less clear conclusions, and a few scientists believe that the monkey results are explained by chance. But one intriguing hint suggests otherwise.
Symington's spider monkeys preferred sons when dominant, whereas the other monkeys preferred daughters. This may be no accident. In most monkeys (including howlers, baboons, and macaques) males leave the troop of their birth and join another at puberty—so-called male-exogamy. In spider monkeys the reverse applies. Females leave home. If a monkey leaves the troop it is born into, it has no chance to inherit its mother's rank. Therefore, high-ranking females will have young of whatever gender stays at home in order to pass on the high rank to them. Low-ranking females will have young of whatever gender leaves the troop in order not to saddle the young with low rank. Thus high-ranking howlers, baboons, and macaques have daughters; high-ranking spider monkeys have sons.
This is a highly modified Trivers-Willard effect, known in the trade as a local-resource competition model. High rank leads to a sex bias in favor of the gender that does not leave at puberty. Could it possibly apply to human beings?
Are you familiar with the story that higher-fitness individuals alter the sex ratio of their offspring (more males) because high-fitness males reproduce more than high-fitness females? That shows all the effects you're denying here.
DOMINANT WOMEN HAVE SONS?
Mankind is an ape. Of the five species of ape, three are social, and in two of those, chimpanzees and gorillas, it is the females that leave the home troop. In the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream in Tanzania studied by Jane Goodall, young males born to senior females tend to rise to the top faster than males born to junior females. Therefore, female apes of high social status "should"—according to the Trivers-Willard logic—have male young and those of low social status "should" have female young. Now men are not excessively polygamous, so the rewards of large size to men is not great: big men do not necessarily win more wives, and big boys do not necessarily become big men. But humans are a highly social species whose society is nearly always stratified in some way. One of the prime, indeed, ubiquitous perquisites of high social status in human males, as in male chimpanzees, is high reproductive success. Wherever you look, from tribal aborigines to Victorian English-men, high-status males have had—and mostly still do have—more children than low-status ones. And the social status of males is very much inherited, or rather passed on from parent to child, whereas females generally leave home when they marry. I am not implying that the tendency for the female to travel to the male's home when she marries is instinctive, natural, inevitable, or even desirable, but I am noting that it has been general. Cultures in which the opposite happens are rare. So human society, like ape society but unlike most monkey society, is a female-exogamous patriarchy, and sons inherit their father's (or mother's) status more than daughters inherit their parents' status. Therefore, says Trivers-Willard, it would pay dominant fathers and high-ranking mothers, or both, to have sons and subordinates to have daughters. Do they?
The short answer is that nobody knows. American presidents, European aristocrats, various royals, and a few other elites have been suspected of having male-biased progeny at birth. In racist societies, subject races seem to be slightly more likely to have daughters than sons. But the subject is too fraught with potential complicating factors for any such statistics to be reliable. For example, merely by ceasing to breed once they have a boy—which those interested in dynastic succession might do—people would have male-biased sex ratios at birth. However, there certainly are no studies showing reliably unbiased sex ratios. And there is one tantalizing study from New Zealand that hints at what might be found if anthropologists and sociologists cared to look into the matter. As early as 1966, Valerie Grant, a psychiatrist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, noticed an apparent tendency for women who subsequently gave birth to boys to be more emotionally independent and dominating than those who gave birth to girls. She tested the personalities of eighty-five women in the first trimester of pregnancy using a standard test designed to distinguish "dominant" from "subordinate" personalities—whatever that may mean. Those who later gave birth to daughters averaged 1.35 on the dominance scale (from 0 to 6). Those who later gave birth to sons averaged 2.26, a highly significant difference. The interesting thing about Grant's work is that she began before the Trivers-Willard theory was published, in the 1960s. "I arrived at the idea quite independently of any study in any of the areas in which such a notion might reasonably arise," she told me, "For me the idea arose out of an unwillingness to burden women with the responsibility for the 'wrong' sex child." Her work remains the only hint that maternal social rank affects the gender of children in the way that the Trivers-Willard-Symington theory would predict. If it proves to be more than a chance result, it immediately leads to the question of how people are unconsciously achieving something that they, have been consciously striving to achieve for generations unnumbered.
"high-income women may prenatally masculinize their sons at the expense of the fitness of their daughters. Women with low income may prenatally feminize their daughters at the fitness expense of their sons" cambridge.org/core/journals/
Almost no subject is more steeped in myth and lore than the business of choosing the gender of children. Aristotle and the Talmud both recommended placing the bed on a north-south axis for those wanting boys. Anaxagoras's belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated. At least posterity had its revenge on Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher and client of Pericles. He was killed by a stone dropped by a crow, no doubt a retrospective reincarnation of some future French marquis who cut off his left testicle and had six girls in a row.
It is a subject that has always drawn charlatans like blow-flies to a carcass: The old wives' tales that have answered the pleas of fathers for centuries are mostly ineffective. The Japanese Sex Selection Society promotes the use of calcium to increase the chances of having a son—with little effect. A book published in 1991 by two French gynecologists claimed precisely the opposite: that a diet rich in potassium and sodium but poor in calcium and magnesium gives a woman an 80 percent chance of conceiving a son if consumed for six weeks before fertilization. A company offering Americans "gender kits" for $50 was driven into bankruptcy after the regulators claimed it was deceiving the consumer.
The more modern and scientific methods are somewhat more reliable. They all rely on trying to separate in the laboratory Y-bearing (male) sperm from X-bearing (female) sperm based on the fact that the latter possess 3.5 percent more DNA. The widely licensed technique invented by an American scientist, Ronald Ericsson, claims a 70 percent success rate from forcing the sperm to swim through albumen, which supposedly slows down the heavier X-bearing sperm more than it does the Y-bearing sperm, thus separating them. By contrast, Larry Johnson of the United States Department of Agriculture has developed a technique that works efficiently (about 70 percent male offspring and 90 percent female.) It dyes the sperm DNA with a fluorescent dye and then allows the sperm to swim in Indian file past a detector. According to the brightness of the sperm's fluorescence, the detector sorts them into two channels. The Y-bearing sperm, having smaller amounts of DNA, are slightly less brightly fluorescent: The detectors can sort sperm at 10,000 a second. Early concerns that the dyes might cause genetic damage have been largely allayed by animal experiments and this technique is now being used in the United States, mostly by people who wish to "balance the family"—have a girl after a string of boys, or vice versa.
Curiously, if humans were birds, it would be much easier to alter the chances of having young of one gender or the other because in birds the mother determines the gender of the embryo, not the father. Female birds have X and Y chromosomes (or sometimes just one X), while male birds have two Xs. So a female bird can simply release an egg of the desired gender and let any sperm fertilize it. Birds do make use of this facility. Bald eagles and some other hawks often give birth to females first and males second. This enables the female to get a head start on the male in the nest,which enables it to grow larger (and female hawks are always larger than males). Red-cockaded woodpeckers raise twice as many sons as daughters and use spare sons as nannies for subsequent broods.Among zebra finches, as Nancy Burley of the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered, "attractive" males mated with "unattractive" females usually have more sons than daughters, and vice versa. Attractiveness in this species can be altered by the simple expedient of putting red (attractive) or green (unattractive) bands on the male's legs, and black (attractive) or light blue (unattractive) on the female's legs. This makes them more or less desirable to other zebra finches as mates.
It is possible that selective spontaneous abortion also explains much of the animal data. In the case of the coypu, studied by Morris Gosling of the University of East Anglia, females in good condition miscarry whole litters if they are too female-biased, and they start again. Magnus Nordborg of Stanford University,who has studied the implications of sex-selective infanticide in China, believes that such biased miscarriage could explain the baboon data. But it seems a wasteful way to proceed.
There are many well-established natural factors that bias the sex ratio of human offspring, proving that it is at least possible. The most famous is the returning-soldier effect. During and immediately after major wars, more sons are born than usual in the belligerent countries as if to replace the men that died. (This would make little sense; the men born after wars will mate with their contemporaries, not with those widowed by the war). Older fathers are more likely to have girls, but older mothers are more likely to have boys. Women with infectious hepatitis or schizophrenia have slightly more daughters than sons. So do women who smoke or drink. So did women who gave birth after the thick London smog of 1952. So do the wives of test pilots, abalone divers, clergymen, and anesthetists. In parts of Australia that depend on rainfall for drinking water, there is a clear drop in the proportion of sons born 320 days after a heavy storm fills the dams and churns up the mud. Women with multiple sclerosis have more sons,as do women who consume small amounts of arsenic.
Finding the logic in this plethora of statistics is beyond most scientists at this stage. William James of the Medical Research Council in London has for some years been elaborating a hypothesis that hormones can influence the relative success of X and Y sperm. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that high levels of the hormone gonadotrophin in the mother can increase the proportion of daughters and that testosterone in the father can increase the proportion of sons.
Indeed, Valerie Grant's theory suggests a hormonal explanation for the returning-soldier effect: that during wars women adopt more dominant roles, which affects their hormone levels and their tendency to have sons. Hormones and social status are closely related in many species; and so, as we have seen, are social status and sex ratio of offspring. How the hormones work, nobody knows, but it is possible that they change the consistency of the mucus in the cervix or even that they alter the acidity of the vagina. Putting baking soda in the vagina of a rabbit was proved to affect the sex ratio of its babies as early as 1932.
Moreover, a hormone theory would tackle one of the most persistent objections to the Trivers-Willard theory: that there seems to be no genetic control of the sex ratio. The failure of animal breeders to produce a strain that can bias the gender of its offspring is glaring. It is not for want of trying. As Richard Dawkins put it "Cattle breeders have had no trouble in breeding for high milk yield, high beef production, large size, small size, hornlessness, resistance to various diseases, and fearlessness in fighting bulls. It would obviously be of immense interest to the dairy industry if cattle could be bred with a bias toward producing heifer calves rather than bull calves. All attempts to do this have singularly failed."
The poultry industry is even more desperate to learn how to breed chickens that lay eggs that hatch into chicks of only one gender. At present it employs teams of highly trained Koreans, who guard a close secret that enables them to sex day-old chicks at great speed (though a computer program may soon match them). They travel all over the world plying their peculiar trade. It is hard to believe that nature is simply unable to do what the Korean experts can do so easily.
Yet this objection is easily answered once the hormonal theory is taken into account. Munching enchiladas in sight of the Pacific Ocean one day, Robert Trivers explained to me why the failure to breed sex-biased animals is entirely understandable. Suppose you find a cow that produces only heifer calves. With whom do you mate those heifers to perpetuate the strain? With ordinary bulls—diluting the genes in half at once.
Another way of putting it is that the very fact that one segment of the population is having sons makes it rewarding for the other segment to have daughters. Every animal is the child of one male and one female. So if dominant animals are having sons, then it will pay subordinate ones to have daughters. The sex ratio of the population as a whole will always revert to 1:1, however biased it becomes in one part of the population, because if it strays from that, it will pay somebody to have more of the rare gender. This insight occurred first to Sir Ronald Fisher, a Cambridge mathematician and biologist, in the1920s, and Trivers believes it lies at the heart of why the ability to manipulate the sex ratio is never in the genes.
Besides, if social rank is a principal determinant of sex ratio, it would be crazy to put it in the genes, for social rank is almost by definition something that cannot be in the genes. Breeding for high social rank is a futile exercise in Red Queen running. Rank is relative."You can't breed for subordinate cows," said Trivers as he munched. "You just create a new hierarchy and reset the thermostat. If all your cows are more subordinate, then the least subordinate will be the most dominant and have appropriate levels of hormones." Instead, rank determines hormones, which determine sex ratio of offspring.
Trivers and Willard predict that evolution will build in an unconscious mechanism for altering the sex ratio of an individual's progeny. But we like to think we are rational, conscious decision makers, and a reasoning person can arrive at the same conclusions as evolution. Some of the strongest data to support Trivers and Willard comes not from animals but from the human cultural rediscovery of the same logic.
Many cultures bias their legacies, parental care, sustenance, and favoritism toward sons at the expense of daughters. Until recently this was seen as just another example of irrational sexism or the cruel fact that sons have more economic value than daughters. But by explicitly using the logic of Trivers-Willard, anthropologists have now begun to notice that male favoritism is far from universal and that female favoritism occurs exactly where you would most expect it.
Contrary to popular belief a preference for boys over girls is not universal. Indeed, there is a close relationship between social status and the degree to which sons are preferred. Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan noticed that, in feudal times, lords favored their sons, but peasants were more likely to leave possessions to daughters. While their feudal superiors killed or neglected daughters or banished them to convents, peasants left them more possessions. Sexism was more a feature of elites than of the unchronicled masses.
As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis has concluded, wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes: farmers in eighteenth-century Germany, castes in nineteenth-century India, genealogies in medieval Portugal, wills in modern Canada, and pastoralists in modern Africa. This favoritism took the form of inheritance of land and wealth, but it also took the form of simple care. In India even today, girls are often given less milk and less medical attention than boys.
Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today. A poor son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a rich man. In modern Kenya, Mukogodo people are more likely to take daughters than sons to clinics for treatment when they are sick, and therefore more daughters than sons survive to the age of four. This is rational of the Mukogodo parents because their daughters can marry into the harems of rich Samburu and Maasai men and thrive, whereas their sons inherit Mukogodo poverty. In the calculus of Trivers-Willard, daughters are better grandchildren-production devices than sons.
Of course, this assumes that societies are stratified. As Mildred Dickemann of California State University has postulated, the channeling of resources to sons represents the best investment rich people can make when society is class-ridden. The clearest patterns come from Dickemann's own studies of traditional Indian marriage practices. She found that extreme habits of female infanticide, which the British tried and failed to stamp out, coincided with relatively high social rank in the distinctly stratified society of nineteenth-century India. High-caste Indians killed daughters more than low-caste ones. One clan of wealthy Sikhs used to kill all daughters and live off their wives' dowries.
There are rival theories to explain these patterns, of which the strongest is that economic, not reproductive, currency determines a sexual preference. Boys can earn a living and marry without a dowry. But this fails to explain the correlation with rank. It predicts, instead, that lower social classes would favor sons, not higher ones, for they can least afford daughters. If instead grandchildren production was the currency that mattered, Indian marriage practices make more sense. Throughout India it has always been the case that women more than men can "marry up," into a higher social and economic caste, so daughters of poor people are more likely to do well than sons. In Dickemann's analysis, dowries are merely a distorted echo of the Trivers-Willard effect in a female-exogamous species. Sons inherit the status necessary for successful breeding; daughters have to buy it. If you have no wealth to pass on, use what you have to buy your daughter a good husband.
Trivers and Willard predict that male favoritism in one part of society will be balanced by female favoritism elsewhere if only because it takes one of each to have a baby—the Fisher logic again. In rodents the division seems to be based on maternal condition. In primates it seems to be based on social rank. But baboons and spider monkeys take for granted the fact that their societies are strictly stratified. Human beings do not. What happens in a modern, relatively egalitarian society?
In that uniform middle-class Eden known as California, Hrdy and her colleague Debra Judge have so far been unable to detect any wealth-related sex bias in the wills people leave when they die. Perhaps the old elite habit of preferring boys to girls has at last been vanquished by the rhetoric of equality.
But there is another, more sinister consequence of modern egalitarianism. In some societies the boy-preferring habit seems to have spread from elites to the society at large. China and India are the best examples of this. In China a one-child policy may have led to the deaths of 17 percent of girls. In one Indian hospital 96 per-cent of women who were told they were carrying daughters aborted them, while nearly 100 percent of women carrying sons carried them to term. This implies that a cheap technology allowing people to choose the gender of their children would indeed unbalance the population sex ratio.
Choosing the gender of your baby is an individual decision of no consequence to anybody else. Why, then, is the idea inherently unpopular? It is a tragedy of the commons—a collective harm that results from the rational pursuit of self-interest by individuals. One person choosing to have only sons does nobody else any harm, but if everybody does it, everybody suffers. The dire predictions range from a male-dominated society in which rape, lawlessness, and a general frontier mentality would hold sway to further increases in male domination of positions of power and influence. At the very least, sexual frustration would be the lot of many men.
Laws are passed to enforce the collective interest at the expense of the individual, just as crossing over was invented to foil outlaw genes. If gender selection were cheap, a fifty-fifty sex ratio would be imposed by parliaments of people as surely as equitable meiosis was imposed by the parliament of the genes.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Ridley, p. 115-128
In the late 1970s an anthropologist in California, Mildred Dickemann, decided to try to apply some Darwinian ideas to human history and culture. She simply set out to see if the kinds of predictions that evolutionists were making for other animals also applied to human beings. What she found was that in the highly stratified Oriental societies of early history, people seemed to behave exactly as you would expect them to if they knew that their goal on Earth was to leave as many descendants as possible. In other words, men tended to seek polygamy, whereas women strove to marry upward with men of high status. Dickemann added that a lot of cultural customs—dowries, female infanticide, the claustration of women so that their virginity could not be damaged—were consistent with this pattern. For example, in India, high castes practiced more female infanticide than low castes because there were fewer opportunities to export daughters to still higher castes. In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potential.
They have a bunch of players nobody wants
NOBODY Want ME, NEWPORT!
About the same time as Dickemann's studies, John Hartung of Harvard University began to look at patterns of inheritance. He hypothesized that a rich person in a polygamous society would tend to leave his or her money to a son rather than a daughter because a rich son could provide more grandchildren than a rich daughter. This is because the son can have children by several wives, whereas a daughter cannot increase the number of her children even if she takes many husbands. Therefore, the more polygamous a society, the more likely it will show male-biased inheritance. A survey of four hundred societies found overwhelming support for Hartung's hypothesis.
Of course, that proves nothing. It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen. There is a cautionary tale that scientists tell one another about a man who cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that fleas' ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right; fleas' ears are in their legs.
Nonetheless, Darwinians began to think that perhaps human history might be illuminated by a beam of evolutionary light. In the mid 1980s, Laura Betzig set out to test the notion that people are sexually adapted to exploit whatever situation they encounter. She had no great hopes of success, but she believed that the best way to test the conjecture was simply to postulate the simplest prediction she could make: that men would treat power not as an end in itself but as a means to sexual and reproductive success. Looking around the modern world, she was not encouraged; powerful men are often childless. Hitler was so consumed by ambition that he had little time left for philandering.
But when she examined the record of history, Betzig was stunned. Her simplistic prediction that power is used for sexual success was confirmed again and again. Only in the past few centuries in the West has it failed. Not only that, in most polygamous societies there were elaborate social mechanisms to ensure that a powerful polygamist left a polygamous heir.
The six independent "civilizations" of early history—Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru—were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute. These men were despots, meaning they could kill their subjects without fear of retribution. Without exception, that vast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave "wives" at his command. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and "droves" of consorts.The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs: The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa, as we have seen, kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom.
Not only did these six emperors, each typical of his predecessors and successors, have similarly large harems, but they employed similar techniques to fill and guard them. They recruited young (usually prepubertal) women, kept them in highly defensible and escape-proof forts, guarded them with eunuchs, pampered them, and expected them to breed the emperor's children. Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common. Wet nurses, who allow women to resume ovulation by cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C.; they were sung about in Sumerian lullabies. The Tang Dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines. Chinese emperors were also taught to conserve their semen so as to keep up their quota of two women a day, and some even complained of their onerous sexual duties. These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors' genes.
Nor were emperors anything more than extreme examples. Laura Betzig has examined 104 politically autonomous societies and found that "in almost every case, power predicts the size of a man's harem." Small kings had one hundred women in their harems; great kings, one thousand, and emperors, five thousand. Conventional history would have us believe that such harems were merely one among many of the rewards that awaited the successful seeker of power, along with all the other accoutrements of despotism: servants, palaces, gardens, music, silk, rich food, and spectator sports. But women are fairly high on the list. Betzig's point is that it is one thing to find that powerful emperors were polygamous but quite another to discover that they each adopted similar measures to enhance their reproductive success within the harem: wet nursing, fertility monitoring, claustration of the concubines, and so on. These are not the measures of men interested in sexual excess. They are the measures of men interested in producing many children.
However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out. All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. In other words, they always raised one mate above all the others as a "queen." This is characteristic of human polygamous societies. Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife-who is treated differently from the others. She is usually noble-born, and crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs. Solomon had a thousand concubines and one queen.
Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending, from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses. Julius Caesar's affairs with women were "commonly described as extravagant" (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote, "The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for deflowering girls—who were collected for him by his wife." Tiberius's "criminal lusts" were "worthy of an oriental tyrant" (Tacitus). Caligula "made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome" (Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him "sundry housemaids to lie with" (Dio). When Nero floated down the Tiber, he "had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore"(Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.
Nor were emperors special. When a rich patrician named Gordian died leading a rebellion in favor of his father against the emperor Maxim in in A.D. 237, Gibbon commemorated him thus: "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested to the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than ostentation."
"Ordinary" Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves. Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth. Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not. If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller. And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth. The unrestricted sexual availability of slaves "is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it."
Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth. This cannot have been an economically sensible decision. Freed slaves became rich and numerous. Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most slaves who were freed had been born in their masters' homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely freed. There seems little doubt that Roman nobles were freeing their illegitimate sons, bred of female slaves.
When Betzig turned her attention to medieval Christendom, she discovered that the phenomenon of monogamous marriage and polygamous mating was so entrenched that it required some disinterring. Polygamy became more secret, but it did not expire. In medieval times the census shows a sex ratio in the countryside that was heavily male-biased because so many women were "employed" in the castles and monasteries. Their jobs were those of serving maids of various kinds, but they formed a loose sort of "harem" whose size depended clearly on the wealth and power of the castle's owner. In some cases, historians and authors were more or less explicit in admitting that castles contained "gynoeciums," where lived the owner's harem in secluded luxury.
Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert,"was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons." His bedchamber had access to the servant girls' quarters and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs. It had access, too, to the warming room, "a veritable incubator for suckling infants." Meanwhile, many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Ridley, p. 197-202
I've Written Out Paiges 192-199 Below. Read The Red Writing In Particular. It'll Explain To You Why I'm Wifeless And Childless! Here, I'll Explain It To You In A Nutshell. I Have NO Wealth! That's The Reason. I'm A Po' Boi! NOW!
https://methalashun.blogspot.com/2015/05/ah-ha-fooled-you-and-thats-how-i-does.html
I'm A REPRODUCTIVE FAILURE, So My Family Is Trying To Cut ME Off And Cut Their Losses. I'm A Burden On Them And Draining Them Of Their Resources. So With Little Possibility Of Getting A G00D Return On Their Investment And Little Possibility Of Future Success (REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS) They're Trying To Get Rid Of ME (Think: Retarded Kid)!
https://methalashun.blogspot.com/2015/05/ah-ha-fooled-you-and-thats-how-i-does.html
I'm A REPRODUCTIVE FAILURE, So My Family Is Trying To Cut ME Off And Cut Their Losses. I'm A Burden On Them And Draining Them Of Their Resources. So With Little Possibility Of Getting A G00D Return On Their Investment And Little Possibility Of Future Success (REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS) They're Trying To Get Rid Of ME (Think: Retarded Kid)!
We know that so many girls are missing because in some countries the ratio of boys to girls is improbably high. In China, for example, in the first five years of the century 120 boys were born for every 100 girls. That may not sound dramatic, but China's population is so vast that by 2020 there will be between 30 and 40 million more boys under 20 than girls in the same age group. And the problem is not confined to China; parts of India, Pakistan, Korea, Taiwan, some former Soviet states and the Balkans also have serious shortages of women and girls. Shockingly, such distorted sex ratios across large populations can only mean that millions of female fetuses and baby girls are being killed.
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/982672188263227392
Aborting female fetuses and killing newborn girls exacerbates a problem that has existed in some societies for centuries, in which girls were sometimes killed but more often neglected or even abandoned, skewing the sex ratio toward boys. These practices are so widespread, and have occurred for so long, that we cannot write them off as mere quirks of foreign cultures or distant eras. In this chapter, I explore how evolutionary biology can help us to understand the origin of strong preferences for sons as well as the deep conflicts of evolutionary interest that can lead to something as repugnant as female infanticide...
The story I tell involves millions of individual tragedies, from the abortion of female fetuses, and the neglect and death of young girls, to the widespread oppression of women. But apart from these many individual tragedies, the society-scale consequences of biased sex ratios could soon become tragedies on a continental scale as young men with little hope of starting a family of their own reach maturity. These men will be alienated, poor, and very angry. And they will fall into the worst kinds of associations with other young men of equally poor prospects. They will be, in a word, trouble. The problems that the young men of China and south Asia will soon present to those regions and to the world are, again, partly biological in cause. An understanding of evolution is an essential tool in defusing and dealing with those problems.
“women rarely marry less educated men, so differential college graduation rates may cause problems for the foreseeable future. Because unmarried men are bad for society, this sex difference in education may lead to individual and societal disruptions.”
Having too many men about the place is not a good thing. For anybody. When the long-established killing and neglect of girls created a large male surplus in nineteenth-century China, men drifted into criminal gangs that terrorized landholders and peasants. These gangs sometimes aggregated into larger militias that visited even greater havoc on those around them. One consequence was the Nien rebellion, which killed more than 100,000 troops and civilians and devastated the economy over a 15-year period.
Just as polygynous societies are more likely to go to war with neighboring groups or tribes, so societies that have too many men tend to throw their weight around. Because young women tend to marry up the socioeconomic hierarchy, young men from the poorest families and those who are uneducated or less employable have the lowest bargaining value in the marriage market. Not only do these men have little stake in society in the form of existing wealth, they also have little prospect of improving their evolutionary fitness by starting their own family. Unable to find wives - and sometimes even work - these men move in groups from one place to another, anonymous transients without the kinds of ties and obligations to their communities that usually prevent antisocial or criminal behavior. These are exactly the kinds of circumstances that make men highly prone to risky, violent, illegal and often unpredictable activities as well as gambling, using alcohol, drugs and prostitution - factors that further increase the risk of antisocial, violent and criminal behavior.
"YOUR DUDE IS A H0B0!" - 40 FONZARELLI
Political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer argue that these problems are on the rise in China, India and wherever else sex ratios are male biased. Kidnapping and trafficking of women are on the rise and the provinces and states with the most male-biased sex ratios tend to have the highest rates of violent crime. The culprits are mostly unmarried young men, often in gangs. Hudson and den Boer calculate that the excess men in China and India will number about 60 million by 2020, threatening not only peace and order within those societies but also regional and global stability. The problem of enormous numbers of excess men cannot easily be undone. It must, instead, be managed. As the wildly sex-biased cohorts of children in places like India and China reach adulthood, the excess young men with poor reproductive prospects will make a lot of trouble. I predict that theft, assault and homicide will rise catastrophically, matched only by abduction and trafficking in women for marriage, prostitution and sexual slavery. New approaches to preventing and managing crime and violence are going to be needed urgently. When asked about their ideal family size, Indian parents often express a wish for at least two sons. The desired number of daughters varies, but never exceeds the desired number of sons. Indian couples don't just wish for more sons than daughters, they base their family planning strategies on these wishes. Couples that use contraception, and men who undergo voluntary sterilization, only ten to do so after the birth of a second healthy son.
"ratio of men to women in a given ecology can have profound influences on a range of interpersonal processes, from marriage and divorce rates to risk-taking and violent crime" sciencedirect.com/science/articl
...
http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/07/06/dowry-deaths-indias-shame/
Parents of high economic status invest more heavily in sons. while parents of low economic status invest more heavily in daughters. Revealed by big data on backpack sales. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303713 …
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/965635840188743680
Son preferences emerge partly - and often in exactly the way Trivers ad Willard predicted - from the caste hierarchy that governs the social life and marriage patterns of India's Hindu majority. Brides can marry into a higher, but never a lower, sub-caste. Men from higher sub-castes are a scarce resource because women from both their own and lower sub-castes are effectively competing for them on the marriage market. As a result, the groom's family negotiates a dowry payment, converting the demand for their son into an economic benefit. The higher the groom's caste, the greater his value and the bigger the dowry payment becomes. With a bigger dowry, a family can secure greater upward mobility for a daughter, and thus for any children she has.
The Trivers-Willard hypothesis gains support again, this time in Africa: Sons from high-status families receive greater educational investment than daughters, while daughters from low-status families receive more investment than sons. psyarxiv.com/n6k4u/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/23/dowry-deaths-big-fat-indian-wedding
...
Fathers spend more money on sons, while mothers treat their daughters favorably. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcpy.1004/abstract …
The Trivers-Willard hypothesis confirmed: Sons from high-status families achieve higher educational outcomes than daughters, while daughters from low-status families surpass sons. cambridge.org/core/journals/
Darwinistically clever parental investment.
The Wealthier You Are The More You'll Invest Time, Energy, And Money In Sons (If You Have Any).
Seema Jayachandran Retweeted
"Why are Indian children so short?" http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151282 …
Spoiler: It' s birth order!
#2 Proximate cause: India's excess stunting is driven by higher birth-order kids. That must be due to factors that vary *within* a family. http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151282
The fact that the children of wealthy city dwellers are the most male biased group in modern India may be simply due to economic and social factors: the affordability of screening and abortions, enormous dowry expectations, and declining fertility providing fewer opportunities to have a son. But the trend also echoes Trivers and Willard's predictions that when women marry up the socioeconomic hierarchy, the wealthiest groups should have the most male-biased sex ratios. Perhaps, as in preindustrial Germany, urban Indian couples are responding to the marriage prospects of their children. These are precisely the families whose sons will be sought after as grooms and can be expected to attract a large dowry payment. The daughters of these families will have far fewer prospects than the sons, and any match will need to be lubricated with a fat dowry.
Although the wealthier families contribute most to the production of too many men, it is ironically not the sons of these families that will suffer the costs. These relatively wealthy sons will always have good marriage prospects. It is the sons of the poor that will be unable to obtain wives, and that is where the biggest problems for societies begin.
Just as supply of and demand for goods influences their market value, so the relative availability of men and women who are interested in mating influences the value of each sex in the mating marketplace. When adult sex ratios deviate from even, individuals of the rarer sex become more valuable and the more common sex becomes less so. In economics, when the supply of an item increases or demand for it drops, competition between suppliers brings down the price. On the mating market it is competition between members of the more common sex that raises the intensity of sexual selection within that sex, usually with unhappy consequences.
"LOOKED UP AND SAW 4 HOES TO EVERY NIGGA!" - MAC 1 O
"there are 5.5 million college-educated women between the ages of 22 and 29, versus only 4.1 million college-educated men in the same age bracket. In other words, the dating pool for college graduates has 33% more women than men—or 4 women for every 3 men."
Throughout history some big deviations in sex ratio have dramatically transformed societies and cultures. Even small deviations from equal sex ratios can cause men and women to adjust their behavior in fascinating ways. In the United States after World War II, the baby boom raised the number of births from 3 million in 1945 to 4.4 million in 1960, after which births fell gradually until the mid-1970s. Because women tend to marry about 3 years younger than men in the United States, the average women born in 1948, for example, came onto the mating market about the same time as the average man born in 1945. So for the baby boomers, the women coming onto the market each year were from bigger, younger cohorts than men.
Female-biased sex ratios in the American baby-boom cohorts marrying between 1965 and 1980 have been blamed for a steady decrease in marriage rates and an increase in divorce rates over that period because an undersupply raised demand for men, giving them less incentive to commit to marriage in the first place, to remain sexually faithful within marriage, to contribute financially, to work in the home and to take a direct hand in raising the children.
That's what's already happened. + what continues to happen in every major east coast city where women with degrees flock
Female-biased sex ratios are often associated with increases in teenaged pregnancies. Girls become sexually active earlier when they outnumber boys. Having sex younger and more often may be a competitive strategy to keep a boyfriend interested. When the supply of boys dwindles, there are more girls competing for boys' interest and when demand grows, prices are sure to rise. Girls have more sex than they would have had if boys were more abundant, and teenage pregnancy relatively rare symptom (I'LL FIX THIS SENTENCE TOMORROW). Likewise, women sometimes find that in an extreme man-drought their best chance of reproducing is to go it alone, further contributing to the rise in unpartnered mothers when men are scarce.
- Men will probably avoid committing during college, such sex ratios tend to lead to men playing the field
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1168938826804473862
- "women who attend college on campuses where women are more numerous tend to view men as less interested in commitment and less trustworthy. They are less likely to expect much from men"
But being in the majority is not all bad news for women. The social scientists Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord suggest that the excess of women, as baby boomers matured, played a role in the rise of second wave feminism. Compared with the stay-at-home wifely stereotype of the 1950s, far more women in the 1960s and 1970s needed to support themselves than had been the case for the generations immediately before. Baby-boomer women also had to compete sexually with one another for men and to decouple sex from the ever less likely institution of marriage. So the liberalization of sexual mores during the sexual revolution might not only have been to escape the stifling sexual repression of an older generation's value. It seems odd to claim that a demographic quirk produced something as profound and important as feminism's second wave, yet the strange interaction between biology and economics created by the baby-boom-fueled surplus of young women may have propelled a movement whose time had come.
A high sex ratio - a scarcity of women compared to men - leads to higher marriage rates, fewer divorces, greater fertility, women choosing higher quality mates and being happier in their marriages. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01494929.2018.1501789?journalCode=wmfr20 …
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1047857021830275072
As the ever smaller post-1960 birth cohorts matured, and older baby boomer men divorced and remarried younger women, sex ratios shifted back from the baby-boom-fueled excess of females. From the 1980s until beyond 2000, available men outnumber women. Under these circumstances men value marriage more highly and are more committed to their families. Today, in US cities when women outnumber men, young men are less likely to get married, preferring to enjoy the opportunities for short-term liaisons created by the glut of women. Men over 35, however, make use of their scarcity by being more likely to marry than when sex ratios are even. Where men are relatively common, they commit to marriage early, competing more intensely to attract a wife in the first place.
https://plus.google.com/101046916407340625977/posts/8o3isk7Nc1g
Demographics doom more and more males to involuntary celibacy
In 1910, western states like Montana and Arizona had high ratios of men to women (111 and 110 men to every 100 women respectively) because more men than women had migrated to those states during their settlement. The sex ratio in eastern states was much closer to even. In 1910 wealthier American men were more likely than poorer men to marry, but in the more male-biased states the gap between married and unmarried men in socioeconomic status was much larger. This probably made for a large number of poor men who had almost no marriage prospects, just as what we are now seeing emerge in India and China. And the excess of men might be what made the American west such a wild and lawless frontier.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491201000512
"Living A Poor Man's Style Like Barrington Levi" - Cillie Cider
P. D. Mangan @Mangan150 - There's a name for someone who plays fair against those who don't: loser.
I'm A LOSER, PD, BUT THERE MAY BE A GIRL THAT WANTS TO MARRY ME! AND I MAY BE THAT GIRL! (MADD AT ME CUZ IMMA MARRY MY CLONE!)
https://plus.google.com/101046916407340625977/posts/8o3isk7Nc1g
Demographics doom more and more males to involuntary celibacy
https://plus.google.com/101046916407340625977/posts/8o3isk7Nc1g
Demographics doom more and more males to involuntary celibacy
There is a surefire way to guarantee that their husband will never cheat on them, and that is to marry the biggest loser that they can find so that nobody else would want him.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/03/one-man-many-wives-big-problem
Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.
For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is a grave, even devastating, deprivation. (Just ask a gay American.) But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences and many grim ones.
Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they write: "Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."
The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."
Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."
Men and women lead happier marriages in regions that had once an overabundance of males. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1729/20160315 …
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/polygamy-fuels-violence/
My point in connecting these incidents is that throughout history polygamy has fuelled violence. Might it be worth suggesting to Muslim leaders, religious and secular, that they push for monogamous norms as one way to reduce violence and bring more peace to the Middle East and to north and west Africa? Of course, polygamy is not the only or the main cause of violence in such places, but it almost certainly contributes.
The correlation between violence and polygamy (strictly, polygyny — being married to more than one wife at the same time — as having more than one husband is much rarer) is not just about violence to women. It is also about violence among men. From Troy to Brigham Young, from Genghis Khan to Islamic State, there has been a tendency for nations that allow polygamous marriage to exhibit more crime and more warfare than those that do not. The cause is increased competition for mates. Polygamy results in more unmarried young men, and these commit most violence.
Even moderate polygamy can produce large imbalances. Imagine that in a village of 50 men and 50 women, two men have four wives, four men have three wives and fourteen have two wives: that leaves 30 men chasing the remaining two women. A recipe for trouble.
The authors argue that the gradual and erratic imposition over many centuries of “normative monogamy” in Europe and then much of the rest of the world was motivated largely by rulers wanting to suppress crime and violence. Or perhaps societies that suppressed polygamy proved more successful, displacing those that didn’t.
Professor Henrich even argues that the advance of monogamy played a part in the industrial revolution. Reducing the pool of unmarried men and levelling the reproductive playing field not only decreased crime, but spurred commerce and innovation. Once men stop striving to achieve marriage (or double marriage) they invest their energy in more productive ambitions.
http://public.wsu.edu/~rquinlan/polygyny.htm
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/
"If She Want This Dicc She Gotta Pay Me Man That's Word To Kurtis [Blow]" - Pacman
Choosin' Fee. Gotta Pay For Me.
Choosin' Fee. Gotta Pay For Me.
WIC Nigga
Minister Farrakhan Answer Question About Polygamy In America
Thus, while men were often practicing overt polygyny and occasional adultery, women were almost certainly engaging in covert polyandry, enjoying multiple mateships on the sly. As George Bernard Shaw put it in his play Man and Superman, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."
Thus, while men were often practicing overt polygyny and occasional adultery, women were almost certainly engaging in covert polyandry, enjoying multiple mateships on the sly. As George Bernard Shaw put it in his play Man and Superman, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."
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