m8ta
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{867} |
ref: -0
tags: evolutionary psychology human mating sexuality discrimination wedlock
date: 01-09-2011 18:22 gmt
revision:1
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From Why Beautiful people have more daughters: "Abuse, degradation, and intimidation are all part of men's unfortunate repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not harassing women because they are treating them differently than men (which is the definition of discrimination under which harassment legally falls), but the exact opposite: men harass women because they are not discriminating between men and women." Interesting argument. But in sexual discrimination cases, the women are not being treated the way they want to be treated - this is more a problem than the inequality. The author then goes on to pose that current sexual discrimination law and policy in US corporations actually inhibits welcome sexual/romantic interest/advances. Many people do find partners at work. Again, I beg to differ: if there is passion between people, things will fall as they should; if policy and culture serves to make this more civilized (provided it's not completely inhibited, as the author suggests), then all the better. In related news: An Analysis of Out-Of-Wedlock Births in the United States Central hypothesis: Contraceptive technology shifted the balance of power between the sexes: prior the pill, women could force the men into promising to marry; in the case of preganancy, cultural standards forced marriage - shotgun marriage. Men accepted these terms because they were uniform across all women - sex implies pregnancy implies child rearing. When contraception became available, this was decoupled, as sex did not beget pregnancy; those women who negotiated on the old terms were likely to lose their mate, hence shotgun marriages (the result of such negotiations) gradually disappeared from culture. The author generally approves of the idea of shotgun marriage, and suggests that a governmental body should enforce a form of it through child support payments. Presently about 40% of children in the US are born out of wedlock. Finally, Serial monogamy increases reproductive success in men but not in women. It rests upon data, only recently gathered, that supports that having multiple partners increases reproductive success more strongly in male than in female humans. This implies that the variance of the fertility of men should be higher than that of women - again, which is borne out in the data, but only weakly: men have 10% higher variance in # of offspring than women. This effect is correlated to serial monogamy - "Compared with men with 1 spouse, men with 3 or more spouses had 19% more children in the total sample". This did not hold with women, nor did varying spouse number in men change the survival rate of their offspring. Irregardless, this reading was spurred by someone mentioning that a genetic analysis of human populations reveals that while 80% of women reached reproductive success, only 40% of men did - implying that historically a few more successful men fathered a large fraction of children. I was unable to find evidence to support this on the internet (and indeed the Behavioral Ecology article gives much less dramatic figures), but it makes intuitive sense, especially in light of some patterns of male behavior. | ||
{838} |
ref: -0
tags: meta learning Artificial intelligence competent evolutionary programming Moshe Looks MOSES
date: 08-07-2010 16:30 gmt
revision:6
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