At 01:00 PM 2/6/2008, David Hobby wrote: Keith wrote:
>>This does not square with field anthropology. Polygamy is well >>known in cultures where female infanticide and distorted sex ratios >>are prevalent. >> "Polygamy greatly exacerbated women's scarcity and direct >> and indirect male competition and conflict over them. Indeed, a >> cross-cultural study (Otterbein 1994: 103) has found polygamy to be >... >>Sorry to shoot down your thoughts. Please try again because I >>would really like to understand it and am clean out of ideas. >>Keith > >Keith-- > >Hi. This is interesting. First, just for clarification, do >the studies have direct evidence of female infanticide, or do >they deduce it from the skewed sex ratio? Both. It's robust. <http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf>http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1a.pdf. >(There is some >evidence that the ratio can be made to vary from the norm >without infanticide. Just checking...) The normal ration at birth is 105 males to 100 females. Because boys are more likely to die, the ratio is close to 1 to 1 by reproductive age. Evolutionary theory says that the ratio will be pulled back close to one because the less common sex then has a better chance of reproducing. (There are well understood exceptions.) >The part I have trouble with is why it would be in the parent's >interest to have male children rather than females. You can see a progression in Azar Gat's collected data. With the exception of China, the female infanticide cultures are hunter gatherer and/or warlike. And the more extreme the environmental problems get the more skewed the ratio. As a guess, such peoples value male hunters or warriors in the clan more than females. Females you can always steal from other groups if you have enough warriors to carry out the task. With the Chinese, I guess it's because the culture expects males to support old parents while the females leave home. It's really worth reading this http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf because the "Malthusian era" existed right up to 1800. In that time there was a tight coupling between the number babies women had and how long the average person could expect to live. Infanticide, especially of female infants, reduced the effective number. >In terms of >number of descendants, snip In that era, the average woman had 2 surviving children plus or minus a tiny fraction. It's weird, but Clark shows that in that time disease *improved* how well off people were on average. snip >It takes a certain mindset to do this kind of analysis, >doesn't it? : ) Definitely. If you like the Clark paper, I highly recommend his book "Farewell to Alms." Lots of stuff the chew over there, especially since the predictions are for most of the world to return to Malthusian times. Have you looked at how thin the grain reserves are? Keith _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
