There has been
much talk about two findings from a recent study: (a) boys reach puberty at
different ages in different ethnic groups and (b) boys are reaching puberty
earlier now than in the recent past.
The first
finding is in line with previous studies:
[…] we found significant differences in the age of
onset of stage 2 genital and pubic hair growth between African American boys as
compared with white and Hispanic boys and transition to testicular volumes ≥4
mL (but not 3 mL). The meaning of this finding is unclear, as no existing
studies inform differences in mean testicular size at given ages, by
race/ethnicity, and sexual maturity stage; or in racial/ethnic differences in
the rate of advancement through the Tanner stages over time. (Herman-Giddens, 2012)
The second
finding is new:
We observed that onset of secondary sexual
characteristics in US boys as seen in office practice appears to occur earlier
than in previous US studies and the 1969 British study commonly used for
pubertal norms. […] White boys in our study entered stage 2 genital growth 1.5
years earlier than the British boys (10.14 vs 11.60 years of age).
[…] These data are consistent with recent trends
from other countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, and China.
For example, urban Han Chinese boys achieve a testicular volume of ≥4 mL (13%
by age 9) and spermarche earlier than studies conducted several decades ago;
Danish boys achieve a testicular volume ≥3 mL more than 3 months earlier now
than 15 years ago. (Herman-Giddens, 2012)
The authors put
the cause down to “exposure to chemicals, changes in diet, less physical
activity, and other modern lifestyle changes and exposures.” In an article for
CNN, the lead author elaborated:
"The changes are too fast," Herman-Giddes
said. "Genetics take maybe hundreds, thousands of years. You have to look
at something in the environment. That would include everything from (a lack of)
exercise to junk food to TV to chemicals." (Wilson, 2012)
Yes, new genetic
variants take time to appear through mutation. But variants for early puberty
already exist in the population. Natural selection has only one thing to do:
increase the proportion of people with those variants. And that can happen with
each passing generation.
In any given
population, almost all variability in male pubertal timing is genetic. This was
the conclusion of a Swedish twin study:
The heritability was 0.91 for age at onset of growth
spurt and 0.93 for age at peak height velocity in this Swedish cohort of male
twin pairs. Of interest is that these heritability estimates are almost the
same as those reported from a Belgian twin study; that is, 0.93 and 0.92,
respectively. Lower heritability estimates, 0.49 and 0.74, respectively, were
found in a Polish twin study.
(Silventoinen et al., 2008)
There is thus
plenty of genetic variation for selection to act on. No need to wait for new
mutations. But why would there be natural selection for earlier male puberty?
One reason is that early puberty is genetically linked to other sexual characteristics. In particular, a class of X-linked androgen receptor alleles is linked in males to aggression, impulsivity, sexual compulsivity, and lifetime number of sex partners and in females to paternal divorce, father absence, and early menarche (Comings et al., 2002). It is likely that these alleles also influence male pubertal timing, but research on this point is lacking—apparently because it is difficult to find a marker for pubertal maturation among boys that is as salient as age at menarche among girls (Ge et al., 2007). Early male puberty thus seems to be part of a “package,” or more precisely a reproductive strategy, that affects the way men go about finding a mate. Natural selection may favor one strategy or another, depending on the current cultural environment.
Is natural selection now favoring the “cads” over the “dads”? That might be what’s happening. As sexual relationships become less stable and shorter-term, women will ignore men who are oriented towards stable, long-term relationships. This was the conclusion of a study directed by Kruger et al. (2003) at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research:
One reason is that early puberty is genetically linked to other sexual characteristics. In particular, a class of X-linked androgen receptor alleles is linked in males to aggression, impulsivity, sexual compulsivity, and lifetime number of sex partners and in females to paternal divorce, father absence, and early menarche (Comings et al., 2002). It is likely that these alleles also influence male pubertal timing, but research on this point is lacking—apparently because it is difficult to find a marker for pubertal maturation among boys that is as salient as age at menarche among girls (Ge et al., 2007). Early male puberty thus seems to be part of a “package,” or more precisely a reproductive strategy, that affects the way men go about finding a mate. Natural selection may favor one strategy or another, depending on the current cultural environment.
Is natural selection now favoring the “cads” over the “dads”? That might be what’s happening. As sexual relationships become less stable and shorter-term, women will ignore men who are oriented towards stable, long-term relationships. This was the conclusion of a study directed by Kruger et al. (2003) at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research:
In the study, 257 women in college were asked to read passages from
Scott's novels. Each read a paragraph describing a dark hero and one describing
a proper hero. Then the women were asked which type of man they would prefer
for a relationship.
As predicted by the cad-dad theory of human mating strategies, the women
preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions. When asked which character
they would like to see their future daughters choose, they also selected proper
heroes. But when asked who appealed to them most for short-term affairs, the
women turned to the dark heroes: the handsome, passionate and daring cads
(Duenwald, 2003).
References
Comings,
D.E., D. Muhleman, J.P. Johnson, & J.P. MacMurray. (2002). Parent-daughter
transmission of the androgen receptor gene as an explanation of the effect of
father absence on age of menarche. Child
Development, 73, 1046-1051.
Duenwald,
M. (2003). For a good time, well, don’t call dad, University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, Anthropology, Raymond Hames
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/dad-cad.htm
Ge, X., M.N. Natsuaki, J.M. Neiderhiser, & D. Reiss. (2007). Genetic and Environmental Influences on Pubertal Timing: Results From Two National Sibling Studies, Journal of Research on Adolescence, 17, 767–788.
Herman-Giddens, M.E., J. Steffes, D. Harris, E. Slora, M. Hussey, S.A. Dowshen, R. Wasserman, J.R. Serwint, L. Smitherman, & E.O. Reiter. (2012). Secondary sexual characteristics in boys: Data from the Pediatric Research in Office Settings Network, Pediatrics, 130, e1058-e1068.
Kruger, D.J., M.
Fisher, & I. Jobling. (2003). Proper and dark heroes as DADS and CADS. Alternative
mating strategies in British Romantic literature, Human Nature, 14, 305-317.
Silventoinen, K., J. Haukka, L. Dunkel, P. Tynelius,
& F. Rasmussen. (2008). Genetics of pubertal timing and its
associations with relative weight in childhood and adult height: The Swedish Young Male Twins Study, Pediatrics, 121, e885-891
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/121/4/e885.full.pdf+html
Wilson, J. (2012).
Boys – like girls – hitting puberty earlier, October 23, CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/20/health/boys-early-puberty/index.html
62 comments:
But how do you square this with the birthrates we are seeing? I thought (incorrectly?) that it was the most religious who were producing the most children.
Or perhaps the cads are having the most sexual partners but because of birth control the dads are having the most babies? (Like that guy from 19 kids and counting vs. Roissy.)
It may be earlier and slower. Hitting puberty earlier may not mean ending it sooner.
One data point I find salient is that the richer countries have early puberty (as measured by female menarche) than Africa and the poorer countries, and that the rich within a country have earlier menarche than poorer people.
As sexual relationships become less stable and shorter-term, women will ignore men who are oriented towards stable, long-term relationships.
I doubt that this is facultative.
Rather, I suspect that something, perhaps Otto von Bismark's experiment, is allowing more people who have the genetic variants that are closer to sub-Saharan African behavior to leave more offspring. Thus, they all carry the variants for earlier sexual maturation and a concentration on sexual activity rather than long-term relationships.
Full text Sexual Selection on Human Faces and Voices.(Full text).
Apparently immune activation reduces testosterone. And men with a masculine face shape are objectively healthier (p230), women with masculine mates report more and quicker orgasms
Going by above it would seem that women prefer masculine men and have the best of bio logic reasons to do so. That makes me wonder if some women opt out of the competition for a masculine man rather than actively chose to marry an unmasculine man. There aren't enough to go around, as monogamous partners at least, so a situation where a woman settles down with an unmasculine man is going to be fraught "Overall, the participants' commitment to and satisfaction with their relationships did not seem to change with fertility, the researchers found. But women with less sexually attractive partners seemed to feel less close to their beaus as they moved from their least fertile to most fertile period. Meanwhile, women matched with the most sexually attractive men seemed to experience the opposite effect." here
Anyway one problem with the idea that we are moving toward a gene pool of cad dads is that women's preferences for masculine faces are correlated with their own attractiveness. Moreover men with high sex drives prefer feminine women.
Given that black men are more masculine and white women more feminine, and most masculine men are attractive to the most feminine women, then white girl/ black male interracial relationships are going to become the norm. Because a lot of white men don't find black women particularly attractive, they find it difficult to believe their pretty and feminine daughters could be attracted to black men. But the cases are quite different. I think there are now social restraints on explictly telling children avoid such relationships. Parents just hope their daughters will not be so inclined, many of them are and their acting on that. We are going to see integration of the extremes of human femininit and masculinity faster than anyone thinks possible.
and white women more feminine
That is not true. By every measure, East Asian women are more feminine.
There's certainly a lot of evidence that 'Cads' are currently outperforming 'Dads.'
Have you thought about why "Game" has seen an explosion in popularity over the past decade? To my recollection, the literal explosion of "Game" material -- books, blogs, etc. -- which focus on young men attempting to get one-night stands by using various "tricks" on women -- didn't really exist in the '80s/90s or before. What may have happened is that young men are currently unsuccessful getting access to women using traditional pair-bond strategies. In keeping with the times, where women prefer players, they may be forced to learn 'Cad' behavior to satisfy women's new preferences.
Anecdotally, one other thing I'm seeing is that men's looks have suddenly become a far more prominent requirement by women. It used to be that men were valued for their money, resources, and power. In my experience, that's valued much less now. Much more important these days are a man's height (preferably 6 ft.+ tall) and a nice symmetric face with perfect teeth.
Still, there are costs and benefits to any particular strategy. Robin Baker argues in "Sperm Wars" argues that should the 'Cads' become too numerous in the population, they actually suffer the costs. STDs and uncertain paternity keep the promiscuous in check at an equilibrium level where they do no better and no worse than the 'Dads.'
If the 'Cads' are suddenly doing better, a good question to ask is: Have the costs decreased to being a 'Cad,' or have the costs increased to being a 'Dad'?
I would say all of the above, plus one extra condition rarely talked about in modern medicine, due to possible law suits which could follow, once such a condition is fully explained by science. This factor, is lack of childhood experience with infectious disease, through excessive use of antibiotics and vaccinations. Such a medical marvel has definitely saved millions of lives over the past century, but could it be, that in an evolutionary sense, childhood infections have been selected for, as restraining tools, to not only ensure the greatest fitness of the immune system, but also to ensure body size, through controlled stature, of a population, does not exceed the available resources of each ecosystem where human beings reside.
Even if a pastoral lifestyle and city environments brought greater exposure (and suffering) from infectious disease, at the same time, over many thousands of years, natural selection also favored reduced stature, later age puberty and a higher childhood death rate, from contagion, as a means of establishing symbiosis, as well as can be, with our species and the environment (everything else). This is of course what the stuff of fitness is all about.
In the modern world, however, genes which govern growth and development have been unlocked, through low incidence of infectious disease, increasing resources for alternative projections, and in the youth, such resources have been plowed into reaching full growth potential, at an earlier age, with full stature, fully grown body plans with stretched forelimbs and long necks. The result is earlier puberty.
I would also say that unlocking these same growth and development genes has also uncoupled what were strict scaling laws governing growth and development of the brain and somatic body as two symbiotic units, which are today, totally unscaled, with the result being, in the unlucky few, a major cause of Autism, ADHD etc.
Also see here:
Sure it does… « JayMan's Blog
I think if we look to novels written by women we can see that cads were attractive to women and always breeding aplenty, even when anti-cad values were very strongly enforced. Take 19th century society England.
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett thinks Collins is a ludicrous milksop, but like the other other women she is powerfully attracted to Wickham. He works her with smooth talk and a sob story. Bennett is only set straight when Darcy tells her he had to rescue his 15 year old sister from Wickham who was trying to seduce her.
Bennett, considered a beauty, doesn't want to marry a wealthy wimp. But clever as she is, she can't see through an absolute bastard like Wickham. Why? Well Wickham is the one described by Austen as being extremely good-looking. He also has dark hair.
In Mansfield Park Mary Crawford raises an objection to impecunious, but moral and kind, Edmund Bertram's plan to become a minister. Bertram begins to doubt himself and wonders if being a minister would make him less of a man. (And less attractive to the ladies?) Being manly was always very important in reproductive success.
George,
That's actually a half-truth. Among white Americans, the "Bible Belt" is a region of below-replacement fertility.
There are certain religious groups, like the Mormons, the Amish, and the Hassidic Jews, who have above-replacement fertility. The relevant factor isn't religion per se, but rather a very group-oriented life environment.
Anon,
I disagree. Can you provide references?
Beyond Anon,
It may be a bit of both. This is purely anecdotal but I know of many couples where the woman has had children with a cad and then sought out a dad to raise them.
Sean,
I believe that female mate choice is constrained in traditional societies and that this was especially so during the period of middle-class ascendency (cf. Gregory Clark's work). Before the 1920s, the dominant mode of courtship was "calling" (and not dating). A young man had to call at a young woman's home. This meant getting prior approval from her parents. This process condemned "cads" to the margins of society.
Anon,
Uh huh. Leaf through any fashion magazine (or porn mag, if you wish). What sort of women do you see?
Davani,
It depends on the kind of society we will evolve towards. We could become a society where single beta men become a class of drones who do most of the real work. But the prestige will go towards the "big men", i.e., ruthless, charismatic men who are good at dominating others.
The Truth,
We see early puberty in many human societies that, until recently, had rudimentary medical care. (I'm still surprised by the second comment).
Anon,
OMG! Jayman beat me to it!
Sean,
But don't those novels also illustrate how constrained female mate choice used to be?
"I know of many couples where the woman has had children with a cad and then sought out a dad to raise them."
I was recently reading the comments of a thread at the Daily Mail filled with comments such as "my ex-husband was a drunk, cruel, womanizer. I'm glad I finally found a nice man who is a great father to my 3 children." There was no self-examination as to why she had the kids with the sexy badboy. That is the ultimate strategy for women, have the children with the sexy badboy and then find a beta provider to raise them.
"As sexual relationships become less stable and shorter-term, women will ignore men who are oriented towards stable, long-term relationships."
Actually, it is that as women become economically independent, either through their careers or the state providing for them, they don't need the dads to support them. So now they can go off and have fun with the cads.
Of course the reproductive rates are different.
The "Bible-Belt" is a huge mixture between genuine religious conservatives and then the fake religious Sarah Palin/Bristol Palin types, who are half-feminist half "traditional", plus minorities who may or may not be conservative/liberal/moderate/etc.
I know this sounds far-fetched but you guys know all about the manosphere and how they hate legal marriage correct?
Legal marriage has been corrupted. It's de-facto liberal feminist. This is even becoming the consensus among religious conservatives.
We have TWO movements towards the disregard towards legal marriage. One is liberal. The other is conservative (manospherian).
The first type is feminist: stupid Sarah Palin with her daughter Bristol Palin who had a baby with cad Levi Johnson as a teenager. She is now a single mother.
We then have various low IQ minority women who slut around and become single mothers due to their low intelligence and not necessarily due to their conservatism. Lack of use of contraception is more an act of stupidity rather than conservatism for them, become in their beliefs and behaviour they are liberal.
We also have religious women having babies with religious men, without legal marriage, in their early to mid 20's and using things like NFP and families staying intact (stable cohabitation?).
Here’s a direct link to the study, titled “Ovulation leads women to perceive sexy cads as good dads.”
What’s particularly interesting about this study is that it proves women don’t just seek badboys for short-term flings; when a woman is at her horniest, she wants sex AND loving commitment from the jerk. And she deludes herself into believing the hansome jerk wants the same thing. (Or rather, her hormones help fuel her hamster into believing the unbelievable.) This goes a long way to explaining why women take on “project” men and attempt to reform them. It’s not because women are nurturers who want to save jerks; it’s because women are turned on and they want to mating cads and want desperately to keep them around and help raise the children they hope to have with them.
This flies directly in the face of the assertion by feminists, manginas and game haters (oh my!) who love to crow, without any evidence in hand, that women only want to sleep with jerks for a night, and want nothing to do with them the rest of the time. .
In other words, it’s evolutionarily better for a woman to risk it all on the jerk women love than to risk nothing on the beta provider women tolerate. Such is the power of the force behind a woman’s prime directive.
Women have no idea of the bleak odds most men have been living with for years, or how disaffected it has made them. I’d guess the average beta, by the age of 30, has been rejected or flaked on at least one thousand times. What this teaches them is to keep a lot of irons in the fire and minimize their emotional investment in any of them.
Beta are in the 80% of men who spends their twenties watching 80% of the women go after the other 20% of alfa men. Needless to say, this adds greatly to disillusionment. Beta´s long since learned to treat sex as a bodily function, like eating or shitting, that they can accomplish with the help of some porn or prostitutes.
Sure, some betas learn game and find success with women. The point is that those few of beta men who have sex or partner nowadays are mainly with women nowhere close to what they find optimally attractive.
In her new book Nina G. Jablonski says "No researchers... have explored the opposite possibility, that women deliberately select darker men!"
Apart from the 'deliberately' I'm not sure if that might not apply to Africa. As I understand it you say in most traditional societies female selection was constrained, like in 19th century society England. But the point about human nature I was trying to make is that women, especially the most attractive/feminine ones, will go for the 'dark hero' every time .
"multiple-partner fertility was more prevalent among African-American men and men who grew up in
households that were not headed by two biological parents. [...] We also found that men were more likely to have children with multiple partners if they had their first sexual experience at a young age,[..] In addition, we found that multiple-partner fertility often occurred in conjunction with problem behaviors, including incarceration and drug use. Also, our analyses showed that although most fathers with multiple-partner fertility had children with just two partners, men who fathered children with more than one woman had more children, on average, than did fathers of two or more children with the same mother" Men Who Father Children with More Than One Woman:A Contemporary Portrait of Multiple-Partner Fertility
According to THIS, "[A] white woman has barely a 1 in 10 chance that a black father of her children will marry her." Yet "2.45 percent of all US births are interracial ones born to white mothers and black fathers."
The eye of the beholder? cites a study where white women rated black men as more attractive than white men.
@Tyrion Lannister:
Um, have a source for any of your statistics?
How many men do you think end up never-married by age 40? By race?
Relatedly, I am familiar with the theories that cad societies where men hyper vigilantly (and hyper jealously) guard their women from alpha male interlopers, and geographic regions where high parasite loads influence the sexual selection process so that beauty — a sign of health and lack of genetic mutations — is favored, produce more beautiful women.
How animal domestication made people better looking
Peter, can you argue somewhat orthogonally to my monogamy-male choosiness theory is the theory that skewed sex ratios which favor men would produce more beautiful women over the generations?. Such societies would be notable for their polygyny?.
Perhaps all these theories reinforce each other, such that we would find the most beautiful women in countries with established monogamy norms, higher parasite loads, and sex ratios favoring men (caused predominately by men dying young, or otherwise taking themselves out of the sexual marketplace).What do you think?
Here’s a hypothesis that I haven’t seen elsewhere: More beautiful women will be found in monogamous cultures, or among monogamously-inclined races.
Where women don’t (or can’t) sleep around, and where men are expected to assume a heavy economic and emotional responsibility for the women they woo, men will be choosier about the women they date and marry. Monogamy selects for male choosiness.
If you’re a man, and you’re limited to dating only a few women in your lifetime, and there are onerous familial and cultural pressures to marry the first or second woman you date, you are not going to throw away your one shot at a girl — not to mention all those resources you accumulated to win her over . You’ll take your time assessing the available female goods, and aim for the most beautiful babe you can get. You’ll waste little time or energy spelunking unattractive girls.
Over eons, this results in the more monogamous races and cultures of humanity producing more beautiful women. Of course, seismic shifts in the mating market have been underway for the past 60 or so years, so I expect a future of less beautiful women, on average and proportionate to their overall numbers, compared to the recent past. The one exception to this uglification trend will be the total bifurcation into a female be
Natural and sexual selection is still significantly shaping human evolution. The Dnieper-Dniester region have become, anthropologically, the Fertile Crescent on female beauty.
My preferred theory is increased male options. The great wars decimated the ranks of the Eastern Front’s men, so much so that the men remaining alive had their pick of the poon. And when men have mating options — whether through the gain of power and charisma or through the luck of living during a time of favorable sex ratio skew — they almost always choose young, slender, pretty women. The Rus men chose wisely.
The Theory Of Dyevolution
But Greg Cochran recently undermined this theory when he computationally concluded that not enough time has passed since the great wars for the miracle of organic eugenics to work its magic and push the Rus women toward elevated heights of beauty.
By the way, post linking to my blog earlier was from me. Was in a new browser and I didn't have my name filled out.
Also, note that Audacious Epigone has found that "dad" types have more babies on average than "cads", by the measures he used (also here, Jason Malloy).
Anon,
It's not just the women who don't self-examine. I remember discussing this issue with an older man and expressing my worries over the long-term consequences. He felt there was nothing to worry about. As long as the kids are brought up right and get a good education, everything will turn out right. That's what most people believe nowadays, including many self-described traditionalists.
Sean,
It's not just that women prefer cads to dads. Cads also try harder. I've seen them work, and they don't react as badly to rejection as other men do.
Greg,
Rigorous monogamy doesn't mean a society where men can pick and choose. Certain areas of the U.S. used to be highly religious (with severe sanctions on prostitution, shacking up, etc.) while suffering from a wife shortage. This was notably the case in frontier areas.
Anon,
I would agree with Greg Cochran. Canada has plenty of Ukrainians who came here before the two world wars. They don't seem to look any different from recent Ukrainian immigrants.
Jayman,
I checked out the links and they didn't seem to lead to any verifiable sources. In any case, how can one measure the reproductive success of cads? Self-report? Census data? I can't think of any worthwhile approach.
Jayman,
It is difficult provide information and statistics on solitary bachelors men/women and singles men/women in a long term, short term relationships, dating and mating opportunities. Percentage of unmarried and married people is not useful in this case.
If you use to read essays on gender dynamics and the sexual revolution. A characteristic feature of decadent societies is the recrudescence of primitive, precivilized cultural forms. That is what is happening to us. Sexual liberation really means the Darwinian mating pattern of the baboon pack reappears among humans, where 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did. The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all. Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'. Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women (phenotype), as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males. The bottom 20% omegas are not meaningful in this context.
To maximize the chance that all of us can be successful in passing our genes in the most safe and effective way, human society developed cultural norms such as marriage, monogamy and societal shame for things like divorce and infidelity. Even polygamous societies were trying to make sure that the most desirable Alpha males had enough variety within their marriages to avoid trying to steal or cheat with someone else’s wife, cuckolding another man into raising a kid that didn’t carry his genes.
Over time, societies found monogamy most beneficial and orderly. The modern sexual marketplace, post-Sex Revolution, marks the first time in history that we have viewed sex as something people should be able to have without limit. It’s quite a mess. Our less evolved forebears understood the dynamics better than we do today. They created marriage, made divorce hard to obtain, and monogamy was neither derided nor ridiculed. And then female economic freedom, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.
Alfa men practice serial polygyny, through mating a lot of girls, marriage, divorce, and remarriage. For all practical purposes, the consequences of serial polygyny are exactly the same as those of simultaneous polygyny. The mathematical consequence, given a roughly 50-50 sex ratio, is that situation is depriving beta men of mating opportunities.
What would be interesting to understand is the reproductive fitness of cad's children.
If cads have more children and become prevalent in the population compared to dads, their children will have less material support than now (less resource extracted from the dads and transferred to the cads from the government). This is also true in the case of a long economic collapse/crisis.
Cad's children have less support than dad's children but, with the government interference, they receive enough resources to be able to compensate for the lack of paternal investment. If we suppose that an economic crisis will reduce the resources for both groups of children, the cad's will fare much worse than the dad's.
This will put cad's at a disadvantage against the dad's in the mating, because women falling for the cad's children will have even less resources available for their children where women able to monopolize the dad's will be able to extract a lot of resources from them for their children.
In the end it is not how many children have the cad or the dad, but how many children have the women falling for the cad or the dad.
The Inductivist had a few data about it:
Mean number of offspring
Wealthy liberal women (n = 35) 1.60
Wealthy conservative women (n = 43) 2.49
Marital Status and fertility
Mean number of offspring
Women with less than four-year degree (sample size = 1,759)
Married 2.23
Separated/Divorced 2.14
Never-Married .46*
Women with four-year degree or more (sample size = 866)
Married 1.88
Separated/Divorced 1.63
Never-Married .15*
At the end, if the women falling for the cad have a lot less children than the women falling for the dads this will keep the number of cads a bay.
For there to be a big genetic change those genetically primed to be cads would have to have had very little reproductive success until recently.
I think 'cad' is a biological type: an optimally testosteronized man who will be better looking, have superior reproductive success in any circumstances, and be healthier. (Men who father 4 or more children by age 30 have greatly increased chances of living to 100 years old. See here)
Peter said, Before the 1920s, the dominant mode of courtship was "calling" (and not dating). A young man had to call at a young woman's home. This meant getting prior approval from her parents. This process condemned "cads" to the margins of society.
Yes, if they stuck with a cad strategy (ie one that wouldn't work). To me cad types sound like men with high sex drive. So wouldn't many a cad-by-inclination living before the twenties repress his predilections and force himself into a 'dad' role. I think they would, if that was the only way to get access to a nubile woman.
I think cad is a biological type: an optimally testosteronized man who will be better looking and more masculine, healthier and have a higher sex drive. (Men who father 4 or more children by age 30 have greatly increased chances of living to 100 years old. See
here)
Most importantly he will have superior reproductive success. Given that very masculine men are attracted to very feminine women, and vice versa (Sexual selection on human faces and voices.), and that such couples enjoy superior reproductive success, why would many men genetically primed to be cads, but forced by society to marry, not have enjoyed at least equal reproductive success to married genetic dad types?
The dark haired and extremely good looking Wickham marries Elizabeth Bennett's silly sister in Pride and Prejudice, I'm betting they went on to have a bigger family than Darcy and Elizabeth.
Is natural selection now favoring the “cads” over the “dads”? That might be what’s happening.
I see JayMan already linked to this above, but I compared age-matched cohorts in the General Social Survey and found the reproductive success of cads has significantly declined over time. Cads don't want to be forced to pay child support, so they use birth control. Dads are happy to pay for children, so they have children.
Mirco Romanato,
"This will put cad's at a disadvantage against the dad's in the mating, because women falling for the cad's children will have even less resources available for their children where women able to monopolize the dad's will be able to extract a lot of resources from them for their children."
Throughout human history, wealthy and powerful men of high status have had a greater number of mates and produced more children than poor and powerless men of low status (Betzig 1986). Psychology and cross-cultural anthropology supports a general rule of greater emphasis on female physical attractiveness in Homo sapiens. In sharp contrast, a strong positive correlation between wealth and reproduction does not exist in contemporary society. Marriage and successful reproduction are no longer privileges of the wealthy and powerful, and men’s reproductive success is not related to class. If anything, the correlation is negative; in contemporary industrial societies like the United States, poor families have more children than wealthy families. In the General Social Survey (GSS) from 1972–2000, for instance, the correlation between men’s income (information on wealth is not available in the GSS) and the number of children they have ever had, after controlling for age (which tends to increase both men’s income and the number of children they have had) and current marital status, is weakly but significantly negative (r .0195, p.05, n 12,084). This is in clear contradiction to the prediction of evolutionary psychology.
Wealth and power were indicators of resources available to invest in the offspring. But female human nature is not designed to find older men with greater power and resources attractive (i.e Young girls don’t swoon for middle-aged billionaires). Before women entered into the workforce, the main reason that women married wealthy but unattractive men, was for financial support. If money is no longer a necessity, they can look for high phenotypical quality men.
Culture that conditioned women to underestimate the importance of male attractiveness. Empirical research proved that people (women and men) prefer individuals of high attractiveness rather than that similar to their own [Walster et al. 1966, Huston 1973]. Experiments by Ellis and Kelley [1999] seem to support that all people prefer highly attractive individuals but only the attractive ones are accepted by them. Further support for this mechanism comes from blind dates [Asendorpf et al. 2011, Back et al. 2011] and internet dates [Hitsch et al. 2010, Shaw Taylor et al. 2011, Millward 2012, OkCupid Blog 2009], where highly attractive participants are universally preferred.
Sean,
"Given that black men are more masculine and white women more feminine, and most masculine men are attractive to the most feminine women, then white girl/ black male interracial relationships are going to become the norm. Because a lot of white men don't find black women particularly attractive, they find it difficult to believe their pretty and feminine daughters could be attracted to black men. But the cases are quite different. I think there are now social restraints on explictly telling children avoid such relationships. Parents just hope their daughters will not be so inclined, many of them are and their acting on that. We are going to see integration of the extremes of human femininit and masculinity faster than anyone thinks possible".
The marriage or sexual partner disparities are easily explained within the wider body of observations. Men place a high premium on women’s attractiveness, and will end up with the most attractive women they can obtain. A corollary is that white men married to non-white women will on average have lower mate value(Low physical attractiveness). Homotypic preference for race has been documented in humans [Kurzban & Weeden 2005].
The lower mate value of white women sexually involved with non-white men, especially blacks, is also evident in lower intelligence and worse mental health. The partner choices of those with lower mate value have more to do with compromise and less with preference compared to those having higher mate value.
a) Both men and women desire attractive sexual partners, the more attractive the better.
b) Compromising on attractiveness criteria is the norm, and men are less restrictive about who they have sex with. Most men can have sex with women nowhere close to what they find optimally attractive
c) The extent to which men can compromise is limited by arousal because erection is not under voluntary control. In contrast, arousal is not a limiting factor in women. A woman who is not aroused by the looks of a man is still capable of voluntary intercourse with him, from which she will derive pleasure and likely orgasm. In contrast, men being more visual, if the physical appearance of a woman does not arouse them, then a non-trivial number of them will not be able to have natural intercourse with the woman even in the dark when they are trying to imagine she is another woman, forget about the light.
d) The nature of many pleasurable sensations, related to mechanical stimulation, will not change with the ethnicity of the partner.
I only have casual observation, not hard data, to back up my theory. I base it on the exponential increase in the past ten years of businesses teaching pickup skills to men. These are real businesses with satisfied clientele who pay in the thousands for weekend seminars and “boot camps” to learn how to turn women on.
Bleeding heart compassion has cursed blessed the country with layers of safety nets that subvert the natural cleansing of losers from contributing to the next generation. The result of all this government largesse is the substitution of handouts for husbands. When provider males who are predisposed to marry and support a family are worth less on the market than they used to be they are slowly replaced by playboys taking advantage of the sexual climate. Women who have their security needs met by Big Government (in combination with their own economic empowerment) begin to favor their desire for sexy, noncommital alpha males at the expense of their attraction for men who will foot the bills.
Prediction: As women’s financial status rises to levels at or above the available men in their social sphere, they will have great difficulty finding an acceptable long-term partner. The men, for their part, will turn away from emphasizing their ability to provide as they discover their mediocre-paying corporate jobs are no longer effective displays of mating value. They will instead emphasize the skills of “personality dominance”.
The betas either learn to adapt or learn to love celibacy. Now, instead of spending their money on diapers, these guys are spending it on in-field instruction in nightclubs.
Our genes only care about one thing: What is the winning reproductive strategy? Today, that winning strategy is cads strategy, sex, and splitting, leaving the kid to be raised by an unwitting chump.
The result of this sea change in relations between the sexes will be a future of more cads and fewer monogamously inclined men. The pendulum will eventually swing back as a world full of cads players and fatherless children cannot sustain itself, but there will be much wailing and gnashing of genitals before that day arrives.
Ultimately, compassionate policies to help protect us from ourselves will backfire. Losers need to suffer and be excluded from experiencing the happiness of financial security, love and sex for the health of society as a whole.
Female economic empowerment and growing government largesse were helping to fuel the desire of women to ride the alpha cock carousel in their 20s, only to settle down with a beta provider later in life when their sexual peak had been passed.
Now science has come around to this point of view with a new study that shows women with money problems prefer softer, beta men who would make good resource provider candidates.
Prediction: As women’s financial status rises to levels at or above the available men in their social sphere, they will have great difficulty finding an acceptable long-term partner. The men, for their part, will turn away from emphasizing their ability to provide as they discover their mediocre-paying corporate jobs are no longer effective displays of mating value. They will instead emphasize the skills of “personality dominance”.
Or to adapt their preferences to rapid changes in the environment such as the introduction of the Pill, feminism and economic self-sufficiency.
We have scientific evidence proving a core concept that women who are materially comfortable — as many women became after their assault on the workforce and colleges beginning in the 1970s — are less likely to seek out beta providers and more likely to indulge their hypergamous drives and sex it up with handsome alpha cads; that is, until Father Time cruelly etches the first of his brandings on delicate, feminine faces. This would go a long way to explaining why age of first marriage has been steadily climbing since 1970; more years devoted to schooling to make the middle class money, yes, but also more years to slut it up with the high status alphas women truly desire but don’t need for material resource procurement.
Women who missed the big feminist bandwagon of the last 40 years and didn’t go to college or make a decent salary are the ones who pine for gentle, beta herbs to take them under their wing and provide a home, food and shopping money. So feminism has indeed been a boon for alpha males who want sex on the cheap with a harem of hypergamous concubines, and a living hell for betas who have been left out in the cold, waiting their turn for the ladies to age into their late 20s and 30s before getting a chance to drop on bended knee for the last ditch lock-up.
Also of note: Women who worried about health problems were attracted to handsome men. So if you are an Adonis alpha male with a goal to bed as many women as possible before kicking off, your best bet is to target hypochondriac careerist chicks.
If you are an average or ugly male who would love nothing more than to snuggle after gently executed missionary sex and debate which color to paint the foyer, your best bet is to target in shape athletic women who come from poor families and have crappy jobs.
Peter,
"I would agree with Greg Cochran. Canada has plenty of Ukrainians who came here before the two world wars. They don't seem to look any different from recent Ukrainian immigrants."
Maybe not enough time has passed since the two great world wars. Germany suffered an slightly greater loss of population in proportion to its pre-war population: 12 million out of 80 million versus 25 million out of about 165 million for the USSR. German losses were 7 million civilian losses versus about 5 million military losses. German women are beautiful, but are not as gorgeous as Slavonic women.
But who reject this theory realize how long the Eurasian plains has been blood soaked? Kiev used to be the center of Russian power during the pre Mongol Kievian state. It was a farce to hold it and the forested area of Moscow became the center of Russian power especially since the open plans was nothing but Tatar and Cossack meat.
However, the most compelling evidence comes from the fact that it was always well known before the war, going back several centuries, that Polish, Hungarian, and Slavonic women were the most beautiful in Europe. Napoleon had several Polish mistresses for instance and that was his preferred nationality for this reason. The Turks raided the Ukrainian Black Sea coast for slave girls for centuries because of their beauty. Nordic vikings taking local wives and giving birth to a hybrid culture. Genetically many russian people are finno-ugric, not slavic or slavic/scandinavian.
Matt, It is simply not true that most girls with black boyfriends couldn't get an average white man.
If a white woman has barely a 1 in 10 chance that a black father of her children will marry her, she isn't rationally deciding to mate with a black man on the basis of marriage market considerations. Yet "2.45 percent of all US births are interracial ones born to white mothers and black fathers."
Two studies by Lewis found black men were rated as more attractive than white men. Kanazawa's analysis of Add Health data found that, net of intelligence, black men are significantly more physically attractive than nonblack men.
48iprPala
Marriage and successful reproduction are no longer privileges of the wealthy and powerful, and men’s reproductive success is not related to class. If anything, the correlation is negative; in contemporary industrial societies like the United States, poor families have more children than wealthy families. In the General Social Survey (GSS) from 1972–2000, for instance, the correlation between men’s income (information on wealth is not available in the GSS) and the number of children they have ever had, after controlling for age (which tends to increase both men’s income and the number of children they have had) and current marital status, is weakly but significantly negative (r .0195, p.05, n 12,084). This is in clear contradiction to the prediction of evolutionary psychology.
There is a positive correlation between a man's wealth and his fertility even in developed countries. It's just that the threshold where that positive correlation starts is far above the middle class level it was back during the 1950s.
I see constant fascination in the manosphere with "alpha males vs. beta males" and "dads vs. cads."
I wish people would get away from these labels. We are all descendants of males whose reproductive strategies successfully paid off... but they weren't all the same! *On average*, all groups of males existing today have always done equally well.
Think about it: if one group, such as cads, were more reproductively successful, natural selection would have started to lean in their direction. After millions of years of evolution, the proportions of various strategies in the population have settled at *equilibrium levels*, at which all strategies are roughly equally successful.
This is all explained in the book "Sperm Wars" by Robin Baker.
So what are the costs to being a Cad, you might ask? First of all, early mortality due to risk-taking behavior. Curtailment of fertility due to STDs. In today's Western societies, being burdened with alimony (and paternity tests) which takes away their resources. The much-reduced ability to run and hide and cover their tracks due to a litiginous society.
There aren't imaginary costs, they are very real.
Sean,
You referred to the research of Michael Lewis as a counter argument. His work is poor. Ellis and He have made an attempt to account for a large body of evidence, and I have added to their argument. Conclusions drawn from a wide body of literature are more likely to be reliable. Lewis would have a difficult time fitting his research within the wider body of observations, whereas it is an easy matter to fit his data within the picture that emerges from most observations and publications on the topic.
The results come from predominantly European college students rating on a 1-10 attractiveness scale facebook pictures of young adult Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians. These ratings are not properly interpretable in terms of a comparison of the attractiveness of ethnic groups as people in the 80th percentile of attractiveness in their ethnic group may be found less attractive than people in the 60th percentile of attractiveness in a different ethnic group, and raters may be ranking faces based on their impression of the average in the ethnic group to which the person belongs.
The ratings of facebook pictures selected by an assistant of his is what Lewis relies on. Lewis never addresses the ethnic backgrounds of fashion models, mannequins showing idealized features, whether black men and East Asian women are disproportionately perceived as the hottest looking on college campuses in the U.S. and U.K., whether men prefer to see East Asian women among pinup models and pinup artwork, what the literature shows about ratings of more ancestral-looking facial features and which groups have more ancestral facial features, trends in cosmetic surgery as they pertain to altering ethnic features and sundry. but Lewis has made no attempt to fit his data and interpretation within the wider body of evidence that spans multiple specialties.
If whites sexually involved with non-whites tend to have lower mate value, then the most likely explanation of why more white men than white women are sexually involved with non-whites is because men being less restrictive about who they have sex with. It should be possible to show that this applies to even sex with blacks when one considers whites capable of having sex with blacks.
Sex between whites and blacks is highly unusual, and in some regions, such as the U.S. and the U.K., more white women than white men are sexually involved with blacks. Since women are not limited by arousal, almost all women are capable of sexual intercourse with black men but not all men can do it with black women.
Off topic here, but you skipped my questions on your last post.
Peter, you say 30-20000 circa europeans where eurasians or proto-asians. OK, it is consistent with the statuettes showing peper-hairs and bushman style buttock of the venuses, along with the almond shape eyes, inherited from the bushman, who are the first asians, so to speak, but
1) does that imply a de-asianisation of the later post glacial-europeans, while east eurasians, i.e, today's asians, retained these characters?
2) Is there any reason west eurasians woold loose asian characters like the epicanthic fold, while east-asians retained or even amplified them. Sexual selection?
3) In this case, the Cro-magnon being more 'asian' than modern europeans, did they have an epicanthic fold or did they have lost it already?
Jason,
Birth control and abortion are reducing the number of all births, both within and out of wedlock. Since out-of-wedlock births are a rising proportion of all births, it seems to me that cads are a rising proportion of all fathers. Perhaps I'm missing something, so please correct me.
Also, your analysis is based on self-report and cultural definitions of "my own children." On the one hand, a significant number of children raised by married men have been fathered by other men, i.e., the "dad" has been cuckolded. On the other hand, many unmarried men have no clear idea as to the number of children they have fathered.
Others,
I agree that these trends are not sustainable over the long term. But how far off is the long term? At what point will the dads be overwhelmed by the cads?
Ben,
Peppercorn hair and large buttocks are not characteristic of East Asians or Amerindians. I believe there was an initial period of moderate sexual selection (before 20,000 BP) that saw lengthening and straightening of head hair and feminization of face shape. With the glacial maximum (20,000 to 15,000 BP), this sexual selection intensified, leading to diversification of hair and eye colors and extreme whitening of skin color. By that time, however, the advancing ice sheet had split the Eurasian population in two, with the eastern Eurasians being severely reduced in number and suffering localized extinction. So these later characteristics were confined to the western Eurasians, i.e., the ancestors of present-day Europeans.
'Matt', physical attractiveness is a criterion that will become more important for women if being a dad leads to losing out in reproductive success. They'll go for men who can give them 'sexy sons'. Kanazawa said net of intelligence, and intelligence is going to become a less important critereon. At their most fertile and when not taking considerations of long term resource provision into account, women prefer more masculine men. (eg bravery is valued over kindness) If you look at white male celebrities considered attractive, their faces are far more masculine than average. Cads masculine looks and behaviour are the default search image on women's mental algorithms, especially women who are daughters of cads and have inherited their androgen receptors.
Peter, I made a new post examining the issue, as well as to reply to some of the comments here:
Some guys get all the babes – not exactly « JayMan's Blog
Since out-of-wedlock births are a rising proportion of all births, it seems to me that cads are a rising proportion of all fathers. Perhaps I'm missing something, so please correct me.
Cultural changes affect the whole spectrum of male willingness to invest, but that doesn't necessarily translate into certain kinds of men reproducing more within that spectrum. If the culture is less demanding that reproduction occur within marriage, this could cause women to choose less invested men (e.g. if that is "sexier") or it could make choosing more invested men even more important (e.g. men who will invest in absence of social obligation).
In a follow-up comment, I did compare the whole population, and found that promiscuity had a stronger negative correlation with male fertility among Gen Xers than it did among Boomers. So the rise in cad fertility was disconfirmed; the trend appears to be in the opposite direction.
a significant number of children raised by married men have been fathered by other men
Non-paternity in developed nations has been measured at 1-3%, and it has declined over time.
On the other hand, many unmarried men have no clear idea as to the number of children they have fathered.
This would only upset my analysis if Gen Xers are underestimating their children compared with Boomers. But since Boomers had more children than Gen Xers, the opposite seems more likely.
Not a day goes by where women don't make the case against themselves. Do people who wreck civilization need "rights?" Are people who don't have future-time-orientation really "adults?"
Jayman, Jason,
You argue very cogently. Just two questions:
1. When the male respondents are questioned about the number of children they have, does the question exclude children who are not biologically related? For instance, if a man marries a single mother and adopts her children, do those children count? Or are they excluded?
2. Are these trends limited to White Americans? Do we also see them in African and Hispanic Americans as well?
The post is about fathering children with multiple women, not sexual promiscuity or number of sexual partners (men who pay for sex can have many women, that does not make them cads)
Cads = men who have had children with more than one woman According to the study I linked, men who have 2 or more children with one mother have lower fertility than men who have had children with more than one woman.
From what its says at above 'sexy son' link women who grow up in insecure circumstances go for the biological gold standard: men who can father masculine sons. Note that an important criterion for this is a man's actual proven ability to attract other women.
"There wasn't a great increase in black immigrants into the United States, so the rise in black-white intermarriages really suggests..." That there is something special going on there IOM.
G.Cochran seems convinced that blacks' are handicapped by mutations. But I think blacks show superior biological cad-quality to whites. They move well, as do cads, (sexy son link). Cochran maintains that in the brain there is more to go wrong; so intellectual function is affected while movements, requiring the action of fewer genes, are not.
OK, but why did Jensen believe that blacks equalled whites at rote memorization of simple facts and skills?
How come mutations only affect conceptual learning? As Jensen said, one reason teachers doubted his figures for black IQ was that the average Black child seemed able to learn things like the names of everyone in their class or school as quick or quicker than whites.
Jensen's own experience of testing was that, in person, the black children seemed smarter in some (perhaps superficial but nonetheless real) ways than white children of the same IQ. He retested some for that reason.
I think that blacks exceed whites in some kinds of social intelligence related to male mating success.
Dr. F,
The GSS variable CHILDS asks how many children you've "had" (defined as "born alive"). So the wording of the question is referring to biological children, but it seems likely different people would answer the question differently.
I don't think there are enough Hispanics in the GSS to make a proper comparison for age-matched cohorts, but the relative decline in fertility has been even larger for promiscuous black men than it has been for promiscuous white men.
An evolutionary model of conditional reproductive strategies argues that girls whose fathers are absent or make little parental investment experience early puberty. However, such a conditional strategy cannot be adaptive unless the absence of the girl's father at the microlevel is predictive of some recurrent feature of the macrosocial system and early puberty is advantageous in the system. I argue that father absence is indicative of the degree of polygyny (simultaneous and serial) in society. Polygyny of both kinds creates a shortage of women in reproductive age, and thus, early puberty will be advantageous. Available comparative data indicate that the degree of polygyny is associated with a decrease in the mean age of menarche across societies, as is the divorce rate a presumptive index of serial polygyny, in strictly monogamous societies.
Peter, I agree with you generaly on your sexual selection theory, but in your previous post, you were talking specifically about 'asian' characters, or more accurately: eurasian or proto-asian characters before the last glaciation.
So you say large buttocks are not asian characteristics, of course not, TODAY. But who can say they were not 30 000 years ago?
When we look at the venuses statuettes, one can't help not to see a 'bushman' type, with clear almond-shaped eyes in some examples. So the proto-asian characters present in eurasia at this time was reminiscent of the african characters present in the bushman populations, including the epicanthic fold.
It is logic to infer that any eurasian population 40 to 20,000 bc could have been a mixture of what we call today 'asian characters', 'western european characters' and 'bushman-like characters'. Cro-Magnons who lived 30000bc could therefore had an epicanthic fold.
My question was about the selective process: how to explain that some of these characters were retained in later eurasian populations and not in other eurasian populations. The epicanthic fold is one of these, still present in asia today but not in western europe.
Is it sexual selection combined with a founder effect? if so, it must have been ferocious, because the asian phenotypes is usually dominant. Let's get real: I know a guy who is third generation asian-american, with probably no more than 1/8 of asian blood, and he still displays a perfect epicanthic fold. A casual sexual selection doesn't seem to be enough and in any case the choice of 'some' of these characters looks pretty arbitrary to me.
Sean,
I agree largely with Jason/Jayman's argument that abortion and birth control are reducing the reproductive success of cads within any one population. But their data exclude the role of exogamy, i.e., they compare white American women only with white American men. I remember reading a study that mentioned the proportion of babies that are born to white American women and that are fathered by foreign-born men. It was a double-digit figure, if I remember correctly.
Satoshi Kanazawa,
I'm honored to have your comment on my blog! The latest studies indicate that the direction of causation is the reverse. It's not that father absence accelerates puberty in girls. Rather, girls with absent fathers tend to have mothers with a different genetic profile, i.e., the same genes that cause early puberty in the daughter also seem to influence the mother's sexual preferences.
I discuss this point at length in my paper:
Frost, P. (2011). Human nature or human natures? Futures, 43, 740–748. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2011.05.017
Ben,
The epicanthic eyefold was probably favored by an environment with a high degree of reflected sunlight. Khoisans in the Kalahari probably acquired this trait independently of early northern Asians. It also occurs in some Europeans, but at a lower frequency.
Could the epicanthic fold just be due to pleiotropy?
They say all babies or fetuses have epicanthic folds that most of them shed, except for Asians, Amerindians, etc. Perhaps other genes end up inactivating or suppressing this shedding process.
Also, the epicanthic fold is just an excess skin fold. Asians have less muscle tone and more fatty tissue, so perhaps it is related to that.
"They say all babies or fetuses have epicanthic folds that most of them shed, except for Asians, Amerindians, etc. Perhaps other genes end up inactivating or suppressing this shedding process."
Epicanthal folds are caused by a flat/underdeveloped nose. They are "shed" when the nose develops normally (which it does not in Down's syndrome, for example).
So, yes, whether or not epicanthi were a target of selection in Mongoloids and Bushmen, they'd occur incidental to facial flattening, regardless.
For SeanTodRoy: http://racehist.blogspot.com/2012/11/racial-intermarriage-and-household.html
Epicanthal folds are caused by a flat/underdeveloped nose. They are "shed" when the nose develops normally (which it does not in Down's syndrome, for example).
Yes, maybe that is all there is to epicanthic folds.
The nasal bridge - the bony part of the nose between the eyes - projects outward from the face and naturally tugs on the skin around it, including presumably the skin of the eyelid.
If there is no nasal bridge, or if it's very flat, there is not going to be this tugging action that stretches the skin of the eyelid, resulting in epicanthic folds.
Perhaps that is the explanation.
Sorry, I don't see how the finding that white women get more support for household tasks (or a husband with lower standards for housekeeping) by marrying a black man, has a bearing on the post. Those men aren't cads. The superior fertility of cads (men who have children with more than one woman) over monogamous men with 2 or more children, is made possible by cad's ability to win women. If a trade off between marketabilty and material comfort and support from a husband is the decisive factor, as you seem to be citing a study for, why is it so common for women to have the children of men who are clearly not going to be supportive or monogamous husbands? I think it is because some types of wome, especially when brought up in insecure family backgrounds, will instictively go for cads. Those backgrounds are becoming more common.
Epicanthal folds are caused by a flat/underdeveloped nose. They are "shed" when the nose develops normally (which it does not in Down's syndrome, for example).
I was going to say that they occur in sagitally hawk nosed Native Americans have quite the frequency of epicanthus and sagitally flat nosed Africans... But I'm not sure about the Native Americans though. It may be that they have the general Asian orbit shape (tall, narrow, circular, bordered by relative wide zygomas) without the epicanthus .
Flat nosed hominids without developed noses don't really have epicanthus either.
So it seems like there are ways to for a hominid develop a flatter nasal / frontal region (as opposed to a more "progeriod"* - http://www.whatsonxiamen.com/news13060.html - profile) without epicanthus, but East Asians and Bushmen didn't go down those routes (whether or not epicanthus was specifically selected for as opposed to flatness for some reason, which, yeah, I doubt).
*e.g. akin to the narrow, projecting nose and retruded jaws of people with progeria.
Anonymous,
You do see epicanthal folds in some Negroids (e.g., this Dinka woman), and don't, as far as I know, see them in Amerindians with prominent noses.
todroy,
We're not having a serious discussion. You're not a serious person. This is merely one additional data point showing, like every other data point, that white women who marry or have children with with black men have lower mate value than white women who marry or have children with white men. One would of course expect the opposite if reality conformed to your sexual fetish.
But their data exclude the role of exogamy, i.e., they compare white American women only with white American men. I remember reading a study that mentioned the proportion of babies that are born to white American women and that are fathered by foreign-born men. It was a double-digit figure, if I remember correctly.
I was looking at the entire sample, not whites. 8% of GSS respondents were not born in the US. Looking only at foreign-born men there is an even steeper cad penalty. Of course, there is a bias here, given that foreign cads can exit the sample in a manner unlike domestic cads. Regardless, the correlation would not reverse with the inclusion of a relatively small number of jet-setting Lotharios.
No offence Jason, but the study Men Who Father Children with More Than One Woman: A Contemporary Portrait of Multiple-Partner Fertility seems pretty authoritative.
It mentions early sexual experience (early puberty) as a predictor. The post suggests cad are spreading their genes, and causing earlier puberty.
Re. the way and rapidity at which this could happen. As far as I can gather, Peter agrees with Cochran Hawks and Harpending who argue against the importance of ``soft sweeps'' ('slight changes in frequency of many standing genetic variants').
However, as I understand it, the Rose fruit fly experiment suggests otherwise. "With each generation the researchers picked the flies that hatched earliest to be the parents of the next generation, and by the end of the experiment, the time to hatching had become 20 percent shorter. The question to be answered was how this happened. [..] In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common." Here.
Are cads outbreeding Dads? In this case, yes:
http://thewomanandthedragon.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/i-cheated-on-my-husband-to-secure-better-genes-for-my-children/
http://thewomanandthedragon.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/i-cheated-on-my-husband-to-secure-better-genes-for-my-children/
100% chance that "karen" is male.
A cad's genes would be better for a son, but for a daughter? "Why doesn't evolution get rid of ugly people?". You can't say that a woman's children irrespective of their sex will do better with a cad's genes. Even the genes of a monogamous but unusually masculine 'dad' may be somewhat maladaptive for his daughter. There are also issues about the social milieu, ie the reproductive fitness value of cad-masculine traits for a son may be non-existent when the son is going to be moving in a higher social class environment.
Re. a question elswhere. Peter already said 'The epicanthic eyefold was probably favored by an environment with a high degree of reflected sunlight'. The Bushmen's Kalahari home has a lot of eye-damaging ultraviolet B rays because of its altitude, and there is more UVB at high latitude (North Asia) that at the equator during summer. (See here. UVB photons ricochet off the ground and into eyes. Snow is the most highly reflective surface. That's why Eskimos wear snow googles.
Maybe it's not the "cads" we should be looking at, but the the tramps:
It’s not the cads, it’s the tramps « JayMan's Blog
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