We will use the terms “farming” and “agriculture” to mean relatively labor-demanding cultivation of fields by either whole families else by males. On the other hand by “gardening” we mean low intensity cultivation of usually temporary plots, often accompanied by some foraging and usually carried out mostly by women. Temporary plots, “swiddens”, are created by preparing an area of forest by girdling large trees, then burning it. The fire destroys weeds and their seeds and the ashes act as a source of nutrients for the soil. After several years the swidden is abandoned as weeds prosper and soil fertility declines. A new field is prepared and burned. Such a system is efficient in terms of human labor but it requires lots of land. These systems are common throughout central Africa, southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and central and south America. This was also the way that the early European invaders of North America farmed since land was essentially limitless. The Pilgrims and the first English settlers in Virginia made swiddens. Synonyms in the literature include “slash and burn” and “shifting cultivation.”
These are also called “female” farming systems (Boserup 1970) because in many of them women do all the work and men essentially parasitize women for food. But as population grows land goes from being a free good like air to be something that is owned and defended. As this transition occurs the low labor option of simply burning down a new field and abandoning the old one is no longer available, and people must trade labor for land as they invest in what land they have available. In the early stages of this process of agricultural intensification this involves as little as field rotation, in which a plot is used for crop one year, then left for several years to recover. If population continues to grow then fallow periods grow shorter and other investments are required like more intense weeding, composting, complex irrigation schemes, carrying human and animal waste to the field, and so on. The end result of this to be seen in tired peasants hauling water to a small terrace halfway up a mountain with an olive tree somewhere around the Mediterranean or in the labor intensive management of wet rice agriculture. The universal consequence of the new high labor input regime is that men are dragged back into working. Peasant farming systems are associated with nuclear families and male labor.
Classification by Mating Strategy
Living organisms are “designed ” by natural selection to reproduce: the rate of successful reproduction is called “fitness. ” A successful organism, in the currency of fitness, must allocate time, energy, and risk to (1) growth and maintenance and (2) reproduction. The allocation to reproduction is divided between (2a) mating and (2b) parenting. Humans are mammals, meaning that we have internal gestation and prolonged infant dependence even after birth as we provide food from mammary glands. Notice that these defining traits of mammals are in fact traits of females: a commitment to parenting is engineered into female mammals but not into males. At this most basic level there is an asymmetry between the two sexes leading to differences in the way that effort is allocated to mating and parenting. Females have “high obligate parental investment “, a fancy way of saying that they are forced to commit to parental effort. Males, on the other hand, vary greatly in this regard. In some species, e.g. coyotes or beavers, males are parental, working with females to provision the young. But species with parental males are not very common, and generally mammal males commit their effort to mating effort, meaning competition with other males for access to females. Think, for example, of a tomcat. Not only is he not the least bit parental, he is a threat to kittens and a new mother cat will drive any tom away from her litter. For an introduction to the ways in which this sex difference in reproductive strategies is played out in Nature you might want to read the chapter on “War between the sexes” of Richard Dawkins’ brilliant monograph The Selfish Gene (1989).
What about humans? In many ways the same regularities seem to govern human societies that govern sex roles in other mammals. Everywhere females are committed to being parental, caring for and feeding children. Male roles are much more diverse. A generalization is that males are parental when ecological circumstances lead to a payoff in terms of fitness. When males can leave off being parental, without fitness consequences, they do and leave parenting to the women. Men in societies where they are not forced to be parental turn instead to varieties of competition with other males, competition that can be blatant and out in the open else quiet and subtle.
For example in many low-density tropical gardening societies the women produce enough to feed everyone. Men parasitize women for food and spend their effort on local competition with other males and on chronic local raiding and warfare (hence the economists’ euphemism “female farming systems”). The ability of females to feed everyone seemingly liberates males from working, that is from direct work to provision his own offspring. Men often do work in these societies, but it is not quite the same. For example men may be responsible for the heavy work of girdling trees, clearing, and occasionally soil preparation. Invariably these activities are done not by dad working with this family in the family plot but by all the men, together as a group, like a fraternity project.
Other ecological systems can result in similar male withdrawal from being very paternal. At the time of European contact Indians of the Great Plains had only had horses for a century or so. The horse allowed a new efficiency in exploiting bison such that one or several males could provide weeks of food with only a few hours hunting. As in gardening systems males were essentially liberated from paternal work. When Europeans encountered these plains bison hunters the males were in many ways like the males in tropical gardening societies—-think for example of the exuberant body paint, shields, and headgear of the men. Another striking parallel with tropical gardeners was the sexual freedom of the women. If males are not investing then male concern with paternity, paternity certainty, and restrictions on female sexuality are all relaxed. Lewis and Clark’s accounts provide lively descriptions of the sexual freedom of Sioux women.
The distinction between societies where males are paternal and where males are competitive was first described, albeit in slightly different terms, by John and Beatrice Whiting (1975). They described and contrasted societies in which the relationship between women and men was “aloof ” with those in which it was “intimate. ” While the Whitings did not frame their description in terms of reproductive strategies, Draper and Harpending (1982) essentially recast their distinction in terms of evolutionary biology and related it to other literature about consequences for children of being reared in homes with or without resident fathers. The dimension of cultural diversity described by the Whitings turns out to be, in our opinion, the most fundamental and interesting axis of human social variation there is.
The Whitings discussed as one extreme those societies where men and women lived together, slept and ate together, seemed to like each other, and cooperated in households. The called these “intimate” societies and found that a reliable indicator was sleeping arrangements: in these societies men and women slept together, often with their children. In the perspective of evolution and reproductive strategies these are societies where males are putting reproductive effort into parental effort, that is to say they are “dad ” societies. While there may be organized external warfare there is usually not much local raiding and warfare.
At the other extreme are societies like those of many gardening groups where males and females don’t like each other very much, where relations between the sexes are, in the Whitings’ terms, “aloof.” Here men may sleep and live in men’s houses rather than in their wives’ houses. The men’s houses usually have some sort of ritual significance such that women are prohibited from entering them. They are low-tech societies’ versions of fraternity houses. While women work hard in these societies, men typically spend a lot of time in subtle and not so subtle male competition like debating, fighting, and planning the next round of fighting with the neighbors.
It is important to emphasize that there is no rigid line between aloof or cad and intimate or dad societies. Almost any generalization about these societies admits exceptions. Nevertheless our description of the cad-dad dimension is useful as a cartoon, a schematic, about how human social systems vary. It is especially useful because it shows how evolutionary theory makes sense of otherwise puzzling patterns in our species.
Generally dad societies are those where men work to feed their own offspring. Middle and upper class America is a dad society, especially the stereotype Ozzie and Harriet America of the 1950’s. Upper economic groups in contemporary industrial nations are all dadly with monogamous marriage and nuclear family households. We also find dad societies at the other end of the world economic spectrum, among foraging people in unproductive environments. For example the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari dessert of southern Africa have durable pair bonds and nuclear family households. They live in groups scattered over the desert but the groups are impermanent and their composition shifts as families move from one to the other. Pygmies of the Congo basin, Shoshone of the North American great basin, and many other groups where males are heavily involved in food production in an unfavorable environment are typical dad groups.
There are foraging groups in unusually rich environments where the “foragers are dads ” generalization fails badly. Along the northwest coast of North America were Indian groups who exploited the rich reliable resource stream of salmon. The products of a few weeks of hard work during the run could be preserved, and this smoked salmon along with other ocean foods and gathered vegetables meant that men could withdraw from working for their families. Instead they spent a lot of time engaged in male status jockeying (e.g. potlatches), other kinds of display like totem poles, and local warfare. Foragers in the wetter, northern parts of Australia also had more art, display, and male violence, than others elsewhere on the continent.
The most familiar examples to anthropology students of cad societies are found among tropical gardening societies. Gardening can mostly be left to the women, freeing men to be boys. Among economists there is the euphemism of “female farming systems ” to describe the African versions of these groups. The important characteristic of gardening systems is that they are found where land is free and where declining fertility and increasing weediness of a field is countered by abandoning it, girdling some trees, and burning down the forest to create a new field.
As population density grows regional swiddening ecologies begin to fail simply because the ratio of land to people declines. Fallow periods become shorter as land that has not completely regenerated is again planted. There are two ways out now: one is to increase the local warfare in order to gain control of more land. The other way out is called “agricultural intensification ” meaning that more labor-intensive versions of land management begin to be used. Instead of letting land stay fallow for a decade the process of regeneration can be hastened by bringing manure and compost to the land, by irrigating it, by intensive weeding, and so on. In general human labor is substituted for land area and this new labor input comes from men. Males are dragged back into working to support their families, gaudy warriors turn into dreary peasants, and the life of males is again focused on the domestic household rather than on the men’s house.
How to Tell Dad from Cad Societies
Here is a list of traits and domains in which cad (aloof) and dad (intimate) societies have been suggested to differ. By putting together this list we are constructing stereotypes versions of our two social types. Real societies are all somewhere in between. Further, since different aspects of culture change at different rates, in the real world of flux and change these things can easily get out of sync.
Sleeping Arrangements
In Dad societies families eat, sleep, and otherwise live together. This is the household typical of most European and North American societies. In Cad societies on the other hand matrifocal households are typical, that is households headed by a woman and consisting of herself and her children. Males may move in and move out but the male-female bonds are not durable if present at all. In many parts of the world, especially in gardening groups, men live in a men’s house—think of a fraternity house or the local American Legion hall. A man may stop by his wife’s house to eat else she may deliver his meals to him in the men’s house.
These arrangements are easy to spot in ethnographies, and they are manifestations of a deeper difference in the structure of social bonds in these societies. In Dad groups bonds of dependency, trust, and support are within the nuclear family while in Cad societies these bonds are more likely to be with members of the same sex. Hence in gardening societies the women’s ties with other women are close and important since social support is the sisterhood. Men are occupied with their interactions with other men: these may be cooperative to violently antagonistic within a community while relations with neighboring communities are relations with enemies.
Subsistence and Work
In Dad societies men typically work hard to provision their own offspring. Thus at the lowest level of social complexity, among foragers, men hunt and, less often, gather. Further up the scale, among more or less intense farmers, men do the hard tedious work. This includes field preparation, planting, weeding and irrigation, and harvesting. In modern industrial societies work often defines the lives of males save among the poorest socioeconomic groups, the “underclass”, whose lives are instead typical of human Cad societies with matrifocal households and unattached males. Males may work in Cad societies, for example in girdling of trees and burning new plots in swidden gardening groups. These are typically male activities, in other words they are group activities of the gang of guys rather than individual males working to feed their kids. Male work in these societies is typically sporadic and it doesn’t last very long. Along the American Northwest Coast men worked hard for the few weeks of the year that salmon were running in the rives. On the plains, after the introduction of the horse, a male hunter could in a good afternoon kill enough meat to feed a good sizes group for a week or more. Interior Eskimo males worked hard killing and slaughtering caribou during the semi-annual migrations, a week or so twice a year.
Male Competition
Males in Dad societies are hardly ever brightly decorated—-they tend to be drab and not outstanding in any way. We associate gaudy males with Cad societies like American Indians on the Great Plains with their feather bonnets, face and body paint, bison helmets, and so on. In the famous ethnographic film “Dead Birds” about a group of swiddeners in highland New Guinea a skirmish between two groups peters out in the face of rain which, according to the narration, the men worried might ruin their hairdos and feathers. The men in this group wear one item of clothing, a penis sheath, that they regard simply as clothing according to many ethnographies. On the other hand young males’ sheaths are only several several tens of centimeters long while that of the war leader rests on his shoulder. Paint, tattoos, elaborate coiffure, careful attention to clothing are all reliable markers of cad societies whether in the tropics or on the streets of European and American cities.
Along with the self decoration of males there is what psychologists have called “protest masculinity” (Broude, 1990), incorporating physically aggressive posturing, destructiveness, crime, and cockiness or machismo. Males act out a kind of hyper-masculine personal style that an older literature interpreted in this (strange to us) way: males raised by females without males in the household have an underlying “feminine identification” leading to a sex role insecurity with which they struggle as they mature. They overreact in rejecting this “identification ” by taking on stereotyped hypermale behaviors. The chronic violence and crime have been attributed by psychologists to this mechanism.
Another prominent vehicle of male competition in ethnographies is bombast, rhetoric and verbal facility. Big men in New Guinea give speeches that go on for hours. There is a lot of competitive language one-upmanship in other Cad groups like rap or cockney rhyming slang. If there is a new word around and if you do not know about it while others do you lose status. This sort of status marking goes on elsewhere, for example among anthropologists. For a while several years ago a new fashion arose in which recent human ancestors are called “hominins ” rather than “hominids “: at meetings anyone who said “hominid ” immediately marked him or herself as outside the in-group. We also have not heard much about the “Neogene ” lately. This valley-girl talk phenomenon is widespread in humans but is especially intense in groups where male competition is prominent.
Fear of Women
In many of these groups men know that women are dangerous, that they sap the energy, strength, and will of males, and that attraction to women has to be avoided. In Highland New Guinea men know that women have secret gardens where they grow herbs for poisoning males (Johnson, 1981). Males, especially young males, want body fat and an oily skin because these are signs of strength. In other highland New Guinea societies it is well known that, while contact with women depletes the strength of a male, semen increases it. Consequently male homosexuality can be the norm rather than the exception.
The Mundurucu of the Amazon Basin (Murphy and Murphy, 1974) have a story that is found all over the Americas that long ago women ruled society until the men staged a revolt and took control. The male superiority and control is fragile and has to be maintained carefully with certain rituals including tooting some horns hidden away in the forest. When the women hear these horns they are struck with fear, or so the men say. The women know all about these horns and they think the whole thing is ridiculous. These tales of the “old days ” when women ruled were taken by Spanish invaders back to Europe to form the basis of myths of societies of Amazon women that are still with us.
While fear of women is not limited to Cad societies (Witness, for example, what happened to Samson when Delilah had his hair cut. We also know that it was not really a haircut that did him in.) but it is especially prominent in them. What can this be about? How can evolution lead to males who fear and avoid women? If we think of these societies as groups of males competing for access to females the complex makes a lot of sense. If I can convince other males that women are dangerous and polluting then I get access to women and they don’t. The complex is a catenation of strategic lies, and woe to the gullible who believe it all. One outcome is that senior males may explain that they are old, their strength is gone, and that they are willing to sacrifice themselves and what strength they have left and, for the good of everyone, have sex with women.
One hint that this complex represents males trying to manipulate other males is that menstruation is regarded as especially dangerous and polluting. Menstruation occurs in humans when much of the uterine endometrium is shed during a cycle when implantation fails to occur. It is a signal that a female is not pregnant, that is that she is potentially fertile. Accordingly males ought to be told that menstruating females are especially dangerous.
In other societies manipulation of males by other males can be institutionalized in different ways. Among the Cheyenne of the North American plains there were two categories of adult male leaders, peace chiefs and war chiefs (Moore, 1990). War chiefs were heroes, celebrated for their bravery and warrior spirit. Everyone praised and admired them. This public adulation was obtained, however, at the cost of fitness, since war chiefs were celibate. While the peace chiefs were ordinarily from large prosperous families, Moore suggests that the war chief path was a route to upward social mobility for poorer males. Moore hints, in other words, at our interpretation of this patterns as institutionalized manipulation and deceit, calling it a “Machiavellian model.”
Local Raiding and Warfare
Chronic local raiding and warfare are endemic in most cad societies, and the fighting is almost always, directly or indirectly, over women. Archaeology shows us that warfare and raiding in human prehistory was widespread and deadly, such that a substantial fraction of all deaths in many groups were directly a result of war and violence. While many hunter-gatherers like Bushmen of the Kalahari apparently do not practice this war and raiding, more prosperous foragers, especially foragers where women can provision everyone, fight a lot. Still the best known warring regions are populated by swidden gardeners. Men apparently don't have a lot to do and, left to their own, become fierce fighters. War may be tied up with regional diplomacy and political maneuvering so that many battles are “phony wars ” serving to display might and enlist allies, this phase coming to an end with a decisive deadly slaughter. The famous film “Dead Birds ” shows this kind of display battle between two groups in highland New Guinea, and the narration suggests that the warfare is ritualized and really not very important demographically since everyone goes home as soon as there is an injury. The film does not show that soon after the film was completed one group invaded and scattered the other group, killing many of them.
Harsh Initiation Rites
Males in cad societies often come up with bizarre and harsh initiation rites for young boys, usually boys at the beginning of adolescence. The boys are mistreated and terrified in various ways, for example circumcision of males often accompanies the rites. They may also be subject to beatings, prolonged separation from others, and other kinds of abuse. Anthropologists have remarked on the apparent psychological effect of participation as males enter as fearful and even effeminate boys and emerge as strutting males. Interestingly urban gangs in North America also have nasty initiation rites, often including being beaten.
A description of a rather typical ceremony is given in Culture, People, and Nature, the classic textbook by Marvin Harris (1975). The Ndembu of Zambia are a central Africa gardening group, part of the African “matrilineal belt “. This belt across central Africa had historically so many tsetse flies that cattle could not survive here so that people had lapsed into a culture of gardening dominated by the labor of females. As in many such groups the men seemed to do little or nothing useful.
Mothers of the boys to be clipped prepare a camp out in the bush, and mothers and their sons from many nearby villages come to this camp. At the camp the mothers cook for their sons until, one evening, the circumcisers showed up. There follows a night of dancing, revelry, and sexual license. The young boys are harassed all night, then marched off to another nearby camp called the “place of dying.” They are seized by males as their mothers are chased away, the mothers wailing a death wail as at funerals. (From many male centered accounts in the literature of initiation rites it is difficult to find much about the viewpoint on all this of the women.) Victor Turner (1967), Harris’ primary source, says that the Ndembu women are “amused and skeptical” about the whole thing. The newly circumcised boys at the camp are beaten, abused, and lectured about how to be a man. At night masked dancers, “red grave people”, appeared to dance and beat the boys with sticks. Finally after a number of days the boys are covered with white clay and taken to the original camp where their anxious mothers are filled with joy to see them. They have undergone a “rebirth” and are now real men.
Versions of this kind of initiation rite are found all over the world, from the Boy Scouts to the Ndembu to street gangs in Los Angeles. The nature and severity vary a lot, but the universality of this behavior suggests it is rooted somewhere deep in our nature. Anecdotal reports suggest that there is a real change in personality of the victims of these rituals—-they enter as anxious and effeminate (recall that they have been raised their whole lives by women) boys and emerge as macho and often fierce men. For example Margaret Mead (1949) says of young males in Tambunum on the Sepik river in New Guinea that they are “… surprisingly feminine, willowy, giving very little premonition of the bombast and high, headstrong behaviour that will characterize them as adults.”
Gaudy Art
Gaudy decorative art and technologiy mark cad societies. We think immediately of the body paint and the feather bonnets and such of Plains Indians, the masks and totem poles of the US Northwest Coast, the elaborate costumes and masks of New Guinea or of West Africa, and so on. Figure 1 shows a collection of spears, knives, and shields obtained by Henry Stanley (1988) when he floated down the Congo river in mid nineteenth century.
These shields and weapons are beautifully designed and made yet they look rather useless. They are appropriate to hang on the den wall but not so appropriate for serious work like killing a buffalo or an enemy. These are men’s toys in this heavily forested part of central Africa where everyone was living mostly off maize. There was almost nothing to hunt, and the men occupied themselves it seems mostly with strong talk and with raiding and warfare. Along the upper reaches of the Congo river the warlike stance of everyone was entirely rational in the face of Arab slave raiding parties, but further downriver there was no apparent external threat that would explain the chronic violence and belligerence.
The North American Northwest coast is famous as the home of sedentary foraging people who commanded rich seasonal resource streams of salmon. A prominent mode here of competition was the potlatch, ostentatious destruction of property to emphasize one’s wealth. These people are also famous for their totem poles and decorated war canoes. These cad male societies with their arts and handicrafts contrast sharply with dad male societies. The vast areas in Asia of dense peasant agriculture bring to mind rather drab males, devoid of paint and adornment, out in the fields working. Certainly in these societies the elite can generate decorative art, like cathedrals, but there is little local production for use in face-to-face male interactions.
HCH has spent many years with !Kung Bushmen in southern Africa. It is fun to imagine how they would react to, say, a totem pole from the US northwest coast. They would have a good laugh, then chop it up as the well dried firewood that it would be.
Sculpture and cave art are widely regarded as signatures of the transition to modern humans 20,000 to 30,000 years ago in Europe. Much of the cave art is of the highest quality but interestingly it is not out in public view—-it was not something that one took mom and the kids to view on a Sunday afternoon stroll. Rather it is deep inside the earth, often reachable only be a difficult crawl. The feeling of it is the feeling of a men’s house or a fraternity house secret room in the basement or a kiva—-an integral and important part of whatever male rigmarole is going on.
Another Dimension
Recently Lars Rodseth and Shannon Novak (2000) have elaborated this way of classifying societies by considering an additional dimension of male behavior: whether males focus energy and effort on the domestic or the public sphere. Domestic males put their interests and efforts into the household or other local domestic unity while public males are more active in political and other activities outside and away from the domestic or household unit. This dimension is potentially independent of the cad-dad dimension and thinking about this new dimension could clarify our understanding of human social diversity.
In dad societies, dad-domestic males are like Ozzie, Harriet’s famous husband. Bushman males are quiet not gaudy and their lives seem focused on their families. Dad-public males, on the other hand, occur in societies where males control the wealth. Males here are more like patriarchs with much of their daily activity in a public sphere. Pastoralists, much of the Islamic world, and many agricultural societies would be classified as Dad-public.
Cad-domestic males are not very prominent in ethnographies. In societies where males are loud, prominent, and face-to-face competitive these are the males who drop out, who do not participate in the ongoing male game. In American urban underclass society these are the mild unassuming males who hold steady jobs and bring the income back to a (mother only) household (Sharff 1981). The analogy with helpers-at-the-nest among birds is obvious. There is also a niche for male dropouts in other cad male societies: for example among the Plains Indians there were males, called berdache, who did not participate in the “normal” male world but instead were of ambiguous sexuality and who did ritual and ceremonial things.
Cad-public males are the ordinary males in cad societies, males participating in the ongoing public jostling competition within the group and violent competition among groups.
When we discuss stereotypical cad and dad societies we are discussing what Rodseth and Novak would classify as cad-public and dad-domestic societies, and it is important to understand the other alternate male roles.
Extreme Public Dads
When males or groups of males control resources that support reproduction they are in a position to demand more from females seeking to marry into the group that are males in other social systems. For example in much of the Near East and South Asia males own the land or otherwise control the sources of food and brides must essentially purchase their way to husbands. Females, or rather their families, must provide two things—-money or other wealth and paternity confidence.
Payment by the family of the bride is called dowry (while payment by the groom or his family is called brideprice.) In these hypergynous dowry systems such payments are often substantial because the number of niches for females, i.e. eligible grooms, is restricted. They are called hypergynous because newly wealthy families a social grade below the family of the prospective groom can buy their daughter’s way upward in class, and hypergyny means female marriage up the social ladder. This flow of women up the social scale leaves excess males at the bottom and excess women at the top. The successful bride must bring not only wealth but also chastity, purity, virginity, and family honor to the marriage. Afterward she is highly restrained in her personal life: she may have some of her external genitalia removed in parts of North Africa so that she will not experience sexual pleasure, she may be essentially locked in her husbands compound for most of her reproductive years, she may have to wear a tent, a hood, and a mask in much of the world of Islam, and so on. In India a dutiful widow should even cast herself on her husband’s funeral pyre since she is, after all, worthless to anyone as a widow.
Dowry systems are concentrated at the top of the local social class or caste scheme, so the preference for male offspring and the presence of excess females are most apparent among the wealthy and those of high social status. These excess women, however, are not free even though they are unmarried. Their chastity and virtue are vital for family honor, and a family with compromised honor will lose its ability to marry off other females of the family. Hence the chaste town librarian of upper class New England, the Hardy Boys’ maiden aunt, and so on.
There is another option available to women in many hypergynous systems—-she can disappear by moving to the city. As Europe became crowded in the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment there was a flow of young females to the cities. The cost to these women was separation from their families because maintenance of ties would compromise the honor of their rural families while the benefit was the opportunity to reproduce. They often became courtesans and prostitutes in Europe, Geishas in Japan, and so on. The historian William Langer calls this the “age of seduction” in Europe as he writes of the Paris dump littered with dead dogs and dead babies (Langer 1972). Cities were population sinks and an appalling fraction of the offspring of these new urban women died. Today much the same dynamic is happening in Latin America with its slums full of women without husbands giving birth to babies that died at a horrific rate. Thailand, with a “traditional” rural peasantry, is at the same time a world capital of sex tourism in its cities because of the inflow of excess females.
- Male aggression is higher in societies where polygyny is allowed and men contribute less to subsistence than women. https://peerj.com/preprints/3331/
Of course, the Big Man can’t afford to keep them locked up in harems. So he puts them to work in the fields, where they can produce enough to support themselves and their children.
Now, the 49 local bachelors who are left over are going to try hard to lure the polygamist’s wives out of the fields and into the bushes. So many of the children born to the Big Man’s wives might not be his genetic offspring. But their mothers can support them—which means that some cuckoo’s eggs aren’t that big of a loss to him.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08/serial-monogamy-and-women.html#sthash.wlhRkunq.dpuf
Of course, the Big Man can’t afford to keep them locked up in harems. So he puts them to work in the fields, where they can produce enough to support themselves and their children.
Now, the 49 local bachelors who are left over are going to try hard to lure the polygamist’s wives out of the fields and into the bushes. So many of the children born to the Big Man’s wives might not be his genetic offspring. But their mothers can support them—which means that some cuckoo’s eggs aren’t that big of a loss to him.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08/serial-monogamy-and-women.html#sthash.wlhRkunq.dpuf
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/11/more-on-polygamy-in-france.html
What does your French correspondent mean by "polygamy"? Does France permit polygamy? Or does it just mean that black men in Africa live with several women at the same time without benefit of marriage under the same roof? Or do they indeed live under the same roof? In some forms of polygamy each woman and her children have separate homes.
Thus, if there is no marriage in France, and the "wives" live with their own respective children in separate dwellings, what we see is the classic ghetto pattern in the USA: black men servicing several women concurrently, traveling from house to house as the spirit moves, and leaving it up to the women to take care of themselves and their children.
And by extension, American ghetto patterns are nothing more than a reversion to the classic peasant African social pattern: marginally employed males traveling from hearth to hearth impregnating females, and leaving it up to the women to take care of themselves and their children, typically by growing food in small plots in the homelands areas [or, in America beginning in the 1960s, by collecting welfare].
"CONVERSATED THEN I DUG THE HOE OUT! FIXED ME SUM FOOD THEN BONED THE HELL OUT!" - DIGGIDY DAZZLE
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/returnofkings/i_attended_the_2015_white_nationalist_amren_conference/newest/
Also do you think that much of the differences between
paternal investment could be explained by the greater demand required of men in
northern climates to stay around and provide for their offspring. In tropical
environments where year round agriculture is present due to soft soil and
temperature women can provide for their children on their own without male
help. In cold climates with snow fall and ancient ice ages men would have been
needed to hunt large game for food as well as till the hard rocky soil in the
summer after the advent of agriculture. North Eurasian men tend to be more
reserved and less extroverted. As such they have to overcome their innate shyness
to chase multiple women. It can happen but polygamy is rare or nonexistent in northern
temperate or arctic climates......Anyways Phil Rushton despite his detractors
like the Leukophobic Razhib Khan seems to have hit the nail on the head. Though
I do have some questions on his overall data. But again as he recently passed I don't think I shall ever know his opinions.
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Nobel-Winner-s-Theories-Raise-Uproar-in-Berkeley-3236584.php
Nobel laureate James Watson, whose co-discovery of DNA revolutionized the field of genetics, has provoked a scientific controversy by suggesting there are biochemical links between skin color and sexual activity and between thinness and ambition.
...
Witnesses were flabbergasted when the 72-year-old discoverer of the double helix suggested there was a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges. "That's why you have Latin lovers," Watson said. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."
ENGLISH BEAT
Botchan, who presided over the session, said Watson was merely trying to call attention to a protein (pom-C) that helps create several different hormones: One determines skin color (melanin); another enhances a sense of well-being (beta endorphins); and the third plays a role in fat metabolism (leptin).
Botchan said Watson was wondering out loud why evolution had linked these hormones, and whether the interrelationship of these mood and behavior-influencing compounds might be affected by exposure to sunlight.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/12/plow-cultures-v-hoe-cultures.html
Did anyone ever say that the Shoshone of the Great Basin were clever? I never read any such thing, but they were hunter-gatherers surrounded by farmers. And remember that "agriculture" is not really a good variable. In history, or across societies, there is a continuum between (a) gardening on the one hand and (b) labor-intensive agriculture on the other. Along this transition there is a change from bride-price to dowry, from males being cads to males being dads, from males being fierce to males being drab workers, and so on. Gardening societies are at most invariably associated with females doing the work and men being rather worthless [or] else heavily involved in local warfare.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/11/evolution-of-extraversion.html
http://www.vdare.com/posts/mismatch-and-muhammad-alis-iq
Rushton called this the “winning personality,” and I called it a “cocktail party personality” in my piece about newsman Vester Flanagan’s murder of two white colleagues, who worked with him at a television station in Roanoke, Va.
Take Notes Sistas! Cuz That's How You Do It!
I LOVE WATCHING THIS NIGGER (ET). I TRY TO GET A LITTLE DOSE OF HIM EVERYDAY BECAUSE HIS SPEECHES CRACK ME UP! ANYWAY, THIS NIGGER (ET) ALONG WITH ALL OF THESE OTHER NIGGERS (THE NIGGER'S PICTURED BELOW) EPITOMIZE THE WINNING PERSONALITY (HIGH EXTRAVERSION, LOW NEUROTICISM) ALLUDED TO IN THE WHITE NATIONALIST LINKS ABOVE AND BELOW! PERSONALITY WISE, THEY'RE NO DIFFERENT THAN BLACK LAWYERS WHO USE THAT JOHNNY COCHRAN RAZZMATAZZ STYLE OF SPEECH OR THOSE SOUTHERN BLACK PROTESTANT PREACHERS WHO GIVE THOSE SCINTILLATING, YET SOULFUL SERMONS (THE HELLFIRE AND BRIMSTONE KIND). IN EACH OF THESE CASES, ALL OF THESE NIGGERS ARE UNCONSCIOUSLY REDIRECTING THEIR OUTGOINGNESS, TALKATIVENESS, EXUBERANCE, AND SEDUCTIVENESS (ALL A PRODUCT OF THEIR SEXUALLY SELECTED, HIGH EXTRAVERSION GENES) TOWARDS ENDS THAT ON THE SURFACE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH SEX! IN OTHER WORDS, THEY'RE RE-PURPOSING A SEXUALLY SELECTED AFRICAN TRAIT (EXTRAVERSION) TOWARD NON-SEXUAL (NON-REPRODUCTIVE) EUROPEAN-CREATED PURPOSES (TO GET OFF YOUR ASS IN ERIC THOMAS' CASE, TO GET OUT OF JAIL IN JOHNNY COCHRAN'S CASE, AND TO GET INTO HEAVEN IN TD JAKE'S CASE)! AND IT'S ALL SO BAFFLING, YET FASCINATING TO THE WHITE MIND!
https://twitter.com/Ericthomasbtc/status/841950425666449408
Fight Back Fellaz!
http://www.vdare.com/posts/overestimating-black-ability-the-j-p-rushton-thesis
This prejudice is of course what keeps afflicting us with the Magic Negro phenomenon in Public life of which Ben Carson is just the most recent example.
DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY GIRLS I COULD HAVE HAD SEX WITH IF I HAD THE WINNING PERSONALITY? OR, IF I JUST HAD THE CONFIDENCE TO SPEAK TO THEM? BOY, I'D BE UP THERE WITH WILT AND MAGIC IF I HAD THE COURAGE TO SPEAK TO GIRLS LEANNE!
https://twitter.com/Ericthomasbtc/status/842045899467591680
That's How You Keep That Marriage Going, Guyz! Forget The Fact That As Mens We're Genetically Wired For Sexual Novelty (New Partners Every Few Months To Years), Sexual Variety (New Partners Every Few Months To Years), And Sexual Promiscuity (New Partners Every Few Months To Years) And Forget That Fact That We're Not Genetically Evolved To Engage In Lifelong Monogamy! Because If You Really Want It (Your Marriage To Last) You Can Make It Work (Your Marriage Will Last). But First You Have To Want It And Then It Will Work!
DID I TELL YOU GUYS THAT I DON'T WORK!
https://twitter.com/Ericthomasbtc/status/846165069318799360
AND THAT I DON'T HAVE A HOME!
https://twitter.com/Ericthomasbtc/status/849396958838083584
NOR HAVE I EVER HAD SEX!
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