tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post6384848598843040036..comments2024-03-28T16:22:14.888-07:00Comments on Steve Sailer: iSteve: Making the world safe for polygamy, one Predator drone at a timeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger168125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-55274991912784074792011-11-03T13:52:20.833-07:002011-11-03T13:52:20.833-07:00Steve, I am trying to coin a term.
For the situat...Steve, I am trying to coin a term.<br /><br />For the situation where people support a particular policy because they assume they will benefit without considering that the policy will similarly affect their competitors.<br /><br />You can see this at work with polygamy as well as student loans. When people support student loans, they envision themselves borrowing money to finance their education. They do not consider that other students will have access to the same money and use it to bid up tuition.<br /><br />Anyway, I propose calling it the "Take-Home Exam Syndrome."sabrilnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-87989472554509399912011-11-03T12:46:46.435-07:002011-11-03T12:46:46.435-07:00"Sexual access" in humans is not exclusi..."Sexual access" in humans is not exclusive to length of time of copulation like it is in primitive species where the only interaction might be copulation.<br /><br />George Clooney has much greater sexual access to numbers and quality of women than a low status male even if he might last much shorter in bed.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-65187052818649636652011-11-03T12:11:07.881-07:002011-11-03T12:11:07.881-07:00If you want women, being in female saturated, high...If you want women, being in female saturated, high female-to-male ratio environments helps enormously.<br /><br />There's a reason trendy nightclubs in major cities let in attractive young women easily, but make it hard for non-elite or connected guys to get in unless they're accompanied by more young women.<br /><br />In some species, sexual competition is as direct as it can get. Multiple males mate with a female and their sperm literally battle it out in the female's reproductive tract.<br /><br />In humans, the competition is more indirect and is largely about sexual access to and control of women than directly mating with them. The competition for supermodels among men will largely be determined indirectly by the competition for wealth or celebrity that allows sexual access to the supermodels.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-29036430062244521862011-11-03T12:01:06.840-07:002011-11-03T12:01:06.840-07:00"but reproduction is mediated through sexual ...<b>"but reproduction is mediated through sexual access. At any given point, there is a set amount of female fertility, and maximizing access to this fertility and excluding other males from access in the process will affect reproduction."</b><br /><br />Through 30 seconds of sexual access? Postulate 3 women, A, B and C. If a man has exclusive access to Woman A then he probably doesn't have it to B or C. Even if he's seeing Women B & C on the side, they may well be in other relationships.<br /><br />What matters is reproduction, and the number of children a woman is willing to have. Most women in our society want no more than 2-3 children. If a woman has one of those children with Justin Bieber then that is one child she will not be having with any other man. It doesn't matter that Bieber's (alleged) sexual access lasted only 30 seconds. His bearing issue with her is what's had consequences, not his brief (alleged) sexual access.Captain Jack Aubreynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-45310482664628139942011-11-03T11:51:15.896-07:002011-11-03T11:51:15.896-07:00elite men divorcing and remarrying younger men ten...<b>elite men divorcing and remarrying younger men tends to consume female fertility.</b><br /><br />Female fertility gets consumed not by men, but by time. A woman can remain celibate until she's 45, but her fertility has been consumed no less than that of another 45-year-old woman who's continually been in a relationship since puberty.<br /><br />Outside of polygamist societies the vast majority of men, even most so-called "Alphas," have an exclusive sexual relationship with (at most) only one woman at a time. This means that even rich and powerful men will never spend more than about 40 years of their lives with a fertile woman. Contra popular belief, there aren't a whole lot of 60-year-old men marrying or dating 32-year-old women.<br /><br />What keeps Beta men from dating or marrying isn't a scarcity of available women. It's that they don't want to date Beta women. A fat low-IQ male slob can easily find a wife if he's willing to marry a fat low-IQ female slob.Captain Jack Aubreynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-74879128817136622942011-11-03T11:31:41.283-07:002011-11-03T11:31:41.283-07:00It's not about the length of sexual access. It...<i>It's not about the length of sexual access. It's about reproduction. If the 20-year-old woman filing the paternity suit against Justin Bieber is telling the truth, then the Bieb only had sexual access to her for all of 30 seconds, but that was enough time to leave her with a son, and that may be the only child she ever has.<br /><br />In biological terms, reproduction is all that matters.</i><br /><br />This is true, but reproduction is mediated through sexual access. At any given point, there is a set amount of female fertility, and maximizing access to this fertility and excluding other males from access in the process will affect reproduction.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-77537087130495590392011-11-03T10:32:47.430-07:002011-11-03T10:32:47.430-07:00I was talking about old wealthy women like Zsa Zsa...I was talking about old wealthy women like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor that Q brought up that divorce and remarry many times as they get old.<br /><br />The point was that this behavior does not tend to consume male fertility like wealthy, elite men divorcing and remarrying younger men tends to consume female fertility.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-90089401224824472832011-11-03T01:28:00.889-07:002011-11-03T01:28:00.889-07:00"Do you not understand the difference between...<b>"Do you not understand the difference between old sterile women divorcing and remarrying old men, and wealthy high status fertile men divorcing and remarrying fertile women?"</b><br /><br />Here you're wrong. You mention Larry King. King has been married a grand total of...36 years. His current wife is 52 and probably hit menopause ~7 years ago, so make that 29 years. Granted he dated his wives before marrying them, and he also had other relationships in between or even during his marriages that didn't result in matrimony, so that ups the number of years a bit. Nevertheless he has probably consumed the fertile years of 2.5 women (~50 years) at the very most.<br /><br />So it's not about the women these serial monogamists are dating or married to, unless you think that the Alphas are ruining them for the Betas. A man can be in a relationship with a different woman for a year, every year, for 40 years, but upon leaving them he frees them up for other men.<br /><br />But once a man has had children with a woman he's diminished the likelihood they'll have children with anyone else, because in so many cases they may not want more.<br /><br />It's not about the length of sexual access. It's about reproduction. If the 20-year-old woman filing the paternity suit against Justin Bieber is telling the truth, then the Bieb only had sexual access to her for all of 30 seconds, but that was enough time to leave her with a son, and that may be the only child she ever has.<br /><br />In biological terms, reproduction is all that matters.Captain Jack Aubreynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-58187954764016541512011-11-03T01:05:51.890-07:002011-11-03T01:05:51.890-07:00This is getting burdened by "emotional logic&...This is getting burdened by "emotional logic" as if the topic were abortion or breast cancer or AIDS. Is Johnny Carson statistically representative of anything? Carson, Larry King, + all male Fortune 500 CEOs + TIME's "Most Influential People" list--do you think those guys matter for <i>polygamy qua polygamy</i>, on a pure math basis? Seen any of the "news" from Wall St. campgrounds last month?<br /><br />Look at the cover of Atlantic Monthly which featured somebody named Kate Bolick. She's sort of bragging at length about how modern men aren't up to her standards (IMO she's got a good case there). There is a culture-wide deprecation of family life. That doesn't mean progressive child-free organic yuppies are going to inherit the earth. It's a serious arithmetic problem down the line.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-83887153334522803372011-11-02T23:09:50.983-07:002011-11-02T23:09:50.983-07:00Do you not understand the difference between old s...Do you not understand the difference between old sterile women divorcing and remarrying old men, and wealthy high status fertile men divorcing and remarrying fertile women?<br /><br />I don't have a "theory".<br /><br />And there isn't much theoretical about the claim that serial monogamy is de facto polygyny.<br /><br />If differential rates are what you're looking at, a value by itself doesn't really tell you anything. You have to look at the context. <br /><br />The context is a white TFR in the US that averaged below 2.75 from about 100 years ago to about 1948, below 2 from about 1948 to the 70s, and below 1.7 since the 70s. <br /><br />3 is significant in this context. It's 76% higher than 1.7. 3 is not lousy at all. Not many white men have 3 kids these days. The Hispanic TFR in the US peaked at 3 in 2007.<br /><br />"Very large numbers of children" is relative of course. Having 5 kids is not a big deal if the average is 5 kids. But it is very large in the context of the white TFR in the US. There are a fair number of wealthy men with lots of kids. Donald Trump and Larry King have 5 kids each.<br /><br />And I don't see how saying that serial monogamy is de facto polygyny suggests that I'm motivated to make this claim by the desire to have non-procreative sex with hot women. If I'm mad at Johnny Carson and believe that he's taking the hot women through serial monogamy, and that serial monogamy is de facto polygyny, then I'd have to be against serial monogamy and other expressions of polygyny. That leaves monogamy. But monogamous environments generally don't allow lots of non-procreative sex with lots of women.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-181104308174991132011-11-02T15:56:41.509-07:002011-11-02T15:56:41.509-07:00The phenomenon of high status women divorcing and ...<i>The phenomenon of high status women divorcing and remarrying a series of men does not monopolize male fertility like the converse monopolizes female fertility. Many of these marriages are sterile relationships as they happen after the woman is into her 40s. They tend to marry older or oldish men. Female fertilitiy is more scarce and more of a limiting factor. High status men tend to divorce and remarry attractive women i.e. women who are in their limited fertile window blah blah yada yada yada etc etc</i> <br /><br /><br />Talk about your masses of irrelevant verbiage!<br /><br />To repeat a point I've made already and which you have ignored, if your theory is true there ought to be a fair number of wealthy men out there with very large numbers of children. Where are they? Johnny Carson? A lousy three children.<br /><br />From the standpoint of children your theory has no basis whatsoever. This fails to deter you because children are just a smokescreen - you're interested in having <i>non-procreative sex</i> with hot women and you imagine that the Johnny Carson's of the world are the reason you're not getting it.Qhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07558322957414189512noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-48191544836954841292011-11-02T13:46:11.149-07:002011-11-02T13:46:11.149-07:00Arguning with 'Q' is just like smashing yo...Arguning with 'Q' is just like smashing your head against a brick-wall - it gets so wearying and taxing after a while that you just to have give up in total exasperation.<br /> Not that 'Q' has 'won' the debate or anything wearying your opponent by quoting masses of irrelevant verbiage and then pointing a finger and saying 'ha, ha ,ha ..I've disproved you' (no you haven't), hardly constitutes a rational debate on the basis of actual evidence.<br /> Call it the toddler syndrome.<br />Anyway, I throw in the towel, I simply cannot be bothered any more.<br /> The braying of a thousand donkeys does not constitute wisdom.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-64457882728929288952011-11-02T13:42:51.319-07:002011-11-02T13:42:51.319-07:00There's nothing leftist about sociobiology. Yo...There's nothing leftist about sociobiology. You're being leftist by trying to ignore the sociobiological implications that you don't like from words. <br /><br />You also don't seem to understand what "de facto" means.<br /><br />The phenomenon of high status women divorcing and remarrying a series of men does not monopolize male fertility like the converse monopolizes female fertility. Many of these marriages are sterile relationships as they happen after the woman is into her 40s. They tend to marry older or oldish men. Female fertilitiy is more scarce and more of a limiting factor. High status men tend to divorce and remarry attractive women i.e. women who are in their limited fertile window. <br /><br />You don't seem to have any mathematical sense or intuition so only big, round integers mean anything to you.<br /><br />If the subject is differential rates, a number like "3" only has meaning in context.<br /><br />White TFR in the US average below 2.75 from about 100 years ago to about 1948. Since about 1948 it has been below 2. Since the 70s it has been about below 1.7.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-33033966791650166202011-11-02T13:09:11.503-07:002011-11-02T13:09:11.503-07:00"What's missing here is any sense of pers...<b>"What's missing here is any sense of perspective. How many men actually do this, and how many men are left unmarried as a result? I've already given you some data on that - 90% of women and 84% of men can expect to be married at some point in their lives."</b><br /><br />Actually <i>lots</i> of men have children with more than one woman. Men who impregnate more than one wife or girlfirend, or men who lay cuckoo's eggs. Justin Bieber seems to be off to an impressive start.<br /><br />So 84% of men eventually get married? Wahoo. Marriage != childbearing.<br /><br />I am not demanding that we redefine the definition of polygamy. I am pointing out that nature doesn't give a shit about our cultural practices. What nature cares about is who does and does not have children. And often, if one man has children with a woman, it's quite likely that woman will not be having children with anyone else. From a biological perspective that is "polygamy" in the only sense that matters.<br /><br />You can argue that a man is more likely to have 5 children by remaining faithful to one wife than by having them with 2-5 women, and that is absolutely true, and if anyone wants to have 5 children that is the path which for so many reasons I would favor. But what's also true is that the guy having children by more than one womb has tied up the reproductive resources of multiple wombs, and potentially denied them to other men.<br /><br />But this conversation is starting to bore me. "Anonymous," despite lacking a better handle, has posted some very interesting material you don't really address, and so all it does is go round and round in circles. Ciao.Captain Jack Aubreynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-69502825729095409712011-11-02T11:05:35.464-07:002011-11-02T11:05:35.464-07:00How many children did the "polygamist" J...How many children did the "polygamist" Johny Carson, who "practiced legalized de facto polygyny by divorcing and remarrying a series of highly fertile women over time" actually have?<br /><br /><br />Three. As in 3.Qhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07558322957414189512noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-37048514487389849632011-11-02T10:59:49.758-07:002011-11-02T10:59:49.758-07:00Johnny Carson, like many wealthy, high-status male...<i>Johnny Carson, like many wealthy, high-status males, spent his career monopolizing long stretches of the reproductive years of a series of young women.</i> <br /><br /><br />Hardy har har.<br /><br />Johnny Carson had four wives. Zsa Zsa Gabor had nine husbands. Christie Brinkley has had four husbands. Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands.<br /><br />Why, o why, are these high status women allowed to monopolize long stretches of the best years of a series of men?Qhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07558322957414189512noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-12105276603712307552011-11-02T10:16:32.019-07:002011-11-02T10:16:32.019-07:00From a legal-cultural standpoint, polygamy is more...<i>From a legal-cultural standpoint, polygamy is more than one wife at the same time. OK. That's easy enough</i> <br /><br /><br />That's the dictionary definition of the word. It's <i>the</i> definition of the word. It's what the word means.<br /><br />Some of you people display an almost leftist desire to twist words around to mean what you want them to mean.<br /><br /><br /><i>A man who has had children with more than one woman is, in a biological sense, a polygamist.</i> <br /> <br /><br />There is no such thing as being a polygamist "in a biological sense".<br /><br /><br /><i>He has tied up the reproductive resources of multiple women, who are then less likely to have children with other men as a result of having had children with the "polygamist."</i> <br /><br /><br />What's missing here is any sense of perspective. How many men actually do this, and how many men are left unmarried as a result? I've already given you some data on that - 90% of women and 84% of men can expect to be married at some point in their lives.<br /><br />In other words the thing you described does happen, but rarely. And it probably happens a lot less now than it did in the past. It used to be common for women to die in childbirth while their husbands were still young, at which point the husbands would remarry and nave more children with the second wife.<br /><br />So all this whinging about some "minority of men" who "centralize" marriage strikes me as being oddly disconnected from reality. And nobody has offered a single hard fact to make me believe otherwise.Qhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07558322957414189512noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-34776646186231394502011-11-02T02:33:52.235-07:002011-11-02T02:33:52.235-07:00anonymous 5:24am - we had that term across the pon...anonymous 5:24am - we had that term across the pond as well.<br /><br />What was this thread about, again?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-70852970317981039502011-11-02T01:00:54.211-07:002011-11-02T01:00:54.211-07:00Q,
your 'Bil Gates' point is just so utt...Q,<br /> your 'Bil Gates' point is just so uttrely pathetic, yet you cite it as some sort of truimph.<br /> The point is in the 'polite' society that Gates moves in, multiple impregnation is just 'not the done thing' - but this doesn't of course mean that Gates does't have the instinct to do such a thing.Even the august Mr. Gates, I assume, genereates spermatozoa at an awful rate every second of his mature life.Like most healthy men, I assume Mr. Gates is lustfully drawn to many other women apart from his wife (why is the porn industry the biggest thing on the internet?), but unlike most men Gates is actually in a position to satisfy the urge - but - socialization has kept him down (literally).<br /> It is the veneer of socialization and conforming to 'societal norms' and not real, true and basic instincts that's stopping Gates and his ilk.<br /> I dare say if Gates could rest assured that he 'could get away with it' and absolutely no one whatsoever would ever know, he would 'indulge',Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-76269124577283933862011-11-01T21:49:28.752-07:002011-11-01T21:49:28.752-07:00This conversation went off the rails so long ago I...This conversation went off the rails so long ago I forgot what we're even arguing about. It seems that Q is arguing the legal/cultural definition of polygamy while "Anonymous" is thinking in terms of evolution/biology.<br /><br />From a legal-cultural standpoint, polygamy is more than one wife at the same time. OK. That's easy enough. It's the definition with which we're all familiar.<br /><br />But you could argue for a new definition of polygamy, a biological one, that says it's not about the sexual access and the chronology, but the reproductive results. A man who has had children with more than one woman is, in a biological sense, a polygamist. He has tied up the reproductive resources of multiple women, who are then less likely to have children with other men as a result of having had children with the "polygamist."<br /><br />Whether you want to consider the latter case genuine polygamy is up for debate. It's potential evolutionary consequences, though, cannot be denied, and its consequences for less marriageable men may be as significant as legally recognized polygamy.Captain Jack Aubreynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-75181338926133821052011-11-01T20:20:14.259-07:002011-11-01T20:20:14.259-07:00Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin by Joseph...<i>Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin</i> by Joseph Lopreato, Timothy Crippen<br /><br />pg. 233<br /><br />http://books.google.com/books?id=KF-pXXmxmr4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA233#v=onepage&q&f=false<br /><br />"Moreover, while polygyny, the oldest and most direct effect of sexual selection, is <i>de jure</i> absent in the majority of today's national societies, <i>de facto</i> polygyny is amply attested to by serial monogamy (e.g., Lockard and Adams 1981; Smith 1984), among other mating patterns previously noted. We have seen, for instance, that divorce, the principle mechanism of serial monogamy, is less likely to be followed by female remarriage than by the remarriage of males, often to much younger, never-married women."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-91394868589322397352011-11-01T19:55:29.650-07:002011-11-01T19:55:29.650-07:00The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Ever...<i>The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life</i> by Robert Wright<br /><br />pg. 101<br /><br />http://books.google.com/books?id=_9bmyrgYSBAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA101#v=onepage&q&f=false<br /><br />"A polygynous nation, in which large numbers of low-income men remain mateless, is not the kind of country many of us would want to live in.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this is the sort of country we already live in. The US is no longer a nation of institutionalized monogamy. <b>It is a nation of serial monogamy. And serial monogamy in some ways amounts to polygyny.</b> Johnny Carson, like many wealthy, high-status males, spent his career <b>monopolizing long stretches of the reproductive years of a series of young women</b>. Somewhere out there is a man who wanted a family and a beautiful wife and, if it hadn't been for Johnny Carson, would have married one of these women. And if this man has managed to find another woman, she was similarly snatched from the jaws of some other man. And so on - a domino effect: a scarcity of fertile females trickles down the social scale.<br /><br />As abstractly theoretical as this sounds, it really can't help but happen. There are only about twenty-five years of fertility per woman. When some men dominate more than twenty-five years' of worth of fertility, some man, somewhere, must do with less. And when, on top of all the serial husbands, you add the young men who live with a woman for five years before deciding not to marry her, and then do it again (perhaps finally, at age thirty-five, marrying a twenty-eight-year-old), the net effect could be significant. <b>Whereas in 1960 the fraction of the population age forty or older that had never married was about the same for men and women, by 1990 the fraction was markedly larger for men than for women.</b>"<br /><br />"If polygyny would indeed have pernicious effects on society's less fortunate men, and indirectly on the rest of us, then it isn't enough to just oppose legalized polygyny. (Legalized polygyny wasn't a looming political threat last time I checked, anyway). <b>We have to worry about the de facto polygyny that already exists. We have to ask not whether monogamy can be saved, but whether it can be restored.</b>"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-31243038636126845242011-11-01T19:35:50.539-07:002011-11-01T19:35:50.539-07:00The handbook of evolutionary psychology by David M...<i>The handbook of evolutionary psychology</i> by David M. Buss<br /><br />pg. 262<br /><br />http://books.google.com/books?id=YT4nXpF07YIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA262#v=onepage&q&f=false<br /><br />"In modern cultures, men with high status and ample resources are often <b>legally prohibited from obtaining additional wives</b>. However, some evidence suggests modern men with high status still have a greater potential for fertility by copulating more often, having sex with more partners, engaging in more extrapair copulations or affairs, and <b>practicing legalized de facto polygyny by divorcing and remarrying a series of highly fertile women over time</b>."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-31289269737945583722011-11-01T19:23:50.308-07:002011-11-01T19:23:50.308-07:00http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/darwin-eternit...http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/darwin-eternity/201108/are-people-naturally-polygamous-0<br /><br />"And although Western culture remains officially monogamous, it tolerates de facto polygamy in many forms. For example, <b>serial monogamists like Donald Trump and Larry King divorce older wives to marry younger ones, which serves to monopolize the fertile years of multiple women (the same thing that polygamy would accomplish).</b> Celebrities like Hugh Hefner and Charlie Sheen live openly with multiple girlfriends, and various male athletes, rock stars, and actors accumulate hundreds or thousands of sexual partners."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-12439276268782092212011-11-01T19:13:13.449-07:002011-11-01T19:13:13.449-07:00Nope. Polygyny maximizes male fertility to an exte...<i>Nope. Polygyny maximizes male fertility to an extent that serial monogamy does not. Ergo, sociobiology need not conflate the two strategies, even if it took the view you attribute to it.</i> <br /><br />I'm not sure what you mean by "maximizes male fertility". You could have a strictly monogamous society where every man has 10 kids and has greater fertility than a polygynous society. I think you mean something like concentrates male fertility. <br /><br />I'm arguing that serial monogamy is de facto polygyny. You could have two societies, one with serial monogamy that outlaws polygamy and another with formalized polygamy, that are polygynous. It's not necessarily the case that the one with legal polygamy will concentrate male fertility more. The one with polygamy might limit the number of wives, legally or socially and culturally.<br /><br />I'm not a Muslim or a Mormon. And I don't see how I'm "trying to drag Christians down to the level of Muslims in the minds of Christians". Christians tend to be the most monogamous. I suspect serial monogamists especially extreme ones aren't very Christian, are atheists, apathetic about religion, etc.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com