POLYGAMY POLL

A lot of social scientists are seriously worried about forthcoming unrest in China and particularly India due to a high male-female ratios (in their case, due to prenatal gender-selection).

eh idk if i'd take this as axiomatic. china fr ex is seeing more marriage to non-chinese, a lot from SE asia. which i guess you could say extends the problem geographically, in one sense. but i don't think you can easily draw a line from unmarriage to violence. having a lot of unmarried young men around is seen in some faint spenglerish way as a precursor to war (oh gnoes the yellow hordes) but considering how much violence we export maybe people ought to think that one thru again.

The concern is more domestic unrest and crime. People with nothing to lose etc.

does "domestic unrest" include marrying a cambodian woman? knowing nothing about indian or chinese crime stats i think this worry is basically crap.

Actually, it looks like the poor bachelors are still victimized:

http://www.economist.com/node/18530371

A skewed sex ratio may instead be making the lot of women worse. Sociologists say it encourages abuse, notably in the trafficking of the sort that Sakina first suffered from but is now ready to pay for. Reports circulate of unknown numbers of girls who are drugged, beaten and sometimes killed by traffickers. Others, willingly or not, are brought across India’s borders, notably from Bangladesh and Myanmar. “Put bluntly, it’s a competition over scarce women”, says Ravinder Kaur of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

Men, especially if poor and from a low caste, suffer too. Women in India are sometimes permitted, even encouraged, to “marry up” into a higher income bracket or caste, so richer men find it easier to get a bride. The poor are forced into a long or permanent bachelorhood, a status widely frowned upon in India, where marriage is deemed essential to becoming a full member of society. Poor bachelors are often victims of violent crime.

I'm not saying it's not the case, because I am no more than passingly familiar with p much everything Sanpaku is talking about, but it is hard to imagine that young men who cannot get married have nothing to lose and will resort to violence. Like the base set of assumptions that prediction requires (men get violent when they don't get what they want/don't have access to sex or romantic relationships?) makes no sense to me.

Seems like there should be roving gangs of murderous gay men if that were the case.

well it has to be put in the greater social context. most of the time those men are also going to be poor.

well marriage doesn't = sex in 'the west' anymore...

xp Okay "marriage deemed essential to becoming a full member of society" adds some clarity. Thanks. Although then I would say the solution is not polygamy but smashing the patriarchy so ppl don't devalue women to the point of creating a shortage of them.

there may be roving gangs of murderous gay men in our fascist/mad max future but i doubt it will be a sexless milieu

I realize I just do not have the analytical structures in my brain necessary to think about how we can prove from mitochondrial DNA that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors

file under 'if a train leaves chicago at 4:45 PM heading towards cleveland at 85 mph and another train leaves cleveland heading towards chicago at 90 mph at 6:00 PM...'

this thread went from sex to word problems way too quickly

as sanpaku pointed out upthread: mitochondrial DNA is strictly matrilineal. that is, it has its very own DNA, outside the nucleus, and it only gets passed from mother-to-offspring. similarly, Y-chromosomes only come from dad (whereas X chromosomes can come from either parent).

if you evaluate the genetic variability of Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA, it would seem that mitochondrial DNA exhibits more diversity than Y-chromosomes*. thus, we conclude that more women have been contributing their unique mitochondrial genes to the pool than have men and their unique Y-chromosomes. s

o basically most babies were made by one guy and a lotta chicks

*nb - i am just parroting sanpaku on this. i've never heard this stat, and have neither reason to doubt it, nor to believe it. that being said, it doesn't seem shocking to me at all to learn that back in civilization's small times, ~alpha males~ (or w/e) made more babies (via polygamy, harems, and/or rape). i should also point out that mitochondrial DNA is subject to different selective pressures than Y-chromosomes. that is: if 1000 couples have 1000 babies, 1000 of those babies will inherit their mom's mitochondrial DNA, and only half will inherit their dad's Y-chromosomes. kinda spit-balling here, but one could see how that might result in a diversity of maternal DNA, and a relative narrowing of the uniquely-male contribution. could be rong tho, I Am Not A Geneticist

Still laffing at "OH GNOES" tbh.

eh legalize it, what do I care

otm

for one thing it would piss off the mormons and i am pro anything that does that automatically

idk I think they would find a way to deal with it.

They would probably say "sweeeet this means the second coming is around the corner, now all that has to happen is the prophet gets shot in the middle east and that rock on the conference center breaks open, Jesus #1"

then they would marry one thousand ladies

and eat jello

signs o the times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxgq7xEtcTk

Funny, yesterday I googled Polyamory, and every 2guys/1girl scenario starts out a fair description of the pros and cons, personal tales, individual situations, all of them ended up describing "doubel pen", let's call it that...

I kind of think polyandry is cool NOT because I am interested in it, but because it is practiced by magpies. And magpies are probably the best creatures on earth!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.