[lbo-talk] Back to History (Back to sociobiology)

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 4 05:17:03 PST 2005


Stop with the younger women stuff, my hypothesis was about fertile appearing women, as I said relative youth might be one marker of that, might not. This is also an irrelevancy. As is your reference to historical data about the age of menache, unless you infer backwards from earlier history to prehistory.

--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:


> Justin wrote:
>
> > You're moving into the biologically irrelevant
> historical period.
>
>
> There is no evidence for male preference for women
> younger than they
> except from the biologically irrelevant historical
> period. There is
> no empirical evidence for prehistoric men's
> preference for younger
> prehistoric women.
>
> Besides, "the contemporary American marriage's
> average age difference is three years between
> spouses" (at <http://
>
www.harvardindependent.com/news/2005/10/13/Forum/Age-
>
> Gaps.In.Marriage.Good.Or.Bad-1021806.shtml>).
> That's a pretty small
> difference which doesn't make an impact on fertility
> or appearance
> for either sex. So, it seems to me that there is
> nothing here that
> one can explain biologically. A more plausible
> explanation is that
> parents in pre-modern times, and women in modern
> times, prefer older
> to younger men for, other things being equal, older
> men tend to have
> more economic resources than younger ones, whereas
> men, earning more
> than women on average and socially conditioned to
> avoid economic
> dependence on women, don't mind pairing with
> partners with lesser
> economic resources.
>
> > > There weren't too
> > > many old women (or
> > > old men for that matter). In that context, I
> doubt
> > > that age meant
> > > much of anything sexually,
> >
> > Well, I was really focusing on appearing fertile,
> ofw hich age
> > might be an index, I wasn't the one who brought
> that up. However,
> > it's also true, that a preference for
> fertileappearing women might
> > be linked to a preference for women in their teens
> rather than
> > their 20s or 30s because these might have more
> children simply as a
> > mater of time.
>
> As a matter of fact, it is probably easier for
> today's men to
> successfully procreate with much younger women than
> prehistoric men
> did. Why? Because the age of menarche, shaped by
> nutrition, has
> declined. "Menarche generally occurs earlier among
> well-nourished
> women. Average menarcheal age in the developed West
> is about 13
> years, while in the middle of the nineteenth century
> it was between
> 15 and 16 years among European women. Areas which
> have not
> experienced nutritional improvement over the past
> century have not
> witnessed decreases in the age at menarche"
> (<http://www.eh.net/
> encyclopedia/article/cuff.anthropometric>).
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi
> <http://montages.blogspot.com>
> <http://monthlyreview.org>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud-
> ahmadinejads-face.html>;
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez-
> congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>;
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/
> 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>
>
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>
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