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Comment by mikebenfield | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"In earlier societies where marriage did not exist..."

I could stop reading right there. There are essentially no known human societies, past or present, in which marriage does not exist. (Possible exceptions for a few very small societies in highly unusual situations.) Marriage is considered a human universal by anthropologists.

But a bit further on:

"This study looked at research being done on 33 nonindustrial populations (nonindustrial = pre-marriage, pre-contraception)"

You're seriously equating nonindustrial with a lack of marriage? You understand that the industrial revolution was less than 200 years ago, right? And that people have been getting married for all of recorded history?

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You left out the sentence before that:

Marriage stops the "natural" dynamic by tying every male to a maximum of one female

That guy must be kidding, right? Monogamy is one thing, but what about other forms of marriage that involves more than one man and one woman?

But the rest of the sentence that you quoted is even worse, but so that it makes more sentence, I'll quote the entire sentence:

In earlier societies where marriage did not exist, the most dominant males had children with many women, and the males at the bottom of the hierarchy did not get to procreate at all.

But in most societies around the world, the poor tend to have more kids. Who is the author of that article?

He's:

a 33 year old semi-retired entrepreneur (I co-founded the Swedish marketplace Fyndiq where I was CTO for the first six years). Nowadays I spend my days mostly reading, writing and photographing stuff.

And making up crazy ideas about society.

> But in most societies around the world, the poor tend to have more kids.

That might be true for women but not for men. And the author is talking about men.

It's actually truer for men, especially in cultures where polygamy is legal.

I very much doubt that most of the extra children these women are having are all sired by rich fathers, as opposed to men in their own social group.

There's plenty of statistical evidence for a positive correlation between income and offspring for men, e.g. http://iussp2009.princeton.edu/papers/91467

Divorcing a man with a good income and getting custody of the kids is a good way to wind up poor. Poverty in the US tends to be dominated by women and their children. Most poor women were solidly middle class until they ended up pregnant, divorced or widowed.

Men who make good money generally have no trouble remarrying and having more kids with another woman if they want it. Stats I have seen suggest that women are more likely than men to have kids, men who do procreate are more likely to do so with more than one partner.

Iirc: about half of all men reproduce, about 80% of all women do. You can infer from that stat right there that men who do father kids have decent odds of fathering them on more than one woman.

Quick question: what proportion of modern humanity is a descendant of Gengis Kahn?

Agreed. The entire thing is based upon a false premise.

Also weren't most very early societies without marriage matriarchal?

Addition: Isn't this also ignoring polygamist marriage?

Well, I hate to crap on someone agreeing with me, but no, I don't think so. There are no known societies that are clearly matriarchal.

The idea that early human society was matriarchal comes out of wild speculation by certain authors with a political bent.

Not saying your wrong, but I just read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari, and my take away was that there were plenty of matriarchal tribes before agriculture and industry. And, generally it's not an unusual thing for primates. He even goes into a lot of detail on why things changed within the last 12,000 years.

No offense, but I'd rather trust that guy's story than some random dude on the internet's.

actually there are quite a few in Asia and Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_matrilineal_or_matrilo...

The Akans of Ghana, West Africa, are matrlineals. Akans are the largest ethnic group in Ghana. They are made of the Akims, Asantes, Fantis, Akuapims, Kwahus, Denkyiras, Brongs, Akwamus, Krachis etc.

"Matrilineal" means property is passed down through the maternal line on the death of the mother, not that of the father.

Matrilineal != Matriarchal.

There are a substantial number of matrilineal societies, probably due to the ease of knowing who your mother is compared to your father, before genetic testing was developed. They are quite often not matriarchal, though.

I recall a quote from Margaret Mead stating that there is no evidence that a matriarchal society has ever existed.

Primates have existed for 50 million years. Marriage is what, 10k years old at most?

nitpicks:

- anthropologists don't study primates.

- primates don't strive for money.

Nitpick: WE are primates. Therefor, at least some primates strive for money.

Sorry, I was very sloppy with the wording. What I meant to say is that monogamous marriage of the kind that is popular in many societies today is a fairly new thing in the perspective of evolution. Most evidence suggests that we introduced monogamy when we went to agricultural societies. I have updated the text. But my argument still holds.

"Marriage is considered a human universal by anthropologists."

Can you provide any sources?

Just about any introductory anthropology textbook.

I think the idea may have originated with anthropologist Donald Brown, who wrote a book Human Universals (which I haven't read) about traits that are pretty much ubiquitous across all cultures.

If you can tolerate a Wikipedia article, here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal

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