Clans make babies:
One of the web sites I showcase is hbd chic. (http://hbdchick.wordpress.com)
The interest of the site is human biodiversity. I am an outsider there, as I usually am, because I do not detect any human diversity at all in the effect that takes my interest. It is like, say, phosphorus metabolism. Just about every human does it the same way along with other mammals. That does not mean I am constantly saying that no, there is no such critter as human biodiversity. I just have none to offer.
But the site takes a great interest in mating patterns, and of course there I am rapt. Recently there has been debate of the proposition that in England, for a very long time, children left their parental homes and went elsewhere to grow up, working for another family all the while. This was in contrast with other places where children pretty much stayed at home. At first I found this less than credible. But as the debate went on and more and more numbers were placed on the table a plausible pattern did emerge. Those other families were not all that distant and a pattern that maintained a reproductive pool that was viable eventually emerged. But unlike other areas, so far as I could tell, the reproductive pattern was not optimized for maximum fertility of the population but for maximum stability of the population. I doubt there was conscious manipulation of the mating strategy toward this end, but it might – just might – have had such an effect.
More recently there has been an analysis that contrasts clannish groups with loyalty to the kin, tight mating circles and little interest in change with urban groups where kindred are pretty much just something else in the environment and there is ample interest in the newest, the biggest and the best.
The thing is that both of these patterns appear to be very persistent. Going back to my favorite Aristotle quotation, which I got from an introduction to Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and where Darwin rather oddly dismisses it, things happen by chance in life and what works is what persists.
So if the urban pattern and the clannish pattern both persist, they must both work. But I suggested the work at different things.
Clans make babies; cities make money.
I shall be interested in knowing whether that elicits comment.
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