It may be mean, but this made me go 'nyah-nyah-nyah'
Mormon polygamists shared the flaws of the fruit fly - Biologist Michael Wade of Indiana University has found that a harem lifestyle was bad for a female rate of reproduction:
But scientists have now uncovered an odd fact about 19th-century Mormons: the more women in a household, the lower the average birthrate. In other words, the more sister-wives a Mormon woman had, the fewer children she was likely to produce.
"Although it is great in terms of numbers of children for successful males to have harems, the data show that, for every new woman added to a male's household, the number of children that each wife produced goes down by one," said biologist Dr Michael Wade, of Indiana University.
The result is intriguing, because this is the first time scientists have observed humans being affected by what is known as the Bateman gradient, a phenomenon that gets its name from the geneticist who first observed it in fruit flies. The more sexual partners the male fruit fly had, the lower was the fecundity of each of those partners, the 20th-century geneticist Angus Bateman noted.
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Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina. Wade says: "It could be owing to competition between women within a plural marriage for shared resources, or it could be owing to other unknown factors."
Neither was polygamy a great deal for males. For every man who had multiple wives, there were many who had none. "For every male that has three mates, there must be two who have none," said Wade. "If a male has even more mates, then the disparity among male reproductive haves and have-nots can become quite high."
I wish I could think that this intelligence would deal a crushing blow to the maunderings of evpsych, but I rather doubt it.
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And, somewhere along the spectrum between 'aaaaargh' and (Frankie Howerd-voice), 'Don't Mock', spotted the classification of Fanny Hill as 'Victorian porn'.
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And, further on the nyah-nyahs, the far from unjust characterisation of the new version of South Riding as 'frenetic yet leaden'. Though that should perhaps be 'leaden because frenetic'.
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