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Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood

#107: April - May 2012 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood

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Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood
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Dexter

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Re: Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood

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From the beginning of ch. 6: "any two randomly selected,unrelated children will be more similar to each other than will children brought up in the same household."

Really? I can believe there's a lot of variation within a household, but that seems surprising.
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Re: Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood

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I was interested in his views that especially in patrilocal societies, education in a daughter is not seen as beneficial to the family because the husband’s family then benefit from her education. Here in Gambia, there has been a drive to increase the schooling of girls by providing free education for them. But now, there are worries because so many boys are dropping out. Also, an educated girl can expect more of a dowry, so boys marry very late.
He cites a ‘widespread insistence that a bride be a virgin at marriage’ but I was watching a documentary where in some African societies it considered good if the woman was already pregnant, because it showed she was fertile. Here, if a woman is widowed she has to stay inside her compound for four months. Very hard if the breadwinner is suddenly lost!
‘Most babies are pretty indistinguishable, and most of the real physical similarities seem to emerge much later in life’ Only a man could say that!
I thought the discussion on infanticide very interesting.
I also found it interesting that he chose not to discuss women who have children by several different fathers; are they ‘shopping around’ for better genes?
His citing of contemporary abortion rates in England and Wales as ‘reflecting the woman’s estimate of her future chances of marriage …’ is very odd, as there almost as many partnerships now as legal marriages, and would not career considerations also come into play?
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Re: Ch. 6 - the dilemmas of parenthood

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Good points. It seems like it's always going to be hard to disentangle the effects of evolution vs. culture. Many times you can explain aspects of culture by evolution, but there is nothing that says culture can't go against the 'selfish gene'.
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