Lets lay out all of the facts we have covered so far:
Facts:
1) Overall marriage rates have declined over the last 100 years.
2) Overall divorce rates have climbed over the last 100 years.
3) Women in the west have become emancipated for at most 100 years (right to vote in US granted in 1920).
4) Educated women are somewhat resistant to this decline in marriage. Their marriage rates have declined less and they are less likely to get divorced.
5) Educated women currently have fewer children then those with less education.
6) Participation in conservative religious groups may buffer against this decline in fertility.
Can these changes be tied to the emancipation of women? Yes but not for the reasons listed by the blogger above. Modern men and women are simply not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population.
Sexual Selection Under Parental Choice: The Evolution of Human Mating BehaviourBy Bruce Charlton
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-science-of-sex-most-important.html?m=1The work of Menelaos Apostolou, a young Assistant Professor from Nicosia University in Cyprus - collected and explored in this recent book, turns-out to be the most significant 'paradigm shift' in the evolutionary psychology of sex since the modern field began in 1979 with Don Symons The evolution of human sexuality.
Apostolou's work means that this whole area of work - many thousands of papers and scores of best-selling books (not to mention the theoretical basis of the online Manosphere and PUA movement) - now need to be reframed within a new explanatory context.
In a nutshell, and with exhaustive documentation and rigorous argument, Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.
This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).
Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.
Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.
Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.
The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).
The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.
The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.
More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who thier children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).
But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.
Apostolou summarizes this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.
Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.
Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.
This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enoughabout the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.
Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.
So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.
Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.
However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.
The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalization for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.
My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.
Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.
An intoxicated person is maladaptive.
So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.
We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.
Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarizes.
In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.
I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.
So what we are dealing with here is a situation where both genders
including men are poorly adapted when it comes to choosing our mates in life. We have evolved with the built in expectation that our parents will arrange these things for us but this no longer happens.
Humanity is currently under extreme selective pressure. We are a population maladapted to our current environment. One of the many stressors we face is an entirely new fitness landscape when it comes to reproduction.
The time when parents made our choices for us is gone. The new status quo has only existed for at most a hundred years (realistically much less). There simply has not been time for the population to adapt to what amounts to a huge environmental shift. We can thus expect to see many individual bad outcomes as individual fail in the face of selective pressure.
The clock, however, cannot be turned back. Knowledge has progressed and society is not returning to a conformation with less degrees-of-freedom. A society that enslaves and refuses to educate half of its population is simply uncompetitive over the long run. Women are emancipated and and not returning to slavery voluntary. Given the option between freedom and slavery human nature cries out for freedom. The genie is out of the bottle.
In the long run this will be a good thing as eventually a population will arise where both men and women are free and place proper focus time and effort in choosing a suitable mate and prioritizing child rearing.
Married Couples Who Attend Church Services Together Are Less Likely to Divorcehttp://www.christianpost.com/news/married-couples-who-attend-church-services-together-are-less-likely-to-divorce-study-171853/
Married couples who attend church services together are more likely to live longer, are less likely to be depressed, and less likely to get divorced, according to a new study conducted by a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study, titled "Religion and Health: A Synthesis," conducted by Tyler J. VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted that religious service attendance is connected to "better health outcomes, including longer life, lower incidence of depression, and less suicide," the Institute for Family Studies noted on Tuesday.
Married couples who attend religious services are 30 to 50 percent less likely to get divorced than those who do not, the study asserts. Such couples are also nearly 30 percent less likely to be depressed and, over a 16-year follow-up period, were shown to have significantly lower risk of dying.
In the meantime the best strategy for dealing with a novel environment is to optimize our chances for success. Educated women are more likely to get married and more likely to have long term and stable marriages so a wise man will seek out an educated wife, and a wise father will educate his sons and daughters. Religion is strongly associated with stable marriages and some conservative traditions may even offset the fertility decline associated with education so a wise man will also seek out a religious wife and a wise father will teach his children about God.
You can choose a practical strategy for dealing the relentless march of freedom or you can sit back and pine for the days of yesteryear. I imagine the Roman plantation owners were quite upset when they could no longer find cheap slave labor and the French noblemen were very distressed when the surfs started to disobey. Yearning for the "good old days" does not help one deal with the present. Women have claimed their freedom. This is the reality going forward and this reality is not going to be reversed.
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