MARRIAGE?
Lets go thru the logic:
(a) human life cycle averaged at ~40, Peak fertility ~21/22, and the average woman bearing six or more children, only half of which survived to adulthood, and only half of which survived to 50. Those surviving to 50 could live quite long.
(b) pairing-off evolved to reduce conflict (Nash optimum)
(c) family evolved in response to property and inheritance.
(d) family increasingly reduced in size in response to property and inheritance.
(e) hypothesis: as life span increases we would expect to see serial marriages to exist for every reproduction cycle under which one is still fit enough to reproduce. In other words, we should be seeing two and three marriages(matings) with increasing frequency, with the duration of marriages a function of mutual interest in property and capital. IOW we should see male rotation of exceptional females at the peak of the pyramid (true), absolute nuclear families at the top of the pyramid(true), nuclear families below them (true), serial marriage below them (true), and serial mating (single mother hood) below them (true), and a dramatic increase in the diversity of economic conditions because of these differences (seems true). IOW: the poor are wealthy enough that they can survive without marriage if we redistribute to them. And as a consequence we should see increasing conflict again between classes, and breed ourselves into India-Brazil-like castes (appears to be happening).
(f) Argument: small homogenous nation-states (kin) with active suppression of underclass (non self supporting) reproduction, and heavy redistribution, where women bear three or more children on average, but preferably four, should, over time, produce transcendence. Whether or not we use the institution of marriage is … irrelevant. The more important question argument is that to bear children one must form a corporation that insures that they are not a burden to society, yet one must bear children in order to earn access to that society, and its proceeds. It is difficult to argue distributions of marriage from longer term to shorter term will not exist. The primary concern is that one cannot bear children and force others to bear their costs.
Further:
So the equilibrium between promiscuity and commitment is determined by property, and property is determined by agency, and agency is determined by reproductive value and personality traits (industriousness, openness etc.)
IOW, relationship structure is determined by economic necessity.
In the current era, my anticipation, is that marriage weaponizes reproduction against serial marriage peoples. And government taxation and redistribution weaponizes underclass reproduction against the middle and upper classes.
We domesticated women for a reason. Civilization resulted from the use of manufactured capital to create property by which to control female reproduction, and limit dysgenia.
Remember good breeding doesn’t make good genes so much as prevent their regression toward the mean.
Given the need for decidability in order to answer questions of this depth, I choose transcendence, excellence, agency, and beauty: which is a way of saying ‘excellence’. Or in more scientific terms “superior genetic information yielding greater control over the universe in shorter periods of time”. It is hard to argue with this choice.
(This is just a ‘taste’. I could write on this subject of equilibria rather than ‘goods’ forever, and I could write on gender equilibria nearly as long.)
Source date (UTC): 2017-05-10 11:39:00 UTC