Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization. ~ A repost ... because effective polygyny is still interesting ~
Before examining the paper, we should mention four terms/concepts: Effective population size, Polygyny, and Operational Sex Ratio (OSR), and Variation in Reproductive Success (RS). The first two are used in the article, and the third I'm adding because it is a good one to know.
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