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Shade of Achilles's avatar

This could seem crude, so I will put it as politey as I can.

Can falling fertility be attributed in any degree to a failing sense of obligation among wives to allow continuing conjugal rights to their husbands? In these Icelandic and Danish studies consanguinity seems decisive, but the data is pre-feminism. Maybe (post)modern decline in fertility is due to lack of access along with lack of relatedness.

Given what you've said about there being some mechanism that causes greater attraction to people more closely related to ourselves, it's not hard to imagine that less related people would find less to like (sexually and otherwise) in their spouse once the novelty wears off. It doesn't *have to be* only a matter of failure to conceive, lost pregnancies etc.

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Dave's avatar

<blockquote>"Well, no. The past was mostly rather dull. During the entire span of human existence, our ancestors largely lived among kith and kin who looked and behaved pretty much like they did. Life was indeed defined by “an equilibrium state of organically developing kinship networks.” Yes, those networks were disrupted at various times and places, but those disruptions were the exception, not the rule, and they were seared into human memory precisely because they were exceptional."</blockquote>

You're trying to suggest that these exceptions weren't, well, exceptional. That the exceptions were equivalent to a unit of of one of those equilibrium states that repeated over long periods.

But if we look at for example Australia, the exceptional event is the Anglo-Celtic invasion of Australia and the replacement of or introgression into aboriginal genomes. That outweighs the millennia of the equilibrium state that obtained among Australian aborigines and their kinship networks, which might as well never even happened by comparison.

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