> Damien Broderick wrote:
> > >>Actually most New Zealanders are women
> > >Why is that? Where have the men gone?
> >More boy babies are born than girl babies everywhere.
> >They die there after more rapidly.
> From: Robin Hanson
> This is what happens in general in primates where
> females do more child raising than men.
J Allman, A Hasentaub / Neurobiology of Aging 20 (1999) 447-454:
"Natural selection will tend to favor genes that enhance survival in adults
in the sex that provides the most care for offspring. ...The death of a
noncaretaking parent might even enhance the survival of its offspring by
removing a competitor for scarce (food) resources. ...However, the human
female survival advantage is smaller in percentage terms...probably due to
the larger role of human males in parenting. ...The differential mortality
between caretakers and noncaretakers comes in part from the former being
risk-averse and the latter being risk-seeking. Risk-seekers constantly probe
their world, seeking out new opportunities and detecting hazards in the
constantly changing environment. Through their probing, they generate new
information that they communicate to close kin, thus enhancing their kin's
survival and the propagation of their shared genes...."
Excellent article in several different ways. Pointer provided by Anders many
weeks ago.
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