Let's throw some actual facts into this discussion, rather than speculation.
At 11:48 AM 9/20/99 -0700, Lee Crocker writes:
>This should really be no surprize. On a pure percentage basis,
>a typical male human shares more DNA with a typical male chimpanzee
>than with a typical female human.
You neglected to point out that we are talking about a 5-8% differential, mostly brought about by the mechanics of genetic inheritance.
>The gene pools for men and women
>have evolved for millennia in tandem, but they are still two gene
>pools.
I think that you are vastly overstating the case here. Biologically speaking, humans are what zoologists call 'weakly dimorphic', meaning that we do not show a large degree of sex differentiation. Darwin, Dawkins, and other naturalists have never pointed to sex differents as a huge factor in large-scale evolution.
>For a man, the ideal strategy was to be more promiscuous.
No solid evidence whatsoever has been produced as to the relative promiscuity of early man versus early woman. This assumption was stated in the earliest writings of evolutionary scholars, but it points more towards present-day cultural norms than anything based in reality. Several recent studies based on DNA sampling have projected that as much as 25% of children may not be fathered by the husband of a given women. This has led many scholars to posit that early woman may have taken on a larger number of partners than previously supposed.
>Today, modern medicine, birth control, economic wealth, and other
>new technologies make all that old hardware irrelevant.
I will agree to this statement, mainly because we have solid evidence to show it.
Kathryn Aegis