*More* spouses?

New Scientist has just given me stress-induced palpitations with their finding that the more wives, the longer-lived the man:

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Lummaa presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

…

One answer seems to be a phenomenon called the grandmother effect. For every 10 years a woman survives past the menopause, she gains two additional grandchildren, Lummaa says. It seems that doting on and spoiling grandchildren aids their survival, as well as furthering some of their grandmother’s genes.

…[But for men,] it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they’re fertile well into their grey years.

So apparently the researchers didn’t examine the metric between the length of lifespan and the length of the “honey-do” list… which suddenly seems terribly imperative to me.

Entered on 20 August 2008 at 16:00 in the Science file | 2 Observations | Print Print

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  1. I’m a little disappointed in the research. Does this mean there is no therapeutic value in polygamy before the age of 60? Do you think the wife would let me bang around if I had a prescription?

    Observation by bugmenot — 21 August 2008 #

  2. [...] – bookmarked by 5 members originally found by bsigrist on 2008-11-09 *More* spouses? http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/?p=423 – bookmarked by 4 members originally found by [...]

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