42
polygamy, see George Peter Murdock, Social Structure, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1949, p. 36. Murdock was professor of anthropology at Yale University.
27. Their name may sound silly, but mongongo nuts are serious groceries for the
Kalahari Desert's !Kung bushmen. These little morsels supply 50% of the !Kung's
vegetable diet. The average !Kung eats 300 of them a day. Yet gathering
mongongo nuts is as easy as taking a stroll. The nuts strew the landscape in such
abundance that thousands "rot on the ground each year for want of picking."
(Richard Borshay Lee, "The Hunters: Scarce Resources in the Kalahari," James P.
Spradley and David W. McCurdy, ed., Conformity and Conflict: Readings In
Cultural Anthropology, p. 195-6. See also Allen W. Johnson & Timothy Earle, The
Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, pp. 40-41.)
28. Douglass H. Morse, Behavioral Mechanisms In Ecology, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980, pp. 170-71. Edward O. Wilson,
Sociobiology, p. 165.
29. For more on the relationship between parental workloads, polygamy and
plumage, see John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, pp. 156-158.
30. Douglass H. Morse, Behavioral Mechanisms In Ecology, pp. 203-205. Konrad
Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 40. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 68.
31. Morse, Behavioral Mechanisms in Ecology, p. 206.
32. John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives,
Warner Books, New York, 1984, pp. 2-5. The Center For Popular Economics
places the shift away from muscle-oriented jobs like farming, logging and factory
work even earlier. It points out that "As early as 1950, more than half the labor
force worked in service jobs." (Nancy Folbre, The Center for Popular Economics, A
Field Guide To The U.S. Economy, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987, p. 2.2 (sic).
33. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstracts of the United States: 1988
(108th edition), Washington, D.C., 1987, p. 428.
34. An additional factor may have contributed to the well-documented physiological
demasculinization of men during the last half of the 20th century--estrogen-aping
environmental chemicals. For a thorough review of the research on this topic, see
Janet Raloff, "That Feminine Touch: Are men suffering from prenatal or childhood
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