In the February 27, 2009, issue of Science on page 1164 begins an article on Chinese government attempts to adjust the male/female birth ratio.  At this time, there are 120 boys born for every 100 girls.  Female foeticide has replaced female infanticide as the technique best designed to dispose of unwanted females.  Still, many baby girls are not taken to the doctor when they grow ill.  There are still quasilegal ways to dispose of children.

I hypothesize that female infanticide and foeticide are patrifocal societal tools used to maintain a patrifocal frame.  Males that don’t fit the male patrifocal ideal don’t achieve a wife and don’t pass on ideal genes.  Maintaining a high male/female birth ratio goes a long way toward encouraging long-term patrifocal societal stability.

“Bao and Li are one of four couples in their 600-person village to have espoused uxorilocal marriage, or living with the wife’s family.  Couples in some regions have opted for this lifestyle throughout Chinese history, but the practice is typically stigmatized.  By rewarding daring couples with land and public praise, Care for Girls aims to remove the stigma.  Bao says it worked:  “People don’t discriminate against you now.”  (Science, p. 1164)

The article goes on to describe attempts to adjust male/female ratios by intervening in the intransigent patrifocal social structure.

“The demographers realized that reversing the trend would require a major cultural shift.  Undermining the patrilineal order, they suspected, might do the trick.  With Marcus Feldman, Zhu and Li surveyed two counties in China where historically loose clan structure had led to a high percentage of men living with their wives’ families.  Both uxorilocal counties had a normal sex ratio at birth and low female child mortality.  Moreover, matrilineality seemed to provide the same benefits as patrilineality: ‘We found that daughters provided economic and emotional support to their parents equal to that of sons,’ Li says.” (Science, p. 1165)

Researchers in China have discovered that social structure is directly related to male/female birth ratios.  What other features may these unique, less patrilineal provinces reveal?  Perhaps there are additional advantages to relieving oneself of allegiance to a society heavily dependent on the concept that males are more valuable than females.  I suspect that there are positive economic repercussions.

The Chinese culture is unique in more ways than can be counted.  Whereas in the West until this last century matrifocal tendencies were demonized along with the serpent, a major symbol of the old goddess religions, in Asia the serpent was assimilated and deified.  In the East, matrifocal values were never totally repressed.  Asian spiritual paths revere the power of the female while seeking balance between the two hormonal archetypes.

The distance that the Chinese culture has to go to begin to respect the rights of women and arrive at a balance that provides bonuses to all may not be as far off as many think.  Though there are many societal habits to be adjusted, there is a spiritual infrastructure that allows for the emergence of the unique.  China is seeking profound industrial and commercial innovation and a primary position in the world’s economies.  By focusing on birth ratios as the symptom of a restraining frame of reference, the peoples of China may have a high quality source of information on how close they are coming to acquiring a useful reference for the new global economy.

Patrifocal societies may be both useful and beautiful in a world that requires and rewards stable societies that can survive over long periods of time.  Now that our global cultures are integrating, innovation is king.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then China’s new matrilineality may be the mother of innovation.

Consider the exhibition of partnership society or matrifocal features in Scandinavian societies and evidence of these qualities in the Canadian, New England, Minnesota and Wisconsin populations.  In earlier pieces, we’ve noted the possible relationships between the need for Vitamins A and D in Scandinavian populations and the exhibition of neotenous features in both sexes of the populations, such as blond hair, blue eyes, lanky builds and lactate tolerance.  Observing the egalitarian social and political aspects of Scandinavian nations, I’ve hypothesized that there might be a direct connection between the neotenous features of individuals within a population and the partnership or matrifocal features exhibited by the society as a whole.

I’m seeing similar patterns in other regions of the world.  Of course, individuals from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have immigrated to Canada, New England, Minnesota and Wisconsin, carrying their biological and social proclivities with them.  Would this explain why North Dakota and Montana are so conservative by comparison?  Do North Dakota and Montana have different ethnic makeups?

I’m seeking evidence that simply living in a northern latitude influences populations to exhibit neotenous features.  One place to look for information is by exploring differences between indigenous American Indian populations.

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“Thus…

Modern technology serves hidden societal assumptions. Different societies encourage radically different uses of technology. A hybrid transitional society with easy access to energy supplies and natural resources, such as the United States, proliferates technologies like a wildflower garden sends out seeds. Still, there is a method to the madness of technological innovation.

On one side perches the atomic bomb and pregnancy ultrasound, two of the most powerful tools of a patrifocal society. On the other side, serving a matrifocal society, are the Pill and the Internet.

Across the world there is a war being fought between destruction and creation. On the eastern front, battles wage across a woman’s womb; and the sex of the survivor determines both the structure of future society and that society’s talent and tendency to innovate. On the western front, the military-industrial-financial world alliance is clashing with the Internet society, and losing.

Female foeticide is one of the greatest killers on the planet, a scourge that goes almost unremarked. Modern ultrasound technology has facilitated the abortions of female fetuses rather than the drowning and smothering of infants. It is a machine that insures a child is male. The liberal West supports abortion. The conservative West supports…

Ten years ago, I was exploring the possible origin of human culture in tribal societies driven by rhythmic dance and music. Tribal societies are on rare occasions characterized by paternal anonymity, or children who are unaware of the identity of their biological father. Observing that human brain size began to diminish about 25,000 years ago, I hypothesized that this reflected an emerging patrifocal emphasis on speech instead of gesture and a movement away from a selection for big-brained males. If this was the case, I suspected that there might be remnants of the old matrifocal paradigm that still exist within contemporary society. In the neurological literature, I sought humans with unusually large brains, difficulty with language, but who were also ambidextrous or left-handed. I came to find that autistic individuals commonly display these features; in addition, I discovered that individuals with autism are often obsessed with pattern replication and have perfect pitch (Brenton, Devries, Barton, Minnich & Sokol, 2008).

It appeared that hidden beneath the just-so story was a theory, which, if brought to light, could help make useful predictions and illuminate unrecognized relationships. From the beginning, the theory drew information from three different disciplines: anthropology, evolutionary biology…

Male control of the female body is a hallmark of a patrifocal society, the Right Wing and hierarchical societies. It is no mistake that the contemporary Republican Party has its roots in the anti-abortion movement. Traditionally, in a patrifocal society such as China or the Yanomamo of South America, society seeks the death of girl infants. If a child is killed while still in the womb, there is no guarantee the male will survive.

In a highly patrifocal society, it is vital that the pool of potential wives be repressed. With few child-bearing females, only the males considered most ideal as husbands will be chosen by the fathers or families of the available woman. In a warrior society, or a very competitive, highly hierarchical society, the males that fail to perform will go mateless. Aggressive, competitive males will procreate and bring higher testosterone warriors into society.

The abortion battle is not over whether killing babies is moral. The abortion battle determines the social structure of society. If females can kill an unborn infant, then future mate selection also reverts to female choice. Females can choose to abort and they can choose their husband according to criteria that support her personal…

Female infanticide provides a patrifocal society the leverage to sexually select for a narrow window of macho male personality types, upholding cultural stability, curtailing innovation.

Female infanticide is a manifestation of sexual selection in a cultural context. Female infanticide can be understood as patrifocal, cultural acceleration and/or stabilization. By decreasing the number of women to less than the number of available men and by being more specific about features that can be chosen for in the character and genes of the males, the more culturally rigid, both in terms of cultural ideas and the genetic pool, the culture will continue to be.

A culture keeps tight control of its degree of diffusion or drift by maintaining a low female/high male ratio. This control results in a shift toward a selection of highly specific traits. As a culture starts to idealize war, the families of those women or their fathers choose a mate based on success-in-war criteria. Female infanticide decreased the number of men likely to create progeny, increasing the likelihood that the warlike criteria would be passed on to the next generation. With a high percentage of young men who are potentially mateless, aggressive posturing abounds, violent confrontations increase and…

On one side towers the pill, the 60s symbol of goddess, placing sexuality in the control of women and providing females the power to decide when to make love and if they will be fertile.

On the other side sits AIDS, symbol of patrifocal, socially conservative Republicanism, demanding that sex stop now and that contraception and abortion be banned.

The pill vs. the virus, joy vs. fear, matri vs. patri is the battle of social structures, the oldest human civil war of all, where the female newborns are the disappeared.

Often, when a new lion king takes over an established pride with kittens not obviously his own, he kills them. It has been estimated that this action is a naturally selected tendency since cats evidencing this behavior are more likely to pass it on to male progeny that retain the trait. Humans are horrified observing this conduct. Yet, female infanticide is widely practiced today in cultures seeking to retain vanishing male dominance in societies where ancient hierarchies are threatened.

Societies retain ideals of the perfect mate. Those ideals can vary radically from culture to culture, even varying from country to country in the West. Perfect mate ideals vary to the…