4 ms·

> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventio

> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed to establish and consolidate power. Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of feudal society. Inheritance today still largely depends on this notion. Dynasties are possible alone because of lineage. If it doesn't matter who has sex with whom and who someone's parents are because there's no clearly delineated nuclear family this might indeed work as an equaliser.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gus_massa 9y ago
You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?) And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.
  - tzs 9y ago
    > A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be. That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly, based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children. Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was not the mother of that child. How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words, both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but sometime during development they merged with their twin. Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other, and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear did. Human chimeras are thought to be very very rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild [2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Well, OK, excepting a very rare circumstance ancient people would not have understood, depending on your definition of "maternity".

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gus_massa 9y ago

You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?) And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.

emodendroket 9y ago
Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.
- tzs 9y ago
  > A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be. That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly, based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children. Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was not the mother of that child. How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words, both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but sometime during development they merged with their twin. Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other, and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear did. Human chimeras are thought to be very very rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild [2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Well, OK, excepting a very rare circumstance ancient people would not have understood, depending on your definition of "maternity".