Why class, education increasingly & inversely predict divorce, multiple mates, illegitimacy

Family Law Prof Blog: Carbone: "The Growing Relationship between Class and Family: Should We Be Talking About Evolutionary Analysis?".

The Family Law Prof. Blog writes: June Carbone (UMKC School of Law) has posted "The Growing Relationship between Class and Family: Should We Be Talking About Evolutionary Analysis?" on SSRN. ... Today, the likelihood of marrying, staying married and raising children within a two parent family corresponds directly with class. Divorce rates, which seemed to plateau in the nineties, in fact diverge sharply by women's education - the better educated have seen divorce rates decline back to the levels before no-fault divorce while they have continued to increase for everyone else. ...

 The college educated have continued to hold the line on non-marital births at the same time they have risen sharply for everyone else. Today, 41% of all births are non-marital; yet, the figure remains at 2% for white college grads and 6% for college graduates overall.

... evolutionary explanations. The most recent data finds that the greater the male income inequality in a region, the lower women's marriage rates and the lower the socio-economic status of the woman, the more likely she is to have children with multiple men. These ... seem to bear out evolutionary predictions that 1) women will prefer access to "better genes" from multiple partners if fidelity does not secure a mate who can meaningly invest in the children and 2) women who can secure a significant investment from a long term partner will become pickier as the variance among potential mates increases. ...

Comments

[Sam]

Your conclusions have no proof or basis. Your conclusion is a logical fallacy.
"I sure wish the pilot would stop turning on the 'Buckle Seatbelt' sign, every time he does the plane gets bumpy."

There are hundreds of explanations as to why lower income correlates with children with multiple men. To automatically infer that it is proof of evolutionary predictions is simply wishful thinking on your part.

[John Crouch]

Just because there are a lot of phenomena at the same time doesn't mean that all theories of cause & effect, all attempts to discern logical patterns and relationships, are invalid. I think the author's using the term "evolutionary" a little more loosely than in everyday speech; he means "the same kind of behaviors that the field of evolutionary biology is concerned with." Doesn't have a lot to do with evolution vs. creationism etc.