“In more than one hundred well studied societies", according to a recent review, “high-ranking men have the right to more wives." But evidence for such selection is inconclusive, based on short-term statistical associations between behaviour and fertility.

And the underlying model of selection, based on Fisher's “fundamental theorem of natural selection" (circa 1930), is no longer taken seriously in population genetics. The neutral theory, which infers selection at the population level, provides a way to measure the nature and extent of both cultural and genetic selection.

In 41 Indonesian villages, we find little evidence for either form of selection associated with male dominance. This first test of the neutral theory in anthropology suggests that, as in genetics and ecology, the appropriate null model is not pan-selection, but neutrality.

About J. S. Lansing
J. Stephen Lansing is a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is also a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and director of Yayasan Somia Pretiwi, an Indonesian foundation promoting collaborative research on environmental problems in the tropics.

He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a lecturer at Udayana University and a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Lansing is the author and producer of several books and films.

Recent publications