Erratum

Extract

Owing to a printer's error in the Author's Response of Daniel Pérusse's “Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies: Testing the relationship at the proximate and ultimate levels,” BBS 16(2) 1993, two lines were transposed. On p. 314, the first line of the right-hand column should appear as the first line of the left-hand column on p. 315 and vice versa.

The corrected sentences should read:

(p. 314, sect. R3.1) The confounding of mating success with male status is accordingly not straightforward, since the status of female partners was unknown and could well have covaried weakly, if at all, with that of respondents; indeed, the strong correlation found between muting success and social status in men suggests that the latter must have “mated down” on many if not most occasions, as is commonly observed in openly polygynous societies (e.g., Dickemann 1981).

(pp.314–15, sect. R3.2) In modern human societies, however, many factors contribute to the fact that female choice is unlikely to be absent from any mating occurrence except rape: (1) Pure female-defense polygyny is not encountered; (2) traditional restraints on female choice such as arranged marriages (Whyte 1978) have disappeared; (3) claustration and general control of female sexuality (Dickemann 1981) are nonexistent or highly reduced. For these reasons, any explanation of mating behavior that completely ignores active choice by women (and men) does not seem very compelling.