Re: Breast Size (Was: Re: Homosexuality and genetic determinism)
Herb Huston (huston@access2.digex.net)
3 Jun 1995 08:47:51 -0400
In article <ebohlmanD9KJLo.HJ6@netcom.com>,
Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com> wrote:
}James G. Acker (jgacker@news.gsfc.nasa.gov) wrote:
}: I'm not advocating this as a social practice, but the
}: average length of marriages (mean time to divorce is approximately
}: 4 years) shows this to be a social pattern. (Cited in _Discover_,
}: and there are books about this topic.)
Not quite. The mode, not the mean, was at four years.
}Something about this figure strikes me as fishy. How was it derived? By
}looking at divorce records?
The source data came from the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations
from 1947 on and covering 62 nations.
} If so, than it doesn't take into account the
}marriages that never ended in divorce. Or was it derived by following a
}random sample of married couples over a period of time, using proper
}techniques for dealing with what statisticians call "censored data" (data
}where you know that, for example, a marriage lasted at least ten years,
}but not how much longer, because, for example, the couple was still
}married at the end of the study. This sort of thing happens all the time
}in longevity and survival studies)?
The book to which Jim alludes is Helen E. Fisher, _Anatomy of Love: The
Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce_, 1992, Norton, New
York; ISBN 0-393-03423-2. Dr. Fisher discusses what she calls "The
Four-Year Itch" in Chapter 5, and she includes an appendix that has bar
charts. For her article, see pages 22-33 of the October 1987 issue of
_Discover_.
-- Herb Huston
-- huston@access.digex.net
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