For part of the explanation, Ms Koelet points to the intriguing marriage patterns of the Swiss.
In addition, the marriage patterns of Asia and Latin America were (and continue to be) quite different from those in Europe; marriage in Asia and Latin America is early and nearly universal, while that in Europe is usually late and significant percentages of people never marry.
A few weeks ago, as Marios and I lounged on the sandy beaches of his native Rhodes, a sobering study was released about the marriage patterns of black women with graduate degrees.
It is improbable that the favorable secular trends in health and life expectancy in human populations worldwide during recent decades can solely be explained by socioeconomic factors and improved health care, yet to date the influence of marriage patterns on population genetic structure has been substantially under-investigated.
Family-fixed effects include factors such as marriage pattern, norms or traditions of education and gender role patterns, and one plausible interpretation of our results would be that exactly these factors influence girls and boys differently.
"In India," Ms. Germain said, "the low status of women, the economic dependence, the marriage patterns, all of these factors are going to mean that women are much less likely than even women in Africa to be able to negotiate condom use or to have any say at all about when sex occurs.
Among the study participants, there was widespread scepticism of the discourse of elevated recessive risk in consanguineous marriages, this being perceived as discriminatory in singling out a particular population on the basis of its marriage pattern.
They exhibit vast diversity with respect to culture, language, subsistence economy and population structure variables like size, growth, distribution, marriage patterns and degree of endogamy [2], [7] [8].
Taken together, these components of marriage patterns can account for the elimination of as little as 20 percent to as much as 50 percent of the potential reproductive years.
Lee et al. (2005), who urges the significance of marriage patterns, asserts that late marriage and lifelong singlehood are crucial factors for explaining low fertility rates.
