robert harley writes ok then consider a population of NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER men each pair off with NUMBER NUMBER women then NUMBER man let s call him wilt also has sex with the other NUMBER NUMBER women this has never happened its relevance is nil it was a extreme contrived example because you glosded over the point of the earlier NUMBER person example but ok mr math let it be n men and women for any n NUMBER they all pair off then some number h n h NUMBER of men has sex with all the other n NUMBER women he hasn t yet had sex with pick any n and h that might be interesting any choice of values results in meaningful differences between the sexes promiscuity as commonly understood it should be more obvious with extreme choices of numbers but it is also true for any choice of n and h if unrealistic totals distract you further and i was hoping this would be clear without saying so outright this model actually approximates the cliche common wisdom about per gender sexual behavior if you reverse the male and female roles those stereotypes are that more men than women seek multiple partners men being more promiscuous than women and that surplus of male interest is satisfied by a smaller number of hyperpromiscuous women often derisively labelled sluts so i chose not to type on average explicitly in my post since this is fork and one tends to assume that people have a clue there is no disagreement between us except that i am more interested in typical behaviour and you in extreme nope now you ve amended the meaning of your initial statement to make it more defensible what i objected to was robert harley the assumption that females of all species tend to be less promiscuous than males simply does not fit the facts hrdy contended well duh it is perfectly obvious that heterosexual promiscuity is exactly precisely identical between males and females of course the shapes of the distributions may differ if you assumed people on fork had a clue would you have needed to jump in with a patronizing duh if you were talking about fuzzy typical behavior would you have huffed and puffed with the words perfectly obvious and exactly precisely identical if your concern was with the typical why didn t you adopt the typical definition of promiscuous rather than a straw man definition which allowed you to interject duh and mock an anthrolopology professor s conclusions actually you probably just had a bad day and felt like jumping down my throat for the hell of it you are welcome to that theory but here s an alternate theory when you jump in with a patronizing and overblown pronouncement e g duh perfectly obvious exactly precisely identical and that pronouncement is itself sloppy and erroneous then others may get a kick out of popping your balloon gordon 