[belorn]

What are you talking about? Baboons, macaques, gibbons, great apes, capuchins, howlers, or squirrel monkey do not conduct arranged marriages, nor marriages at all for that matter. Looking at evolution and how it formed us and we find very little of arranged marriages.

Arranged marriages also limits men and women equally (the definition is the bride and groom are selected by individuals other than the couple themselves) so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make in the first place.

[hobofan]

> It could easily be argued that women are "responsible" for this via setting up the incentive structure that men responded to in the ancestral environment.

I was saying that this argument by ThrustVectoring doesn't hold true, as neither men nor women (at least not the bride or the groom) made the partner choices themselves.

[busterarm]

Just to pile on with what you said to the parent...

For most of the thousands of years we've had something like marriage, it was a privilege of the upper class anyway. Marriage served as a means to preserve political power.

If you don't have any political power, you weren't getting married.