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Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Science
- Boston Globe
In ancient teeth, clues of human evolution — and perhaps a new species
A close examination of 13 teeth discovered in the Ledi-Geraru research area, ranging from 2.6 million to 2.8 million years old, adds new fragments of evidence to the increasingly complex story of human origins and potentially reveals an entirely new species, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Advertisement Human evolution has long been visualized as a simple linear timeline, a kind of evolutionary baton race in which one species evolves into another, from apes to modern humans. The new finds reinforced that human evolution was more of a tangled-up bush. Different species and different branches of the hominin family tree overlapped with one another in time and space. Three smaller teeth, the researchers report, were from the group that modern humans belong to, Homo, and dated to 2.6 million and 2.8 million years ago. They were found at Ledi-Geraru in 2015 and 2018. The larger teeth were relatives of Lucy — an Australopithecus whose famed fossil find in Ethiopia 50 years ago changed the modern understanding of human origins. Already, outside researchers are debating next steps and whether they agree that the teeth found by Reed's team represent a new species of Australopithecus. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. Because of the uncertainties around federal funding, Reed isn't yet sure if the next year of grant funding will come through. Advertisement 'We don't have all the pieces of the puzzle,' Reed said. 'What's exciting to us is you want more pieces of the puzzle to put this [story] together.' For years, paleoanthropologists have been piecing together evidence of a diverse world of hominins — the group that includes modern humans and our close ancestors. In Kenya, 1.5 million-year-old preserved footprints show that Homo erectus and another branch of the hominin family tree, Paranthropus boisei, walked along the shores of a lake within hours or days of each other. In and around a cave in South Africa, fossils reveal that Homo erectus, Australopithecus sediba, and Paranthropus robustus coexisted 2 million years ago. Now, in East Africa at sites within the Ledi-Geraru research area, a collection of ancient teeth show Homo and Australopithecus coexisting in yet another spot. But would they have interacted with one another? Would they have interbred? John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was not involved in the work, said the find is exciting because it opens a window into a critical and mysterious period of human evolution between 2.5 million and 3 million years ago. He said he's eager to see the work published, but noted that such finds raise as many questions as they answer. 'The kinds of evidence that Ledi-Geraru is generating is evidence spanning hundreds of thousands of years of time, and potentially hundreds of square kilometers of space,' Hawks said. 'When several things are reported together like this, that creates a challenge of interpreting what that evidence together tells you.' Advertisement Clément Zanolli, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux, said in an email that he was not yet convinced that the teeth are a new species of Australopithecus and would be cautious about attributing the smaller teeth traced to Homo. Newer techniques that use CT scanning allow scientists to study the internal structure of teeth and could build a stronger case. He said the finds would represent some of the oldest remains of Homo and the youngest specimens of Australopithecus in East Africa. 'These new findings are thus adding more pieces to the puzzle, but they are not decisive to understand human evolution,' Zanolli said. When the famous Lucy fossil was discovered a half-century ago, she was popularized as a 'missing link' between apes and humans. Human evolution looked simpler then. Today, the tree of human evolution is full of species that may have been direct ancestors, distant cousins, or side branches that died off. If anything, the science of human evolution has become a deeper mystery, as it has become clear that there were once lots of hominins walking around the planet, sometimes interacting with one another. As hallmarks of human innovation — such as using stone tools and butchering meat — have been shown to have been shared with hominin ancestors, the question of how and why humans alone succeeded has become more mysterious. Zeray Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist and professor at the University of Chicago, said he thinks it's possible the Australopithecus teeth described in the paper aren't a new species, but they could be evidence that Lucy's species persisted. Australopithecus afarensis was previously thought to have vanished around 2.95 million years ago from East Africa. Advertisement One model for how to understand human evolution is a concept called 'budding cladogenesis.' In this model, species don't progressively change into the next species and vanish. They give rise to different species at different times and in different places, and the ancestors may stick around and live alongside them. Lucy's species could have been one such long-lived species, and the teeth are one new piece of evidence to consider. 'The material is … highly fragmentary, but it does have important information in regard to a time period which is really critical,' Alemseged said. 'It really allows us to think about the complex question of how evolution has happened.'
Chicago Tribune
08-08-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Russ Feingold: Messing with the Boundary Waters is bad politics
As a former U.S. senator and lifelong Wisconsinite, I believe deeply in our responsibility to protect special places. Today, that responsibility includes standing up for one of the most beloved — and politically underestimated — wild places in America: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. In May, House Republicans championed a provision in the budget reconciliation bill that would have given away 6,000 acres of the Superior National Forest to a Chilean billionaire who has dreams of opening a toxic copper mine on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters. Fortunately, the provision was later rejected by the Senate Parliamentarian. Had that language made it through the Senate, it wouldn't have been just an environmental disaster — it would have been a political one as well. A pending stand-alone bill by Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., who authored the giveaway provision in the budget bill, seeks to grant expedited mining rights to the Chilean billionaire, threatening America's public lands and our nation's most visited wilderness. The repeat users of the Boundary Waters are not coastal environmentalists. They are our Midwestern neighbors — voters from Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and North and South Dakota — who return year after year to paddle, portage and camp in one of the last truly wild places left in this country. We are not talking about just a few adventurous families. About 150,000 people experience the Boundary Waters every year, out of more than 8 million people who visit northeastern Minnesota annually, meaning millions of Midwesterners have personally experienced this national treasure. These are battleground state voters. Undermining a place so central to their outdoor traditions and interests is just plain bad politics, in addition to being a terrible idea on the merits. Why would we ever mine in a place that is almost as much lake as forest? The 3 million-acre Superior National Forest, of which the Boundary Waters is a part, contains 20% of all the freshwater in our country's entire 193 million-acre national forest system. We know that Midwestern voters across the political spectrum care about protecting the environment. The University of Wisconsin at Madison's Center for Communication & Civic Renewal conducted a poll in December to ascertain what divides or unites voters in the Midwest. The results showed that environmental issues are one of the few areas that generate strong bipartisan support among Midwesterners. The Boundary Waters also faces a threat by the Donald Trump administration. On June 11, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a callous and inaccurate tweet blithely announcing that she and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had begun the process of undoing the 20-year copper mining ban in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters. Rollins' knee-jerk social media post immediately after the exclusion of the giveaway language from the budget bill reflects complete ignorance of the power of this place. The lakes and forests of the Boundary Waters support communities and businesses and enrich the lives of countless wilderness travelers. The Boundary Waters is not some faraway preserve. It's 1.1 million acres of forests and interconnected lakes in northeastern Minnesota. President Theodore Roosevelt recognized its unique beauty and ecological value in 1909 by establishing the Superior National Forest. This region is part of a priceless landscape of protected lands and waters that stretch across the U.S.-Canada border. From scout trips to honeymoons, family vacations to solo paddles, this wilderness is woven into the fabric of life for thousands upon thousands of Midwestern families. It is public land that belongs to all of us. Now, that fabric is at risk. The proposed copper mines — owned by Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta — would threaten the Boundary Waters with acid mine drainage and heavy metal pollution. If that contamination happens, there's no going back. One of the purest freshwater systems on Earth would be damaged — and it cannot be remediated once it's poisoned. Why would we jeopardize clean water, wildlife and a thriving recreation economy for the short-term profits of a Chilean company? This isn't a partisan issue. It's about clean water and our outdoor traditions and protecting the places that reflect our values. I urge everyone who cares about our public lands to speak up. The Boundary Waters needs us now. Let's not look back and wish we'd done more.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Trade War Could Turbocharge Deforestation in the Amazon
This past December, I was driving down the Trans-Amazonian Highway, near the city of Santarém, in northern Brazil, when the road disappeared into what I thought was fog. When I got out of the car, though, I realized that the haze was smoke, wafting thick and acrid from the burning forest. The week before, Santarém had registered at 581 on the air-quality index—among the worst ratings in the world. Fire is not a natural phenomenon in the Amazon, but now the flames arrive with alarming frequency and scale. Each dry season, farmers carve up and burn hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres in one of the world's largest terrestrial carbon sinks to make way for cattle pastures and soy plantations, the leading engines of deforestation across Brazil. According to a January report, in recent years, deforestation due to soy production has increased. Now global-trade tensions threaten to further accelerate the ecological destruction. President Donald Trump's 145 percent tariff on imports from China and China's 125 percent reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods could reroute a significant share of China's demand for American commodities. Soybeans are among the United States' top exports to China, supplying about 30 percent of the country's demand. If tariffs on U.S. soybeans remain, China will almost certainly purchase more from Brazil, the only country that produces more soybeans than the U.S.—just as it did during a trade war with Trump in 2018. Experts fear that such a boost in demand for Brazilian soy, coupled with moves to cut environmental policies in soy-producing Brazilian states, could drive further deforestation. Some of that deforestation will likely happen in the Cerrado, the savanna biome next to the Amazon that serves as Brazil's second-largest source of carbon storage. The Cerrado is governed by much laxer environmental laws than the Amazon, and has become a major hub for soybean production. There, deforestation is rampant. In the Amazon, far more land is legally protected, and rules dictating how much farmers can clear their own land are much stricter. 'Our published research shows that there is very little land that's suitable for soy and that can be legally cleared in the Brazilian Amazon,' Lisa Rausch, who studies Brazilian deforestation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Just because clearing land for soy is illegal, though, doesn't mean it wouldn't happen. Brazil has a solid system of regulations and institutions to prevent illegal deforestation, but enforcement is weak, especially in the Amazon, which has a long history of illegal slash-and-burning. One study found that almost 91 percent of all deforestation in the Amazon from August 2023 to July 2024 happened without authorization. Rising soybean prices will boost demand for the cleared land that farmers generally need to grow the beans. Soy production in the Amazon tends to follow an established pattern: First, loggers cut down the most precious trees, opening up roads through the forest. Then cattle farmers cut and burn the remaining forest and lay claim (legally or not) to the land. Eventually, they sell the cattle-cleared land to soy farmers. The cattle farmers seek out new pastures, pushing the agricultural frontier ever deeper into the rainforest. 'The Amazon offers far more land than anywhere else. There are over 50 million hectares of open pastures, many of them degraded,' Mairon G. Bastos Lima, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me. Brazil's political landscape is also shifting in ways that could allow for more legal deforestation in the Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has advocated for more action on illegal deforestation. But since last year, right-wing governors in the Amazon's soy-producing states, among them Mato Grosso, have been attempting to gut environmental regulations. This includes changing the designation of some land in the Amazon to savanna, significantly increasing the amount that can be legally deforested. These same governors have passed laws that effectively void the Soy Moratorium, a voluntary agreement that has contributed to a historically steep decline in deforestation by barring signatory companies from purchasing soy grown on land in the Amazon that was deforested after 2008. A similar campaign against the Soy Moratorium is also starting to play out at the federal level. The Brazilian supreme court suspended Mato Grosso's law and has yet to rule on whether undermining the Soy Moratorium is constitutional. Undermining the agreement could boost Brazil's soy-driven economy but also create new incentives to clear the rainforest. 'The fact that the Amazon soy moratorium is actively being weakened right now, I think it puts Brazil at a really precarious place,' Rausch said. The Amazon covers nearly 7 million square kilometers and contains approximately a fifth of all the carbon captured by vegetation across the planet. Soybean plantations capture only a fraction of the carbon that tropical rainforests do, and drive emissions through transportation and processing. Deforestation has also been correlated with dry spells and a delayed rainy season—bad for soybeans and other crops that depend on the rain as well as for the rainforest and the people that live in it. Data from Trase, a nonprofit that tracks global supply chains for commodities, show that soy-linked deforestation released 133.4 million U.S. tons of CO₂ in 2022 alone—equivalent to the electricity use of more than 15 million U.S. homes. Losing even more of the Amazon's carbon bank to soy farming could greatly accelerate global warming. The climate isn't the only thing at stake. A few days after my smoke encounter, I visited the Munduruku do Planalto, an Indigenous group who live in several communities about 30 miles east of Santarém. The plateau they live on is favored for soybean production, and their villages have become oases of forest, streams, and açai groves surrounded by soybean plantations. The Munduruku now live with water contaminated by agricultural runoff and harassment from surrounding soybean farmers. 'We have lost everything, in so many ways—socially, culturally, spiritually, and economically,' Manoel Munduruku, a prominent leader of the Munduruku do Planalto, told me. Indigenous communities, including the Munduruku, have historically been one of the most effective buffers against deforestation in the Amazon. But they too are under threat: In February, a Brazilian-supreme-court justice introduced a proposal that would significantly weaken Indigenous land rights. The exact contours of soybean demand in the new economic world that Trump has created remain to be seen. The U.S. president has already postponed the aggressive tariffs he originally proposed, except in the case of China (although he left a blanket 10 percent in place for most foreign goods), and he may change his mind again with little warning. Growing frustration from American soybean farmers and industry associations, who operate primarily in red states, could prove to be politically damaging, especially given that soybean farmers were hard-hit by tariffs in Trump's first term, and many are still recovering. But if the tariffs stick, their most lasting effects for Brazil—taxed at only 10 percent even under the original plan—will likely be not geopolitical, but environmental. As Brazil plans to host COP30 later this year, a surge in soy exports could undermine the very climate goals that world leaders will gather to discuss. It would be a dilemma for Brazil—and for the world. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Trade War Could Turbocharge Deforestation in the Amazon
This past December, I was driving down the Trans-Amazonian Highway, near the city of Santarém, in northern Brazil, when the road disappeared into what I thought was fog. When I got out of the car, though, I realized that the haze was smoke, wafting thick and acrid from the burning forest. The week before, Santarém had registered at 581 on the air-quality index—among the worst ratings in the world. Fire is not a natural phenomenon in the Amazon, but now the flames arrive with alarming frequency and scale. Each dry season, farmers carve up and burn hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres in one of the world's largest terrestrial carbon sinks to make way for cattle pastures and soy plantations, the leading engines of deforestation across Brazil. According to a January report, in recent years, deforestation due to soy production has increased. Now global-trade tensions threaten to further accelerate the ecological destruction. President Donald Trump's 145 percent tariff on imports from China and China's 125 percent reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods could reroute a significant share of China's demand for American commodities. Soybeans are among the United States' top exports to China, supplying about 30 percent of the country's demand. If tariffs on U.S. soybeans remain, China will almost certainly purchase more from Brazil, the only country that produces more soybeans than the U.S.—just as it did during a trade war with Trump in 2018. Experts fear that such a boost in demand for Brazilian soy, coupled with moves to cut environmental policies in soy-producing Brazilian states, could drive further deforestation. Some of that deforestation will likely happen in the Cerrado, the savanna biome next to the Amazon that serves as Brazil's second-largest source of carbon storage. The Cerrado is governed by much laxer environmental laws than the Amazon, and has become a major hub for soybean production. There, deforestation is rampant. In the Amazon, far more land is legally protected, and rules dictating how much farmers can clear their own land are much stricter. 'Our published research shows that there is very little land that's suitable for soy and that can be legally cleared in the Brazilian Amazon,' Lisa Rausch, who studies Brazilian deforestation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Just because clearing land for soy is illegal, though, doesn't mean it wouldn't happen. Brazil has a solid system of regulations and institutions to prevent illegal deforestation, but enforcement is weak, especially in the Amazon, which has a long history of illegal slash-and-burning. One study found that almost 91 percent of all deforestation in the Amazon from August 2023 to July 2024 happened without authorization. Rising soybean prices will boost demand for the cleared land that farmers generally need to grow the beans. Soy production in the Amazon tends to follow an established pattern: First, loggers cut down the most precious trees, opening up roads through the forest. Then cattle farmers cut and burn the remaining forest and lay claim (legally or not) to the land. Eventually, they sell the cattle-cleared land to soy farmers. The cattle farmers seek out new pastures, pushing the agricultural frontier ever deeper into the rainforest. 'The Amazon offers far more land than anywhere else. There are over 50 million hectares of open pastures, many of them degraded,' Mairon G. Bastos Lima, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me. Brazil's political landscape is also shifting in ways that could allow for more legal deforestation in the Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has advocated for more action on illegal deforestation. But since last year, right-wing governors in the Amazon's soy-producing states, among them Mato Grosso, have been attempting to gut environmental regulations. This includes changing the designation of some land in the Amazon to savanna, significantly increasing the amount that can be legally deforested. These same governors have passed laws that effectively void the Soy Moratorium, a voluntary agreement that has contributed to a historically steep decline in deforestation by barring signatory companies from purchasing soy grown on land in the Amazon that was deforested after 2008. A similar campaign against the Soy Moratorium is also starting to play out at the federal level. The Brazilian supreme court suspended Mato Grosso's law and has yet to rule on whether undermining the Soy Moratorium is constitutional. Undermining the agreement could boost Brazil's soy-driven economy but also create new incentives to clear the rainforest. 'The fact that the Amazon soy moratorium is actively being weakened right now, I think it puts Brazil at a really precarious place,' Rausch said. The Amazon covers nearly 7 million square kilometers and contains approximately a fifth of all the carbon captured by vegetation across the planet. Soybean plantations capture only a fraction of the carbon that tropical rainforests do, and drive emissions through transportation and processing. Deforestation has also been correlated with dry spells and a delayed rainy season—bad for soybeans and other crops that depend on the rain as well as for the rainforest and the people that live in it. Data from Trase, a nonprofit that tracks global supply chains for commodities, show that soy-linked deforestation released 133.4 million U.S. tons of CO₂ in 2022 alone—equivalent to the electricity use of more than 15 million U.S. homes. Losing even more of the Amazon's carbon bank to soy farming could greatly accelerate global warming. The climate isn't the only thing at stake. A few days after my smoke encounter, I visited the Munduruku do Planalto, an Indigenous group who live in several communities about 30 miles east of Santarém. The plateau they live on is favored for soybean production, and their villages have become oases of forest, streams, and açai groves surrounded by soybean plantations. The Munduruku now live with water contaminated by agricultural runoff and harassment from surrounding soybean farmers. 'We have lost everything, in so many ways—socially, culturally, spiritually, and economically,' Manoel Munduruku, a prominent leader of the Munduruku do Planalto, told me. Indigenous communities, including the Munduruku, have historically been one of the most effective buffers against deforestation in the Amazon. But they too are under threat: In February, a Brazilian-supreme-court justice introduced a proposal that would significantly weaken Indigenous land rights. The exact contours of soybean demand in the new economic world that Trump has created remain to be seen. The U.S. president has already postponed the aggressive tariffs he originally proposed, except in the case of China (although he left a blanket 10 percent in place for most foreign goods), and he may change his mind again with little warning. Growing frustration from American soybean farmers and industry associations, who operate primarily in red states, could prove to be politically damaging, especially given that soybean farmers were hard-hit by tariffs in Trump's first term, and many are still recovering. But if the tariffs stick, their most lasting effects for Brazil—taxed at only 10 percent even under the original plan—will likely be not geopolitical, but environmental. As Brazil plans to host COP30 later this year, a surge in soy exports could undermine the very climate goals that world leaders will gather to discuss. It would be a dilemma for Brazil—and for the world.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The New ‘Marrying Down'
Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It's women who are 'marrying down.' Researchers debate whether marriage between educational equals—homogamy—is on the decline. But one thing is clear: The phenomenon of women marrying men with less education than themselves, what academics call 'hypogamy,' is on the rise. In fact, women are now more likely to marry a less-educated man than men are to marry a less-educated woman. Christine Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, shared data with me on trends in the educational profile of heterosexual married couples from 1940 to 2020. According to her calculations, in 2020, American husbands and wives shared the same broad level of education in 44.5 percent of heterosexual marriages, down from more than 47 percent in the early 2000s. Of the educationally mixed marriages, the majority—62 percent—were hypogamous, up from 39 percent in 1980. Crunching the numbers slightly differently, Benjamin Goldman, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that among Americans born in 1930, 2.3 percent ended up in a marriage where the woman had a four-year degree and the man did not. Among the cohort of those born in 1980, that figure was 9.6 percent. (This trend is hardly unique to the United States; hypogamy is becoming more common all over the globe.) It's a fragile time for gender relations in the United States. Young women and men appear to be diverging politically. Fewer people are dating, marrying, or having kids. Some commentators argue that there aren't enough suitable bachelors to meet the standards of accomplished modern women. Meanwhile, a growing 'manosphere' claims that women's advancement is to blame for all manner of struggles experienced by lonely, unmoored men. Yet for all the worry that a chasm is opening between men and women, the rise in the number of hypogamous couples suggests that some men and women are doing what men and women have always done: coupling up regardless of differences and figuring out a way to get along. 'It's clear,' Goldman told me, 'that understanding the dynamics of these couples is key to understanding the future of marriage.' The rise of the better-educated wife raises all sorts of questions we don't have complete answers to: What is drawing people to these relationships? Have women's strides in the labor market given them more latitude to marry whomever they love, or are they just settling? How are these couples dividing paid and unpaid work? Are they happy, or is their unconventional setup a strain? We don't even know if the couples in these unions are particularly progressive, Nadia Steiber, a sociology professor at the University of Vienna who is leading a multiyear project studying hypogamy, told me. Some people might imagine that women married to less-educated men are über-feminists happy to shirk traditional gender roles. And yet, men with less education tend to hold more traditional views on gender—which could suggest that the highly educated women marrying them also hold, or are at least open to, more traditional views. For all that remains unknown about the dynamics of hypogamous relationships, a growing body of research suggests that women are indeed marrying less-educated men simply because that's who is available—not necessarily because of changing preferences. In 2021, about 1.6 million more women than men were enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States, Clara Chambers, a research associate at Yale University, told me. But according to a recent paper she co-authored with Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard University, marriage rates among college-educated women have been broadly stable. The explanation for that is fairly straightforward: Without enough college-educated men to go around, college-educated women must be marrying men without a degree. Evidence that the rise of hypogamy is largely a response to these demographic constraints—rather than to, say, women's economic empowerment, the increase in online dating, or shifts in preferences—has been found in many countries. [Derek Thompson: Colleges have a guy problem] Even if shifting norms and preferences aren't driving the rise of hypogamy, they do seem to be evolving in conjunction with it. The World Values Survey, which explores how values and beliefs vary by country and shift over time, routinely asks people whether they agree that 'if a woman earns more money than her husband, it's almost certain to cause problems.' Schwartz and her research colleagues have found that in countries where women have more education and hypogamy is more prevalent, people are less likely to agree with that statement. And the fact that women and men are coupling up despite their educational gaps indicates that preferences are perhaps more flexible than some people assume. Various studies suggest that 'preferences are not this fixed thing,' Schwartz said. People respond 'pretty quickly to the availability of partners.' It's important not to overstate the change under way here: Educational achievement does not map neatly onto earnings. Some research has found that women in hypogamous marriages, in the United States and abroad, are a bit more likely than other women to earn as much as or more than their husbands, Schwartz told me, but most don't. Steiber's research in Austria found that women with more education than their husband took a smaller hit to their earnings after having a child than other Austrian mothers did, but not by much—and that their families still tended to fall into the male-breadwinner pattern after kids entered the picture. That is, women's educational advantage may draw husbands and wives closer to economic equality—but men still usually have the economic advantage. [Yascha Mounk: Nothing defines America's social divide like a college education] Recent research can help shed light on why this is. When Goldman, Chambers, and Winkelmann looked at how the earnings of non-college-educated men have fared over the past several decades, they found that men married to college-educated women have done comparatively well for themselves; their earnings have gone up a bit over time, even after accounting for inflation. But the earnings of non-college-educated men who aren't 'marrying up' have dwindled considerably. In other words, college-educated women are partnering up with the highest-earning men without degrees, Goldman said. 'The remainder of non-college men are really struggling.' The persistence of men's tendency to outearn their wives was evident in conversations I had with people in hypogamous relationships from around the country. In some cases, I spoke with both partners, and in others I spoke only with the wife. The extent of the couples' educational gap varied—but the man was the breadwinner in most of these relationships. For instance, Mitchell Self, who lives in central California, has been with his wife, Mary, since high school. He did farm labor for a while after graduation, then transitioned into welding and founded his own company. Mary attended a nearby college and graduated with a degree in geospatial studies. She's now caring for their two young children full-time, and while she's glad to have a degree, she doesn't think she'll ever be the breadwinner in their marriage. 'He will always be able to make a lot more money than I could ever make,' she said. Some couples I spoke with told me that the husband's income was what had allowed the wife to pursue her education in the first place. When Allison Hiltz met her now-former husband, she was working in retail. Neither of them had a four-year degree. She finished her bachelor's, and then the two moved to Colorado, where she earned a master's degree in public policy and, later, a seat on the Aurora city council—all of which she was able to do, she said, only because her husband made enough as a diesel mechanic in the trash industry to keep them financially afloat. The few breadwinning wives I interviewed had high levels of education. Sonia Ben Hedia Twomey was an undergraduate when she first met her husband, John Twomey, who has a bachelor's degree in business and works in the auto industry in Austin. Sonia eventually earned a Ph.D. and is now a computational linguist for a major tech company. John's job makes decent money, he told me, 'but it doesn't make her money.' For the most part, the wives and husbands I interviewed didn't think of their educational gap as a problem. Another Mary, who asked to be identified only by her first name given the sensitive nature of the topic, recently earned a master's degree and is married to a man who has yet to complete his undergraduate work. 'He's very educated,' she told me. 'He just doesn't have a bachelor's.' She would like for him to finish his degree, mainly for the professional opportunities, she said. But she and other women I spoke with told me that they didn't believe that formal education automatically translated to smarts or intellectual curiosity—and that they felt on pretty equal footing with their husbands. In a few cases, women floated the possibility that they'd avoided tension in their marriage because their husbands earned more than they did. Perhaps, they suggested—alluding to entrenched gender norms—earning less than one's wife would feel like a greater threat to a man's masculinity than having less education? For what it's worth, the Twomeys told me that Sonia's breadwinning didn't bother either of them—although other people are sometimes weird about it. After Sonia gave birth to their first child, it was John who left his job to care for their baby boy. The decision just made sense: Day-care prices where the couple live are high, John was burned out at work, and he relished the opportunity to bond with his son. But when the couple mentioned their arrangement to friends, family, and co-workers, many people reacted with surprise or confusion. John's parents seemed almost concerned. 'It blew their minds,' he told me. [Read: I still get called daddy-mommy] Stay-at-home-dad life could also feel isolating when John ventured into public, he told me. On weekday mornings, when he would head to a park or museum with his son, he was invariably the only man around. 'I was like, I'm sticking out here,' John told me. 'People probably think I stole a child.' So far, the social weirdness of their arrangement hasn't been enough to rock the Twomeys' marriage. But Hiltz, the Colorado woman who served on her city council, said that it was. People who work in local politics, which is not terribly lucrative, are generally well aware that high-earning spouses may be subsidizing their colleagues' political careers, Hiltz told me. But where she lives, the assumption is usually that the spouse is a doctor or a lawyer. When people would inquire about her husband's work, and 'he would say, Oh, I work in trash, you could see people's minds spin,' Hiltz told me. 'It was at times uncomfortable.' In that sort of indirect way, Hiltz does think their education gap contributed to the demise of their marriage: The doors that her education unlocked for her meant she spent time in environments that could end up being socially awkward for both of them. When I spoke with Jack Hiltz, Allison's ex, he agreed that ultimately, it felt as if they were inhabiting different worlds. These sorts of societal influences can be tough on a marriage. Steiber pointed me to a recently published study of heterosexual partners in Europe, which suggested that the relationship between the educational matchup of a couple and their well-being depends, to an extent, on the prevailing norms in their given country. But norms aren't immutable. It used to be that hypogamous marriages were more likely than others to end in divorce. Yet recent analyses of marriages in Europe and the United States suggest that this is no longer the case. These trends don't prove that the culture is shifting. But they might offer a reason to be cautiously optimistic about society's ability to adjust to new realities. After all, cultures are made up of people. And 'people are adapting,' Schwartz told me. Perhaps, with time, more of society, too, will learn to adapt to the shifting status of women and men. Article originally published at The Atlantic
