Part 1 of Spencer’s write-ups of nineteenth century worldwide ethnographic accounts of male-female and household & family relations among relatively ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer societies...

... are, apart from the 'savagery' of Victorian language, surprisingly not so out of sync with the contemporary sciences of ape-human evolution recently exhibited in our Social Science Files Archives.

PART III DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS

CHAPTER II

THE DIVERSE INTERESTS OF THE PARENTS AND THE OFFSPRING

§ 277 … Commonly, when discussing domestic institutions, the welfare of those immediately concerned is almost exclusively regarded. The goodness or badness of given connexions between men and women, is spoken of as though the effects on the existing adult gene…