This might be controversial but...

Polygamy isn't so unusual to me anymore. In my opinion that becomes part of our innate ability to share. Some people like myself are not very good sharers - and sharing a partner wouldn't be pleasant. Its same concept when a parent remarries and the child has to cope with the new step parent, or vice versa when the step parent has to cope with the children. Can also point to freud's theory here - that we desire a parent but won't act on it because of the other parent. Sharing can lead to pretty bad sides of people depending on the level they can take. For example, I once met an adult woman who was abused verbally her life by her mother because her mother wanted all the attention from the father. Being born into it could lead to different results - polygamous family typically produce more polygamous families. You can not also make a rational distinction between how humans were in the beginning and how they are now because even though anatomically we may be similar, our mind has gone through A LOT of evolution and has become extremely complex ( and hopefully will continue as well ). I do believe some people sometimes can inherit a more innate sharing attribute but honestly I think people nowadays are more selfishly inclined. You also have to consider Survival vs thriving. Dawn of humanity was mainly survival. Until the agricultural revolution, humans had no other intention that to reproduce, eat, and drink. So if it means impregnating as many woman as you can get and increasing your herd to do more work ( scavenging and hunting ) than so be it.

 

We started as any other animal, savage and wild. Be glad that we have advanced to the point where we don't sleep in a pile all together anymore, or live just to reproduce, eat and shit.

 

Related to this is an interesting old article from 1987 by Jared Diamond on the "mistake" of agriculture.

One thing seems certain, the advent of agriculture seems to have required the development of codified laws to curb the excesses that Diamond talks about, most notably under the auspices of religion.

Who knows how we were "meant" to live? Choices were made long ago that give us no choice in how we are supposed to live today. No such hunter-gatherer society would have taken humanity to the moon, that is certain, but Diamond asks us to consider the cost, and it is massive.

 

I believe it goes back a lot further than 10k years, if I recall correctly.

The "Hound Tall" podcast with comedian Moshe Kasher did an episode with Christopher Ryan, an author of "Sex at Dawn", as a guest. Entertaining and educational, worth the hour or so listen.

I also question how "natural" monogamy is, or at least the idea of lifetime, never ever ever have sex with anyone else, relationships are. Dan Savage makes this point quite a lot about people who consider themselves to be very strictly monogamous, and they are. Until that relationship ends, often cause someone has sex with another person.

Societies have had an interest in promoting, at least officially, a strict monogamy, as a way of establishing paternity. Establishing paternity has been historically important for dealing with property, and it is interesting that lifetime monogamous pair bonding as a societal norm is much less likely to be found, even today, in groups that do not really own separate, personal property.

 

I think this is a hugely important question in any such topic. It seems self-evident to me that we are "supposed to be" exactly as we are...how could we be this way otherwise?

It's one thing to say "we have this feature that runs counter to our societal values that is deeply embedded in our (or some of our) physiology"; it is quite another to say that we therefore "should not" be as we are, or that we "were not meant to be" this way or that.

Basically, how incompetent must nature (or god if you prefer) be in order for one of its creations (us) to circumvent its intent?

To the OP, thanks for raising this...I think the statement "we have this feature that runs counter to our societal values that is deeply embedded in our (or some of our) physiology" is worthy of our consideration.

 

Hello bi2me.

You may also enjoy reading/learning about anarcho-primitivism.

 

As I understand it, primates are not known for their pair-bonding, or fidelity, across all species, including humans. It is indeed a big ask for us to go against Nature by trying to force ourselves to be monogamous 'for life'. I think a better idea is to just rejoice in love while it lasts, yes try to work at it to keep it strong, but not to be too surprised if it doesn't, whether one is straight or gay.

 

I think divorce lawyers invented marriage, so it gave them a career and a way to earn a living!

 

100 points for the right answer! Divorce lawyers, the summit of civilization...

 

There are varying practices across primates. Gibbons mate for life, and afaik have never been observed to betray their partners. Chimpanzees are pretty promiscuous. Bonobos are extremely promiscuous, and will mate regardless of the sex or sexual maturity of their partner. Gorillas will have one successful male with several females. Humans are, across basically all societies with very limited exceptions, monogamous but occasionally commit adultery. Like many seabirds.

The problem with "meant" is it requires someone to do the meaning. In the absence of God, there is no one who means for us to act one way or another, there is just what we, as a matter of fact do. If one primate has one set of mating habits and another has another, then that means that at some stage in the past, circumstances for one species changed and individuals who acted in a slightly different way were more successful at raising offspring. What their species had done before had nothing to do with what they were meant to do.

Personally, I think it very unlikely that before 10,000BC humans were polygamous. A few reasons:

1. There still are hunter-gatherers, and they generally choose partners for life.

2. Gender dimorphism. There is a phenomenon that in mammal species where successful males get exclusive access to multiple females, the males evolve to become significantly larger than the females. Effectively the males are playing a high stakes game, and so they put everything into being as big as possible. Male elephant seals, for example, are enormous compared to females, and they are a species where 4% of the males account for over 80% of the breeding. Gorillas are another example.

Male humans are slightly larger than females, so over our recent evolutionary history, each male who succeeded in getting any females would have averaged only slightly more than 1 female.

3. I can only think of two ways people could be non-monogamous. First it could be that one man provides for many child-rearing women, which would have been effectively impossible before there were hierarchical societies which allowed men to have harems without having to hunt and forage to feed them all himself.

The second option is that men take no particular role in rearing their own children. I find it hard to believe that men would have been as conscientious at mucking in and helping to rear all of the children of their band or tribe as they would if they were rearing children they knew to be their own. And women who tried to raise children on their own would have been at a severe disadvantage.


All that said, I also believe that adultery is an evolved strategy in some situations where we think we can get away with it. For men, the reward is having extra children that they don't need to raise themselves. For women, there is evidence that they are more attracted to masculine men when they are ovulating. For them the reward is that they can marry a nurturing man, and have him raise the children of a stronger man.

Another interesting thing is that (according to Mr Jared Diamond, mentioned by greatwhale), there have been studies done on straight couples that have monitored their discomfort as they imagine different things. Men are more distressed by the thought of their wife having sex with someone else. Women are more distressed by the thought of their husband loving someone else. This shows what each side has most to fear. Men risk spending their life raising another man's children. Women risk losing the man who she needs to provide food while she raises children.

And just in case I haven't been clear - just because that was how people lived over recent evolutionary time doesn't mean I think that monogamy with occasional adultery should be a template for everyone's lives today, or that it is moral to commit adultery.

---------- Post added 17th Mar 2015 at 11:14 PM ----------

If anyone here is a biologist who wants to take apart what I said, please do. That was based on general knowledge and without looking things up, so I won't be surprised if some of it is wrong or out of date from current understandings.

 

As far as the "what do other animals do?" is mostly of pretty limited value once you answered the "X isn't 'natural'" question. Homosexuality being the big one that I think we've all got some insight on.

However, I think it's pretty interesting to note, while agreeing that it is in no way necessarily determinative of how humans "naturally" or "should" act, that the apes youve noted are somewhat to very promiscuous are the most closely related to humans, chimps and bonobos.

There is a third option on non-monogamy that I think you've missed: collective child rearing. I'm not sure why we should make the assumption that men in these societies would care about a question of paternity in the same way that we do. Or really even see that as a concept. If the kids are just the groups, then who cares who the father is for "support". And actually, the evidence for both modern and historical hunter-gatherer societies is communal child rearing, with involvement from both sexes. Such that saying a child has several mothers and fathers is likely the closest way to show the relationships in modern terms.

Oh, I've got more but I've gotta run.

---------- Post added 17th Mar 2015 at 06:34 PM ----------

Oh, just one more tangential thing. i think that the only way you get people caring about paternity is when we have even the concept of property. And that doesn't really matter too much until agriculture, iirc

 

I think that it is on target about agriculture completely changing things for humanity. I can''t see the nomad life working for a world of six billion, but still there is the problem that we have had to adopt behaviours that fit the agricultural world that were not part of our original nature. I have read that the legends that were passed down that became the book of Genesis really reflected the transition of humans from nomadic life "living on the fruits of the garden") to an agricultural society (requiring special knowledge, but also toil and conflict)

 

I disagree on paternity only being important once there's hereditary property. Even in the absence of property I should still want the bearers of my genes to grow up as healthy and strong individuals who should have success rearing children themselves.

True re chimps and bonobos being more closely related to humans. Another argument that we were mostly monogamous that I had forgotten however is that humans have much smaller testes than either of those species. If you're promiscuous, it's important to have as many sperm as possible so that when you mate with a female, you have more chance of conceiving than the other males she mates with. And human males produce far fewer sperm than our relatives.

(While on this subject, humans have enormous penises compared to most primates. Gorillas - only about 1.25 inches. Oh and there's some evidence that gay men have slightly larger penises on average than straight men, by about .33 of an inch. Yay.)

There is at least one human polyandrous society that I think is fairly promiscuous. There children are raised by women and their brothers, which seems more plausible than everyone working in a group together. I think also that people being kept ignorant of their fathers was also part of what Plato proposed for his fictional utopia in The Republic. Might do some reading, but I might not be able to post much today.

 

Interesting conversation! For what it is worth, I am an evolutionary biologist however I deal with plants and not primates.

First, with sexual reproduction comes a host of behaviors that optimize getting as many of your genes into future generations. This means making as many healthy babies as possible (by healthy I mean ones that grow up to have lots more babies). I bring up this long history because we too often are trapped in some notion that human behavior was in a natural state 10,000 years ago. Sexual behaviors have been evolving a long time. Humans have been around for 400,000 years and sexual behaviors could have changed a lot during that time. Further, these sexual behaviors have a long long history that precedes the origin of Homo sapiens. Also, we are still evolving.

As far as increasing reproductive success, this can involve promiscuity which will allow for more offspring (especially for males), better chances at good genes (reproductive assurance often for females). Also, females that have more mates may get more resources. Even birds that are often socially monogamous are often genetically promiscuous (meaning they pair socially but the nests have multiple fathers).

Also, jealousy is ancient and widespread. Mate guarding, sperm competition, etc. Honey bee males rip their bodies in half in mid-air during mating to leave their penis inside the female. This reduces a queen's opportunity to mate with other males. Take a look at damselfly penises. There are a lot of good evolutionary reasons to be jealous.

Finally, these behaviors have a genetic basis (evolution only acts on genes in fact). However there is undoubtably a lot of plasticity as well (changes due to environment). Therefore, while humans may have tendencies for both promiscuity and jealousy, the environment will likely minimize or amplify these tendencies.

---------- Post added 18th Mar 2015 at 02:45 AM ----------

I want to make one more very important point. Evolution does not select for happiness....only getting as many of your genes into future generations.

Therefore, we should not try too hard to look to evolution to see how to make our lives happy or govern our society. Just because it is "natural" does not mean it is best for ourselves or society.

 

Hi,

I understand you to be saying...

So although we label incest a moral issue in truth it is tied to healthy babies and avoiding inbred defeciencies.

There is a kernel of truth that society has twisted to its own ends.

Tom

 

That is probably true Skiff (although I am not aware of any studies addressing that). I will say that many sexually reproducing organisms have mechanisms to avoid or minimize mating among closely related individuals (this can be seen in plant, fungi, animals...).

What is tricky in all of this is that genetics (and thus evolutionary history) has some effect on behavior of an individual. Individuals make up a society. It is therefore difficult to completely disentangle genes from society when you think about it. Also, genes are not the only determinant of behavior - so is environment. This gives us feedback loops that can modify individual behaviors in a number of ways. It is really complicated but wonderfully fascinating. It is a joy to think about.

However, my opinion is that people should to not spend too much time inferring how we should live based on this. There is still much to be discovered and there are a number of hypotheses for what underlies the myriad of sexual strategies in humans and beyond. We don't know enough to be honest. Even if we did, we would just understand patterns and mechanisms. This is interesting stuff. However, it can only go so far towards informing how to increase human well-being.

 

From a same sex standpoint irrelevant...

 

Correlation is not necessarily causation.

Primitive man inbreeds, birth defects follow, primitive man makes assumptions about penalties of inbreeding. Not necessarily correct assumptions but these assumptions thwart inbreeding and problem is solved but for wrong reason.

In addition to any biological blocks genetically inspired in animals.

That still goes on today.

Truly fascinating material.