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Carrion Luggage #1103632 added December 14, 2025 at 8:32am
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Only One
Here's a rare occasion when I talk about sex, thanks to Nautilus.
And already I have issues.
The headline may seem neutral enough, but then you get to the subhead, and it uses "fidelity" as a synonym, which conveys an implicit bias due to the positive connotations of "fidelity." And then you get to the evolution part, and wonder about direction of causality: did sexual practices shape our evolution (other than in the obvious sense of enabling evolution to continue), or were are sexual practices shaped by evolution? Or some synergy between them?
Well, substitute "I" for "you" in that paragraph. You know what I mean.
And let's not undersell the worst implicit assumption there: the primacy of heterosexuality.
Across cultures and millennia, humans have embraced a diversity of sexual and marital arrangements—for instance, around 85 percent of human societies in the anthropological record have allowed men to have more than one wife.
"Allowed?"
And yes, it's almost never the other way around.
Still, remember what Oscar Wilde said: "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
Anyway. If that 85% figure is correct, and I have no facts to contradict it, then we should be considering polygamy—not monogamy, not polyandry, not any other mutually agreed-upon relationship—to be the default for humans.
The problem with polygamy as a cultural norm, though, apart from Wilde's quip, is math. The proportions just don't work out, unless you send a lot of your young men off to die in war. Which, of course, a lot of cultures did. Or unless you also accept polyandry, which, given the patriarchal, hierarchical nature of most societies, ain't gonna happen.
I'd be remiss if I didn't note that "monogamy" itself, the word, literally means "one wife," while "polygamy" obviously means "multiple wives," thus reinforcing the male-primacy point of view. But words can change meaning over time, and for the sake of convenience, just assume that whenever I use a word like that, I'm referring to sexual partners of any gender.
But in the broader evolutionary picture, some researchers have argued that monogamy played a dominant role in Homo sapiens’ evolution, enabling greater social cooperation.
"Some researchers." Right. It couldn't be the ones with an agenda to push, could it?
This theory aligns with research on mammals, birds, and insects, which hints that cooperative breeding systems—where offspring receive care not just from parents, but from other group members—are more prevalent among monogamous species.
I'm not sure we should be labeling it a "theory" just yet.
To decipher how monogamous humans actually have been over our evolutionary history, and compare our reproductive habits to other species, University of Cambridge evolutionary anthropologist Mark Dyble collected genetic and ethnographic data from a total of 103 human societies around the world going back 7,000 years. He then compared this against genetic data from 34 non-human mammal species. With this information, Dyble traced the proportion of full versus half siblings throughout history and across all 35 species—after all, higher levels of monogamy are linked with more full siblings, while the opposite is true in more polygamous or promiscuous contexts.
I have many questions about this methodology, not the least of which is this: humans don't have sex for procreation. We have it for recreation. Procreation is a byproduct, not a purpose, most (not all) of the time. A study like that, concentrating on births, completely ignores the purely social aspect of multiple partners.
As support for my assertion there, I present the bonobos, our closest primate relatives, who engage in recreational sex all the time.
Most species don't seem to use sex for recreation, though I'm hardly an expert in that regard. This makes humans (and some other apes) different from the birds and the bees, and using other animals as models for the ideal human behavior is a good example of the naturalistic fallacy.
Point is, I submit that using live births as the sole indicator of degree of polygamy is just plain wrong, and will lead to incorrect conclusions.
“There is a premier league of monogamy, in which humans sit comfortably, while the vast majority of other mammals take a far more promiscuous approach to mating,” Dyble said in a statement, comparing the rankings to those of a professional soccer league in England.
And with that, he betrays his bias.
This doesn't mean that the study doesn't have merit, mind you. It might be useful for drawing other conclusions. I just don't think it means what he, and the article, claim it means.
Meanwhile, our primate relatives mostly sit near the bottom of the list, including several species of macaque monkeys and the common chimpanzee.
Heh heh she said macaque.
Let's not forget another important thing: a species will almost always have the reproductive strategy that works for that species. It could be pair-bonding. It could be complete promiscuity. It could be something in between. Whatever works for that niche.
Personally, I'd hypothesize that humans fall somewhere in the middle for the simple reason that we live for drama, and what's a better source of drama than who's doinking who? Hell, it's the basis for at least half of our mythology, and all of our soap operas.
There's more at the article, obviously. I just want to close with this:
Unlike other humans, I don't care who's doinking who. The only thing I care about is that everyone involved be consenting or, better yet, eager. You want to be monogamous? Find another monogamist. Poly? Find other polys. Single? Get some good hand lotion. I. Don't. Care.
But if you agree to a particular lifestyle, whatever that may be, and then you go behind your partner's or partners' backs? That's what I consider wrong. Not, like, on the same level as murder or theft or wearing socks with sandals, but still, it's something to be ashamed of. |
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