Why is monogamy an ideal?
If you search Google scholar for "primate dimorphism and monogamy" you'll find a plethora of articles confirming that Homo Sapiens wouldn't be expected to be monogamous because of marked sexual dimorphism (males are bigger). Generally, dimorphic species exhibit strong male-male competition and individual males usually mate with a lot of females. This pattern is common among primates with only a handful of exceptions.
So how did monogamy become an ideal for our species? What does this imply about the human psyche in terms of our power to override biology?
So how did monogamy become an ideal for our species? What does this imply about the human psyche in terms of our power to override biology?
Comments (94)
In the sense that people say they believe in it, of course, but the people who follow through on that belief are few enough that I'd say it doesn't really count as a species trait. And if we look at our closest cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, it's not a trait of theirs either.
[quote=Passer and Warnock (1991)]Mrs. D, a 74-year-old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalise her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognised other family members and would misidentify her husband only.[/quote]
Main page: Capgras Delusion
That may be. I suppose the question would then be: why did it ever come up at all? Biologically speaking, it probably shouldn't have. Does this imply that we're more than our biology?
You're saying we lean toward monomorphism? If that's true, that would explain it. But we sure don't look monomorphic (except for the occasional androgynous individuals).
I don't think so. We are able to posit ideals that we're unable to live up to. That's a large part of what makes people unhappy, in my estimation -- they want to be what they are not, and feel anxiety for not living up to their ideal. (hence why Christianity has a forgiveness-mechanism built in, to sustain the Christian identity in spite of not living up to the ideal)
Sapolsky refers to humans as the confused ape because we are not one thing or another. We are ape-like in some ways but not in many others.
Whether we manifest the vision of monogamy or not, a fair chunk of western culture orbits the idea of monogamy, if only serial. My question is why?
Really? I don't think we're that out of proportion to the dimorphism of other primates. Are we?
For that I'd say the explanation is patriarchy. Men wanted ways to ensure that the children they were responsible for were actually their children, so monogamy was invented as an ideal. You can always tell who the mother is, but it's not so easy to tell who the father is. So, if my house is responsible to raise a child, I want to ensure that it is my child, and not someone elses child -- in effect, monogamy controls female bodies such that men know whose children is whose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vspqIbrzGXU
As a married human male, I can't imagine having to deal with more than one wife. Just one is hard enough.
I'll check it out, Thanx!
Why not just have harems like gorillas? The whole point of our larger size is to run off other males, but instead we gang together in large groups.
Maybe it's related to egalitarianism: if we all can't have harems, nobody gets one? That would be in line with:
Quoting T Clark
This all supposes power on the part of every male in society. Maybe as you say, for the sake of peace.
Another possibility is that human females are smaller, but maybe their aggression makes up for that?
It only assumes that any society, human or otherwise, will only work if it can take care of it's children.
China is having big social problems now because there are too many men and two few women because of the abandoned one-child policy. The wifeless men are not individually powerful, but as a group they can be disruptive.
Children of a harem system thrive. Why would monogamy allow us to care for children any better? What the non harem system allows is egalitarianism.
Quoting T Clark
What I explained earlier is that our biology should preclude large scale societies where male-male competition is seen as a threat. So you're suggesting that the answer is simply that: when we started creating large societies (maybe post agriculture?) we needed to squash social unrest, so monogamy appeared as one way to do that.
Do you know that's true? Anyway, only rich guys can have harems. In societies where multiple wives are allowed, most men have only one. Pew says that only 2% of marriages world-wide have more than one wife even though polygamy is legal in many Islamic countries.
Hey, @Jamal. A source I found on the web says polygamy is legal in Russia. Is that true?
In societies that don't have harems, at least (since some societies do have harems, hence the word harem) -- the women will have to agree to patriarchy as well as the men, but when you frame it like that it's a lot harder to catch on. So, monogamy.
Man, nailed that one!
Acculturation: "monogamy" creates an artificial scarcity that, like prohibitions (i.e. social ideals/idols) of other consensual behaviors, monetizes sex aka "prostitution". :pray:
Only that the neocortex "overrides" (i.e. exploits) the limbic system by commodifying human practices, bodies, offspring ...
I think the lesson here is to avoid drawing causal conclusions about human behavior from statistical analyses of animal behavior.
Well, gorillas seem to have survived pretty well using that reproductive system. They've been doing it for 7 million years, so I assume it has the potential to work.
Why wouldn't work for humans? That was the question. I think your answer was that the needs of a larger society require squashing the harem system (assuming it ever existed among Homo Sapiens).
I don't think patriarchy answers the question, though. Patriarchy doesn't entail monogamy. A harem allows a male to guarantee patrilineal descent.
Again, I think the answer might have to do with the egalitarianism required by a larger society for the sake of social stability.
That's a very weak response. A non sequitur. Human babies take much more care than gorillas. I think you have you're own preconceived notions and are not interested in examining them more thoroughly.
It doesn't just come down to statistics. There's a theory for why monogamy and monomorphic sexes tend to appear together. The evidence is strong enough to warrant the question: what are Homo Sapiens doing working against biology?
Your cousins are apes? Strange
That's true. Human babies do require more care. Why couldn't a community of women handle it?
There are very few people on this forum who are capable of being civil for more than a few minutes at a time, so if you go off the rails into psychosis, I won't be surprised.
Quoting A T Rutberg
If one did a statistical analysis of the cultural roles
assigned to human beings on the basis of biological sex, and only had the centuries prior to the 20th century to work with, one might be convinced the evidence was strong enough to claim that human males have a large range of innate capabilities not shared by women. This is the danger of not appreciating the complex and reciprocal way that culture and cognition interact with biological motives in humans.
There is just as much evidence that in humans, biology, in the form of motivations, drives and instincts , are just as much the servants of changing cognitively-shaped purposes as they are their master. If there is a fundamental human drive, it isn't static survival but pragmatically oriented anticipatory sense making.
Monogamy is desirable for modern cultures because it is an optimal way to achieve the most intimate and stable relational bond with another person, and this in turn maximizes the richness of our sense making engagements.
So are you agreeing that biology suggests we shouldn't be monogamous, but we've somehow overridden that? The OP question was simply whether that actually happens. How would we know whether our purposes are in charge or slaves to instinct?
Quoting Joshs
The will to meaning? You sort of act like anything static is non-existent. There is no change without stasis. It's two sides of one coin.
Quoting Joshs
Is it?
Quoting Joshs
So, you're saying we choose monogamy, contrary to biological drives, because it enriches our anticipatory sense making? :chin:
This actually started because of a little stray factoid. The reason most NFL quarterbacks are white isn't what you'd expect. It's not a history of racism. It's that white males between 32 and 43 have superior long range depth perception. Go figure.
Do you have evidence for this? They used to say it was because black players weren't smart enough. If you don't have specific credible evidence you can share, you should be ashamed of yourself.
For what it's worth, black quarterbacks make up between 15 and 20 percent of quarterbacks in the NFL while black people make up 12 percent of the US population.
I've never heard that. It's kind of stupid because NFL quarterbacks don't call the plays. They don't have to be very intelligent.
You've avoided the question - do you have any credible evidence about white people's vision vs. black people's? You're using that as evidence that selection of quarterbacks does not reflect racial prejudice. As I noted, a weak argument.
You have to get past the idea of drive as some kind of simple mechanism, with cognitions in a one-way relation of subservience to them. Have you read John Deweys The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology?
Quoting Tate
In other animals, too, cognition isnt simply the slave of drives. If monogamy isnt a thing among other primates , its not strictly because of top down influence of biological drive on behavior , but because of the way the intentional aims of the animals interact with and co-shape motivated behavior. Other animals modify their aims and purposes within a much more restricted range of possibilities than humans, not because of stronger instincts but because of a more limited cognitive capacity.
No. It's just white males between 32 and 43 years old. It was confirmed by NASA, and the Russian space program discovered the same thing. Does that seem racist to you? I just thought it was funny.
No, I haven't. The name suggests that instincts are dynamic? I suppose that's possible.
I've speculated that the reason Homo Sapiens picked up monogamy was because it decreased social unrest. It was part of our launch into larger scale groups. I think you're suggesting that once this started, it began to shape our instincts.
Quoting Joshs
How do you know this?
I didn't say it was racist.
Quoting Tate
That's not true. You didn't say you thought it was funny. You said it was the reason there are fewer black quarterbacks in the NFL than one might expect.
Quoting Tate
This is starting to derail, but I did think it was funny.
This seems a bit strong. Correlation does not imply causation. Seems more likely that it is rooted in the neurobiological incentive system than primate dimorphism.
Quoting Tate
Stability comes to mind. Two are more likely to be stable than three, three more likely than four...
If it's derailing, it's because of your unsupported and unlikely claims about the social effects of sexual and racial differences.
I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from assigning views to me that I did not express.
What sort of incentive system would explain why dimorphic animals are usually not monogamous? I'm asking.
It's not just primates, btw.
Quoting ThinkOfOne
Social stability is the hypothesis that makes the most sense to me at this point.
This doesn't even begin to make rational sense for any number of reasons. Not least since NFL quarterbacks typically become starters well before the age of 32. Racism has been and remains the best answer. Seems likely that this "little stray factoid" was started by racists.
You made a specific claim that the relative lack of black quarterbacks in the NFL is because of racial differences in eyesight.
You have stated explicitly and without evidence that, given biological differences between human males and females, human families should be expected to be made up of one male and more than one female or, as you say, harems. You then go on to provide unconvincing and unnecessary explanations.
The point was that dimorphism likely has nothing to do with it. It's merely a statistic what shows correlation. In and of itself, it means nothing.
Why would racism pertain to the quarterback position, but none of the other positions? I'd be happy to believe it, it just doesn't make any sense.
Correlation isn't meaningless. It's a mistake to assume causation, as you said. It's definitely mistake to jump to conclusions based on a correlation. But it's not meaningless.
Based on your responses on this thread, you don't seem very familiar with the history of the NFL, racism in the US and the long-term effects of systemic racism. Another poster started to try to explain things to you, but you didn't seem to have the prerequisite knowledge needed to understand what was being said.
It isn't that correlation is meaningless, it is that correlation in and of itself is meaningless. There's a distinction that needs to be made there.
Sure. I don't disagree with this.
This is why the topic intrigues me. The fact that males and females are dimorphic reminds us of our basic earthly makeup. Our ideas about monogamy are opposed to this, attempting to leave the earth behind in some ways.
Likewise the fact that the eyes of white men of a certain age tend to be spaced apart just so that they provide improved long distance depth perception, the fact that the leg muscles of black men tend to allow them to jump higher, these are intrusions on the image of a certain kind of Over-human: the one who is over nature, above time and space, evacuated from the earth.
When the institution of marriage was invented I'm quite sure that there was big shortage of males, not of females.
Humans get bored --> Lonely.. That can be a general observation. Most of the time we prefer to be around others. Sex feels good. We like to feel we have strong connections to others. Everything else is up for grabs as far as I can tell. Monogamy seems to work best in terms of equality though. Getting lost as one of many seems a bit asymmetrical. Unless both parties are equally getting benefits, one party is losing (out) by circumstances.
It's probably the most stable form of relationship as well.
Quoting Tate
Many bird species are monogamous, as are some mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish. I think that casts doubt on any spiritual interpretation of monogamy.
Quoting Tate
Now, Tate... we've already talked about this.
And this is another Homo Sapiens anomaly. Studies show that we look directly into one another's eyes more than other primates do. I don't want to read too much into that, but it stands to reason that this is a sign of a deeper drive to connect intimately with others in a way that isn't necessarily sexual.
It may be that the ground for monogamy has more than one source.
You are wrong to believe that those mammals (only meerkats I know to be monogamous, snakes and birds do not count) have other choices.
We humans know that we were not always monogamous, we know we have choices as well. Nonetheless we may come to disdain many things which make us look like other animals (dogs, cows, and so on).
It is not only about sex. There are so many things which make us nauseous just because they show some animalistic qualities in our eyes. We know we are animals, but to a certain degree we refuse to behave as such.
That's something different from snakes and birds which may not know at all that they have a polygamy option.
That undermines your argument. You wrote:
Quoting Eros1982
You claim humans have monogamy because we can connect with people spiritually, but then you say other animals are monogamous for other reasons. I don't find this very convincing. Do you have any evidence.
Read it again and you will find it.
Two people may do the same thing for two different reasons. What's wrong with that argument?
By the way, birds are not mammals. I don't know how they feel about sex... when I see a naked woman I am closer to a dog than to a bird, I guess. And polygamous men and women (especially orgies) to many of us bring in mind dogs in the parks, not seagulls.
The more you search world literature the more you find animal names used with offensive meaning for human behavior.
Bird brain?
But birds do so much with their brains!
Quoting Eros1982
Apparently they like it; it has kept them going for 150,000,000 years.
I agree with you, but T Clark was complaining why I said that birds do not count. I said birds do not count because in my previous post I mentioned mammals, not all possible animals.
Let it be clear here also that stating: 1) we turn monogamy into ideal because we are not mammals and 2) we turn monogamy into ideal because we want to show that we can differ from other mammals, are two different things.
I was arguing for 2, not for 1. I don't know what T Clark understood.
I also believe that at the core of Abrahamic religions and those moral codes I've heard about (Kantian ethics included) the idea of making humans different from animals was very important. This might be one explanation why Abraham saved Isaac, but not the ram.
People who in our eyes (depending on how we are taught to see) look or behave like animals are really repulsive to this day.
Quoting Eros1982
Many non-human animals; whether they're mammals, birds, or something else, are monogamous. That undermines your argument that human monogamy is somehow exceptional. We're animals too.
I think you didn't read what I was saying.
We may want to be monogamous because we aim to be exceptional, birds may not have that goal at all.
When I am loyal to a woman for my whole life I make a choice. I don't know what's the purpose of monogamy in birds or whether it is a free choice.
Monogamous animals are usually sexually monomorphic. We're dimorphic, so our monogamy is unusual. This is explained in the OP.
You have not provided any evidence for this claim.
I provided it to those who are capable of searching Google Scholar. Those who can't are just screwed. :victory:
Really, it's a horrible story. Abraham was being put to the test: would he obey the order to kill his son? He passed the test when he prepared to kill Isaac. The ram was made available at the last moment as the sacrificial alternative to Isaac (the proverbial 'ram in the thicket').
I don't think the Abraham/Isaac story has anything to do with the subject at hand. A better source would be the Genesis passage about humans having dominion.
Clearly humans are different in the same way that dogs are different than donkeys or whales are different than wallabies. Different, but related.
Can we agree that monogamy among humans is imposed rather than natural? Geese are pretty much monogamous because it is in their evolved nature to be monogamous. Primates are not evolved to be monogamous. Monogamy is imposed by institutions of our own creation to manage fertility and control potentially disruptive behavior. Because we have more freedom of choice than geese, we can elect to be monogamous. Sometimes choosing monogamy doesn't make us a monogamous species.
Depicting something as "the ideal" is bait to make it more attractive than it would otherwise be. We don't depict chocolate as "ideal" because it doesn't need any enhancement. Self-sacrifice in war is offered as an ideal because soldiers generally prefer to survive war.
I did search as you indicated. The first item I came across is the one I quoted in a previous post that contradicts your position. Here's a link to my post:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13479/why-is-monogamy-an-ideal/p2
A lot of the people in Genesis practiced polygamy. Maybe because war killed the men?
As I said, those who can't use Google Scholar are screwed, in a number of ways.
You know what else is unusual about our relationship dynamics in comparison with other animals? The fact that one could write a treatise on the myriad ways we have chosen to connect up together, from culture to culture, from individual to individual , from era to era. This discussion so far has de-emphasized the historically changing ways humans have thought about relationship. Is a term like monogamy really coherently understood without taking into account how significantly our social views of women, or of love , have changed in the past few thousand years?
What , for instance, is the link between modern thinking about monogamy and the appearance of the concept of romantic love? How have changing views of the role and capabilities of women altered the dynamics of marriages in terms of the sharing of responsibilities for child rearing, housekeeping and income generation? How do we make sense of the unraveling of the nuclear family in favor of all kinds of alternative family arrangements ( single parenting, the rise of non-married partnerships , and the single most significant trend today: the growing numbers of people living alone)?
The monogamous-nonmonogamous binary that you are importing from biological science wasnt designed to address the infinitely malleable ways in which humans are capable of transforming the basis of their relationships with others.
Bringing all this back to the question of the OP, does human pairing behavior transcend the biological mechanisms that make paring behavior in other species so predictable? I would put it this way: in creatures with our brain size, capacity and adaptability, the mechanism of cultural transmission produces a rate of behavioral transformation much more accelerated than that which the mechanism of genetic evolution can achieve.
I think the best way to understand pairing behavior in humans is not by comparing us to individual animal species, but comparing the shifting patterns of our paring behavior over the course of cultural history with the trajectory of diversifying pairing behaviors in general over the course of biological evolution.
I agree. The OP simply starts with the news that our biology suggests that we should have reduced monogamy. What's going on with us that we've made monogamy an ideal?
It's an invitation to speculate. I think so far the consensus is that it had to do with suppressing male-male competition for the sake of social stability along with a few other stray factors.
Do you think human males are innately more competitive than females? What about gay monogamy?
Among socializing mammals the norm is competition for social dominance between males and separately between females. The difference is that the among males, dominance conveys breeding rights if the species is sexually dimorphic, as we are.
I think the answer to your question is no. The weight of millions of years of evolution is behind competitiveness in both sexes.
Keep in mind that the weight of evolution refers to the fact that patterns of mating behaviors barely changed for millions of years among species of primates. This weight of unchanging patterns was due not only to fixed genetic coding but also to unchanging primate cultural behavior in general over millions of years. Perhaps we could say that, given the profound changeability of human cultural behavior over the course of mere centuries , we have thrown off the weight of those millions of years of unchanging behavior. In other words , competition need not be thought of genetically inbred in humans. We now see anti-competition messages being spread in the schools and other areas of culture , for instance. We may eventually arrive at a time when competition is overwhelmingly rejected as a desirable and useful value. Will this be an overthrow of our biological heritage, or an overthrow of the myth that this was ever our heritage?
I think it's apparent that we have done that to some extent. The question I got hooked on was: why? Why monogamy?
But you touched on some else I thought about. Humans are more flexible psychologically than other species. What if we end up being monomorphic psychologically? That is: what if males and females end up being almost interchangeable in terms of behavior? So the monogamy isn't really off course biologically unless we overlook the extent to which psyche is what we are, moreso than biology.
I don't know if I put that in a way that makes sense.
Patriarchy is the enforced social rule of men as the head of the household who makes decisions with respect to household economic arrangements, at least with respect to this topic (it's much more than just this rule, but this is a simple enough beginning).
This balance of power has changed in parts of the world, but that tradition is still alive and well -- and I'd say that even if we choose to re-interpret monogamy in some other way, that this is where the ideal "comes from", so to speak -- its cultural genealogy comes from the fact that children are expensive, that it's harder to track who the father is, and monogamy makes tracking that economic responsibility much easier.
Oh, yes -- we're recently enlightened, you see. ;)
But, yeah, I believe human beings are creatures, more or less. Flesh, blood, bone, and brain, and related to all the life that we see before us through the evolutionary story.
Historically patriarchs had multiple wives, so why do you say this is the source of monogamy? How did monogamy evolve out of polygamy?
I think you're starting from a false notion of patriarch here -- it's a picture of a man with his harem. While that is an example of patriarchy, it's not a definition. Patriarchy as I set it out: the social rule where the penis-haver of a household makes economic decisions for said household. So, "historically speaking", monogomous relationships count insofar that the penis-haver is the one who holds the power of the wallet within the household.
Some patriarchs have multiple wives -- but I'd say that even most do not. Polygamy is just an extension of the logic taken to an extreme: if I can own one wife, then if I'm rich enough I should be able to own multiple wives. While we of modern, sensible tastes don't put it in terms of ownership, it wasn't so long ago that a man could have his wife put away for being "hysterical" in our purportedly modern world.
The definition of monogamy I've been using is scientific: it's a bonded pair.
By "scientific", I meant according to the way biologists use the word.
Quoting Moliere
Nevertheless, it's held up as an ideal on a large portion of the earth. The question was: why?
I pulled a definition from this pdf claiming to be a post-secondary biology textbook: "mating system whereby one male and one female remain coupled for at least one mating season"
Given that human beings don't have a mating season, I'd say it's a hard sell on being useful to describe humans.
Quoting Tate
I've supplied an answer, and answered your rebuttal: polygamy is an extension of monogamy, not a strike against monogamy as an ideal. The ideal is there because penis-havers make economic decisions over the household, and they don't want to be saddled with someone else's child.
Missing women, this by Michelle Kohler, :smile:
Chimpanzees are the closest living primate to humans genetically. They are more dimorphic in size than humans. They have hierarchical, male-dominated societies. Even so, dominant males do not normally restrict access to females for mating by other males. Bonobos are a subspecies of chimpanzee. While they are not monogamous, their societies are matriarchal and males do not compete physically for mates.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;[/quote]
A severe case of Othello Syndrome or perhaps just a dude, hopelessly in love.
Mono[s]gamy[/s]theism.
From a medical standpoint, having multiple sexual partners increase the risk of not only venereal diseases that can cause infertility (TORCH syndrome), but also fatal illnesses (Hepatitis B, AIDS).
There's an easy workaround though (Warning, not failsafe): condoms and/or antibiotics :snicker:
My two denarii. I feel Roman today!