"My name's Alice, I've got my own security business..."
Posted on 09/28/2009 7:40:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
It was difficult to cheat, because there was no way to meet someone at the market (no markets), no singles bars, no Twitter...
Definitely have met some of ‘em...
"My name's Alice, I've got my own security business..."
monogamy is not a natural state for men...and some cultures worldwide....usually the less civilized don’t even make any pretense about it
however..during Pax Romana and the advance of the Church there is no doubt at least to me that at least the concept of a nuclear family with a loyal manhead is the best avenue for the advancement of any of any human group and those that don’t do this regress into serial polygamy tribalism
look around the world at cultures with parity...and just who did they learn their governance and modern behavior from?
and why?
While doing research in birds with roughly the same pattern of monogamy and cheating as humans, biologists wondered why the trait to “cheat” was not more widespread, after all a male bird that nests down with a female mate, but runs off when she isn't looking to mate with another female - has DOUBLED his paternal contribution to the next generation.
They found out a very interesting thing.
When the male bird was off looking to cheat, his female was often entertaining offers to cheat from other male birds.
Humans are mostly monogamous, and this works well because children need a father, and we work much better as a pair than alone. But fully 10% of the human population is not born to the guy who mom said was their dad.
Momma’s baby. Daddy's maybe.
You mean that video I saw on TV of a bunch of cavemen bowling and drinking beer wasn't a documentary???
I don’t know where you get your data from but in many cultures men practicse serial polygamy and even in our culture when I was a boy I’d wager that 75% of the men I knew cheated and maybe a quarter of the women.
Monogamy is a religious construct...not the natural state.
I am open to any links you have with historical stats to bolster the argument.
I believe men choose to be faithful becasue they know it’s more often than not best but not because they inherently are driven to.
LOL..no way Jose.
I’ve lived all over the world....monogmay is most common in the US and Israel...Canada too
Female monogamy is of course rigid in Islamic nations
Just like the birds. They build their nests with a partner and rear their young with a partner - but many of those little birds like to cheat on their mate.
Monogamy is a religious construct that happens to match almost every religion and the cultural practices of almost every human society from the dawn of time?
People pair off. They may well keep an eye out for a trade up, a trade in, a trade off, or a temporary trading of bodily fluids; but they do tend to pair off... one woman, and one man.
The biological drive to pair up is just as strong as in the little birds that do so, but associated with a lot more thinking and second guessing in our species.
The biological drive to cheat is just as strong in humans as in the little birds, but we have more information to bring to bear on the subject, societal and cultural ramifications - and yet we seem to do it just as much as those little tweety birds.
Amazing isn't it. We think about it a lot more, but end up enacting pretty much the exact same behavior patterns as a bird with the brain the size of a button.
Well put. Of course, the Laconian Spartans thrived for three hundred years under a totalitarian system which featured the killing of (as they saw it) weak infant boys, completely brutal indoctrination into a state of permanent warfare, and pederasty, so, ya never know. :’)
...yes, but only ‘so far’....
that was because only Spartan women bred real men...
Human/animal comparisons always collapse when you get to the subject of children. Human children are so completely defenseless for so long—a helplessness that has no parallel in nature—that they will not last long without a protective mother and father.
Monogamy was likely a primary factor in the overwhelming natural-selection victory of humans. If, as the article posits, Neanderthals lived in promiscuous communal groups, this explains very well why there were so remarkably few of them. According to all the studies I’ve seen, there were never more than a few thousand Neanderthals in all of Europe at any given time.
;’)
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