In enforcing monogamy, we ensured that male got what they wanted (a young woman) and now, that male can focus his attention on work. This worked well for women too (if they had a choice of male) since they now have a partner as well. Adultery was looked down upon to preserve the "sanctity" of this 1:1 relationship. This also kept men working hard to build the society (since they didn't have to deal with family issues much) and women preserved morality and guarded home upbringing.

Today, since adultery/serial monogamy/polyandry/polygamy etc. is a joke and widely "accepted", there is no incentive to get married. So many 18-35 waste their youthful lives just dating, dating, meeting jerks, partying, jumping from partner to partner....instead of focusing on building a REAL stable relationship.

By early 30s, most folks are sick of dating and all illusions of love are gone.

Monogamy is not practical without heavy penalties on non-monogamous relationships.

If by "monogamy" one means having one stable primary relationship at a time while having dalliances with secondary/tertiary partners and transitory partners, then "monogamy" seems to fit the baseline human sexual behavior for the majority of people, across cultures, and across history.

Today, since adultery/serial monogamy/polyandry/polygamy etc. is a joke and widely "accepted", there is no incentive to get married. So many 18-35 waste their youthful lives just dating, dating, meeting jerks, partying, jumping from partner to partner....instead of focusing on building a REAL stable relationship.

If society looked at the actual data, and adjusted to the patterns of behavior people actually exhibit -- serial monogamy with possible secondary partners -- then I suspect there would be more scope and opportunity for building stable real relationships. There would be less pressure on keeping the strictures of such a monogamy. It would be easier for people to remain "faithful." There would be less drama. There would be less sexual dissatisfaction and boredom.

(My data: My previous relationship was with someone "poly." My current relationship is traditionally monogamous, to which I do adhere.)

Adultery has been "looked down on" (to put it mildly) for a lot longer than monogamy has been a norm.

Economic inequality between males means more and more women are competing for a smaller supply of wealthy males.

Increased demand for top males leads to gender inequality as more and more women compete for a smaller pool of rich men, reducing the bargaining power of every individual woman and increasing the bargaining power of the few males who are marriage material.

Increased demand for top males leads to polygamy and other polygamous arrangements such as mistresses.

If people worry less about starvation, they will put less emphasis on potential partner's financial status.

I don't see how any of this holds up in today's society where women are earning just as much as men, and in some relationships, more.

If a female no longer requires resource provision because she is earning enough money, she will prioritize genetic fitness in her mate selection, and so will be MORE willing to engage in a polygamous arrangement because polygamy can get her access to a greater diversity and quality of genetic material. Monogamy is only necessary for the female if it will provide her with resources or protection. Monogamy is not necessary for her to get access to sperm--sperm is cheap. She doesn't worry about money and can instead get the best genetic material without the best resources.

Therefore, female wealth drives polygamy.

But male economic inequality also drives polygamy.

Both factors increase polygamy. The only way to reverse these pressures would be to legalize rape and return to a state of nature. This would dethrone female agency as the factor that determines who will reproduce with who, and would elevate male violence to the deciding factor.

A lot of this study isn't about "today's society". Also notice the last paragraph: "Monogamous marriage has largely preceded democracy and voting rights for women in the nations where it has been institutionalized, says Henrich, the Canadian Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution in UBC’s Depts. of Psychology and Economics. By decreasing competition for younger and younger brides, monogamous marriage increases the age of first marriage for females, decreases the spousal age gap and elevates female influence in household decisions which decreases total fertility and increases gender equality."

* Keep rape illegal

* Reduce male economic inequality

* Reduce female personal wealth

Since rape would still be illegal, female desire would still be the agent that determines reproduction and mating. But since females have no personal property, they would have to acquire resources by accessing a male's resources. Since males are all roughly equal, she will prefer to find a male who does not provide resources to other females.

Voila! Monogamy.

I think also, if wealth was the most important factor wouldn't it make sense for one female to have multiple male partners contributing? That would reduce the need to compete for 1 economically strong partner.

The causality is obvious, given a bit of reflection.

This only makes sense if you think the individual is the primary site of selection pressure. It need not be. In fact, it probably isn't. Genes compete and cooperate with each other across populations. An example of selection pressure that is supported beyond the interest of one individual's reproductive success is the gay uncle hypothesis: Kin selection means that genes that favor a group's reproduction while dooming an individual member's chances can be successful.

In a social species like Homo Sapiens it is far too naive to examine fitness at the level of individuals. Our fitness is a function on ensembles of human beings, not just individuals. How the fitness of an individual and the groups they belong to are related is deep and fascinating.

Cooperation and collectivism are as much our essence as competition and individualism. There is no dichotomy between them. We are related to both Chimpanzees and Bonobos.

Anyway, this relates to your reasoning in this way: A group of human beings who freely procreate with each other and maximizing paternal uncertainty maximize their mutual interest. Such a reproductive strategy strongly selects for behaviors that maximize group cohesion and mutuality.

If we assume a reproductive strategy, the set of behaviors and their underlying genetics gain fitness relative to that reproductive strategy. A reproductive strategy that emphasizes the propagation of individual's genes specifically works well with genes that favor individualistic behavior while a reproductive strategy that emphasizes the propagation of a coherent population's genes works well with genes that favor collectivist behavior.

The converse implication holds as well. The population of human beings and the genes that are distributed amongst it are not driven by one master impulse, but instead ebb and flow according to external and purely human pressures. If a dictatorship arose tomorrow and instituted collective breeding, that would be quite a tumultuous change in pressures for individualism and against collectivism. Human nature is in a non-linear feedback loop.

Take a coherent set of behaviors and the genes that support them. Take another set that are at odds with those behaviors. You can ask how those evolve as if they were competing as organisms. There are no clean lines drawn in biology. Genes propagate and evolve, organisms propagate and evolve, populations of organisms propagate and evolve, ecosystems propagate and evolve, behaviors propagate and evolve.

So what I'm trying to say in a long-winded way is that your focus on individual interest is much too narrow and misses the forest for the trees.

European-style civilization is probably not possible without it, as I expect we will soon learn.

(the source material about which the article is written )

"The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects—promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences."

Wouldn't that just be any culture that has a significantly offset male-female ratio?

sarcasm, polygamy and monogamy have the same major social problem, one spouse too many.

A significantly-greater-than-1.0 male-to-female ratio would be a different cause of the same problem; polygyny produces it even without that ratio difference. (Polyandry would seem, in principle, to offset it, but there aren't lots of historical examples of that to study.)

Wonder what the polygamy male-female ratio is compared to current societies with skewed ratios (CN / IN)?

No. What seems to matter in the study is whether men have acceptable marriage prospects. (It'd be interesting to see, in that context, whether permitting same-sex marriage reinforces the effect observed and further reduces the same problems. It'd also be interesting to see, as marriage itself becomes less of an expectation, whether the effect is more from men being married -- in which case denormalizing marriage would be expected to reverse the benefits -- or whether the effect is more from men not being alienated by being unable to meet a social expectation of marriage -- in which case denormalizing marriage would be expected to reinforce the benefits.)

Polygamy:

Some men having a chance at a huge family. Most women having a chance at a family, but with a shared husband. Many men having no chance at a family at all.

Monogamy:

Most men having a chance at a family. Most women having a chance at a family.

Now consider that the more one has to lose, the better behaved one is. When men have a chance for a family, they'll do what is needed to make the attempt for a family (normally being productive members of society), after which they get far more needs met than when alone (consider that loneliness is quite dangerous for a person) and they likely have more to lose (especially if they have children). Thus they are more behaved.

But in a polygamous society, there is far less of a chance. So more men decide to not play by the rules. They will seek out more dangerous means to meet their immediate needs.

All this being said, it isn't the marriage that matters. It is the family that does. A society that only allows monogamy on paper, but which allows a polygamous marriages, and where a divide begins to exist meaning that you have many men without a chance of having a family will have the same issues.

Also, I'm not to sure what happens when many women don't have a chance for a family. While one might think it would work the same, there are a few key differences. A man can be responsible for multiple simultaneous pregnancies, but a woman cannot. A woman has, historically, had a level of assurance of the legitimacy of their children that a man does not, and on average men tend to be more physically powerful than women. Also of note is that those last two factors stop being a significant difference with technology (paternity tests and guns being respective examples), so historic data may not fit what trends we will see in a technologically advanced society. (To say nothing of technology increasingly being able to meet a person's needs, which will increasingly make it harder to plot future events based on past data.)

Polyandry had particular high logistical costs for most of our history, because of childbirth. However, birth control technology has developed to the point where such arrangements are now practical. My current girlfriend and various women I knew in college have reported to me encounter frequencies of 3X per day during their 20's, along with their male partners at the time basically complaining of that rate being "unsustainable." It may well be possible for certain women to be able to sustain polyandrous relationships, and for them to benefit from such relationships while acting as a moderating force in society. (The "Attila" stories by Antonio Sequra and Jose Ortiz have a character who engages in this arrangement in a post apocalyptic world. In the stories, the polyandrous arrangement also serves as a small military force, highly motivated to protect its leader. These stories are probably NSFW, so no links posted here.)

Oddly enough, a there is a very "easy" legal/social framework for allowing the establishment for what is effectively a "loosely bound" polyandry: legalized prostitution. Of course, "easy" is in quotes, because, while the legal framework would be very straightforward, the political and cultural barriers to passing the enabling legislation are huge. Also, only a subset of the activity enabled by such legislation could be fairly called a "loosely bound polyandry."

EDIT: If we note the prevalent pattern of human behavior, humans are pretty much "serially monogamous" -- where our attentions are mostly, but not exclusively, given to one particular partner at a time. However, the state of nature seems to indicate a pattern of having secondary and tertiary partners or transitory dalliances as well. Given the availability of effective birth control and mechanisms for preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease, we are probably overdue for a reshaping of societal norms to better fit the actual historical behavior of "monogamous" people.

EDIT: I was informed that polyandry was practiced, so was possible before modern birth control.

Logistics of childbirth don't make polyandry as an institution impossible; the societies in which polyandry, fraternal or otherwise, was practiced have not generally been modern societies or otherwise especially relieved of the natural logistics of childbirth.

Has there been any research on this on okcupid data, etc?

Edit: I'm not talking about moving towards poligamy. I'm talking about moving away from monogamous marriage in general.

To quote from the article: According to Henrich, monogamy’s main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems.

It seems obvious to me that this not a specific disadvantage of polygyny, but a specific advantage of monogamy. The state of nature, without marriage, also ought to produce a less "egalitarian distribution of women".

Its arguably moving toward marriage itself being less of an expectation, but its not clear how that relates to the study.

That's speculative, and not at all what the study found.

It could be that that's what's important; it could be, instead, that what is important is the social expectation of marriage combined with the opportunities available for it. It could be something else. It could be a combination of any of the three.

> Thus if you had some society which allowed only monogamy but also allowed concubines, you would likely see the same issues as caused by polygamy.

Since concubinage is generally exclusive in the same way as marriage is (and exclusive of marriage), you'd expect in pretty much any case it to have similar social effects to polygyny (if it isn't just considered a form of polygyny in which there is a wife with a formally preferred status, which is common in polygyny.)

> Or if you had a society that didn't do marriage at all, but the relationships that formed tended to be greater towards polygamy than monogamy.

OTOH, if it is the social expectation and opportunity aspect of marriage that is at issue, a society which lacked the formal marriage and social expectations tied to it might not have the problems of a formally polygynous society even if the informal relations formed were generally polgynous rather than monogamous.

And if, on yet another hand, there is a stabilizing effect of socially-recognized relationship, the absence of social recognition might produce problems similar to those in a formally polygynous society regardless of the form of the informal relationships that form.

I'm not against polygamy or polyandry, but I don't see a trend in the near term.

On the other hand, we've long had a tradition of traditional married couples where the man keeps a mistress on the side, usually in secret (though secrets don't tend to last very long).

Pedantic, perhaps, but while its generally acceptable to use "polygamy" to mean "polygyny" when you aren't discussing "polyandry" (because virtually all real-world polygamy is polygyny), if you are explicitly discussing both forms, its should be "polygyny and polyandry", "polygamy" includes both.

> On the other hand, we've long had a tradition of traditional married couples where the man keeps a mistress on the side, usually in secret (though secrets don't tend to last very long).

Its really weird to call monogamous marriages "traditional" when comparing them to the polygynous marriages, since while the latter have fallen out of favor progressively in the last several centuries, they have quite a long tradition pretty much everywhere.

That said, its actually in many places a long tradition for kept mistresses, particularly of powerful men, to be fairly open.

Bu they don't: the authors of the "Media Release", who are writing for the general public using language as familiar as possible, use the term "polygamy", but never in quotes from the authors of the study -- which always use "polygyny". The study itself always uses "polygyny" (and, at least at one point, more specifically "non-sororal polygyny"); the only times "polygamy" (or related forms like "polygamous") appear in the paper itself are in discussions of what other others studies found, one mention discussing forms of pair-bonding as "monogamous and polygamous", and in titles of works cited.

Particularly of note in poverty stricken communities and the African American community which also happen to have many social problems. Its an interesting theory worth looking more into IMO.

Its perhaps more visible, but is it really becoming more common? Where are the statistics showing this?

59% of African American mothers with two or more children have children by different fathers (http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/8338-many-us-women-have-chi...).

While sometimes people refer to "serial polygamy", and there are some contexts where its actually reasonable to view that as a kind of polygamy, here, where the focus is on formal, recognized marriage structures and whether men have the opportunity to enter into them, it isn't the kind of polygamy that is at issue, both:

(1) because its not a formal, recognized marriage structure, and (2) because even if it were, it would be polyandrous, and the paper is comparing polygyny (not "polygamy" more generally) to monogamy, so this would be driving past monogamy on to the opposite side, if it were relevant at all.

It is not polygamy/andry, it is an act of desperation on the women's side to have any kind of economic support. When the social net is thin or unexistent - even if it means risking to have another kid. Add to the fact that poor people are the most restricted with their access to contraception and abortion. And you have a self perpetuating mess instead of social fabric.

It is the other way around - remove the jobs from a community, men turn to crime - initiate "War on drugs" - and you have a positive loopback mechanism. That is multi generational.

...That doesn't seem to me to be a proper control population.

I love examples of good intentions going bad.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...

To speculate, IMO its in large part due to physical differences between races - the small petite Asian frames being advantageous for Asian women and disadvantageous for Asian men, and the large Black frames being advantageous for Black men, and disadvantageous for Black women. Societal views definitely play a role too. It would be interesting to compare across different societies.

I had no idea that the majority of older cultures practiced this. I'm no history buff either though. Still, that's very surprising to me for some reason.

The reverse, polyandry, also saw occasional practice, like in pre- and early Islamic Iran.

I'm thinking particularly because the focus is on patriarchal, unequal and heavily stratified societies. That makes me wonder if it would make for a different study if it compared with gender neutral polyamorous societies with many-to-many relationships. I'm not aware that such societies exist in socially significant volumes outside of small groupings though. Still, it smacks a little of Eurocentricism.

What about top women taking on more men?