T be more specific, I mean polygyny. The majority of civilisations have been polygynous.
I only know of one polyandrous marriage tradition in recent history. A region of India often has polyandrous marriage where a single woman marries brothers in order to not dilute the inheritance among diverse grandchildren.
Before reliable birth control.
True, most of those traditional methods have been less reliable than modern hormonal approaches.
It's not difficult to ignore your biological imperatives. We do it all the time. It is a part of being in a civilised society. It's why I don't murder my neighbour when we have a dispute despite being really angry at him.
According to reputable anthropologists, historians, and evolutionary psychologists, the modern concept of monogamy is only about a thousand years old. Before that, we had lots of polygynous polygamy. For all but the rich and powerful, who were concerned with passing down assets, pure monogamy was the exception rather than the rule, especially in cultures that were not part of "western culture."
Our early anthropologists, coming out of western European (colonial) culture made many assumptions about what was natural and normal for the human species. They made judgements about other cultural norms, declaring them "less civilized" because they didn't adhere to their own cultural norms. They mad the mistake of assuming that their cultural norms were the only correct, proper, and civilized ones.
It is more evolutionary advantageous to have your children provided for and protected, which is why multiple women often marry a single man with the resources to do so. You need your offspring to live, first and foremost. There is nothing about my argument that suggests that diversity isn't achieved - a man having multiple wives is diversifying his genetic line. Diversity is also achieved by multiple men and multiple women having their own sexually exclusive relationships. I am not sure what you're even trying to refute here.
What I'm trying to address here is that human culture is diverse, and so are the norms across cultures. A very rich man having a large polygynous harem means that many of the women are effectively out of the gene pool and of those women who do have offspring, they will be only half-diverse--half of that population's next generation will be "roughly" 50% identical (well, probably closer to 25% individually, because the father gives 50% of his genes, but 50% of their alleles will come from one source).
In cultures where the survival strategy is based on the whole community working together to raise children, the diversity is strongly encouraged, evolutionarily. The situation you present above is a relatively recent development in human history, especially before agrarian societies.
People are not always biologically wired to do what is best for the population as a whole, but for themselves. If that were the case, humans would behave a lot differently, especially since our conception of what is beneficial for society changes over time. Sexual exclusivity may not provide the most diversity that can be achieved but is optimally advantageous for both individuals and civilisations as a whole.
You keep using that phrase...
Biologically wired (or biologically hard-wired) implies something we are born with and cannot change. Very little of human behavior is biologically wired--the vast majority is due to software rather than hardware, the behaviors we have modeled to us in childhood, the norms we were raised with. The same with biological imperatives--I don't see anthropologists or evolutionary psychologists using that term. A quick search for the phrase shows that it appears in a lot of sources that are not scientific journals. I would not trust Business Insider, Harvard Business Review and the like to be reliable sources for scientific information.
No. Where did I say all? Please don't be dishonest and argue in bad faith like this. Promiscuity is unnatural from an evolutionary biological perspective, as I explained previously. You grew up in the 60s and 70s, claim that the social acceptance towards promiscuity was challenged by society, and think I am the one with the cultural biases towards promiscuity? The fact that promiscuity only became prominent in the last 50 years of our civilisation shows that it is a cultural behaviour only and not a viable reproductive strategy.
Here:
This difference in male/female reproductive strategies is why men covet virgins, and women do not, and why both men and women are turned off by promiscuity.
You have characterized non-monogamy (promiscuity) as unnatural. You declared that both men and women are turned off by promiscuity, making a general statement about men and women, and not qualifying it as
some men and
some women.
As I said above, anthropologists, historians, and evolutionary psychologists mark that modern monogamy is only about a thousand years old. Promiscuity did not just become prominent in the last 50 years, it was the norm for most of our human history.
It may seem like "normal" based upon your own experience, but please do not project that experience on other cultures and subcultures.
Of course not. These games are meant to appeal to fantasy, which is why people want to experience polyamory or harems in the game, or experience taking a woman's virginity. If these games were realistic, they wouldn't be popular or sold.
If your lifestyle makes you happy, then who I am to stop you? But it is very clear why sexual exclusivity is appealing to a lot of people. It is a biological imperative due to it being an evolutionary advantage. You claim to not understand, so I explained it to you, and then you tell me that I am wrong.
From my perspective, you presented your own cultural biases and presented them as norms for the species as a whole. My information is not limited to my own perspective, I have included research and publications by people in the field who study such things as a career, and whose papers are vigorously peer reviewed. You are not wrong in that this is your truth, your cultural experience. I just tried to point out that that view is not as universal as you seem to think it is.
Also, I did not claim to not understand, I said I didn't "grok it," a concept from Stranger in a Strange land (and common with the real world
Church of All Worlds), meaning "To understand profoundly and intuitively (empathically)." As someone with a background in anthropology and psychology, I can understand it intellectually. For me, those issues seem like something from a foreign culture. For much of my life, I felt like I was an alien observing human tribal traditions, but then I realized that "Western Civilization" isn't the pinnacle of human civilizations, it just tends to be the loudest.
May You Never Thirst
