Did monogamy appear before religion?

Great Debates
21

I don’t understand your logic here. Polygamy results in all that?

I’m not sure I understand this statement either. The goal of the ruling class, or wealthy, of any nation can only survive if the people they rule are relatively happy. One of the 10 commandments is to not “covet thy neighbor’s wife”, meaning if she’s married, she’s off-limits. (religious law). Get people to buy into religion, the idea of an afterlife, and penalties for being polygamous, and the idea of monogamy could take root. The agriculture theory also has merit.

I don’t think, as you say, the entire history of western civilization has wanted monogamous marriage. If you could pull off having 4 women that you could stand and that could also stand each other, have no emotional issues or guilt swirling around, I’d say most men would take a shot at polygamy. So would most women. The fact that humans cannot keep their emotions in check for the most part makes polygamy impossible for most of us to imagine. But if people didn’t get bored or unhappy in their monogamist lifestyle, adultery would be non-existent, and divorce would probably be much lower.

If monogamy took root because of the practical reasons of property ownership and agriculture, and not religion, that certainly makes some sense to me.

22

Except that the Jews were polygamous. So the example you chose actually contradicts your theory.

Then can you explain it to me?

In particular can you explain why monogamy was exceedingly rare even 200 years ago? If polygamous societies can manage property ownership and agriculture for 10, 000 years, doesn’t that comprehensively refute the idea that monogamy exists for reasons of property ownership and agriculture?

It seems to me that monogamy is nothing more than a cultural quirk that accidentally took hold on one small corner of one small continent. Just like the quirk of wearing trousers. When that area happened to conquer large areas of the rest of the world, for reasons utterly unrelated to monogamy, they transplanted both those quirky cultural trait with them.

IOW I can’t see any evidence that monogamy is inherently any more advantageous than wearing jackets and ties. Sure, most of the world has adopted western European dress from their western European conquerers, just as they have adopted monogamy. But the evidence that either cultural quirk has become widespread due to some inherent advantage is not only totally lacking in evidence, it actually contradicts the evidence we do have.

23

Even in societies with harems, having a “chief wife” or “first concubine” is a common phenomena.

A point I’ve heard made about how ancient human tendencies towards monogamy are; consider that human males unlike chimpanzee males find younger females much more attractive. That makes the most sense if you assume that evolved as a response towards being with one female for life; a younger female has a longer reproductive lifespan left.

24

I’m not sure I buy that.

Human females are smart. They require a lot of time and effort and resoucres to court.

Even in the truly promiscuous setting, the 21st century nightclub, it requires a lot of time and effort and resources for a male to convince a female to sleep with him. There’s the initial chat up, the dancing, buying drinks, the taxi home etc. Despite the mythical “Fonzie” type player who walks up to a woman and snaps his fingers and gets laid, in my experience all men need to put in a great deal of time and effort to have sex even in meat markets where everybody knows that they are there to find a sexual partner.

In settings that were probably more normal for early humans, the condition was even more extreme. Men probably needed to devote weeks if not months to courting a woman before they could receive sex, just as is the case for most men on the promiscuous modern dating scene.

And one of the almost universal features of the courtship process is that the female demand that the men not pay similar attention to other women. Even in a promiscuous species this makes perfect sense, since a the female wants the male to know that a) the child is his because he was always with her and b) the male is mature enough/keen enough to maintain a sexual relationship to provide some level of ongoing support for her and the offspring, and not be distracted by the next pretty face as soon as she falls pregnant.

The practical upshot of all this is that, even if humans are naturally perfectly promiscuous, a male only has access to very limited number of females at a time. He has to devote his efforts to the females with the highest return on his investments.

The youngest females are the most fertile, they are the ones with the fewest prior offspring that will compete with his own offspring, they are the ones with whom he can establish subsequent sexual relations based on prior groundwork. Even for a perfectly promiscuous human species, human males should show a preference for youth.

Male chimpanzees don’t give a toss about age because they devote absolutely no energy to obtaining sex. Courtship is non-existent. Resource sharing is the exception rather than the rule, fertility declines with age are minimal and males have absolutely no role in providing for offspring.

So while the preference for youth may be indicative of monogamy. it could almost as easily be the result of polygamy. Nothing humans do is simple.

25

At the risk of stating the obvious, the people most disadvantaged by the lack of a stable marriage relationships are not men or woman, but children. People who talk about marriage customs, without addressing how those customs effect children are missing the point. People may enter into marriage with their own desires and goals, but from the point of view of society, the purpose of marriage is to provide an environment to raise children to be useful members of society.

26

Should be an easy enough question to answer. Our sexual physiology seems to put us squarely in the middle between the biological expectation that a male will have to compete with other males scrupin’ the mate and the male having exclusive access to the mate (or mates). The size of the testes, number of sperm, layout of anatomy wrt impregnation, behavior patterns…all of that seems to hint that humans are in between related species that have either open mating where a male would have to assume that his sperm is in direct competition with the sperm of another male that might have already beaten him to the punch, and species that have nearly exclusive access to their mate or mates. Say, bonobo vs gorilla, with humans somewhere in between.

So, assuming I’m not totally off the deep end here, the basic building blocks of our sexuality have been in place probably from before we even were our current species. Adaption and change to get us where we are today takes time, so we are talking 100’s of thousands of years…probably a lot more.

Then there are the social aspects. Even more a WAG than the above, I’d guess that once humans started to communicate and to form social and familial groups that some sort of social compact or rule that emphasized something like monogamy entered into society purely to mitigate sexual strife as well as it could be mitigated. Being humans, and we continued to adapt mechanisms to deal with both monogamy and, um, non-monogamy using biological as well as social mechanisms, until we have the hodge-podge of today’s tangles of sexual norms, mores, customs and rules.

I don’t think an exact date for when religion first appeared in human beings (my guess is it’s a lot older than people think, at least if you define spirit worship, animal totem worship and the worship of nature and natural events), but think our sexuality was formed long before humans developed religion…probably several species before we became human. Rather than religion being the driving force for monogamy, my WAG is that it was the tight knit hunter gatherer societies who needed full cooperation and respect, and a minimum of strife to ensure survival that first brought the social aspects of monogamy to humans (or even some of our pre-human ancestors). While it’s possible to have a tight knit society without monogamy (there are primitive peoples who use other forms of bonds), I think it’s one of the easier ones to set up given the hardships our ancestors went through trudging out of Africa or facing the various ice ages.

Anyway, those are my WAGs, FWIW. Monogamy (and all of our other sexual baggage) pre-dates religion, and religion was secondary, at best, to the formation of sexual bonding in early human and pre-human society. Later on, religion was able to take the basic building blocks of human sexuality and form and shape it into a more formal event, but those things came much later IMHO.

(And before anyone asks, the above is my take on it, based on things I’ve read and stuff I learned in school, plus a healthy or unhealthy dose of History Channel, Science Channel, Discovery, NATGEO, NOVA, TLC and all the rest, so large grains of salt are probably in order)

-XT

27

That doesn’t matter. If the powerful dominant males round up all or most of the females for themselves then those young men aren’t going to have any females available to them no matter how attractive or fertile they are. There are polygamous species where the non-dominant males don’t ever get to breed at all. And throughout most of human history, most males never sired offspring while most females had children - in Darwinian terms women pretty much automatically succeeded just by being women.

It’s the lower class men who benefit most from monogamy because it helps ensure that some woman somewhere will be likely to hook up with him, even if he’s just a leftover because the other more desirable men are already taken.

28

  1. If the powerful dominant males round up all or most of the females for exclusive sexual relations with themselves, then in what sense is that not marriage? You are be arguing that marriage benefits young men because marriage is detrimental to young men.

  2. How are these powerful dominant ,males round up all or most of the females, since they are, by definition, not doing so though their fighting ability.

  3. Can you please explain how marriage prevents powerful dominant males rounding up all or most of the females for themselves?

Cite!

I am calling bullshit on that one. Please provide evidence that 51% of males never sired offspring.

  1. This is simply begging the question. Where is the evidence that women won’t willingly have promsicuous sex with lower class men at least as willingly as higher call men?

  2. This is a total no-sequitur. If a man is so undesirable that he can only enter into a relationship because there are no alternatives, how does marriage change that situation? How does marriage make an utterly undesirable man magically desirable?

29

As I already said, this isn’t even remotely true, and even if it were it wouldn’t hint at any such thing.

Morris had to cherry pick his data to try to back up his “hypothesis”. He deliberately excluded most of the great apes because the data flatly contradicts what he proposes. In terms of testicle size humans are slightly larger smaller than chimpanzees, where promiscuity is the norm, we are also slightly smaller than Orangs, where females have never been observed mating with multiple males. We are larger than Gorillas, where males form harems and females frequently cheat and much larger than gibbons that form true pair bonds and females never cheat.

So Morris’ hypothesis based on testicle size only works if you conveniently exclude 75% of ape species.

Even if that were not the case, as I mentioned earlier, testicle size and semen production correspond far more accurately with penis size and protein consumption than with sexual strategy. Since humans have anomalously large penises and anomalously high protein consumption we would expect anomalously large testicle size even if we were perfectly monogamous.

Like so many of Morris’ ideas on human evolutionary psychology, it sounds pood and captures public attention, but doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny.

And that or course is the million dollar question.

Most early 20th century psychologists and anthropologists,. typified by Mead, were adamant that humans were entirely plastic, that there were no basic building blocks of any human behaviour and that everything we did was the result of socialisation and upbringing. They believed that such massive changes could be engendered in a single generation.

And this is one of the reasons why the myth of the promiscuous noble savage has persisted for so long, despite the dearth of evidence for such.

Chimpanzees communicate and form social and familial groups. That hasn’t resulted in marriage so far.

Well we know that non-human species buried their dead, so it’s a safe bet that belief in the afterlife and spirit world predates our species.

30

I understand that because of the OP bringing in organized religion into the equation, it is assumed that the implication is of the religious institution of exclusive (not necessarily monogamous, as history proves) marriage, but ISTM if the argument is about “man in a state of nature” (and that IS a concept full of mythology) then would it better be between “promiscuity” vs. “steady regular mostly-exclusive relationships”, regardless what we call them, rather than marriage as such?

31

It seems to me that he’s just saying monogamous marriage benefits young men.

Social power? We’re several evolutionary branches away from raw physical power being the only major determinant of group status, I think.

If monogamous marriages are the norm, the dominant males no longer have the social backing to reinforce their whims (I think - but it’s not my idea, I’m just telling you why it’s sensible to me if viewed from a sociological stance.)

I didn’t get that from it, I got that mandating monogamous marriage limits the opportunities for higher-status males to isolate as many women from availability, thereby allowing lower-status males a larger pool of potential mates.

32

Just checking -are you just referencing Neanderthals here?

Anyway, I think it’s a logical leap to go from “buried their dead” to “believed in an afterlife”. There’s something missing in that sequence.

*Not *that I’m disagreeing with you that religion is pre-sapiens, BTW. Just questioning the logic there.

33

Terminology is often tricky on this subject. I find it best to always specify “sapiens” or “modern” humans when referring to our species. “Human” in this context, to me, means any species in the genus Homo. But I’m sure **Blake **meant “sapiens”.

34

Yes. Polygamy causes rape and sexual violence as well as violent crime more generally and many other bad effects. Monogamy is the system under which rape, child abuse, and generaly crime are lowest. This is the conclusion of many researchers who have looked into the issue and is no more in dispute than the link between smoking and lung cancer. I’ve already linked to one article that proves the point. Plentiful others are readily available to anyone wwo can use Google.

35

We need to carefully distinguish our terms here. Marriage isn’t the same thing as monogamy. And while most human societies throughout history have allowed polygamy, it’s also true that most marriages were monogamous.

Also note that monogamy isn’t the same as sexual fidelity.

As Malthus pointed out, plenty of modern human relationships that appear on the surface to be sexually exclusive really aren’t. There’s quite a lot of sneaking around, and this applies to other species that are canonically monogamous, not just humans.

So just because we have monogamous marriage doesn’t mean that people always behave monogamously. And that includes the women.

The biggest difference between Victorian England and Thailand isn’t the actual sexual behavior of people, but rather what’s talked about openly. Prostitution, de facto polygamy, affairs, children out of wedlock, premarital sex, homosexuality, and so on, occurred all the time and people gossiped about it and knew about it, but wouldn’t talk about it in front of children or in mixed groups.

What people are willing to say about their own sexual behavior, or the behavior of the people they know, is often propaganda. They often have very good reasons to lie, and therefore it shouldn’t be surprising to find that people lie about sexual behavior all the time.

36

There’s a much simpler explanation. The human penis is unusually large because it’s sized to fit the human vagina, and the human vagina is unusually large because it needs to be, to give birth to our huge-headed babies.

37

Lets take this one at a time, there was no contention just a request of definition. How do we want to define monogamy, how does that definition compare to what we may consider a common law marriage.

Without a agreed upon definition of terms the rest of your contentions and rebuttals (and false accusations and false premises) are meaningless.

38

cite for the sex with girls in conquered lands? The only way they could legally have sex with anybody (war captives included) was by marrying them. In fact, before they got to marry a captive lady, they had to disfigure her by shaving and then wait for a month. A month is a good deal of time for family or neighbors to try dissuade the man from such a rash action, if they were so inclined. Plus there were restrictions on the resulting mixed nationality offspring’s ability to participate in religious ritual like normal citizens.

Incidentally, I think that the minimal biblical reference to polygamy amongst the non-royals is a good indication that polygamy was very much a non-issue back then even though legal. If you are looking for literary evidence of sale of women
for the benefit of a polygamous elite Chinese literature is a safer bet. Or, for that matter, ante-bellum abolitionist yellow press aimed at American South.

39

Well, in pretty all societies, you can’t have everyone in a polygamous relationship. You’d need a sever dearth of males, or a large number of unmarried adult males. That may not have been uncommon after a major war, assuming the rest of the population didn’t end up as slaves.

40

It is not a concept that originate with Paul. It was the norm in Jewish society centuries before Paul’s death. Whenever Jesus discussed marriage, divorce, and fidelity, he used singular pronouns in such a way as to indicate that it was simply assumed that each person had no more than one spouse. As for your claim that “there was bitter argument” in the early Christian church about monogamy vs. polygamy, you’re flatly wrong. We’ve no evidence there was any such argument.