Monogamy, polygamy and social chaos

[md2000]

Something I read once said that in these multi-wife marriages, the first wife has cetain rights - in some cultures, a veto over which new wives the husband can select. She usually also becomes the “matriarch of the household” and lords it over the other wives in a dozen petty ways to make sure they know who’s in charge… IIRC some places, she’s the one managing the household finances and so there’s a definite pecking order…

[Chronos]

This overlooks the fact that simply getting a woman pregnant was not sufficient for reproduction over evolutionary time. Humans are not self-supporting until about age 15 (in primitive cultures), and need more than one adult to provide resources for them (especially during the mother’s late pregnancy and the child’s infancy, when the mother’s motility is restricted)

I didn’t mean to imply otherwise: Humans are, definitely, very heavily on the K strategy end of the scale (having a few offspring and investing heavily in them, as opposed to having many offspring and letting them fend for themselves). I was just commenting on why polygyny is so much more common than polyandry: A man can, if he has sufficient resources, beget children with a great many women, while no amount of resources will allow a woman to bear more than about one child per year (and that’s pushing it).

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Der_Trihs

I’ve always heard it put the way Wesley Clark does. For example, I’ve heard that idea used to predict general unrest and possibly warfare in China and India thanks to the gender imbalance they’ve inflicted upon themselves.

As I’ve heard it put in the past, polygyny is more a matter of natural human inclinations, especially female ones; women tend to flock to the dominant males. Polygyny isn’t so much “instituted” as it is formalized; polygyny is the human norm as much as anything is. Monogamy is more artificial, designed to make sure that the great majority of men have access to a woman.

In the absence of marriage and available women, men will frequently make do with prostitution, this is not true of women. Women are the ones who seem to be in favor of monogamy (or marraige in general for that matter). Most women I know would rather than an average fellow all to herself rather than a timeshare in some hotshot.

I thought there was some sort of evolutionary reason for this sort of behaviour.

[ITR_champion]

79 percent of men believe that monogamy is desirable (in England at least). Admittedly the percentage is slightly higher for women, but nonetheless an overwhelming majority of men do want to marry one woman and remain married.