Excellent article. A few thoughts:
1. The vast majority of men want to sleep with as many women as possible. The vast majority of women want to secure access to the resources of a high value man. Polygamy aligns these desires but it's far from the only solution, and it is in many cases a very suboptimal one: it adds the many constraints…
1. The vast majority of men want to sleep with as many women as possible. The vast majority of women want to secure access to the resources of a high value man. Polygamy aligns these desires but it's far from the only solution, and it is in many cases a very suboptimal one: it adds the many constraints of marriage for both parties.
It is interesting that while the West has since discarded polygamy, mistresses and serial monogamy et cetera have filled that role.
In other words, polygamy may just have been the most obvious means to an end that's now being satisfied in superior ways.
2. Dating apps revert social dynamics to an earlier era by reducing the costs of getting to know each other, which makes it easier to know more mates. If you make a behaviour cheaper, you get more of it.
It also solves the, admittedly trivial, uncertainty problem: if you are both on a dating app and are both checking each other out, you already know that you are into each other. There's no need to go through the sometimes overlong pas de deux of divining the romantic intentions of the other party.
3. A lot of polygamists had their favourite wives anyway whose children they often went on to install as heirs: David's favourite was Bathsheba. Genghis Khan began his conquest of central Asia to recover his first and beloved wife from kidnappers, et cetera. This indicates that romantic love is probably monogamous in nature, but sexual desire is polygamous.
A culture that prioritized romantic love would probably end up monogamous anyway, and romantic love is very easy to prioritize when you don't need your mate to survive. Industrialization might have contributed just as much, if not more, than Christianity, in dismantling polygamy by democratizing wealth.
4. Nature probably optimizes to favour partial monogamy anyway. A species where most men do not pass their own genes is incredibly wasteful and very fragile. Evolution dislikes both of these things. The 'Gini Coefficient' of sexual inequality is therefore likely to be lower than half.
Excellent article. A few thoughts:
1. The vast majority of men want to sleep with as many women as possible. The vast majority of women want to secure access to the resources of a high value man. Polygamy aligns these desires but it's far from the only solution, and it is in many cases a very suboptimal one: it adds the many constraints of marriage for both parties.
It is interesting that while the West has since discarded polygamy, mistresses and serial monogamy et cetera have filled that role.
In other words, polygamy may just have been the most obvious means to an end that's now being satisfied in superior ways.
2. Dating apps revert social dynamics to an earlier era by reducing the costs of getting to know each other, which makes it easier to know more mates. If you make a behaviour cheaper, you get more of it.
It also solves the, admittedly trivial, uncertainty problem: if you are both on a dating app and are both checking each other out, you already know that you are into each other. There's no need to go through the sometimes overlong pas de deux of divining the romantic intentions of the other party.
3. A lot of polygamists had their favourite wives anyway whose children they often went on to install as heirs: David's favourite was Bathsheba. Genghis Khan began his conquest of central Asia to recover his first and beloved wife from kidnappers, et cetera. This indicates that romantic love is probably monogamous in nature, but sexual desire is polygamous.
A culture that prioritized romantic love would probably end up monogamous anyway, and romantic love is very easy to prioritize when you don't need your mate to survive. Industrialization might have contributed just as much, if not more, than Christianity, in dismantling polygamy by democratizing wealth.
4. Nature probably optimizes to favour partial monogamy anyway. A species where most men do not pass their own genes is incredibly wasteful and very fragile. Evolution dislikes both of these things. The 'Gini Coefficient' of sexual inequality is therefore likely to be lower than half.