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From: bloom-debbie@cs.yale.edu (Debbie Bloom)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,alt.romance,soc.men,soc.women,soc.singles
Subject: Re: Are Humans Naturally Monogamous?
Message-ID: <26937@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 26 Oct 90 17:24:54 GMT
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In article <17086@thorin.cs.unc.edu> biagioni@capella.cs.unc.edu (Edoardo Biagioni) writes:
>The question:
>>>Without cultural training would human being by there biological nature
>>>be monogamous or is it culturally ingrained from childhood?
>
>milt@waynes-world.esd.sgi.com	(Milton Tinkoff) writes:
>>I think it is culturally ingrained.  Men can impregnate as many fertile
>>women as they can have sex with.  This allows men to 'spread their DNA
>>around' as much as they can.
>
>There is an unspecified assumption here that if a man impregnates two
>women he is more reproductively successful than a man who only
>impregnates one.
>
>This is a false assumption for two reasons:
>
>(1) a woman can bear many children, so a man with two children by
>two women has fewer than a man with three children by one woman.
Ah, but he can impregnate many many other women while the first is pregnant.
So, the potential number of offspring goes up tremendously.

I learned in a psych class once that biologically men want to mate with many
women to maximize the # offspring they can pass their genes to.  But women
want to mate with one man because they want support *after* they have the
baby (so they want him to stick around).  At least, I think it was that.

>(2) The ultimate reproductive success depends on the reproductive success
>of the offspring; in many cases this is at least partly dependent on the
>physical the offspring gets from BOTH parents during development. This was
>probably even more true in prehistorical times than it is now.

>So depending on the environment, it may or may not be evolutionarily
>advantageous for a man to 'spread [his] DNA around', especially if that
>means men are no longer sure of the paternity of their offspring and
>offspring, neglected by one parent, has fewer chances to reproduce.

Well, this may not be a problem in some cultures.  For example, the Mundurucu
people in Brazil have a Men's house and many Women's houses.  At the women's
house live the women from a few families, and they take care of all the
children which they have produced.  There are marriages, but they have little
bearing on how many people take care of the children.

-Debbie