[keepreal]

Here is some scientist saying that female choice drove monogamy, which makes sense since female rather have a male will invest all to her than having to share resources with other girls. It is also interesting that chimps are promiscuous while gorilla are polygynous, I think orangutans are monogamous like most humans.
http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2012/05/29/st...ary-shift/
here is some woman explaining it in detail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VupEC0cA...re=g-all-c
Maybe we being ancestrally alpha harem based makes women want alphas more subconsciously in addition desiring for the other qualities that are associated with an alpha.

[Deluge]

(07-02-2012 07:19 AM)keepreal Wrote:  

It is also interesting that chimps are promiscuous while gorilla are polygynous, I think orangutans are monogamous like most humans.

Men are polygynous, women are hypergamous. The agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago necessitated monogamy on societies that abandoned the hunter gatherer lifestyle, but we've been unravelling back to our natural state since the sexual revolution.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Humans are not naturally monogamous. However, civilization is built on monogamy.

[Blackhawk]

Society promotes polygamy when there's an excess of food and resources, allowing rapid population increase.
Society promotes polyandry when there are more people than the carrying capacity of the land, allowing rapid population decline.
Society promotes monogamy when the carrying capacity of the land has been reached, creating population stability.

This is already known from studying human tribes worldwide. Not apes, chimps, or orangutans. But people.

[speakeasy]

Most apes are polygamist. Early man probably was too. I think the main point of marriage was bind man to woman in order to guarantee that the man wouldn't abandon the woman after pregnancy. He could, but in these much smaller close-knit primitive societies, there were more social consequences to face for such behavior.

[keepreal]

(07-02-2012 04:43 PM)Blackhawk Wrote:  

Society promotes polygamy when there's an excess of food and resources, allowing rapid population increase.
Society promotes polyandry when there are more people than the carrying capacity of the land, allowing rapid population decline.
Society promotes monogamy when the carrying capacity of the land has been reached, creating population stability.

This is already known from studying human tribes worldwide. Not apes, chimps, or orangutans. But people.

Not necessarily, there is a lot of animals or people with low resources, resort to polygyny as one alpha defend his rich resources and get all the bitches. Polyandry or visiting marriage, and promiscuous system are more common in female dominant society.
It is probably the case that when food plenty and egalitarian society, females probably go through serial monogamy.
Females or males even in urbanized and upper class of agricultural culture are not really sexually monogamous, but they are socially monogamous.
In fact most of societies through out history were at mostly polygynous(but the monogamous societies constitute majority of population, but even then a lot of them the upper class were promiscuous or engaged sexual polygyny), look the roman aristocrats they had one wife each, but they had tons of concubine servants. Medieval times nobles had tons of mistresses, of course the poor peasants were often socially monogamous and probably sexually too, cuz they can't afford to fuck around except with rich or higher class people.

[Jean Valjean]

(07-02-2012 04:43 PM)Blackhawk Wrote:  

Society promotes polygamy when there's an excess of food and resources, allowing rapid population increase.
Society promotes polyandry when there are more people than the carrying capacity of the land, allowing rapid population decline.
Society promotes monogamy when the carrying capacity of the land has been reached, creating population stability.

This is already known from studying human tribes worldwide. Not apes, chimps, or orangutans. But people.

If that's true, then given the abundance of food and resources in our society, where it's possible for everyone to be fed, clothed, sheltered, etc., society should be promoting polygamy. Do you have a source for this, by the way; I wanted to read more about that.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Blackhawk hasn't been here for over nine months, but you never know when he might pop in.

It often pays to check the time stamp of the last post in the thread

[AboveAverageJoe]

If Jesus can be resurrected than so can this thread.
I find this subject fascinating and worthy of intelligent discourse along with decently vetted sources, of course.