As outlined
here, though mixed in with a few other topics, polygamy and monogamy act as soft-eugenics programs that over generations change the overall gene pool and the two act as a feedback loop.
You can compare it to people who live high in the Himalayas, who have considerably better abilities to process oxygen. This has culminated over many generations, where those who were better at processing oxygen would have a slight advantage in a low-resource society where dominance and/or competence were paramount. Being more successful led to having more children and over a long period it led to those traits being more common.
Polygamy was the global norm before social forces like Christianity. In these society, the model was leaders had many wives, allies of the leader had multiple wives and others had few if any wives and were essentially slaves. Women also were typically of slave status. This was a raw alpha dominance society that proliferated genes that were suited to survive in it. It was the only option in those times due to the circumstances. This was shifted by religions that were imposed by rulers in concert with priests. Through the socialisation and the successive change in the gene pool, fewer dominating alphas existed and the society had changed so that they were less successful.
Today in West Africa about 20% of marriages are still polygamous. For the most part, prior to European colonisation the societies were dominated by:
- inter-tribal and kingdom collonisation
- hierarchical polygamy with slave status and no wives for the weak
- extreme violence, summary justice, ritual sacrifice
- slave trading
This is a social structure that selects dominance. There is little room for trades or professions to flourish. Such things have typically precariously sprouted elsewhere and then brought in by more technically advanced cultures. Intelligence and technical competence were of little importance beyond what it took to understand the simple dominance hierarchy. The result is there was no path for genes that produce larger brains, higher reasoning ability and faster neurotransmission to proliferate.
The result in West Africa is the average IQ (a measure of verbal, numeric and spatial intelligence) is close to 70 (
see page 357). There was no structure through which they were selected and little area for its utilisation. Due to the affects of poverty in Africa average IQs are about 10 points lower than their biological threshold. Just as your eyes only have so much ability to focus, your lungs have only so much ability to process oxygen etc., there is a threshold of how much the brain can process and how fast. There is nothing known of that can change this. If you compare this to East China, which has had a society with a middle-class with some dark ages for 3,000 years, the average IQ minus poverty is about 110.
On the front of male dominance, there is a gene called MAOA (also known as the warrior gene), which is involved in the regulation of neurotransmitters. A variant of this gene, known as 2R. This variant doesn't break down as many neurotransmitters which can cause elevated aggression. It is particularly linked to pathological aggression like organised crime, i.e. carrying on the same sort of behaviours that civilisation has sucsessivley genetically deselected. 1 in 18 African Americans have this gene variant as opposed to almost 1 in
150,000 orientals.
Confucius was something of a Chinese Jesus, who taught many of the same socially stabilising models, such as the notion of the family unit, 500 years before Christ. And the Chinese were already more civilised than the Jews at that point.
The married family the the bedrock of modern civilisation. The previous model was a few men, taking what they wanted, smashing things up and leaving little or nothing more than what came before them. The family model forces men to give up a life or whoring and plunder and instead invest in their children. With each generation, children can take on a little more wisdom, knowledge and the structure of the society gently eases out genes that promote violence and usher in those that encourage intelligence. But as with anything, the left cannot dismantle quickly enough what gives them everything they want.