26/04/01

Men are 'Biologically' Monogamous

Two scientists suggest that monogamy is biologically determined - and that human males have an innate predisposition toward monogamy. 

This seems ridiculous - given the evidence.

It is far more likely that, for example, 'fear of aggression' is determined biologically, and that monogamy is simply a good CULTURAL way of reducing aggression within a society.

In relationships men want sex, and women security 

Robert Uhlig   The Daily Telegraph

AT the heart of all long-term relationships lies a fundamental deception, scientists say today. Women stay with men for security, and men remain with women for sex. 

This doesn't quite tally with the notion that men are sexually clapped-out by the age of 45 - the common misandric complaint in the feminist press. If they were clapped out, then, presumably, according to these scientists, they wouldn't require their 'long-term relationships' to be maintained.

However, the evidence would seem to suggest that, while men remain fairly sexually desirous throughout most of their lives, even into old age, a couple of decades inside a monogamous situation dulls rather significantly a typical male's sexual arousal to his own long-term partner! 

In other words, men almost certainly do NOT remain in long-term relationships primarily for sex. If anything, their sex drive is likely to make them 'play the field' in order to derive satisfaction from different female conquests. Long term relationships are not very conducive to this!

Researchers in Holland and Sweden say in New Scientist that the deception is the driving force behind the evolution of monogamy. By offering sex all the time, they say, females in monogamous species, such as humans, birds and porcupines, disguise whether they are fertile and trick males into staying.

The implied notion here is that young Homo Sapiens of the male gender are inclined, if not desperate, to reproduce offspring. This is laughable. Orgasm Yes. Offspring No Comment.

The result is that men haplessly ['haplessly'? - men are hopeless aren't they?] become monogamous, unable to move on to a new partner because they cannot determine whether their most recent coupling has resulted in pregnancy. [There is no sense or logic to this. Firstly, do men actually care? Secondly, he'll find out if she's pregnant soon enough!] Although it intuitively makes sense [no it doesn't] scientists had no explanation why men were mainly monogamous [This is almost unbelievable twaddle! Are men mainly monogamous as a direct consequence of their biology, or does culture force them to be so?] whereas males in most species seek to mate with as many females as possible to maximise the number of children they father.

Usually, a male choosing a stable relationship over a philandering lifestyle would have fewer offspring, putting him at an evolutionary disadvantage. [EXACTLY!] Now, Magnus Enquist, a zoologist at Stockholm University, and Miguel Girones of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology have made a mathematical model proving that under certain conditions monogamy makes more sense than sleeping around.

Prof Enquist said that in most species, females only had sex when they were fertile because it took energy and risked disease. "The male strategy is to stay with the female for as long as she is fertile, then leave." This meant that males could easily tell which females were fertile to avoid wasting time on mates that would not conceive.

Males usually gave females no help in raising their offspring. But humans, birds and porcupines were more sophisticated, Prof Enquist said, because the females did not use visual or chemical clues to indicate when they were fertile. Instead, women had sex at any time to prevent men from telling when they might be fertile.

This explanation sounds too far-fetched.

The most likely reason that women had sex at any time is that, quite simply, if they had not been readily receptive at all times to male advances then their potential suitors would have immediately galloped off elsewhere to find more welcoming female territory.

In other words, females were designed to be permanently willing!

LOL!

Once males were blind to a female's condition it was no longer worth their while chasing lots of partners, because the one they were with was as likely to be fertile as any other.

This sounds like baloney.

And politically-correct baloney at that - apart from the female 'trickery' bit!

And, if my memory serves me correctly, it is only in the past few thousand years - at most - that men and women have actually become aware that sex might lead to babies.

Evolutionarily speaking, males today are mostly the offspring of the most highly sexual males. And the females of today derive from the ones most able to look after their children successfully. 

The females, of course, would also have benefited considerably by successfully manipulating males to look after them and their children. And so one can surmise that today's women are the offspring of the best manipulators in town!

(As if we didn't know.)

And, of course, if monogamy was truly an innately-predisposed biological 'imperative' for human survival, then societies would hardly need fairly draconian cultural laws such as those relating to marriage - and commitment. Homo Sapiens would simply fall into 'marriage' - like some of those monogamous birds! 

And if men were innately monogamous, societies would also not have so many problems caused by those seemingly insatiable sex drives that make many men do the stupidest - and often most criminal - of things.

Our genes have certainly not changed much in the past 50,000 years, and much of our brain is pretty 'old' - millions of years old - in the evolutionary sense. We share very much with chimpanzees! And the evidence seems to suggest that Homo Sapiens started to 'civilise' into large co-operative groups, of 50 or more, only some 20,000 years ago.

The trick to 'success', and growth, in ALL these different groups, was 'patriarchy' - a cultural phenomenon where, among other things, rules were laid down that made the men the heads of their families.

And the groups that did this, and made other successful cultural 'deals', grew in power - until Homo Sapiens eventually took over the planet.

And it is well worth noting that those groups that were NOT patriarchal DIDN'T 'MAKE IT'!

NOT ONE OF THEM!

Males are not monogamous biologically. And it would NOT have been evolutionarily advantageous for them to be so. After generations of 'hominids' (2 million years of them perhaps) the 'monogamous gene' would have been statistically washed away by the 'genes for philanderers and rapists'!

In recent times, however, (20,000 years - where evolution can have had little impact IN THIS AREA) men have been forced to be monogamous by many societies that wanted to be strong and that needed to maintain certain beliefs (often religious) in order to protect that strength.

In the future, however, humans will probably arrange matters so that many more females than males are born.

And then we will see how truly monogamous men are!

LOL!

(Also see We're going to become extinct, like the dinosaurs.)