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you know some my guy friends for years have been talking about how they don't
think that the human species is meant to be monogamous and I've always kinda
chalked it up to the really are just looking for excuses to sleep around but
we actually now have a really interesting actually two studies
conflicting studies
and I came across an article that writes this up on science news dot org if
that's not a web site that you
check out I encourage you to look at it it's a very very interesting website lot
a good stories on it
and it look at two studies that were done on the origins ok human monogamy
and the studies conflict and I'll talk to you a little bit about that the two
studies are
the evolution of social monogamy in mammals
and another one called the male
infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates
ok and so see if I can sum these up for you no way thats concise
and then we can discuss them one group of researchers
says that monogamy evolved in primates to counter the threat have males
killing babies to boost their siring success
I the other team concludes that mammals including primates become monogamous
when females
live far away from one another so
the differences in these two studies are raising a lot of eyebrows
up by Anthony de Fiori who's an evolutionary anthropologist at
University of Texas in Austin says
they do seem to be saying the opposite thing it's interesting because the day
meaning the two studies use very very similar
methods the two groups researchers also disagree on whether the research has
implications for why humans evolved
fidelity teammates at both teams investigated the evolution of social
monogamy
which researchers define as male and female
pairs living in breeding pairs it doesn't mean that they're always
faithful there can be cheating
Amanda and it just means that the living situation is in pairs social monogamy
I'm its common for birds
to have the social monogamy but it's actually pretty rare in mammals
and that's because birth birds have both sexes can participate in the parenting
duties such as
incubating the eggs feeding the checks but male mammals
can't Jess state or breastfeed a baby so during the long period when the mother
mammal is occupied with the baby
an opportunistic father can go and start having babies with an with another
female so
nine-percent I've mammal species such as walls and beavers live in pairs in which
the mail sticks by his maid
and it's more common among primate species about 25 percent of primate
species live in these pairs
now *** sapiens what seems to it seems to be clear now that *** sapiens are
not
genetically deferential to monogamy and
a we know that because there are many societies that don't adopt
monogamous social standards similar to kind of modern-day
Western world so now the the question is
did monogamy did social monogamy among humans
evolve as a result love behavioral evolution
alone right and this really comes back to the idea of
we have this modern society modern legal system
and kind of modern codes behavior
and is that what is pushing monogamy more so than anything else and again
here we're not talking about people having multiple wives or husbands which
is you know the institution of marriage
is a legal one very specifically but we're really just talking about socially
social monogamy and the idea that
the correct thing for most people in again there are people who are
are polyamorous are there and multi-way relationships so on and so forth
but broadly speaking social monogamy is the norm
what is natural about that and what has been kinda a socially constructed
send me your thoughts could this ever change would you want to change does it
make sense to you that things are the way they are or not
I think that this is really interesting particularly in so many of my friends
for years have been saying
I just feel like humans are meant to have many partners at the same time and
that's just the way it should be
and my fiance shouldn't care which i think is that kinda like that
out on that really explains what the source of a lot of that sentiment
is