Is monogamy in line with human nature?

Abstract:Humans are animals that drink without being thirsty, so if everything is left to the body, then sex is a game that can happen anytime and anywhere. Monogamy uses marriage as a form of marriage to keep sexual partners relatively stable. This reduces the number of males...

Humans are animals that drink without being thirsty, so if everything is left to the body, then sex is a game that can happen anytime and anywhere. Monogamy uses marriage as a form of marriage to keep sexual partners relatively stable. This reduces the endless competition between males for mates, leaving more room for cooperation and time and energy for raising children.

From this point of view, monogamy is the key to ensuring that humans gain a competitive advantage. But after basic needs are met, people often develop a desire to "go to a higher level", which is in line with people's inherent need for self-expansion. Would you be satisfied with facing the same face for your entire life? Putting aside self-control, you have to admit that human nature is curious and greedy.

It has long been an open secret that men desire the number of sexual partners, and emperors of all dynasties have been their role models. For women, although being surrounded by men is not the highest goal of a beautiful life, it doesn't hurt to have more people loving you, right? Besides, human nature is to get tired of the old and love the new. Of course, this "new" does not always refer to new people, it can also mean changing the old look into a new one, it all depends on your management skills.

A new study suggests that for today's monogamous marriages, we can thank two key players: men with low combativeness and women who choose to be faithful to them.

This courtship strategy may have triggered a key step in the long process of family evolution, said study author Sergey Gavoli, a biomathematician at the University of Tennessee. "Without it, our modern family model would no longer exist."

The mating structure of humans is significantly different from the promiscuous sex of chimpanzees. In a chimpanzee group, a small number of males dominate the rest of the group with their superior fighting power and can mate freely with female chimpanzees. The inferior male gorillas, on the other hand, largely lose the opportunity to mate.

Male chimpanzees do not contribute anything to raising their offspring, leaving that responsibility to the females. Some scientists believe that our ancestors had similar mating and raising patterns to chimpanzees. The transition to monogamy is crucial for humans, a highly intelligent species, because it takes a lot of time and energy to cultivate children's independence, which is difficult for mothers to accomplish alone.

So how did this change happen? This is not a simple question. Gavolito says dominant, promiscuous males enjoy not having to invest in their own offspring because they will have plenty of them anyway. If males help and protect a small number of offspring, the results can be very successful, but they need to make sure those children are their own and not someone else's. Otherwise, they will be wasting their resources, and there is a high possibility that other males will take advantage of the situation.

In a study published May 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gavoli used mathematical modeling to test the factors that scientists have hypothesized might drive the shift to monogamy. These include mate guarding (males hang around females they have mated with so that others cannot mate with them) and provisioning (males offer food or other resources to females in exchange for the opportunity to mate).

After processing and analyzing a large amount of data, he found that these factors alone were not enough to keep a species from promiscuity. But after some tweaking the model worked.

First, he no longer assumes that all males will behave in the same way. He tested the following scenario: What would happen if low-ranking males offered food to females in exchange for the opportunity to mate? These disadvantaged males have nothing to lose by changing their courtship strategy because they no longer have any advantage in a fight.

Another key change is that these low-ranking males will choose females who are loyal to them. “When I take those factors into account, things move toward monogamy,” Gavolit said. Eventually, monogamy spread throughout the tribe.

When people were talking about free love in the 1960s, they had no idea that humanity's most important sexual revolution had already happened millions of years earlier, Gavolito added.

Owen Lovejoy, a biological anthropologist at Kent State University in the United States, said that this paper coincides with his theory of the evolution of monogamy. For years, he had believed that monogamy arose from males providing food to females. But David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that while the paper provides a "plausible" explanation for the emergence of monogamy, it greatly simplifies human sexual behavior. He said that human mating behavior is diverse, including not only stable long-term pair bonds, but also a variety of other strategies, such as casual sex, serial monogamy (having multiple spouses in a lifetime, but not more than one spouse at the same time), and seeking sexual partners other than spouses.

The paper also fails to explain why males did not go directly from promiscuity to monogamy, but instead used polygamy as a transition. Bernard Chappe, a primatologist at the University of Montreal in Canada, believes that once polygamy emerged, the transition to monogamy would be easy even without the Gavoli assumption that males provide food or other resources to females.