When men want women on this kind of basic animalistic, just life level, to reproduce. Right? So the most obvious way to distribute women is to give all the women to the strongest man. Right? So you get — reproduce from the strongest person. That’s the way gorillas — many gorillas, silverbacks live. The one guy gets all the girls. And the problem with that is it sounds like a good idea, but it’s unstable because, obviously, all the other guys finally get think to themselves, oh, I know what we’ll do. We’ll get together and we’ll kill the main guy, the alpha guy, and we’ll steal the woman. And that’s why those governments are unstable. That’s how you get Magna Carta where the aristocrats, the most powerful people, go to the king and say, we want power too. That is, kind of, the human way of acting out that gorilla system. Ultimately, other men want women.

When you have a democracy, the best system is monogamy. Right? One per customer. Everybody gets a woman. And it sounds like that means that weak people will be allowed to breed, but it turns out it’s actually a pretty good system because it favors diversity. Because a lot of times, the smartest guy in the room and the strongest guy in the room are two entirely different people. So you want the strongest guy to reproduce, but you also want the smartest guy to reproduce, and that is how humanity advances. In fact, monogamy, one per customer, is a really good basis for a society. However, it goes against the gorilla code, and the gorilla code is written into our DNA.

  • memfree@lemmy.ml
    10·
    3 months ago

    The premise is suspect.

    First, there are lots of (mostly) monogamous animals (‘cheating’ in monogamous pair bonds gets a fair amount of study).

    Second, which gorillas? Are you talking about the ones that form alliances with several males and maintain friendly relationships, groom one another, and fight together against common enemies?

    Third, monogamy (even with cheating) seems to have an advantage for species where females forage on their own rather than in groups/herds. There’s more to it, though.

    This is from a pre-print study, so should be viewed with some suspicion, but it at least describes the current state of investigations:

    Since phylogenetic inertia is not a realistic explanation given that four very distantly related lineages are monogamous, the implication is that monogamy has alternative fitness advantages for males. These benefits must also be advantageous for the female, otherwise she would be not willing to tolerate the male’s continued presence – and, perhaps more importantly, would not be willing to undergo the evolution of the expensive cognitive and behavioural traits associated with pairbonding (Dunbar & Shultz 2021).

    the fact that primates, in particular, have a long period of offspring dependency suggests that the problem is more likely to be associated with offspring survival.

    For human-specific stuff, here’s a piece on promiscuity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210680/

    And one on the ideology of female ‘honor’ and predictors of who will feel what and how strongly : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10563489/