Monogamy
This can be interpreted as a form of plural mating, as are those societies dominated by female-headed families in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Brazil where there is frequent rotation of unmarried partners.
[30] However, the Human Rights Campaign has stated, based on a Rockway Institute report, that "LGBT" young people... want to spend their adult life in a long-term relationship raising children."
Frequencies as high as 30% are sometimes assumed in the media, but research[36][37] by sociologist Michael Gilding traced these overestimates back to an informal remark at a 1972 conference.
[47][48][49] Similarly, monogamy should evolve in areas of ecological stress because male reproductive success should be higher if their resources are focused on ensuring offspring survival rather than searching for other mates.
[3] Furthermore, human intelligence and material culture allows for better adaptation to different and rougher ecological areas, thus reducing the causation and even correlation of monogamous marriage and extreme climates.
[51] Although careful not to say that this indicates monogamous mating in early hominids, the authors do say that reduced levels of sexual dimorphism in A. afarensis "do not imply that monogamy is any less probable than polygyny".
[51] However, Gordon, Green and Richmond claim that in examining postcranial remains, A. afarensis is more sexually dimorphic than modern humans and chimpanzees with levels closer to those of orangutans and gorillas.
[55] Plavcan and van Schaik conclude their examination of this controversy by stating that, overall, sexual dimorphism in australopithecines is not indicative of any behavioral implications or mating systems.
[60] Drawing on the work of Ester Boserup, Goody notes that the sexual division of labour varies in intensive plough agriculture and extensive shifting horticulture.
[11] A further study drawing on the Ethnographic Atlas showed a statistical correlation between increasing size of the society, the belief in "high gods" to support human morality, and monogamy.
[63] Betzig postulated that culture/society can also be a source of social monogamy by enforcing it through rules and laws set by third-party actors, usually in order to protect the wealth or power of the elite.
[3][64][65] For example, Augustus Caesar encouraged marriage and reproduction to force the aristocracy to divide their wealth and power among multiple heirs, but the aristocrats kept their socially monogamous, legitimate children to a minimum to ensure their legacy while having many extra-pair copulations.
[65] In both of these instances, the rule-making elite used cultural processes to ensure greater reproductive fitness for themselves and their offspring, leading to a larger genetic influence in future generations.
[68][69] Alexandra Kollontai in Make Way for the Winged Eros[70] argues that monogamy is an artifact of capitalist concepts of property and inheritance and wrote, "The social aims of the working class are not affected one bit by whether love takes the form of a long and official union or is expressed in a temporary relationship.
[75][76] This would correspond to the period necessary to bring a child to relative independence in the traditionally small, interdependent, communal societies of pre-Neolithic humans, before they settled into more separate agricultural communities.
[11] While genetic evidence typically displays a bias towards a smaller number of men reproducing with more women, some regions or time periods have shown the opposite.
[78] The Musharoff study also found a male bias in Europeans (20% female) during an out-of-Africa migration event that may have increased the number of men successfully reproducing with women, perhaps by replenishing the genetic pool in Europe.
However, there was a temporary but sharp decrease in the ratio during the start of the Neolithic resolution, where the average man with modern descendants had children with 17 women (circa 8,000 years ago).
Laura Betzig argues that in the six large, highly stratified early states, commoners were generally monogamous but that elites practiced de facto polygyny.
[91] Monogamy has appeared in some traditional tribal societies such as the Andamanese, Karen in Burma, Sami and Ket in northern Eurasia, and the Pueblo Indians of the United States, apparently unrelated to the development of the Christian monogamous paradigm.
[97] Michael Coogan, in contrast, states that "Polygyny continued to be practised well into the biblical period, and it is attested among Jews as late as the second century CE.
R. Ammi, an amora states: Whoever takes a second wife in addition to his first one shall divorce the first and pay her kettubah (Yevamot 65a)Roman customs, which prohibited polygamy, may have enhanced such an attitude[original research?]
[102][103] As John Paul II interpreted the dialogue between Jesus and the Pharisees (Gospel of Matthew 19:3–8), Christ emphasized the primordial beauty of monogamic spousal love described in the Book of Genesis 1:26–31, 2:4–25, whereby a man and woman by their nature are each ready to be a beautifying, total and personal gift to one another: Jesus avoids entangling himself in juridical or casuistic controversies; instead, he appeals twice to the "beginning".
... it clearly leads the interlocutors to reflect about the way in which, in the mystery of creation, man was formed precisely as "male and female," in order to understand correctly the normative meaning of the words of Genesis.
Friedrich Engels stated that compulsory monogamy could only lead to increased prostitution and general immorality, with the benefits of restricting capital and solidifying the class structure.
The new democratic marriage system was based on the free choice of couples, monogamy, equal rights for both sexes, and the protection of the lawful interests of women.
It abolished the begetting of male offspring as the principal purpose of marriage and weakened kinship ties which reduced the pressure on women to bear many children, especially sons.
The Government then initiated an extensive campaign of marriage-law education, working jointly with the Communist Party, women's federations, trade unions, the armed forces, schools and other organizations.
[120][121] Evolutionary theory predicts that males would be apt to seek more mating partners than females because they obtain higher reproductive benefits from such a strategy.
[143] This finding highlights the role of genetic evolution in altering the neuroanatomical distribution of receptors, resulting in certain neural circuits becoming sensitive to changes in neuropeptides.
