Re: Men wander and women want a single partner....NOT
Thomas wrote:BorisKitten wrote:I think it's just as much an evolutionary advantage for women to seek multiple partners as men...for the obvious reason that, the more men a woman sleeps with, the more likely it is that ONE of them will believe he's the father.
I think your argument works if the average woman can expect to keep each of her multiple partners ignorant of her other engagements. But I would guess that in the stone-age environment evolution optimized us for, that would have been hard to impossible.
In the absence of secrecy though, to a first approximation, each of the n possible fathers would provide some amount of care for a child they knew was theirs. I would expect that they provide 1/n as much for a child that has one chance in n of being his child. Thus, under monogamy, the mother gets one father's worth of childcare; under promiscuity, she gets n times 1/n father's worth of it. There would be no difference either way under that first approximation. To a second approximation though, I expect that monogamy should leave the child better cared for, because the mother's promiscuity makes the care for it a public good: Each of the n possible fathers have an incentive to have their genes free-ride on the child care provided by the other n-1 possible fathers. Thus, their best reproductive cost-benefit tradeoff is to provide less than their fair share. Or in less pompous terms, child care would become a similar problem as cleaning-up is in an apartment-sharing community. Children conceived in monogamy will be better cared for on average, for the same reasons single-inhabitant apartments are better-cleaned on average.
Of course there still is the original argument for the opinion you are attacking: Men can father more children than women can mother over their lifetime. Therefore men can best maximize their reproductive success by going for quantity, while women can best maximize it by going for quality.
Thank you for your thoughtful post, Thomas.
First, I don't think it was necessarily true that females made a secret of multiple engagements. I base this partly on the fact that it's unlikely a single male will bring a female to orgasm, especially in the presumably "rough & tumble" sex of our ancestors. She may be MADE for multiple partners in succession. If she were built for a single partner, a single partner would probably cause her to orgasm (thus helping along conception) much more QUICKLY.
Given the assumption that we didn't have time for long & leisurely love-making sessions, only a series of male partners would be able to satisfy her. And when we think about it, this is a great deal safer than one long session, as more people are looking out for predators in this case.
Second, if females are "made" for monogamy, why do sperm compete and kill one another?
Third, we do not even know if our ancestors were aware of the concept of fatherhood.
Fourth, a male can only TRY to impregnate many females in the year it'll take a female to bear a child. He will only succeed if his sperm is able to compete with that of other males.
Fifth, I believe we are overestimating the importance of a "known" father for a given child. Given the high death rate during birth, we must note that ONLY ANOTHER LACTATING FEMALE will be able to assist in raising the abandoned infant. A male is utterly useless to the infant in the common event of the immediate death of the female.
Thus,
community matters a great deal more than fatherhood to our survival, and this is true in other areas, such as scaring off predators, hunting, keeping watch, and the like. We did not live in couples; we lived in groups.
Sixth, we are also underestimating the importance of females' ability to scavenge meat and to procure small game. The presence of males may well have been incidental to the survival of the group.
There is no doubt a very good reason that females all ovulate, when living together, at almost exactly the same time. Presumably, sex would be more lively during these ovulating days of the month than during other times. No doubt this served other purposes of which I'm not aware.
Now there is no doubt in my mind that children conceived in monogamy TODAY will be better cared for than those conceived in "the woody line." But I'm speaking of our sexual natures, not our society, and our sexual natures are the product of millenia.
I think what's important to me here is to question our assumption that it is males' nature to wander and females' nature to seek a single mate. To me, there is very little real evidence to support this assumption.
Thanks for helping to enliven this discussion.
