Monogamy May Have Evolved To Prevent Infanticide 256
sciencehabit writes "Human males and females have a strong tendency to live together in monogamous pairs, albeit for highly varied periods of time and degrees of fidelity. Just how such behavior arose has been the topic of much debate among researchers. A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males."
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
and killing offspring is directly opposed to the core of evolutionary theory
Unless those offspring are in direct competition for food and reproductive access with your offspring. Then it makes a lot of sense evolution-wise.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO (Score:5, Insightful)
primates tend to be in bands
Except for the ones that aren't, like orangutans, a close relative of ours.
Mogamy happen because it takes a long time to rise the offspring, and it needs the support of both the female and male
That's one pressure. TFS mentions another. There can be more than one reason, and there usually are.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you explain why you *didn't* get into a car accident in the last month? What was it that you did that nobody else who got into a car accident last month did, to cause you to avoid all the accidents that could have happened?
You could say that Bill was drunk, or Alice was texting, and that's why they got into car accidents, but that doesn't explain how every single person that drove drunk or texted while driving didn't get into an accident.
What kind of explanation were you expecting?
Birds clearly have an advantage by being able to fly. If I said "Flying is not advantageous, because if it was, all organisms would have evolved to be able to fly", would that be convincing to you?
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
The study (and the linked article) go far beyond "lots of stuff could have worked and this is the one that must have come up." What is says is that monogamy hasn't evolved in other species because they don't practice infanticide. And why is that? Because big-brained animals take a long time to develop, so the young are defenseless.
tired of evolutionary bs (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe evolution happens, both historically and currently, and on scales both grand and small.
But I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations about how something or another could have been a factor in our evolutionary past.
That kind of speculation is for late-night living-room talk, not scientific journals.
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
How does monogamy change who is in competition with whom? There is no evolutionary mechanism to enforce monogamy. From a purely genetic standpoint there is no benefit to monogamy for a strong male.
Articles like this are just freeze dried beef pasta boiled up in 100 gallon vats and thrown to the neckbeards who gobble it up while slathering vaseline and yanking each other off.
Shit isn't even pretending to be science any more. It's just some asshole in a lab coat leading a revivial in a Kentucky tent.
The argument is that your statement about a strong male being better off without monogamy seems right but isn't, because if strong males fail to stick around and ensure the children they conceived survive to reach adulthood and carry on the cycle, it won't happen, and their "strong" genes will be wiped from the face of the earth.
Re:Oh Please (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
why it hasn't evolved in lots of other species.
IANAA (I am not an Anthropologist) but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and hypothesise that it is because human offspring require a much bigger commitment of time, energy and resources before they can fend for themselves, than the offspring of pretty much any other species on the planet. Mind you monogamy is not exactly some sort of genetic trait we have evolved. Here in the west it is largely a cultural phenomenon that the christian church has popularised. There are plenty of cultures around the world where even fairly low status males can have more than one wife and there are also cultures where wives can have multiple husbands. So it is probably more accurate to say that humans evolved to be highly social and to engage in highly structured very long term bonding to form monogamous or polygamous families, partly to minimise infanticide and to maximise the odds of their very time and resource expensive offspring reaching adulthood.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
But the point is, it's not productive to discuss what "could be" explained by evolution, since that is practically everything and anything. You have to stick with the fossil record, DNA, and (where possible) direct experiments.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
What is says is that monogamy hasn't evolved in other species because they don't practice infanticide.
What I was thinking when I posted was of all the nature documentaries where a male adopts a new female into his "harem" and promptly kills her young. A few weeks ago I saw a somewhat unnerving film of a zebra doing that, picking up the foal by the neck with his teeth, and bashing him down onto the ground. I believe lots of other species do it too, and I've seen films of several.
Re:Incorrect assumption (Score:2, Insightful)
Women cheat just as much as men. Your argument still holds--it makes just as much sense for the female to cheat as it does the male, namely the opportunity to mix your genes with someone else's--you just need to excise some of the sexism.
Re:tired of evolutionary bs (Score:5, Insightful)
But I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations about how something or another could have been a factor in our evolutionary past.
Good thing that's not this story then, where the entire point of the paper was to test various hypothesis about monogamy. Seriously, at least RTFA.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:5, Insightful)
Young women are not attracted to 'idiots' that crash and burn, they are attracted to 'heros' who's skills and strength keep them alive and healthy despite the odds. It's not a conscious thing in either sex, "cheating death" is an integral part of the human ritual of finding a suitable mate, it's so deeply ingrained in humans that a males brain chemistry will reward "cheating death" with feelings of elation, pride, and self-satisfaction.
Looking back as an old man who had the luck to survive the motorbike ritual (among others), young men really do behave like peacocks, the things they unconsciously do to attract a mate are even more dangerous to the individual than that ridiculous tail is to the peacock. At the end of the day it does make our societies (if not our species) better suited to the civilizations we invented. We are continually evolving and are in a feedback loop with the environment we have created for ourselves, not unlike the termite and it's air-conditioned fungus farm.
Re:tired of evolutionary bs (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations...
Out of interest, did you RTFA? Or, more importantly, did you read the original [pnas.org] papers [sciencemag.org] it cites? It's a fairly common scenario for scientists to do some real, rigorous testing of a hypothesis, and describe their work in a scientific paper, and then for a mainstream news article to print a dumbed-down version, and smart people reading that article to get the wrong idea of the original work.
In short: before you bash the scientists involved, read what they wrote, rather than what someone else wrote about them.
Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps not. Maybe the mods objected to the misogyny.
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to hypothesize that a lot of people are hung up on finding an evolutionary answer for everything. Sometimes things just happen in a species without there being an evolutionary advantage. Species are not hyper optimized. Sometimes things are just side effects. Sometimes I get a feeling that people like to anthropomorphize evolution, replacing a deity that designs with specific reasons and goals with a system that does the same thing. Especially with very fuzzy things like behavior.
Ie, I've heard people discussing the reason for grandmothers. This is a silly concept, unless your view of evolution is that it is a system that optimizes organisms. Maybe grandmothers exist because humans live longer than they used to, no need for a hand waving explanation. Others want to have an evolutionary "reason" for homosexuality. Yes, it's not a nice thought to think that it's a biological mistake, but it's certainly easy enough to think that it is because some genes are expressed at a certain time that caused various hormones to be produced at a particular time in development, and as a side effect of this slight variance in timing you end up with an organism that does not fit the standardized phenotype. May as well ask what the evolutionary advantage of preferring red heads over blondes is.
Humans are extremely complex, in a chaos system way. We have plenty of attributes that are not optimal for reproduction of the species, but they exist because they don't kill us off. But evolution is dumbed down for teaching purposes, even in undergraduate classes. People still recite "survival of the fittest" as if it's some sort of law. Others talk about "higher" species or "more evolved", which is nonsense.
As for monogomy, research among cultures around the world do show a consistent view that is "mostly" monogamous. Ie, serial monogamy with occasional cheating on the sly. That's universal. Yes, there are examples of cultures with polygamy, but even in those societies the polygamy is rare and when it occurs it is due to societal pressures (ie, a severe shortage of one gender, usually men due to wars), and at other times is restricted to just high class members of society (ie, to have more than one wife is proof that you are wealthy).
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he's correct.
That is complete nonsense. We are seeing the results of social pressure to be monogamous; it is not genetic.
Just look at history for 1000's of examples to the contrary. Monogamy is a very recent phenomenon.
These studies are a huge disservice to humanity that attempt to "force" a point of view on people.
It's also reasonable to assume that infanticide may have more attribution to infant mortality than deliberate action by another male.
People who produce this junk are really missing so much of the picture.
I can believe this! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But that doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)