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You are making a fairly obvious mistake here in conflating timelines. Widespread “state sanctioned monogamy” is a very recent phenomenon but the genetics result

You are making a fairly obvious mistake here in conflating timelines. Widespread “state sanctioned monogamy” is a very recent phenomenon but the genetics results you are basing from have to do with very long time frames. There are loads of plausible ways monogamy arose as a virtue that needn’t have to do with changing that ratio & there are loads of ways that ratio could have come about without societies filled with “angry young men” This is a fairly obvious set of bad reasoning. Either you’ve not paid much attention or you are arguing in bad faith (likely to further some worldview).

iguy 8y ago
No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to massively unequal concentrated power. Kings who could command the labour of thousands. There's a giant bottleneck there in how many men reproduced. And we started on building organised societies, including organised religion, around then too. It seems clear to me that these are partly about finding ways to counteract such tendencies, ways to make people work together better. We needn't invoke virtue, merely that societies with less internal friction & more work from everyone were better at clobbering their neighbours. Now I may be wrong about this story, surely there are other explanations. But it's not "WTF" material.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  Wide spread state sanctioned monogamy as a norm is a couple of hundred years old. All 3 of the Hebrew based religions for instance don’t have the requirement and quite the opposite have polygamy as part of their basic texts. Before approximately the Victorian age the idea of monogamy from a reproductive position would be seen as odd. States have other ways to handle their angry young men. A common one from history (the Bible is rife with it) was using them to slaughter some other states young men & enslave the women.
  - iguy 8y ago
    > Before approximately the Victorian age No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen. Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-Laslett.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La... I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign. Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.

iguy 8y ago

No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to massively unequal concentrated power. Kings who could command the labour of thousands. There's a giant bottleneck there in how many men reproduced. And we started on building organised societies, including organised religion, around then too. It seems clear to me that these are partly about finding ways to counteract such tendencies, ways to make people work together better. We needn't invoke virtue, merely that societies with less internal friction & more work from everyone were better at clobbering their neighbours. Now I may be wrong about this story, surely there are other explanations. But it's not "WTF" material.

kasey_junk 8y ago
Wide spread state sanctioned monogamy as a norm is a couple of hundred years old. All 3 of the Hebrew based religions for instance don’t have the requirement and quite the opposite have polygamy as part of their basic texts. Before approximately the Victorian age the idea of monogamy from a reproductive position would be seen as odd. States have other ways to handle their angry young men. A common one from history (the Bible is rife with it) was using them to slaughter some other states young men & enslave the women.
- iguy 8y ago
  > Before approximately the Victorian age No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen. Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-Laslett.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La... I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign. Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.