February 14, 2012 • 29 mins
From black vultures to angler fish, the Earth is home to many monogamous species. Humans, however, don't quite make the list. In this episode, Julie and Robert explore why humans have a hard time with the concept of monogamy. Are we hard wired to stray?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Suglas. Julie,
we were just talking before this podcast about the George
Michael video for Freedom. It's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, I don't,
(00:28):
I don't ever. I just remember seeing it on TV
back in the old days, when you know, I had
nothing better to do than to watch lots and lots
of MTV. I think it's vintage nineties, isn't it. Yeah, yeah,
it was definitely vintage nineties. That would have been about
the right time frame. But it was, as I remember,
a pretty sexy video. And they're all sorts of sexy
things going on in it, and uh and and at
(00:50):
one point George Michael writes a word on the back
of his wife's or girlfriend's back, right, yeah, actually his
then girlfriend's back, and the message is monogamy. And it's
interesting because, as you say, it's a very sexy video,
there are a lot of people who are um seem
to be expressing their sexual liberation right, which which in
(01:11):
a sense George Michael would do later for real. And
it's different context yeah. Uh, not not a boudoir, but
at least to the American public, it would be in
a stall, which is fine. Whatever. The point is is
that the video is interesting because it seems to be
about sexual liberation and yet they bring up the point
of monogamy, right, Yeah, and what is the relationship actually
(01:34):
between these two things. Not that we're saying that George
Michael video from the early nineties has to really have
a compact, solid message about the way the world works,
but it's fascinating in a light of this podcast where
we were discussing the topic of monogamy, yeah, which we
actually decided that we would dedicate a whole podcast too,
because we recently recorded um a podcast about same sex
(01:57):
pairings in the animal world or a game animals if
you read animals, right, which again carries a lot of
uh you know, anthropomorphic package with it. Yeah. And it
was interesting because we we were talking about the las
and albatrosses in oah Who, Hawaii, andty three of that
population is actually same sex female female pairings. And some
(02:18):
of these albatrosses or these birds have been together since
they started studying them nineteen years previous to so it
could have been that these birds work together for much
longer than that. But the point is just that monogamy
seems to be in nature, it seems to be in
different species, and humans really try hard, I think to
(02:40):
be monogamous. I'm try harder than others. This is true, um,
but we're not always very successful. So we want to
talk about that today, right, so animals, let me just
run through a few favorite examples of monogamous creatures. You
have given apes. You have wolves, termites, couties, barnet owls, beavers,
bald eagles, golden eagles, condor swan, broga cranes, sandhill cranes, pigeons,
(03:04):
red tailed hawks, black vultures, and apparently three percent of
the four thousand metal species are monogamous. Of course, Homo
sapiens aren't on that list, but we'll discuss that a
little more as we go. Some of the examples that
I came across in the researcher were pretty pretty interesting.
The black vultures, for instance, discourage infidelity. All nearby vultures
(03:25):
attack any vulture caught philandering, and that was interesting. For
all their disgusting corpse seating there, they're they're strict moralists.
For me, one of the most amazing examples of the
mate for life species is easily the angler fish. To
refresh that, it's about the size of a teacup deep
sea animal, frightening horror show jaws with big teeth and
(03:45):
a lighted lure that hangs in front of its face.
It's one of those. It's like one of the favorite
deep sea fish of all like ten year old boys.
So that kind of has like a lantern. Yeah, it
has like a little lantern in front of it, and
then idea is it attracts fish and then it eats
it with its frightening jaws. So you have the female, right,
and then you have the male who's kind of a
little guy. And what he'll do is he'll come up
(04:06):
and he'll he will latch on to the back of
the female, but it's with his sharp teeth, all right,
and then he just keeps hanging on. Gradually he grows
into the female, like physically his skin grows into hers.
The fuse together. He ends up getting his food through
a common blood supply, His eyeballs atrophy, his his organs
(04:29):
waste away, and he eventually becomes a sperm producing organ.
Like the only thing that really stays intact or the testes,
so he mates for life, but it's it's really hard
to imagine. Yeah, it's because he's fused to her physically
and they become a single organism basically, and so you know,
it's up in the air whether that is a life
(04:50):
worth living. Yeah, I mean talk about loss of identity
and a committed relationship. In a sense, it's like like
two reactions to it. To really anthrom Morphies, It's like,
on one hand, the male Engler fish is kind of
like the ultimate do nothing husband. You know, we're always
he's there. It's just his He's just a pair of
testes that's feeding off of her. But then on the
(05:13):
other hand, it's like a he's kind of put in
his place, like all right, like he's he may not
have any other purpose, so he's just reduced to his
his one thing and just becomes basically an organ. I
was to say, it doesn't even he can't even get away,
he can't even have some me time. Um, yeah, that's amazing. Well,
this isn't quite as traumatic that I wanted to talk about.
(05:35):
Prairie voles, Okay, because these guys of North American prairie
vowlts spend their entire adult life with one partner, and
researchers thought that was pretty interesting. He wanted to get
in the mind, so to speak, of these prai volts
and try to figure out what made them so monogamous.
And it turns out that the monogamous males have high
(05:55):
levels of the hormone vassa prison in their brains, and
promiscuous male bowls have a low level of vasa prison
in theirs. And so what they began to think is that, well,
perhaps this is a good explanation, this high level of
basic person in males. What about humans? And it can't
(06:16):
It's not really an apples to apples things some people
like to extrapolate and say, well, maybe that's the same
thing with with humans. Um uh. And while voles are
social creatures like humans, they do have a very different
brain from ours. That's pretty obvious. And in particular, periy
vols brains are studied with receptors for vasa prison and oxytocin,
(06:37):
and that's really what results in that high pair bonding instance.
Um So, I think it's interesting. Again, I feel like
people extrapolate those results sometimes and try to say that
humans have the same situation going on since we also
have basic person in oxytocin. But you know, it's hard
to say at least the jury is out. But the
idea is, especially with the voles, is it's this bonding
(06:59):
that's taking place and it's resulting favorable chemicals in the brain.
It's almost like a drug to them exactly. That's the
they're part of. The reward center is going nuts every
time they get a little oxytose in the based person. So, yeah,
that makes sense that they would want to stay in
a you know, for lack of other terms, a committed
relationship because they're getting something out of it. And in fact,
(07:20):
if you look at number of the North American Poles
are monogamous, then that bears out this whole idea that
they're getting something out of it. But according to the
Population Reference Bureau, the probability of an adult a human
getting married um and and presumably being monogamous at some
point during their life is still nearly But the problem
(07:43):
here is the of these marriages and then divorce, which
points to this this whole idea that we really do
want to be monogamous. Maybe there are benefits for us
which will discuss, but again we're still not great at it.
We'll just leave this to another animal, that being them
the gray lag goose. Yes, yeah, also another highly social creature.
(08:05):
Researchers that Austria's Conrad Lorenz Research Station found that while
some birds, some of these birds remained calm and flight,
others were extremely stressed. And they wanted to find out,
and they implanted heart rate monitors in twenty five of
the geese, and they found that the geese who were
in monogamous relationships I guess you could say, had heart
(08:25):
rates about ten percent lower during flights than the heart
rates of single birds here right, And again again it's
not apple staffles with humans. You can't say it works
with these geese. So this must be what's going on
in humans. But it is interesting to look at that
there they are less stressed out there and they're not
you know, I mean they know what they're doing that
evening right, Yeah, exactly pizza in a movie. But also
(08:50):
this is interesting. While resting, the female heart rates rose
when their mates were more than a few feet away,
but stressed them was lowered when their mates returned. And
this is from Claudio posture. She's an ethologist at Austria's
research station, the Austria Konrad Lawrence. She said, an increase
in heart rate is an investment. You'll have more energy available.
But if you don't do that, if you're in safe mode,
(09:12):
you'll save more energy which could have a long term
advantage for you. So in the animal world this makes sense.
If you're pairing up, you're probably you know, uh, safer right,
safer in numbers, and you don't have to expend a
lot of energy looking behind your back right. Well, you know,
even on a you know, on a human level, it's
like people who are paired up, they can sort of
(09:34):
double team problems. Um, you know that, and you can
let your guard down a little know on the other
person's looking out. I guess, I guess we don't. We
don't we tend not to sleep in shifts in human relationships.
You don't know? Oh yeah, I don't either. It would
be weird. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's there's a
lot of data out there that says that people are
on couples. Men and women who are married tend to
(09:56):
live longer, especially men. And some of this though, they'll
eat to the social network, social support system that's in
place that helps to reduce stress and helps to bulster
up your immune system. Actually, so in humans, there are
definitely reasons where you can see what this would be
an advantage to become part of a monogamous pair. Huh,
(10:17):
But then why I stop there? Why marry one person?
Why not marry several and then just read the benefits?
Oh well, we'll talk about this right after your break.
All right, we're back, and uh, we've been talking about
I mean, the podcast is about monogamy, but in attempt
to understand monogamy, we have to discuss its opposite number.
(10:41):
That's right, and more specifically polygyny, which is different from
polygamy in the sense that polygony is based on one
male with several females, right, Polyamory is a whole another
thing here. Polyamory is many different people participating in different
configurations of relationships. There are actually usually monogamous. But just
(11:05):
wanted to point that out that we're talking more about
polygyny here. In a paper called The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,
authors Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richardson said
that they wanted to try to get to the bottom
of why we are not exclusively a polygynous society, you know,
in all cultures across the world. And they say that
(11:28):
the anthropological record indicates that historically, approximately eight of human
societies have permitted men to more than one wife, and
both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggests that large absolute differences
in wealth should favor more poligionious marriages. Yet monogamous marriages
(11:49):
have spread across Europe and more recently across the globe,
even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. They wanted to
know why because it seems on paper like, why wouldn't
you just have a poligonous societ? Right? Those were the stakes. Yeah,
And why why doesn't someone like Donald Trump have just
multiple multiple wives? Right, I mean at one time as
opposed to serious right, right? Yeah? And that's particularly the
(12:10):
case with powerful men, right because the more wives, more
wealth uh u mss, the more stature. And some people
would say that women would be attracted to that powerful
man and would want to align in that configuration of
polignous marriage because you would reap the benefits of that.
It's just from slate dot COM's is polygamy really so awful?
(12:33):
Women are usually thought of as the primary victims of
polignous marriages, but as cultural anthropologist Joe Henrich the guy
we started talking about documents, the institution also causes problems
for the young, low status males, denied wives by older
wealthy men who have hoarded off women, and those young
men create problems for everybody. Yeah, so we're getting to
(12:54):
the meat of it right here. Well I can I
can't help, but I'm sure a lot of people have
already are already thinking of the HBO series Big Love,
which dealt with this kind of situation among an offshoot
of mainstream Mormons, a fictional group in this particular TV series.
But you see that even in this the show, which
I found the first few seasons rather enjoyable of character
(13:15):
development standpoint, But you would have like one individual, like
the villain of the show, has multiple lives of varying ages,
and then at times the younger men are not I mean,
they end up having to leave because they don't have
the opportunity to claim a wife. So you end up
having like wife monopolization by the older members of a society.
Exactly right there, there's a dearth of women available, and
(13:39):
hen Rich and Boyd and Richardson say that when you
have unmarried men and you have a scarcity of women, um,
that is correlated with increased rates of rape, fact murder,
and substance abuse. Right because on one lover, you're gonna
you're level to uh partake of more risky behavior because
you don't have as much at stake. You know, you
don't have this, you don't have an vestment in family,
(14:01):
an investment in family, you don't have investment in children.
You probably don't have like a well decorated house or anything.
You know, uh, you know it's the toilet is probably disgusting.
All these things. And and then I suppose you are
really focused on climbing up the ladder, you're going to
be more willing to take those risks to get the
kind of financial footing that you would be required to
(14:23):
claim one of these lovely ladies. That's right, you may
steal right to try to accumulate wealth. Um. Also, they
said that these guys would engage in crimes to not
only just a math enough wealth to attract women, but
also kidnap other men's wives, which saying that here in
the United States seems kind of crazy to say that
out loud unless you're talking about bora. But um, you
(14:46):
know this is is another instance why this doesn't really
work across the scales, although there are some instances where
a plug in as society could work. We know that
of the most community in China, um, and that is
a matriarchal society. And that's one where I don't know
if you would call it we actually wouldn't even call
(15:08):
it polygionist, very polygamous. But in that society, women have
decided that they won't pair with men. They will have
sex with men or even relationships or or have a
mate in a man, but that man does not live
with them. Um, if they have children with that man,
he does not raise them. In that society, men are
more useful as uncles. So the uncle's actually helped to
(15:31):
raise the children and not that the actual um father
of those children. And it's a very peaceful society. And
um it's become a bit of a something for for
tourists to to sort of ugle. But's but speaking of
the of the children's interesting, some of these studies we're
looking at the dealt with the the effect on the
(15:52):
children in these situations like that. More related to the
amount of attention they can get and how much how
much time has spent on the children in a poligonius
family versus a monogamous family. Yeah, yeah, children definitely suffer
in this scenario. Henrich cites a study of nineteenth century
Mormon households and forty five of them are headed by
wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and forty five are
(16:15):
headed by poor men, generally with one wife. And what
they found is that the children of the poor men
with one wife actually feared a lot better than the
wealthy polgynous fathers. And the reason is that they think
that those even though they are wealthy and they had resources,
they were still spread thin the the pollagonius fathers, and
(16:36):
they weren't able to invest that much time in their children. Right.
I mean, if there's just the one, it's easy to say, yeah,
I'll be at your karate practice. But if they're like
fourteen of them, you might not make a single karate practice, right.
And and this is so important in children's development, but
even with their language skills, is to have that one
on one time with their parents in order to get
(16:58):
a hold on, you know, the building blocks of the world.
So if you don't have that attachment to your parents,
then it's possible that you would have some um issues
and actually developing. And what they found is that the
pork is actually live longer than the wealthy kids. And
then the other part of this too is that you
have women kind of getting the short stick and poligonous marriages. Um,
(17:20):
that would seem obvious right right, because there they end
up they're sort of traded off at a very young
age two older men. They're they're treated like a commodity
as opposed to an individual in these cases. And and
I mean you can just easily imagine like it's going
to be a rare sixteen or even like eighteen year
old it's going to really have the like, the the
assurance to really stand up a to uh an older
(17:44):
older man in one of these societies. But then and
then be two other women that are already a part
of that family. That's true that one of the studies
we were looking at actually pointing out the like in
a In the particular study, there were there were no
examples of sister wives the lack of a better word,
the TLC show that you're referring to, Yeah, well, I
(18:04):
mean I think sister wife was the term, the term
but um, but there were no examples of the sister
wives all getting along well, like like the situation tended
to breed a certain amount of contempt among the ladies,
that's right, they said. Henrich said that an ethnographic surveys
of sixty nine polygamous cultures, they reveal no case or
(18:27):
no cases where cowife relations could be described as harmonious,
which again would makes sense because everybody's trying to uy
for resources and time. So you know, I don't think
everybody's sitting around come each other's hair, um and and
singing come buy. I yeah, but then again, I mean
I also can't help but you know, I mean, having
(18:47):
not analyzed that study in enormous detail, but you know
what relationship is could be described as when everything her harmonious,
you know. So it's like, are they applying a separate
standard to these, uh, these these families, and they that
they wouldn't be applying to a study of the monogamous.
Well see, And now to go back to monoga's relationships,
(19:09):
particularly in the United States where the divorce rate is
so high, there are a lot of psychologists that will
point to this and say, uh, the reason why we
can't stay monogamous is because we have these ideals of
what a relationship should be, and we can't necessarily suss
out the reality versus the fantasy. Um. And that's of
(19:29):
course not part and parcel of every divorce that happens.
But they say a lot of that is involved in
why we decide part ways. The society says that we
should be able to achieve this, but then our brains
and our behavior patterns they all end up pointing in this, uh,
this rather different direction. Yeah. So, I mean, part of
it is, you know, just genetic, right in terms of
(19:52):
what sort of directs our behavior on an individual basis,
I'm not saying wholesale males and females. And then part
of it is cultural, what we've leave we need for
ourselves out of a relationship and what a relationship means
to us. Yeah, I guess, I guess. The thing is
it just seems like it does seem like a no
brainer that while like a relationship between two individuals is
going to have a certain amount of complexity to it,
(20:14):
a certain you know, a certain amount of ins and
outs for every additional person added to that relationship, even
if they're you know, in the status they have the
status of a sister wife as opposed to like a
full pledge, you know, equal part of this uh, this
this unit. Uh, it's just going to breed more and
more complexity and more and more feelings of distrust or
(20:35):
you know, etcetera. Which is probably why if you if
you look back, um, of the human species, why we
have been primarily monogamistic. It used to be that we
thought that because we were trying to uh spread our genes,
and that men were certainly you know, going after more
women to procreate with them in order to do that, UM,
(20:58):
that we really run from more of a polygenous society.
But if you look at the stats, and this is
really interesting, this is from a Life science article, it
says that we've pretty much always skewed monogamous. Dr Damian
the Buddha, an investor investigator at the Saint Justine University
Hospital Research Center, headed team that analyzed genomic data from
(21:20):
three population samples Africa, Asia and Europe and um completely
monogamy would yield a one to one breeding ratio right um.
The study found that the breeding ratio varied between one
point one and one point four according to population. So
one point one in Asia, one point three in Europe,
(21:40):
and one point four in Africa. And those stats really
don't point to an overtly polygamous um society overall for
the human species. So to your point less complex than
he is probably better, right at the end of the day. Yeah,
that doesn't you know, necessarily for the question about why
(22:01):
we can't always, uh stay monogamous or why some people
can um. But it's certainly a field that is ripe
for more investigation. Well, let's look forward into the future.
What does the future hold for monogamy? Okay, we've talked
about in our Birthday Candles podcast about the very real
possibility that we might live to five hundred years, the
(22:26):
ripe old age of five hundred years, maybe even a
thousand years, depending on how well we can maintain ourselves
right with the current technology, and then the technology in
the next fifty years a hundred years, right, And if
and if two individuals can grow apart over the course
of say a decade, then they're definitely there's definitely a
higher risk they're going to grow apart over the course
of five hundred years. Uh. And this assuming that the
(22:49):
you know, there's enough neural plasticity in play that one
is changing and that these four hundred year old individuals
are not just sort of neurologically mummified versions of the
past self. You know. But but assuming you know, life
continues and people are pursuing interest in all, and you
could easily imagine that that from century to century, or
even from half century to half century, you're growing into
(23:11):
new people, and then by necessity you're you're pairing up
with new people. It's I mean, think about how much
you change from age of twenty to thirty and imagine that,
you know, like you say, a turning five hundred and
then you know two hundred years later, Uh, you're going
to have a completely different perspective and probably you're going
to have many different partners. Right, So does monogamy exist
(23:33):
in the future. I think it's what we're asking, um
And already, I mean, there have been people who say
we should have marital term limits. Um. You know, for
us now like fifteen twenty year contracts um in which
couples agree to invest time to sustain a family and
to be together. So the question is what does that
look like in the future, And um, you know, what
(23:56):
about reproduction because this is this A lot of this
is predicated on reproduction, right, like pairings get together because
there are a lot stronger together to raise a family.
This is the sort of evidence that we've been looking
into in the animal world and and uh with humans.
And so you know a lot of people are saying
that reproduction is going to start to happen in the
(24:17):
labs much more so than it is today. Right, I
mean it's already becoming more of a situation where I
mean reproductive choices such as artificial extamination, the use of
donor eggs, the use of surrogate mothers, and then of
course widespread adoption. Uh. These are all examples of where
the classic model I feel of of the family unit
and uh, end of reproduction has shifted somewhe So you know,
(24:40):
it's easy to mention the future it will continue to
shift well, and especially I mean we're talking about possibly
having a uterine replicator, so you could actually just date
a child again in the lab. So to your point,
how does that shift society if you no longer have
to pair up in order to at least accomplish some
of these aspects of life. Yeah, I mean society has
(25:02):
always changed with its technology, and it's gonna continue to
do so, even as the technology affects such, you know,
such basic human activities as the spreading of one's jeans.
And as we discussed um in the Ladies on Planet
Earth podcast, that we already see a trend in which
women are choosing not to marry or mary later since
(25:22):
they're better educated and they have better earnings. So just
you know, present day, you know, you wonder how much
of monogamy is going to stay the same, at least
as how we perceive monogamy. So do we end up
becoming the angler fish where ladies are the man is
just basically reduced to some tests in a tube somewhere,
(25:45):
and it's just like a race of ferocious ladies with
sharp teeth and glowing things protruding from their forehead. I
don't know, I don't know. That's kind of living in
the deep ocean. I mean, I gotta say, that's that's awesome.
I mean, get me wrong, out of my husband. I
don't necessarily want him to glom onto my bath. Um,
but that that makes for a nice little short story
(26:07):
right there. The anglic fish one of the nature's nature's
wonders all right, Well, let's call over the robot. I
have a couple of quick messages here to read, all right.
These are both in response to our hugged Out podcast
we heard from a listener, Amanda. Amanda Ryson says, I'm
a hugger exclamation point. I grew up. I grew up
in a family that did not hug. My sister that
(26:30):
is eleven years older than me, cannot stand to be touched.
So when I came around, I was a shocker to everyone.
Me wanting hugs and touch so much got me the
nickname clean on awesome. Well that's a yeah, that's the
That's interesting that Amanda sinthing him because it reminds me
of Actually, I received a text message from my sister
related to this, and my sister Ali rideson and says,
(26:51):
just listen to your podcast on hugging. I have a
picture of the three of us here on my desk.
Who's referring to herself, me and our sister Lucy, who
my sister Alex, and this calls loopers. She says, I
have a picture of the three of us here on
my desk. In it, you were giving me a side hug,
which the awkward hug that I my mom. Uh and
(27:14):
uh he said, and Loopers is standing a foot away
because she's she's not a hugger. So what about Alian?
She does she engage in like a hug hug? You know,
I'm not sure. Um, she's definitely a hugger. Uh, definitely
more so than uh than me or Lucy. Yeah, but
so so I guess you that there's three hugs, so
(27:35):
I mean, and you can sort of, I guess you can.
You might be able to make some argument about like
birth order there because I'm the oldest and I'm just
kind of an awkward hugger. Lucy is the middle child.
She's not a hugger at all. He doesn't really like
to be touched. And then Ali is certainly the more
gregarious of the three of us, and she's she seems
(27:55):
like a like a she's definitely more of a hugger.
She's more apt to talk about her feelings and all. Yeah,
but that might be Geneticamly, she might be the double
G variant that we're talking about, and so she's got
the receptors for it, and she might be a hug junkie.
She could be. She was also born in Canada. I
don't know, like she was she was born. What happen
doesn't make sense at all, doesn't I don't know. And
(28:17):
we have to scar Canadian listeners if they're all there's
something in the water of well. I know that generally
the stereotype of the Canadian is that the Canadians more reserved.
Like the Canadian hug is not a thing, right, I
have not heard of I've heard of Canadian bacon, but
not the Canadian hug. Yeah, I don't know. Well, Canadians
can straight me out on us, or my sister can
(28:37):
straighten me out if she hears this. It's some more
texts about it. But anyway, so there you go. There's
some some feedback on the Hugs episode. If you would
like to share some feedback on hugs, on monogamy, on
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(29:00):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Suglas. Julie,
we were just talking before this podcast about the George
Michael video for Freedom. It's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, I don't,
(00:28):
I don't ever. I just remember seeing it on TV
back in the old days, when you know, I had
nothing better to do than to watch lots and lots
of MTV. I think it's vintage nineties, isn't it. Yeah, yeah,
it was definitely vintage nineties. That would have been about
the right time frame. But it was, as I remember,
a pretty sexy video. And they're all sorts of sexy
things going on in it, and uh and and at
(00:50):
one point George Michael writes a word on the back
of his wife's or girlfriend's back, right, yeah, actually his
then girlfriend's back, and the message is monogamy. And it's
interesting because, as you say, it's a very sexy video,
there are a lot of people who are um seem
to be expressing their sexual liberation right, which which in
(01:11):
a sense George Michael would do later for real. And
it's different context yeah. Uh, not not a boudoir, but
at least to the American public, it would be in
a stall, which is fine. Whatever. The point is is
that the video is interesting because it seems to be
about sexual liberation and yet they bring up the point
of monogamy, right, Yeah, and what is the relationship actually
(01:34):
between these two things. Not that we're saying that George
Michael video from the early nineties has to really have
a compact, solid message about the way the world works,
but it's fascinating in a light of this podcast where
we were discussing the topic of monogamy, yeah, which we
actually decided that we would dedicate a whole podcast too,
because we recently recorded um a podcast about same sex
(01:57):
pairings in the animal world or a game animals if
you read animals, right, which again carries a lot of
uh you know, anthropomorphic package with it. Yeah. And it
was interesting because we we were talking about the las
and albatrosses in oah Who, Hawaii, andty three of that
population is actually same sex female female pairings. And some
(02:18):
of these albatrosses or these birds have been together since
they started studying them nineteen years previous to so it
could have been that these birds work together for much
longer than that. But the point is just that monogamy
seems to be in nature, it seems to be in
different species, and humans really try hard, I think to
(02:40):
be monogamous. I'm try harder than others. This is true, um,
but we're not always very successful. So we want to
talk about that today, right, so animals, let me just
run through a few favorite examples of monogamous creatures. You
have given apes. You have wolves, termites, couties, barnet owls, beavers,
bald eagles, golden eagles, condor swan, broga cranes, sandhill cranes, pigeons,
(03:04):
red tailed hawks, black vultures, and apparently three percent of
the four thousand metal species are monogamous. Of course, Homo
sapiens aren't on that list, but we'll discuss that a
little more as we go. Some of the examples that
I came across in the researcher were pretty pretty interesting.
The black vultures, for instance, discourage infidelity. All nearby vultures
(03:25):
attack any vulture caught philandering, and that was interesting. For
all their disgusting corpse seating there, they're they're strict moralists.
For me, one of the most amazing examples of the
mate for life species is easily the angler fish. To
refresh that, it's about the size of a teacup deep
sea animal, frightening horror show jaws with big teeth and
(03:45):
a lighted lure that hangs in front of its face.
It's one of those. It's like one of the favorite
deep sea fish of all like ten year old boys.
So that kind of has like a lantern. Yeah, it
has like a little lantern in front of it, and
then idea is it attracts fish and then it eats
it with its frightening jaws. So you have the female, right,
and then you have the male who's kind of a
little guy. And what he'll do is he'll come up
(04:06):
and he'll he will latch on to the back of
the female, but it's with his sharp teeth, all right,
and then he just keeps hanging on. Gradually he grows
into the female, like physically his skin grows into hers.
The fuse together. He ends up getting his food through
a common blood supply, His eyeballs atrophy, his his organs
(04:29):
waste away, and he eventually becomes a sperm producing organ.
Like the only thing that really stays intact or the testes,
so he mates for life, but it's it's really hard
to imagine. Yeah, it's because he's fused to her physically
and they become a single organism basically, and so you know,
it's up in the air whether that is a life
(04:50):
worth living. Yeah, I mean talk about loss of identity
and a committed relationship. In a sense, it's like like
two reactions to it. To really anthrom Morphies, It's like,
on one hand, the male Engler fish is kind of
like the ultimate do nothing husband. You know, we're always
he's there. It's just his He's just a pair of
testes that's feeding off of her. But then on the
(05:13):
other hand, it's like a he's kind of put in
his place, like all right, like he's he may not
have any other purpose, so he's just reduced to his
his one thing and just becomes basically an organ. I
was to say, it doesn't even he can't even get away,
he can't even have some me time. Um, yeah, that's amazing. Well,
this isn't quite as traumatic that I wanted to talk about.
(05:35):
Prairie voles, Okay, because these guys of North American prairie
vowlts spend their entire adult life with one partner, and
researchers thought that was pretty interesting. He wanted to get
in the mind, so to speak, of these prai volts
and try to figure out what made them so monogamous.
And it turns out that the monogamous males have high
(05:55):
levels of the hormone vassa prison in their brains, and
promiscuous male bowls have a low level of vasa prison
in theirs. And so what they began to think is that, well,
perhaps this is a good explanation, this high level of
basic person in males. What about humans? And it can't
(06:16):
It's not really an apples to apples things some people
like to extrapolate and say, well, maybe that's the same
thing with with humans. Um uh. And while voles are
social creatures like humans, they do have a very different
brain from ours. That's pretty obvious. And in particular, periy
vols brains are studied with receptors for vasa prison and oxytocin,
(06:37):
and that's really what results in that high pair bonding instance.
Um So, I think it's interesting. Again, I feel like
people extrapolate those results sometimes and try to say that
humans have the same situation going on since we also
have basic person in oxytocin. But you know, it's hard
to say at least the jury is out. But the
idea is, especially with the voles, is it's this bonding
(06:59):
that's taking place and it's resulting favorable chemicals in the brain.
It's almost like a drug to them exactly. That's the
they're part of. The reward center is going nuts every
time they get a little oxytose in the based person. So, yeah,
that makes sense that they would want to stay in
a you know, for lack of other terms, a committed
relationship because they're getting something out of it. And in fact,
(07:20):
if you look at number of the North American Poles
are monogamous, then that bears out this whole idea that
they're getting something out of it. But according to the
Population Reference Bureau, the probability of an adult a human
getting married um and and presumably being monogamous at some
point during their life is still nearly But the problem
(07:43):
here is the of these marriages and then divorce, which
points to this this whole idea that we really do
want to be monogamous. Maybe there are benefits for us
which will discuss, but again we're still not great at it.
We'll just leave this to another animal, that being them
the gray lag goose. Yes, yeah, also another highly social creature.
(08:05):
Researchers that Austria's Conrad Lorenz Research Station found that while
some birds, some of these birds remained calm and flight,
others were extremely stressed. And they wanted to find out,
and they implanted heart rate monitors in twenty five of
the geese, and they found that the geese who were
in monogamous relationships I guess you could say, had heart
(08:25):
rates about ten percent lower during flights than the heart
rates of single birds here right, And again again it's
not apple staffles with humans. You can't say it works
with these geese. So this must be what's going on
in humans. But it is interesting to look at that
there they are less stressed out there and they're not
you know, I mean they know what they're doing that
evening right, Yeah, exactly pizza in a movie. But also
(08:50):
this is interesting. While resting, the female heart rates rose
when their mates were more than a few feet away,
but stressed them was lowered when their mates returned. And
this is from Claudio posture. She's an ethologist at Austria's
research station, the Austria Konrad Lawrence. She said, an increase
in heart rate is an investment. You'll have more energy available.
But if you don't do that, if you're in safe mode,
(09:12):
you'll save more energy which could have a long term
advantage for you. So in the animal world this makes sense.
If you're pairing up, you're probably you know, uh, safer right,
safer in numbers, and you don't have to expend a
lot of energy looking behind your back right. Well, you know,
even on a you know, on a human level, it's
like people who are paired up, they can sort of
(09:34):
double team problems. Um, you know that, and you can
let your guard down a little know on the other
person's looking out. I guess, I guess we don't. We
don't we tend not to sleep in shifts in human relationships.
You don't know? Oh yeah, I don't either. It would
be weird. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's there's a
lot of data out there that says that people are
on couples. Men and women who are married tend to
(09:56):
live longer, especially men. And some of this though, they'll
eat to the social network, social support system that's in
place that helps to reduce stress and helps to bulster
up your immune system. Actually, so in humans, there are
definitely reasons where you can see what this would be
an advantage to become part of a monogamous pair. Huh,
(10:17):
But then why I stop there? Why marry one person?
Why not marry several and then just read the benefits?
Oh well, we'll talk about this right after your break.
All right, we're back, and uh, we've been talking about
I mean, the podcast is about monogamy, but in attempt
to understand monogamy, we have to discuss its opposite number.
(10:41):
That's right, and more specifically polygyny, which is different from
polygamy in the sense that polygony is based on one
male with several females, right, Polyamory is a whole another
thing here. Polyamory is many different people participating in different
configurations of relationships. There are actually usually monogamous. But just
(11:05):
wanted to point that out that we're talking more about
polygyny here. In a paper called The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,
authors Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richardson said
that they wanted to try to get to the bottom
of why we are not exclusively a polygynous society, you know,
in all cultures across the world. And they say that
(11:28):
the anthropological record indicates that historically, approximately eight of human
societies have permitted men to more than one wife, and
both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggests that large absolute differences
in wealth should favor more poligionious marriages. Yet monogamous marriages
(11:49):
have spread across Europe and more recently across the globe,
even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. They wanted to
know why because it seems on paper like, why wouldn't
you just have a poligonous societ? Right? Those were the stakes. Yeah,
And why why doesn't someone like Donald Trump have just
multiple multiple wives? Right, I mean at one time as
opposed to serious right, right? Yeah? And that's particularly the
(12:10):
case with powerful men, right because the more wives, more
wealth uh u mss, the more stature. And some people
would say that women would be attracted to that powerful
man and would want to align in that configuration of
polignous marriage because you would reap the benefits of that.
It's just from slate dot COM's is polygamy really so awful?
(12:33):
Women are usually thought of as the primary victims of
polignous marriages, but as cultural anthropologist Joe Henrich the guy
we started talking about documents, the institution also causes problems
for the young, low status males, denied wives by older
wealthy men who have hoarded off women, and those young
men create problems for everybody. Yeah, so we're getting to
(12:54):
the meat of it right here. Well I can I
can't help, but I'm sure a lot of people have
already are already thinking of the HBO series Big Love,
which dealt with this kind of situation among an offshoot
of mainstream Mormons, a fictional group in this particular TV series.
But you see that even in this the show, which
I found the first few seasons rather enjoyable of character
(13:15):
development standpoint, But you would have like one individual, like
the villain of the show, has multiple lives of varying ages,
and then at times the younger men are not I mean,
they end up having to leave because they don't have
the opportunity to claim a wife. So you end up
having like wife monopolization by the older members of a society.
Exactly right there, there's a dearth of women available, and
(13:39):
hen Rich and Boyd and Richardson say that when you
have unmarried men and you have a scarcity of women, um,
that is correlated with increased rates of rape, fact murder,
and substance abuse. Right because on one lover, you're gonna
you're level to uh partake of more risky behavior because
you don't have as much at stake. You know, you
don't have this, you don't have an vestment in family,
(14:01):
an investment in family, you don't have investment in children.
You probably don't have like a well decorated house or anything.
You know, uh, you know it's the toilet is probably disgusting.
All these things. And and then I suppose you are
really focused on climbing up the ladder, you're going to
be more willing to take those risks to get the
kind of financial footing that you would be required to
(14:23):
claim one of these lovely ladies. That's right, you may
steal right to try to accumulate wealth. Um. Also, they
said that these guys would engage in crimes to not
only just a math enough wealth to attract women, but
also kidnap other men's wives, which saying that here in
the United States seems kind of crazy to say that
out loud unless you're talking about bora. But um, you
(14:46):
know this is is another instance why this doesn't really
work across the scales, although there are some instances where
a plug in as society could work. We know that
of the most community in China, um, and that is
a matriarchal society. And that's one where I don't know
if you would call it we actually wouldn't even call
(15:08):
it polygionist, very polygamous. But in that society, women have
decided that they won't pair with men. They will have
sex with men or even relationships or or have a
mate in a man, but that man does not live
with them. Um, if they have children with that man,
he does not raise them. In that society, men are
more useful as uncles. So the uncle's actually helped to
(15:31):
raise the children and not that the actual um father
of those children. And it's a very peaceful society. And
um it's become a bit of a something for for
tourists to to sort of ugle. But's but speaking of
the of the children's interesting, some of these studies we're
looking at the dealt with the the effect on the
(15:52):
children in these situations like that. More related to the
amount of attention they can get and how much how
much time has spent on the children in a poligonius
family versus a monogamous family. Yeah, yeah, children definitely suffer
in this scenario. Henrich cites a study of nineteenth century
Mormon households and forty five of them are headed by
wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and forty five are
(16:15):
headed by poor men, generally with one wife. And what
they found is that the children of the poor men
with one wife actually feared a lot better than the
wealthy polgynous fathers. And the reason is that they think
that those even though they are wealthy and they had resources,
they were still spread thin the the pollagonius fathers, and
(16:36):
they weren't able to invest that much time in their children. Right.
I mean, if there's just the one, it's easy to say, yeah,
I'll be at your karate practice. But if they're like
fourteen of them, you might not make a single karate practice, right.
And and this is so important in children's development, but
even with their language skills, is to have that one
on one time with their parents in order to get
(16:58):
a hold on, you know, the building blocks of the world.
So if you don't have that attachment to your parents,
then it's possible that you would have some um issues
and actually developing. And what they found is that the
pork is actually live longer than the wealthy kids. And
then the other part of this too is that you
have women kind of getting the short stick and poligonous marriages. Um,
(17:20):
that would seem obvious right right, because there they end
up they're sort of traded off at a very young
age two older men. They're they're treated like a commodity
as opposed to an individual in these cases. And and
I mean you can just easily imagine like it's going
to be a rare sixteen or even like eighteen year
old it's going to really have the like, the the
assurance to really stand up a to uh an older
(17:44):
older man in one of these societies. But then and
then be two other women that are already a part
of that family. That's true that one of the studies
we were looking at actually pointing out the like in
a In the particular study, there were there were no
examples of sister wives the lack of a better word,
the TLC show that you're referring to, Yeah, well, I
(18:04):
mean I think sister wife was the term, the term
but um, but there were no examples of the sister
wives all getting along well, like like the situation tended
to breed a certain amount of contempt among the ladies,
that's right, they said. Henrich said that an ethnographic surveys
of sixty nine polygamous cultures, they reveal no case or
(18:27):
no cases where cowife relations could be described as harmonious,
which again would makes sense because everybody's trying to uy
for resources and time. So you know, I don't think
everybody's sitting around come each other's hair, um and and
singing come buy. I yeah, but then again, I mean
I also can't help but you know, I mean, having
(18:47):
not analyzed that study in enormous detail, but you know
what relationship is could be described as when everything her harmonious,
you know. So it's like, are they applying a separate
standard to these, uh, these these families, and they that
they wouldn't be applying to a study of the monogamous.
Well see, And now to go back to monoga's relationships,
(19:09):
particularly in the United States where the divorce rate is
so high, there are a lot of psychologists that will
point to this and say, uh, the reason why we
can't stay monogamous is because we have these ideals of
what a relationship should be, and we can't necessarily suss
out the reality versus the fantasy. Um. And that's of
(19:29):
course not part and parcel of every divorce that happens.
But they say a lot of that is involved in
why we decide part ways. The society says that we
should be able to achieve this, but then our brains
and our behavior patterns they all end up pointing in this, uh,
this rather different direction. Yeah. So, I mean, part of
it is, you know, just genetic, right in terms of
(19:52):
what sort of directs our behavior on an individual basis,
I'm not saying wholesale males and females. And then part
of it is cultural, what we've leave we need for
ourselves out of a relationship and what a relationship means
to us. Yeah, I guess, I guess. The thing is
it just seems like it does seem like a no
brainer that while like a relationship between two individuals is
going to have a certain amount of complexity to it,
(20:14):
a certain you know, a certain amount of ins and
outs for every additional person added to that relationship, even
if they're you know, in the status they have the
status of a sister wife as opposed to like a
full pledge, you know, equal part of this uh, this
this unit. Uh, it's just going to breed more and
more complexity and more and more feelings of distrust or
(20:35):
you know, etcetera. Which is probably why if you if
you look back, um, of the human species, why we
have been primarily monogamistic. It used to be that we
thought that because we were trying to uh spread our genes,
and that men were certainly you know, going after more
women to procreate with them in order to do that, UM,
(20:58):
that we really run from more of a polygenous society.
But if you look at the stats, and this is
really interesting, this is from a Life science article, it
says that we've pretty much always skewed monogamous. Dr Damian
the Buddha, an investor investigator at the Saint Justine University
Hospital Research Center, headed team that analyzed genomic data from
(21:20):
three population samples Africa, Asia and Europe and um completely
monogamy would yield a one to one breeding ratio right um.
The study found that the breeding ratio varied between one
point one and one point four according to population. So
one point one in Asia, one point three in Europe,
(21:40):
and one point four in Africa. And those stats really
don't point to an overtly polygamous um society overall for
the human species. So to your point less complex than
he is probably better, right at the end of the day. Yeah,
that doesn't you know, necessarily for the question about why
(22:01):
we can't always, uh stay monogamous or why some people
can um. But it's certainly a field that is ripe
for more investigation. Well, let's look forward into the future.
What does the future hold for monogamy? Okay, we've talked
about in our Birthday Candles podcast about the very real
possibility that we might live to five hundred years, the
(22:26):
ripe old age of five hundred years, maybe even a
thousand years, depending on how well we can maintain ourselves
right with the current technology, and then the technology in
the next fifty years a hundred years, right, And if
and if two individuals can grow apart over the course
of say a decade, then they're definitely there's definitely a
higher risk they're going to grow apart over the course
of five hundred years. Uh. And this assuming that the
(22:49):
you know, there's enough neural plasticity in play that one
is changing and that these four hundred year old individuals
are not just sort of neurologically mummified versions of the
past self. You know. But but assuming you know, life
continues and people are pursuing interest in all, and you
could easily imagine that that from century to century, or
even from half century to half century, you're growing into
(23:11):
new people, and then by necessity you're you're pairing up
with new people. It's I mean, think about how much
you change from age of twenty to thirty and imagine that,
you know, like you say, a turning five hundred and
then you know two hundred years later, Uh, you're going
to have a completely different perspective and probably you're going
to have many different partners. Right, So does monogamy exist
(23:33):
in the future. I think it's what we're asking, um
And already, I mean, there have been people who say
we should have marital term limits. Um. You know, for
us now like fifteen twenty year contracts um in which
couples agree to invest time to sustain a family and
to be together. So the question is what does that
look like in the future, And um, you know, what
(23:56):
about reproduction because this is this A lot of this
is predicated on reproduction, right, like pairings get together because
there are a lot stronger together to raise a family.
This is the sort of evidence that we've been looking
into in the animal world and and uh with humans.
And so you know a lot of people are saying
that reproduction is going to start to happen in the
(24:17):
labs much more so than it is today. Right, I
mean it's already becoming more of a situation where I
mean reproductive choices such as artificial extamination, the use of
donor eggs, the use of surrogate mothers, and then of
course widespread adoption. Uh. These are all examples of where
the classic model I feel of of the family unit
and uh, end of reproduction has shifted somewhe So you know,
(24:40):
it's easy to mention the future it will continue to
shift well, and especially I mean we're talking about possibly
having a uterine replicator, so you could actually just date
a child again in the lab. So to your point,
how does that shift society if you no longer have
to pair up in order to at least accomplish some
of these aspects of life. Yeah, I mean society has
(25:02):
always changed with its technology, and it's gonna continue to
do so, even as the technology affects such, you know,
such basic human activities as the spreading of one's jeans.
And as we discussed um in the Ladies on Planet
Earth podcast, that we already see a trend in which
women are choosing not to marry or mary later since
(25:22):
they're better educated and they have better earnings. So just
you know, present day, you know, you wonder how much
of monogamy is going to stay the same, at least
as how we perceive monogamy. So do we end up
becoming the angler fish where ladies are the man is
just basically reduced to some tests in a tube somewhere,
(25:45):
and it's just like a race of ferocious ladies with
sharp teeth and glowing things protruding from their forehead. I
don't know, I don't know. That's kind of living in
the deep ocean. I mean, I gotta say, that's that's awesome.
I mean, get me wrong, out of my husband. I
don't necessarily want him to glom onto my bath. Um,
but that that makes for a nice little short story
(26:07):
right there. The anglic fish one of the nature's nature's
wonders all right, Well, let's call over the robot. I
have a couple of quick messages here to read, all right.
These are both in response to our hugged Out podcast
we heard from a listener, Amanda. Amanda Ryson says, I'm
a hugger exclamation point. I grew up. I grew up
in a family that did not hug. My sister that
(26:30):
is eleven years older than me, cannot stand to be touched.
So when I came around, I was a shocker to everyone.
Me wanting hugs and touch so much got me the
nickname clean on awesome. Well that's a yeah, that's the
That's interesting that Amanda sinthing him because it reminds me
of Actually, I received a text message from my sister
related to this, and my sister Ali rideson and says,
(26:51):
just listen to your podcast on hugging. I have a
picture of the three of us here on my desk.
Who's referring to herself, me and our sister Lucy, who
my sister Alex, and this calls loopers. She says, I
have a picture of the three of us here on
my desk. In it, you were giving me a side hug,
which the awkward hug that I my mom. Uh and
(27:14):
uh he said, and Loopers is standing a foot away
because she's she's not a hugger. So what about Alian?
She does she engage in like a hug hug? You know,
I'm not sure. Um, she's definitely a hugger. Uh, definitely
more so than uh than me or Lucy. Yeah, but
so so I guess you that there's three hugs, so
(27:35):
I mean, and you can sort of, I guess you can.
You might be able to make some argument about like
birth order there because I'm the oldest and I'm just
kind of an awkward hugger. Lucy is the middle child.
She's not a hugger at all. He doesn't really like
to be touched. And then Ali is certainly the more
gregarious of the three of us, and she's she seems
(27:55):
like a like a she's definitely more of a hugger.
She's more apt to talk about her feelings and all. Yeah,
but that might be Geneticamly, she might be the double
G variant that we're talking about, and so she's got
the receptors for it, and she might be a hug junkie.
She could be. She was also born in Canada. I
don't know, like she was she was born. What happen
doesn't make sense at all, doesn't I don't know. And
(28:17):
we have to scar Canadian listeners if they're all there's
something in the water of well. I know that generally
the stereotype of the Canadian is that the Canadians more reserved.
Like the Canadian hug is not a thing, right, I
have not heard of I've heard of Canadian bacon, but
not the Canadian hug. Yeah, I don't know. Well, Canadians
can straight me out on us, or my sister can
(28:37):
straighten me out if she hears this. It's some more
texts about it. But anyway, so there you go. There's
some some feedback on the Hugs episode. If you would
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