Monogamy Shamogamy

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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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.

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 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 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 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 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?

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 angler fish and they're strange ways, then you can find us on Twitter, where we are Blow the Mind. You can also find us on Facebook. Just do a search on Facebook for stuff to Blow your Mind and you will probably find us, And you can also send us an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.

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