Against polygamy
 

Nothing serious, just some stuff I thought of a while back. Tongue firmly in cheek, okay?

This is an argument against Mormon-style harem polygamy. I think I must have seen an ad for Big Love or something.

Consider the following stipulations:

Each male can take as many wives as he chooses. Women marry one man at most.

Each wife gives a possibility of nookie.

Nookie only takes place between man and wife (because anything else is an abomination, remember?)

There is risk of strife, but only between wives (because if a woman disagrees with the man, she is automatically wrong and will shut her cakehole.) This could irritate the man.

Simple mathematics shows that adding wives beyond one worsens the situation.

Consider:

Adding wives increases the chance of nookie in a linear manner:

Number of wives : ........... 0....1....2....3....4....5....6
Opportunities for nookie :.. 0....1....2....3....4....5....6


But adding wives increases the chance of strife at an increasing rate.

Number of wives : ........... 0....1....2....3....4.....5....6
Chance of strife :............. 0....0....1....3....6....10...15

This is because each additional wife can engage in strife with any one of the existing wives, but can only engage in nookie with the man.

Clearly, no sensible man would add wives beyond one, or maybe two (you know ... one for use, one for pleasure...).

Maths. Proving Mormons wrong yet again. :D

I'm thinking about sending this to the Journal of Chauvinist Pig Studies, so I'd appreciate your feedback.

IIRC Wang Lung noted this when he brought Lotus into his marriage with O-lan.

Classic rookie mistake.

If I disagree, I am automatically wrong.
Therefore I will shut my cakehole.

Is there nothing you can't mathematize?!!! (well played)

I disagree. One wife knows she has no competition, and thus will only want nookie on her schedule. But if she is aware of wife #2's nookie offerings, she is more likely to increase her own offerings to compete (for approval, for more babies, etc.) Thus the opportunities for nookie are a gestalt proposition: two wives together will likely provide a greater chance of nookie than the sum of each individual wife alone.

It is important to note, however, the law of diminishing returns. The function wives(nookie) is likely a logarithmic scale approaching a limit of around one nookie per day. No point in adding wives beyond that ideal maximum.

Hence the fantasy of most men: a threesome with 2 girls.

Isn't that ironic? All most women are fantasizing about is ONE good (in every sense) man. You say men are content with a hundred crappy women?

But Polygamous Nookie is provided on a serial, not parallel basis. There are no two-for-one specials.

I know this because I do watch Big Love, Sister Wives, and saw several documentaries on Mormon Cults on National Geographic channel yesterday.

From what I know/heard, the founder of the Mormon church was caught committing adultery on his wife, and then told her God came to him as an angel and told him it was legitimate to take multiple wives.

Because in a biological sense, marriage for homo sapiens is and always will be universal. Throughout the globe it has been one husband one wife. This solves the postpartum feeding problem, as the mother stays at home and has the father bound to her through marriage so he can go gather food for his offspring.

No knocking on the religion, but polygamy goes against human evolution/instinct.

It's true. Men never cheat on their wives because that would be unnatural...

:lol:

And all us chicks want to do is breed and feed and hope hubby doesn't run across a sheep or something so he'll come home and bring us food. ;)

I didn't mean cheat, but the union of marriage universally has always been 1:1 and evolved that way for humans because of the postpartum feeding problem.

The what?

Fresh are you discounting Japan and most of the Middle East in your calculations? Traditionally in Africa, men would have as many women as they could afford.
And even Europeans Kings routinely had known mistresses. Madame de Pompadour, Nell Gwynn.

Men throughout the ages have done whatever and whomever they have been able to get away with. And the more power you had the more you wanted to ensure the succession of your DNA. Houses and Kingdoms have fallen because Kings have been unable to produce offspring.

Um. No. Your model is far too simplistic. It may be the "norm" currently but that's in large part a consequence of path dependence and not anything hard-wired.

It's a really complicated issue and I'm not qualified to really tear up your view. For that we would need an anthropologist.

But here is my only-mildly informed, quickly written view.

Polygamy (or monogamy or polyandry) is societal and not against anything inherent to humanness. It is an attempt at establishing paternity, just like monogamy.

Paternity became important when human societies shifted to be primarily agrarian. Wealth could be kept within the family at that point.

To this day there are tribal peoples where mating pairs are informal and children are community assets (i.e., every male has a vested interested in caring for all of them like they were their own). Desirable males will have many mates. They don't even have the concepts of polygamy and monogamy, and are just fine without it.

That said, polygamy can cause societal problems. I read a research summary claiming that some amount of terrorism from Middle Eastern countries is linked to polygamy. It creates an excess of young men without prospect of marriage.

Sister Wives makes me wanna puke.

I can't believe wolf watches it without some serious - uh, mood enhancers.

You need to define what you mean by "post-partum feeding problem."

Yeah.

Maybe by "union of marriage" fresh means it in the very limited modern sense. Marriage between common people has only been an institution for about 2,000 years, and doing so with any formality is an even more recent invention. Even then, that's only sufficient in the Christian west.

That's a pretty small damn universe.

I assume that the post-partum feeding problem can be defined thus:
How does a group of humans ensure that all members are fed, including newborns, which can only ingest liquids?

This is pretty unsatisfactory to me. It doesn't seem to have any cultural implications (marriage and monogamy are most definitely cultural).

(I had a whole rant listing reasons why it's not a problem, but I'll hold onto that...)

Who gets to eat the baby. If there's more than one wife, there will be competition over the devouring of the young.

Who gets to eat the afterbirth?
And how is it cooked?
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recommends cooking with garlic.

Although I thought that was supposed to be avoided by breast feeding mothers?
I admit this is from 1998, but many people here still remember it.

And young men with blue balls can be a terror!


Women want security to "breed and feed", and long ago they got this security by having children with the alpha male. But the alpha male was making babies with as many partners as he wanted to.

Oh, I see. Women want...

Thanks for tellin' me, I forgot what I wanted.

And to paraphrase Paula Cole: Where Have All the Alpha Males Gone? :lol:

I must be an anthropological oddity. ;)

What I was meaning to say was the origins concept of "marriage" or mutual agreement between a man and a woman and their offspring.

All forms of marriages came about because of the postpartum feeding problem. I took a cultural anthropology class; this is fact. And then culture took over and and variances/differences happened.

BUT marriage and everything related to it happened because of this: as the species homo sapiens produce offspring with very long childhoods and usually only one at a time, the human mother did not collect food/hunt while taking care of this offspring. The father takes the responsibility for being the food provider for his mate and offspring. We are not a mate-and-leave-your-offspring type of species, and because of that marriage has developed universally.

:facepalm:

See what you started, Zen, with your smarty-pants maths?

Pants again!

:lol2:

Laughing way too hard today. You peeps kills me!

transcript or it never happened.

:lol:

jeeze people, stop posting while I'm distracted by the kids. We have a postsnowfromthedrivepartum wiifeedingfrenzy problem

This is the funniest thing I've read in a week. Thanks.

What about women of the Aeta tribe in the Phillipines? They hunted with great success. And a woman that has newly given birth can hunt, she only needs an elder and/or a lactating woman to stay behind to care for the infant.

Also, what would prevent a woman from collecting food while caring for a child, no matter how freshly hatched?

I don't see where you're getting that those marriages were 1:1.

Be careful with universalities. There's always a counter-example.

I'm having a post-Pardo feeding problem. I can only eat on Saturday night at 11:30.

The Cellar: We took a cultural anthropology class

Oh come on, you gotta include the punchline!

The Cellar: We took a cultural anthropology class, this is fact.

yeah, I thought I dropped something, I'm such a klutz

You can just sew it back on.

I was probably trying to hunt/gather and nurture at the same time. Always ends in tears.

Sew? Sew? Don't look at me! :bolt:

I'mm'a use double-sided sticky tape.

Teh Cellar: We don't sew, we velcro

but you sewed the velcro on.

What do you do if you lose a buttonhole?

(that was the joke)
Poke another one. Any hole's a goal.

Once when Mark Twain was lecturing in Utah, a Mormon acquaintance argued with him on the subject of polygamy. After a long and rather heated debate, the Mormon finally said, “Can you find for me a single passage of Scripture which forbids polygamy?” “Certainly,” replied Twain. “‘No man can serve two masters.’”

THE male portion of my married friends says "Why would I want two of them? This one's more than I can handle!" She just flashes a knowing, sly smile. ;)

Okay your joke - I just precis'd.

But I identify with his partner.
I am a whole lotta woman.

Yeah, I don't 'spect a guy would have a whole lot o' energy for another waffle-headed wife, if'n he's got me.

I'm a potato wife: big & common & knobbly & spread wide.
Y'all might only want me once a week. With increasingly exotic toppings. But I'm a staple and men have died from wanting me.

It may be fact that you took cultural anthropology, but it is absolutely not fact that mariage has always been 1:1. That isn't true now, let alone throughout history. Unless you beg the question by saying that anything that isn't 1:1 doesn't count for some reason.

Wow, this thread took some funny turns.

Clod, you made a very interesting point. Imma have to think about that.

Fresh ... WTF are you smokin??? And where was this course, the university of fundamentalist bs? No offence intended, but ... duuude... (or was this more tongue in cheek stuff?)

Do you know how brilliant you are? :)

Delicious!

You know what you don't find in the US? Baked potatoes covered in curry.

I love both those things and it never occurred to me to mix them.

Isn't she? No one paints a picture with words the way Sundae does. :)

My cockles? Consider them warmed.
What a lovely tribute to come back to!

Here is some strong evidence about human polygamy (technically polygyny) based on DNA analysis. It links to the original article if you want it all nerded up.

ETA: I'm curious about many things - where in Africa (tribal or Muslim or Christian areas, eg) these samples were taken, and how long the time scale is, i.e. 1,000 years or 100,000.

I also wonder if this method properly allows for the possibility of serial harem-polygyny, i.e. each male gets to breed with all the females in the group for a year or two before being ousted by the next male. That could create the genetic appearance of breeding parity, while still preserving polygyny.

So I did some digging.
The original article is here.

We really need Pie back to cope with this kind of maths, it is WAAAAAY beyond me.
BUT! There was a link to a criticial reply, here.

They pointed out that the original paper had double-corrected for some factor and the true ratio is somewhat higher - where the original gives 1.1, 1.3 and 1.4, the correct figures should be 1.3, 2.2 and 2.6! Thus leading to the conclusion of:
i.e females were rougly twice as likely to breed as males.

I should declare that the original authors then reply here with a bunch of stuff I cannot fathom, but they acknowledge and agree with the reply about double correcting. Either way, there is pretty good genetic evidence for widespread polygynous polygamy in human history.

Given that many societies and individuals have been monogamous, the remainder must have been definitely polygamous to make the averages work out like this.

It still does not address the serial polygyny question, though.

Is that like when you have multiple vaginas? :eek: