I was going to do an article about monogamy and looked it up on Wikipedia. Left leaning Wikipedia is at pains to convince us that monogamy is rare in the human race. According to one study it commonly occurs only in 15% of societies.
We might ask what is it? Why is it? And are we humans monogamous? Monogamy is of course with the father and mother of the young stick together in order to look after and raise the young.
A number of species practice monogamy including birds such as the bald eagle, wolves, coyote, beavers, swans, gibbons, emperor penguins, mountain gorillas and of course humans. Some only do it for one season and change partners on the next season.
Why would they do it? The claim is that the female needs help with the young. In order to achieve that she wants the male to help and in order to do that she has to convince him that the young or his and not someone else’s.
This swan does this. It said that it is difficult to find a good healthy male swan. So when she finds one, she hangs onto him.
Some are monogamous through being harem species. They are various deer, seals and bats for example to do this. That is to say one male has several females and they are exclusively with him. The mountain gorilla famously does it he protects and looks after the entire troop. On the plains multiple predators can attack together, such as lions or hyenas. This is almost t impossible in jungle so predators tend to operate singly. The male gorilla’s purpose is to defend against a single attacker. There is no need for multiple males to defend the troop. Many like to claim this is some sort of oppression. It is not. The moment the females decide he is failing they simply leave and find another male but as long as he is successful they will have his young.
The Emperor penguin has a similar reason. In order to successfully raise a young penguin, she hatches it far away from the open sea where many enemies are. This is on the ice pack, but the problem is the egg could freeze easily. She can manage to protect it for several weeks but will have nothing to eat for that time. So she enlists the help of the father. Through an elaborate dancing and clucking ritual the parents establish a bond and them mate and she goes off to lay the egg. He continues to feed in the open sea, but when the time comes, he comes back, repeats the elaborate ritual to make sure she’s the right one and then takes over custody of the egg while the female goes and eats. She returns in time to help raise a newly hatched penguin.
The human race is the same. The woman needs the man to help raise the children. This includes protecting them.
Now the study in Wikipedia quotes is by one Murdoch and White in 1969 which states that polyandry, multiple husbands, is rare (<1%) but polygyny is common (frequent or occasionally in 84% societies). This leaves pure monogamy at 15%. This leaning towards polygyny is quite revealing in itself.
It’s strange if we know gonna be so rare that is not hard to find marriage ceremonies from all around the world. And brief search can find marriage ceremonies that are Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Judaism, Christian, Japanese, Voodoo, Zulu, Nubian, Moroccan. And there were plenty more for the looking.
We are from a hunter gatherer species. The men do the hunting. The women do the gathering. The woman cannot do both especially when burdened by being pregnant. We have extremely vulnerable children. They cannot walk for about nine months. Compare that to any other species. Most walk almost immediately after birth. It’s usually necessary to keep the red or flock moving to keep predators at a distance.
The polygyny suggestion from the Murdoch and White study suggests not that polygyny is common. Indeed it doesn’t really say how much of the society is polygyny and how much monogamous.Some tendency to polygyny implies that women will go after the alpha male whilst trying to keep whatever male they have convinced that the children are his. No, not all women are like this but 1960s studies of blood groups of babies put a figure of at least 10%. and possibly as high as 30%, of women gave birth to babies that could not possibly be the husbands. This was in the days before DNA was done by blood group which misses some infidelities. Strangely, no such studies have been done since the rise of feminism. So my answer to Wikipedia is that we are mostly monogamous, mostly loyal and you can find exceptions in most societies but for most men supporting more than one woman is difficult, for most women having sex with more than one man is easy however the majority seem to be loyal.
If we want a society where men support their children this is not just about money but being an active part in the child’s life. Any suggestion that that is no longer necessary is I think ruled out by the facts. Women can only afford not to be monogamous when they get supported, often by the state, for being non-monogamous.
So I would say the human race is monogamous and it will sometimes fail but everybody including the mother, the father and the children benefit when we try and maintain that arrangement.
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