peace through polyamory

I'd like to understand better how monogamy evolved because I think it's one of those tragic cases that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about, where something that has evolutionary fitness value does not necessarily make us happy, or only makes some of us happy at the expense of others (in the case of monogamy, women may be happier than men with how it works). J. Haidt¹ was referring to status seeking and how it's a zero sum evolutionary game, whereby those who gain more status do it at the expense of others who thereby have less status. Also though seeking status can give one a momentary dopamine rush, and winning at the status game might give us a momentary euphoria (and for men it's also an indirect way to obtain a mate), it fails to give us a more lasting feeling of satisfaction even when we win. These observations work also for monogamy, as we will see later. But before we get there, I want to revisit the empirical claims/hypotheses I made in this previous post , because they are not satisfactory as they stand.


Here is the main hypothesis I want to revisit and test against what we know: monogamy is correlated with more violence than polyamory, where polyamory* is defined as the mating system where both polyandry and polygyny are socially permissible (aka polygynandry), AND where women and men have roughly equal sexual choice (as distinguished from a patriarchy where men make most of the sexual decisions, or a matriarchy where women make most of the sexual decisions). I'm going to fine tune this hypothesis:  monogamy has a selective advantage in times of war and scarcity, while polyamory has a selective advantage in times of peace and resource abundance. The rationale for this is as follows: At root, offensive war and other kinds of violence occur partially because of male sexual frustration, either as an alternative outlet, or because it is a strategy to gain (compete against other males) or protect sexual mates for men (if war was just about acquiring non-sexual resources, women would be just as interested in waging offensive wars as men, even if they are not the combatants themselves). Concomitantly, when men are sexually satisfied, they are not only less aggressive (which makes them less effective in war, if all other factors remain unchanged), but also less interested in hard work with delayed gratification, which makes them less productive (and hence also less effective in war). The proximate mechanism might be testosterone levels, but it may be more complicated⁵. Lower productivity is not a problem in times of peace and abundance, but in times of war and/or scarcity, lower productivity means being outcompeted by more aggressive and/or productive tribes/nations (and in non-egalitarian cultures, being individually, not just tribally or nationally outcompeted). In times of peace on the other hand, polyamory offers the advantage of multiple men and women all teaming up to raise children and other cooperative endeavor,  and reducing intra-sexual competition for mates (compared to both monogamy and patriarchal polygyny). Why should polyamory reduce sexual frustration in men compared to polygyny and monogamy? In polygyny the lower status/wealth men can't find wives (they are taken up by the higher status/wealth men), whereas in monogamy, initial satisfaction is followed by frustration and cheating because of the evolved yearning for variety and adventure in men⁵. Without the norms of egalitarianism, polyamory too would become a system where only the high status males and the attractive and motherly women would get to have sex. And without cheating, sublimation and female prostitution (and pornography in the modern era), monogamous men would be even more violent than they are.

The argument for the advantage in warfare of monogamy over polyamory is not taking into account that though polyamorous men might be less aggressive than monogamous men, they might also be able to cooperate better in battle, because of their higher egalitarianism, and the evolved function of sex as a social lubricant or glue, something we share with the bonobos ( in monogamous systems the social unit is just the family). Roman legionnaires were less aggressive than celtic fighters, but still defeated them due to their stronger cooperative abilities (and there are other examples of how cooperation and organization in battle can override fierceness). So it's not true that a culture with a monogamous mating system will always win as far as warfare over a culture with a polyamorous mating system.

And there are other factors such as sheer numbers of soldiers--monogamous societies probably had more soldiers than polyamorous tribes.

The kind of polyandry where brothers share a woman is usually patriarchal, having to do with a scarcity of women due to infanticide of girls and/or where women are a commodity like cattle. Also the kind of polygyny where men are scarce due to death in warfare is usually patriarchal.

Testing these ideas at face value against Pinker's data² seems absurd, and partially why I said my previous discussion was unsatisfactory. Didn't he show that hunter gatherers were more violent than modern or even agrarian state run societies, at least as far as homicide? And if Ian Morris³ and others⁴ are correct that hunter gatherers were more egalitarian, and if I am correct that this extended to sharing of sexual and emotional "resources", then Pinker seems to have shown the reverse of what I'm proposing. However, the devil is in the details... Pinker's ethnographic data (which were originally from Lawrence Keeley) were not about hunter-gatherers at all, or were about hunter-gatherers that were partially agrarian or horticultural (and indeed as I discuss below, less sexually egalitarian than even our modern western cultures). Pinker's archaeological data (also from Keeley?) are consistent with a totally different interpretation than that hunter gatherers were more violent than state societies (though statehood could also be a factor in reducing violence). It could be, and I will argue that this makes sense in other self-consistent ways as well as tests of empirically testable predictions, that the violence found in the bones of these hunter gatherers was due to violence committed AGAINST them by more violent tribes, ones that were less polyamorous, or that they were such themselves, starting on a transition to less egalitarian mating strategies, driven by inter-tribal competition for resources and warfare.
Wouldn't we then expect to find layers under the archaeological carnage that showed more peaceful times? No, because hunter gatherers were nomadic.


My claims that monogamy is correlated with increases of violence compared to polyamory and that it has a selective advantage in warfare also seem at odds with this paper from Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson⁶, who (using GROUP selection) find that monogamy actually decreases INTRA-tribal crime rates. But it isn't at odds because what they are comparing monogamy to is patriarchal polygyny, or single men in a monogamous society (that's like saying Buchenwald is better than Auschwitz). And consistent with my hypotheses, they find a correlation between effectiveness in INTER-tribal competition (which includes winning in warfare and higher productivity) and monogamy. This makes sense because compared to patriarchal polygyny, there are less sexually frustrated men in monogamous societies, and since they are competing less for females, they can spend more time cooperating on productive or military endeavors against other nations, villages or tribes. The least sexual frustration among men should be (if I'm correct) in a polyamorous culture though. Monogamy is OK at first, but after a while most men get frustrated with it and either sublimate their evolved tendency for variety into productive or violent endeavors (though not as violently or frequently as in patriarchal polygyny), or simply cheat, which can lead to further violence.

Also consistent with my hypothesis that polyamory has a selective advantage in times of peace and abundance is this paper from L. Fortunato and M. Archetti⁷ that (using KIN selection) makes a case that monogamy evolved (at least partially) as a result of optimization of private property and scarce land allocation to the next generation, i.e. in the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to agriculture. As Keeley discusses in the book that Pinker bases his thesis on, nomadic hunter-gatherers had no incentive for warfare, with abundant resources/sparse population, and no resource-intensive housing or other property that they were attached to either for themselves or for the next generation. Their main source of security was from a sense of belonging to nature and to the tribe. If resources were sufficient there was no incentive for hoarding of any kind, including mates. Sharing with the tribe would be the preferred strategy for obtaining security. If resources were scarce or if another tribe was competing for resources, going somewhere else would usually incur less costs than warfare. Language made it possible to gang up on alpha males who tried to hoard females or non-human resources, and children were the responsibility of the whole tribe, thus egalitarian polyamory had an advantage over patriarchal polygyny as far as rearing children. But if the temptation for getting resources from another tribe or the land occupied by another tribe arose and was acted on, those tribes that had more sexually frustrated males would win in war or pillage, hence patriarchal polygyny would win over egalitarian polyamory. And later, during agrarian times, those nations or city-states that were more productive in food production and war implement design and construction would win over those who were less productive, with one of the reasons for the lower productivity being higher average male sexual satisfaction, hence monogamy would win over polygyny in other agrarian cultures and over polyamory in hunter gatherer tribes. I wonder if some of this can be tested against historical and archaeological data.

Check whether all the ethnographic data of violent horticulturalists (from Pinker) is consistent with either monogamy or patriarchal polygyny. The following are "positive controls":
Jivaro- It seemed to be a patriarchal polygyny, more recently (due to Christianity) a patriarchal monogamy. This book⁸suggests that men have most of the power in matters of marriage and sexual relations. The only power a woman has in an unhappy marriage in Jivaro culture is to commit suicide, which is quite common.
Yanomamo- These guys are a patriarchal polygyny on steroids. The more alpha a man is, the more women he can marry. Women have not much power, not only in sexual matters.
Mae Enga- Patriarchal monogamous or polygynous
Dugum Dani- Same as above, with a long period (4-5 years) of post-partum sexual abstinence
Murngin-patriarchal polygyny
Huli-patriarchal polygyny where women are treated like commodities (paid for with pigs and more recently with cash)
Gebusi--not sure yet. Awaiting a paper. They seem egalitarian, even in sexual matters, though "(wives) may be sporadically beaten without reprisal by husbands"⁹. Polygyny is only in 7% of men and mostly due to levirate (upon death of the husband, wife and other property go to brothers of husband).  On the other hand, they ARE mostly monogamous and highly jealous. This could be an exception to my hypotheses which is fine, since perfect agreement between theory and data is virtually non-existent in social science, due to multiple factors, as discussed below. Or else, their seeming sexual eglitarianism may be the reason (modulo other factors) that they have the lowest violent death frequency of all the other tribes in Pinker's dataset. The men may still be more sexually frustrated than in a polyamorous culture (none of the above is that), but less frustrated than the polygynous cultures above.

Having shown that my hypotheses are (mostly) consistent with already analyzed data, let's move on to NEW empirical evidence to test my hypothesis, that polyamory can thrive (outcompeting other mating strategies) in times of peace. What we need to look at are societies which are known to be polyamorous and compare their rates of self-violence or offensive violence to other societies. For now we only look for correlation, not causation. Besides the already discussed problem of distinguishing innate violence vs defensive, externally caused violence, testing the hypothesis is complicated by four things:
1. There are other factors besides mating strategy, such as whether the society has a "Leviathan"/state to potentially reduce violence (one of Pinker's factors), population density, the degree of egalitarianism in non-sexual matters (another of Pinker's factors), the religious views about the value of human life of people from the in-group vs the out-group, the cultural views on other people outside the tribe, gentle vs harsh child-rearing, being an immediate return hunter-gatherer vs settled horticultualists, agrarians, industrialists etc.
2. Some of these factors may not be independent. For example, being an immediate return hunter-gatherer (IRHG) does not overlap with a state society (but there are non IRHGs without a state), has a high influence on egalitarianism and mating strategy.
3. The violence has not been quantified for many of these.
4. In some cases, it might be difficult to tell if the mating strategy is patriarchal or egalitarian or somewhere in between, especially as historical circumstances change.

The first two complications can be dealt with by a proper factor analysis, which I might do at some point. The last two await some anthropologists with more resources than me. For now we'll have to content ourselves with a crude qualitative analysis of cultures that are listed in wikipedia as having polyandry.
                                          violence (as far as I can tell)
Piraha in Brazil                   low
ancient Minoan civilization low
Mosuo in China                 low
Masaai in Africa                low
Bhutan                               low
Tibet                                  low
Northern Nepal                 low
Rajasthan                          low until modern times, polyandry is patriarchal
Ladakh                              war is prevalent throughout history, polyandry may be patriarchal
Zanskar                             much defensive war, patriarchal polyandry
ancient Sparta                   high defensive, patriarchal polyandry
Trobrianders                     low
Aleut                                 high, patriarchal polyandry
Inuit                                  medium, patriarchal polyandry and polygyny
kanak                                defensive war, patriarchal polyandry
Marquesans                       high violence, at least since colonial times. Hard to tell if polyandry was/is patriarchal or not


So my hypothesis is supported by this crude analysis of the data.

After all this, I still get the feeling that I and all these evolutionary psychologists have missed something. What is missing is the observation that monogamy seems to work much better for women than men. This seems to be consistent with the INDIVIDUAL selection model of evolution, the one that I referred to in my previous post as ugly and somewhat false (because it doesn't take into account group selection). I don't understand why it is better for women, as this model claims, to have one highly devoted man, rather than several (less) devoted men and women in a tribe, if passing property onto next generation is not an issue (it isn't in a hunter-gatherer tribe). So maybe this model partially explains why it's better for women to have monogamy today, rather than cheating or patriarchal polygyny. But it doesn't explain how monogamy evolved from hunter-gatherer polyamory, or why monogamy is better for women today than polyamory (indeed polyamory seems to be gaining traction in the relatively peaceful, wealthy and somewhat sexually egalitarian western middle classes).  There is something else going on, which I think has to do with women generally caring more than men about peace and safety, their own and their children's. Perhaps the recent upsurge in polyamory is partially due not only to relative peace and abundance, but also contraceptives, which have made it safer for women to have sex, so they don't have to worry about having children every time they want a sexual connection. Also having economic means that are not making them fully dependent on men can also encourage more egalitarianism in the sexual domain.

In hunter-gatherer tribes women might have had peace and safety from being polyamorous but in modern times, polyamory usually leads to drama and conflict. Safety in modern times comes from having more money and a nuclear family, not from belonging to a tribe. So I suspect poly-pioneering women are going to have a hard time of it (and I have anecdotal data to support this). On the one hand, polyamory is encouraged by the relative abundance and peace (on a macro level). But on the other hand polyamory is discouraged by the (micro level) vestigial conflict that arises when people brought up in a monogamous culture try to be more tribal.

I recently also read this paper⁹ (based on INDIVIDUAL selection for both men and women) which suggests that IF the advantages of polyandry are small, then female sexual fidelity in exchange for male provisioning decreases the occurrence of "free riding" males that invest mostly in acquiring female sexual partners through competition with other males, and this clears a previously blocked (by free riding males) evolutionary path towards monogamy. This model, like other individual selection models for the evolution of monogamy focuses on competition among males for females (and hence progeny of their own) and female selection for provisioning males, in other words men see women as sex objects and women see men as meal, home and status tickets. Not a pretty picture for monogamists.

Another possible reason for why pair bonding (and later monogamy as a social institution) evolved from polyamorous tribal systems might be that pair bonding systems produce higher selectivity for mates (in both males and females) and hence according to this paper higher variability ensues in both males and females. And higher variability might be more evolutionarily fit.

Whatever model we ascribe to for the evolution of monogamy, whether individual, kin or group selection, the picture is not pretty. It's time to stop pretending that monogamy is just a neutral "choice" in a free market of ideas. A choice requires that the person is not conditioned by their early childhood imprinting and later social propaganda to "choose" with overwhelming probability. It's the same delusion that people who are born into a religion have when they think they chose that religion.  It's actually like a hurtful ideology that people have no better choice about in the present environment.  It's like saying that colonialism is just a choice. If we want a world that is based on peace, love and respect for life, we should do everything we can to discourage monogamy and encourage polyamory (not through ideology, but through providing for a larger personal sphere than the nuclear family, as in a village or a tribe). If in that kind of cultural environment someone still chooses monogamy, and not just to rebel, then it might be closer to a choice and we should encourage that as well.
Footnotes
* The more common definition of polyamory is consensual non-monogamy.
References

1. The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
2. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Stephen Pinker
3. Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, by Ian Morris
4. http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-z-curve-of-human-egalitarianism/
5. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1098%2Frstb.2011.0290&file=rstb20110290supp1.pdf
6. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2012) 367, 657–669 
7. Evolution of monogamous marriage by maximization of inclusive fitness, J. Evo. Bio. 23, L. FORTUNATO*1 & M. ARCHETTI

8. Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence by Christine Fielder and Chris King

9. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1200717109 PNAS | June 19, 2012 | vol. 109 | no. 25 | 9923–9928