Monogamy is an Evolutionary Strategy

This is reaction to the recent blog post, Monogamy is a lie!

This is a much more important topic which that blog post doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of, because this goes deep into even how societies organize and the back story of the formation of popular culture. I doubt I will be able to touch on all the facets in one blog post. This is a very deep topic.

In my opinion and scientific understanding, that blog is too simplistic and only considers what a man may think he desires without factoring in what each specific man could realistically achieve and the various strategies that men and women employ in order to maximize their evolutionary strategy.

Competing Evolutionary Strategies

As in all life forms, humans are collectively maximizing their evolutionary strategy, to promote their genetics to as many offspring as possible. Individual instances may have various strategies, even including celibacy or even refusing to bear children. It is interesting to note that those degenerate strategies are perhaps the result of a successful strategy of another competing class of humans who inherently (whether they consciously recognize it) desire to promote the impotence of other humans in order to reduce competition. The interplay of strategies is probably far too complex to summarize in a short blog post, but I will try to at least help the reader gain some insight.

Nature is resilient because it can draw upon a huge diversity of chaotic random experiments (i.e. chaotic genetic mixes) so that at any given time, there will be a best fit to the circumstances. It is this huge pool of diversity that protects against extinction events.

Female Eggs Are Rarer

One of the first and most important facts we must consider when analyzing human sexuality and reproduction, is the female's eggs are more valuable and rare than the male's sperm. If the human race only had one male, it could impregnate every female. Whereas, if we only had one female, humanity will be on the verge of extinction. This is likely why females are not given enough testosterone to cause them to take huge risks as man so bravely do, so as they will be protected and the men will be sacrificed first. Women however will become extremely brave and great strength when their offspring are threatened and again because they only have a limited number of eggs and pregnancies within their roughly two decades fertile lifespan. I've read stories of females who lifted a car to rescue their child, but I didn't verify this.

Typical Female Evolutionary Strategy

The female's evolutionary strategy is typically to make sure she has sustenance to raise her offspring, while also attempting to be impregnated with what she perceives to be the superior genetics. A female's hindrain is typically instinctively tuned to want to be impregnated by the male who is perceived to the leader or superior to the other males.

And this is apparently why women are instinctively attracted to bad boys, because this seems to correlate with high level of violence that apparently correlated with the alpha-male victors in our primitive, post-paleozoic, hunter-gatherer time period when mortal danger was omnipresent.

Alpha-male Evolutionary Strategy

The alpha-male's strategy is typically to have the beta-males raise his offspring. The female needs sustenance especially while she is pregnant, and the alpha-male spends all his time remaining superior and impregnating as many females as possible.

Beta-male Evolutionary Strategy

The beta-males also wish to be alpha, but for whatever reason they are realistically incapable of it, so they must accept the role of trying to impregnate a female when she is fertile by keeping her away from an alpha-male.

He may for example use his ability to provide sustenance as an offering. If the female perceives that beta-male to be of sufficiently good genetics to justify giving some of her eggs and fertile cycles to, then she may perceive that his offering is of great value for her evolutionary strategy, but she will likely demand his monogamous commitment because she pays a high price (in terms of her rare eggs and pregnancy cycles) and expects the certainty of the sustenance in return. So she doesn't want her beta-male creating new responsibilities where he will dilute his ability to commit everything to her. The feelings of love seem to derive from these various strategies. Love is a release of oxytocin into our brain to make us desire to continue that relationship.

The beta-male also has an incentive to promote societal enforcement of monogamy because it is a group watch strategy to prevent alpha-males from stealing his female's reproductive cycles. Society can be on the watch of females and ostracizing them when they go outside the bounds of their committed relationship to accept the genetics of an alpha-male. Yet society also needs the alpha-males to succeed sometimes in spreading their genetics, because they are dominant and thus their genes have a certain level of priority, yet nature also needs to maintain the diversity of the gene pool in order to be resilient.

Cycle of Civilization Collapse and Rejuvenation

So there we have the reason that everyone pretends to want to enforce monogamy but simultaneously everyone has an incentive to try to cheat it.

And the alpha-males have both an incentive to promote monogamy so the beta-males raise the offspring of the alpha-males and restrain the beta-males from competing with the alpha-males to impregnate so many females, while also if possible a superior strategy of promoting memes which encourage the beta-males to become infertile (e.g. condoms) without destroying the fertility of the females and encouraging them to accept promiscuous females.

So thus I see the devolution of Western culture upon us because the males have been emasculated with a combination of societal enforcement of child support payments along with the absolute right of the female to divorce taking all the financial support while remaining promiscuous.

Again the blog post I am reacting to doesn't seem to comprehend that it is promoting a strategy that is not only entirely unrealistic for most men, but is also perhaps dysfunctional in terms of evolutionary strategy (although every aberration has purpose in nature's cycle of creative destruction). This is another sign of the decadence of Western civilization.

And so that is the primary reason why I live in southern hemisphere, where traditional evolutionary strategies, marriage, etc.. are still intact.

References

Most of what I know on this subject originates from the writings of Eric S. Raymond, the 150+ IQ progenitor of the term "open source" in his famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay. Also James A. Donald (one of the first guys who communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto) also presents a blog of politically incorrect mysgonist yet also logical analysis. I had written a related blog several years ago, Information Is Alive!

Edit: all images herein are licensed for reuse.

I want to pay tribute to one of those bad boy icons: