Things are not so just because it feels better to you to imagine that they are. Paternity has only become important to humans in the past 3% of human history (that’s why the social system that began around the time of agriculture is called Patriarchy). Prior to that women mated with several men at a time because it was biologically advantageous to do that and if you live in a cooperative group where everyone takes care of each other (which is how humans lived for 97% of their history), who cares who the father is?
“The great anthropologist and comparativist Sarah Hrdy tells us that, across species, including among humans, the best mother for many eons was the one who was, under particular and far-from-rare ecological circumstances, promiscuous. By being so, she could hedge against male infertility, up her odds of a healthy pregnancy and robust offspring, and create a wider network of support by lining up two or three males who figured the offspring might be theirs. (5)
Partible paternity, where a woman mates with several men, who are then all considered partial fathers of the offspring, still takes place in lowland South America. “Among the Bari of Venezuela, many women, but not all, take lovers during their pregnancy. They later identify these men as secondary fathers of their children. In this case, “possession of a secondary father was associated with a heightened probability that a pregnancy would eventually produce an adult Bari individual,”(6)
and this too
Two US anthropologists, Katherine Starkweather and Raymond Hames, have recently shown that polyandry, the practice of women taking multiple husbands, is much more common than people in their discipline previously recognized. And Stephen Beckerman at Pennsylvania State University has drawn attention to what he calls ‘partible paternity’, where a woman has sex with more than one man in order to get pregnant, with these multiple partners jointly recognized as fathers of the offspring. This practice is common throughout the lowlands of South America, and other examples can be found around the world. And some cultures, such as the Na (or Mosuo) people in southwest China, don’t seem to have any stable pair bonds at all. Among the Na, monogamy is frowned upon, everyone is free to have as much casual sex as he or she wants, and jealousy is apparently unheard of.
Your Jack the Ripper nonsense is specious — and, I’ve already addressed it. The fact that you cannot or will not comprehend my response is not my problem.
What lies deep within our nature is a desire for community, caring, tribe. Humans are a highly social species. The proof of that is the fact that for the vast majority of human history, this is how we lived. It’s only in the past 10,000 years that institutionalized dominance hierarchy came about.
It’s also said that women are “the more social sex,” so they’re obviously less visual, more interested in things like personality, money, status, and power.
Women also have more options than men and therefore are much more selective, because they have more reproductive value than a man, so they’re less oriented to have sex with just anyone they find visually appealing, right?
Makes perfect sense, right? Wrong.
Both of these notions scientifically aren’t accurate.
Unfortunately, research left it at that, but new evidence is showing that the brains of women actually respond more to watching sex, overall, but men are more visually selective than women.” (7)
Polyamory is becoming more and more popular, in part because it is a system of relating to others that is more in line with our human desire for connection and cooperation, rather than control and domination. Your pop evolutionary psychology is tired. Do your homework before spouting off! Bombast alone is not going to make any points at all.
Edit: And what makes you think that patriarchy is working? We’ve just about killed the planet by insisting on dominating it. Men have a high rate of suicide, due in large part to the emotional alienation that constant jousting for position in the hierarchy demands. Women and anyone who is considered weaker are systemically abused. New inventions and material success is not the only metric of what’s working. The advancement of “civilization” has come at a steep and highly uncivilized cost. And a dominance hierarchy is pyramid shaped. It only truly “works” for the few at the very tip top.
If I seem angry, it’s because I’m pretty sick of condescending Bros who don’t even know what they are talking about trying to preach to me from on high rather than hold an actual conversation based in science and reality.
