Ask Dr. Helen: Should Men Be Kicked Out of the Church Nursery?
Marco said…
“I didn’t want a wife. I wanted sex. It’s just the way males operate thanks to millions of years of evolution in a world where survival of the species is contingent on men spreading their “seed” early and often.”
Your take on evolution isn’t quite right. Men have the urge to spread the wild oats as part of our heritage as mammals However, in our evolution as humans, monogamy developed as the default strategy due to the long helplessness of human infants (due in part all of us in effect being ‘preemies’ becasue of brain size versus mom’s pelvis size) and the need for a male to stick with and support his mate in primitive conditions if any of his progeny are to make it.
“Marriage” is the cultural recognition of this arrangement, because the tribe has an interest in helping promote known paternity, so the next generation is raised and fewer provocations to violence between the men exist.
Men cheating, the wealthier/powerful having outright mistresses, or even multiple wives, are holdovers in our temperament from the mammalian past. Polygamy as an institution only seems to have existed once hierarchical cultures developed in which a few men could escape the equality of poverty.
Very few mammals (only wolves come to mind at the moment) show any signs of fatherhood caregiving. Only birds seem to be fully, truly monogamous. Humans could be characterized as ‘mostly monogamous’ due to the tension between the older and more recent evolutionary strategies.
P.S. i highly recommend The red Queen by Matt Ridley as a starting point into the field of ‘evolutionary psychology’ — you’ll learn more about fundamental human nature, including how its expressed in different cultures, than you ever will from a typical psychology, anthropology, or sociology class.
