Comments on: Polygamy helps men live longer

By: admin

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:13:57 +0000

Ginger: I don’t know any statistis about happiness and longevity of women who live in polygamous relationships, or in polyandry for that matter. There does seem to be some scholarly history of writing about polygamy and longevity, however, such as this 1979 item http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/439954. I think the author was saying that human evolution and longevity were on the increase as long as we had tribalism and polygamy, but when civilization and monogamy came along that wrecked the progress. “The general thesis is that a very greatly accelerated rate of incorporation of favorable genes or gene combinations can be achieved in surprisingly few generations among social animals provided that dominant males become the patriarchs of many descendents by virtue of their partial or complete monopoly on available females.” That argument may or may not have scientific validity but would surely get a professor picketed today if not thrown out of the university. In any event he is patently wrong since human lifespan over the last few thousand of years has gone ip from something like 28 years to 79 years.

By: ginger

ginger — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:55:41 +0000

I think there was also a study some years ago that administered a general “life satisfaction” or “happiness” test to a large number of people. When they looked at the subjects’ sex and marital status, they found that married men in general were significantly happier than the other three groups. The least happy group overall were the married women. That says something right there, doesn’t it? I wonder what polygamy does to the women…

By: admin

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:29:54 +0000

True, true. This is a large-populations study looking at averages over large numbers of individuals. No doubt there were many men in the societies that practie monogamy who had many sexual partners. And there were also many men in the societies that practice polygamy who had only one partner or no partner at all.

By: Vincent Papasergio

Vincent Papasergio — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:49:58 +0000

How can they be sure the monogamous men were truly monogamous? This group might have only been married to one woman, but involved with many.