This abstract was posted into Patriarchy Website on 20th Jul 1998 by Israel CS Lim
Published in The Sunday Times, 3rd May 1998, Singapore under the title:
THE EVOLUTION OF REPRODUCTION
HUMAN BEINGS: Nature’s Monogamists?
Indirect clues suggest humans lean towards the harem rather than monogamy.
- Men tend to be larger than women, a pattern typical of polygynous mammals.
- A worldwide ethnographic survey of 849 human societies show 708 whose customs are polygynous (more than 1 wife), 4 polyandrous (more than 1 husband) and 137 monogamous.
- Psychological evidence shows males typically seeking sexual variety, attracted by physical indicators of female fecundity such as youth and blooming health, while females are drawn to indicators of male wealth and power.
- In the Roman Empire and medieval Christendom, though marriage was monogamous, mating was often polygynous. A lord of the manor would have one wife but his household was set up as an unofficial harem of servant girls.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, a reader in Zoology and a Fellow of New College at Oxford.
CLINTON'S AFFAIRS
An AbstractMr Clinton’s affairs .... would get him respect in Iraq.
I must throw in the usual health warning. I do not long to return to ancestral ways. I hate to live in a hunter-gatherer world where men fight over women. With pleasure I take un-Darwinian personal decision as a deliberately monogamous individual.
But I am not happy to live in a sanctimonious, lawyer driven society that tries to bring down a man for doing in private what many men would secretly emulate if only they had his opportunities. Of course, I find something unpleasant in the abuse of power over employees and underlings.
But once again, that is a Western, modern perception of what is going on, something that would provoke hoots of derision from Mr. Clinton’s Arab opponents.
As for the charge of mendacity, by all means let us have leaders that are truthful on great affairs of state. But in small affairs that are the business of a man, his wife, and other individuals involved, it is a prying society that compels him to lie by not allowing him to say: "That is none of your business."
Wealth, power and worldly success once translated directly into wives and grandchildren, and in many societies they still do.
But in our society they are pursued in their own right alone, like the taste for unlimited sugar long after the rules have changed. Men today seek wealth and power, because wealth and power among our ancestors, in all kinds of direct and indirect ways, brought genetic survival. Mr. Clinton is a beached tribal chief, washed high and dry in the land of the lawyers.
Richard Dawkins
The Sunday Times, 3rd May 1998, Singapore
