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Out of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of Polygamy
In this changing world of what is socially and politically "correct," polygamy is perhaps the last great taboo. Over the last thousand years, monogamy - at least in name - has been the default setting for coupledom and procreation in the Western world. And yet, throughout history, there have been inklings that monogamy is an uncomfortable institution for human beings. The consistently high rate of marital "cheating" by both sexes, plus the persistent interest in a variety of sexual partners - on the part of women as well as men - suggest strongly that monogamy isn't easy, and certainly isn't "natural," for either sex.
In Out of Eden, esteemed writer and evolutionary biologist David P. Barash tackles this uncomfortable finding: that humans are actually biologically and anthropologically inclined toward polygamy. Drawing on decades of research, Barash presents a remarkable array of scientific evidence from evolutionary biology and cross-cultural studies that guide the reader through the hidden impacts of polygamy on such crucial behavior as violence, parenting, sexual preferences, adultery and efforts at monogamy itself, along with mind-bending speculation about the possible role of our polygamous predisposition when it comes to human genius, homosexuality and even monotheism. Although our species has long been "out of Eden," this fascinating read is ultimately reassuring that biology is not destiny.
In Out of Eden, esteemed writer and evolutionary biologist David P. Barash tackles this uncomfortable finding: that humans are actually biologically and anthropologically inclined toward polygamy. Drawing on decades of research, Barash presents a remarkable array of scientific evidence from evolutionary biology and cross-cultural studies that guide the reader through the hidden impacts of polygamy on such crucial behavior as violence, parenting, sexual preferences, adultery and efforts at monogamy itself, along with mind-bending speculation about the possible role of our polygamous predisposition when it comes to human genius, homosexuality and even monotheism. Although our species has long been "out of Eden," this fascinating read is ultimately reassuring that biology is not destiny.
238 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2016
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1,019 people want to read
About the author
David Philip Barash
38 books64 followersDavid P. Barash is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, and is notable for books on Human aggression, Peace Studies, and the sexual behavior of animals and people. He has written approximately 30 books in total. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harpur College, Binghamton University, and a Ph.D. in zoology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. He taught at the State University of New York at Oneonta, and then accepted a permanent position at the University of Washington.
His book Natural Selections: selfish altruists, honest liars and other realities of evolution is based on articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and published in 2007 by Bellevue Literary Press. Immediately before that was Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at literature, a popular but serious presentation of Darwinian literary criticism, jointly written with his daughter, Nanelle Rose Barash. He has also written over 230 scholarly articles and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with many other honors.
In 2008, a second edition of the textbook Peace and Conflict Studies co-authored with Charles P. Webel was published by Sage. In 2009, Columbia University Press published How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories, a book on sex differentiation co-authored with Judith Eve Lipton. This was followed in 2010 by Strange Bedfellows: the surprising connection between sex, evolution and monogamy published by Bellevue Literary Press, and, in 2011, Payback: why we retaliate, redirect aggression and seek revenge, coauthored with Judith Eve Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. His book Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary puzzles of human nature appeared in 2012, also published by Oxford University Press, and in 2013, Sage published the 3rd edition of his text, Peace and Conflict Studies.
His book Natural Selections: selfish altruists, honest liars and other realities of evolution is based on articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and published in 2007 by Bellevue Literary Press. Immediately before that was Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at literature, a popular but serious presentation of Darwinian literary criticism, jointly written with his daughter, Nanelle Rose Barash. He has also written over 230 scholarly articles and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with many other honors.
In 2008, a second edition of the textbook Peace and Conflict Studies co-authored with Charles P. Webel was published by Sage. In 2009, Columbia University Press published How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories, a book on sex differentiation co-authored with Judith Eve Lipton. This was followed in 2010 by Strange Bedfellows: the surprising connection between sex, evolution and monogamy published by Bellevue Literary Press, and, in 2011, Payback: why we retaliate, redirect aggression and seek revenge, coauthored with Judith Eve Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. His book Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary puzzles of human nature appeared in 2012, also published by Oxford University Press, and in 2013, Sage published the 3rd edition of his text, Peace and Conflict Studies.
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February 25, 2016
This could be the book that finally tips me off the fence about whether there are built-in psychological differences between men and women.
This is a contentious area, especially when it comes to sexuality, and the confusion over it all has led to a rather unbecoming digging-in of opposed positions. The line from many social analysts now is that gender differences are mainly down to culture and upbringing, and this position is also the one that is most politically correct – which has nothing to do with its validity, but it confuses the issue by making some people more likely to agree with it and others more likely to challenge it for this reason. Meanwhile, attempts to posit hardwired, biological reasons for gender differences have a tendency to be over-speculative – and thus dismissed as ‘evo-psych bullshit’ by those who wish to believe that society and upbringing are all-powerful.
The evo-psych bullshit position and its sexual implications are epitomised in the bestselling Sex at Dawn, which argued that humans are naturally polyamorous because dude, did you see that documentary on bonobos? While the opposing position is epitomised in Cordelia Fine's very well received Delusions of Gender, which showed to most people's satisfaction that there is, in fact, a lot of stereotyping and unconscious bias involved in the testing of gender issues and neurology more generally: more than likely, everyone has the same brain and is taught to use it differently by social convention.
Now along comes David Barash offering the Third Way no one knew they wanted. Certainly, as a biologist, he has a lot more time for evolutionary and primatological evidence than most social scientists do, though he is disarmingly nervous about admitting it. Perhaps it's just a rhetorical tactic, but I found it very endearing to see him almost on the point of apologising about where the data lead(s); ‘it is downright dreary,’ he says, ‘to have the same basic, male chauvinist distinctions between men and women, boys and girls, confirmed in study after study, starting in very young childhood, but there's no way around it.’ He is well aware of the dangers of being misrepresented as offering some biological ‘justification’ for sexism, and he's at pains to point out that he is not arguing
Barash's position, to put it simply, is that social conventions may indeed be responsible for many of the observed differences between male and female behaviour – but that these conventions in turn have arisen as an expression of biological predispositions. He makes the very simple but very powerful point that if social structures alone were responsible for these things, then we might expect to see different attitudes in different cultures around the world. But we don't. The sad fact is that patriarchal mindsets and attitudes – including male violence, women as resources, sex as currency, male possessiveness and jealousy, female fondness for male wealth and status, male fondness for female youth and beauty – are ubiquitous wherever we look at human societies throughout history and around the globe – and they persist even when social enlightenment would wish to discourage it. And behind them all is the spectre of ‘polygamy as the default setting for human intimacy’.
Let's quickly canter through a few of those issues. Male-male violence – well, here's a depressing and well-known fact: 95 percent of homicides, wherever and whenever data exist, involve young men killing other young men. Different societies of course have vastly different attitudes to violence – in Iceland there are 0.5 homicides per million people, whereas in most of Europe it's closer to 10 per million, and in somewhere really nasty like the United States the figure is 100 per million. But the proportion committed by men relative to women remains constant, which suggests that something deeper than culture is at play. In Barash's view, the reinforcement provided by social attitudes to this stuff – the way young boys and girls are taught about conflict and aggression, for instance – is more of a symptom than a cause; indeed,
Research into sexual preferences is equally disheartening. David Buss's famous study of 37 different human societies found that women across the board ‘consistently chose mates based on their financial wherewithal, ambition and industriousness’; a similar study involved showing women pictures of men in smart suits and Rolexes and men in Burger King uniforms and asking which they would rather date. The results may seem obvious, but this obviousness is itself quite telling – especially when men choose mates on completely different grounds, consistently plumping for ‘physical attractiveness and relative youth’. This disparity goes even in societies like Sweden, where women have essentially the same economic and social status as men.
Sexual dimorphism – the fact that women and men look different – is another universal. Men are bigger than women, and proportionally much more muscly even when size differences are accounted for. And a lot of this is still being selected for – women cross-culturally, when given the choice, prefer taller partners to shorter ones, for example.
You may be asking what the hell any of this has to do with polygamy. A lot, it turns out. In particular, social polygyny – one man with a harem of women – correlates very strongly with almost all of these factors: violent male-male competition and male aggression, intense ‘mate guarding’ or sexual jealousy, increased sexual dimorphism, and a general trend across evolutionary time whereby women are seen as resources and compelled to find high-status mates who can provide stable environments for child-rearing. (Polyandry – one woman, many men – is also part of the story, but I'll come to that later.)
And, of course, there's the brute fact of polygyny itself, which appears in societies everywhere as soon as the historical record pops into existence. Again, this is not something that has emerged from individual social conventions – it is absolutely cross-cultural. Historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has pointed out that in simple societies like the Yanomamo of Venezuela, or the !Kung of Botswana, the strongest men keep up to ten women; larger societies, in Polynesia for example, had guys at the top with up to a hundred women; and in huge empires such as those in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Inca Peru, and many subsequent empires, powerful men sometimes kept thousands or even tens of thousands of women. The evidence, Barash believes, is overwhelming that Homo sapiens was primarily a polygynous species until into the historical era, and that this has unfortunately (and it is unfortunate) left both men and women with a complicated inheritance of inclinations and predispositions which in many cases we would rather not have.
Unlike the authors of Sex at Dawn, Barash is not pointing to polygamy with any excitement: biology is not used here as a tool to justify a behavioural choice. Men who like the sound of ‘harem-keeping’ are probably imagining that they would be the ones with a stable of women on tap, but in fact most men in polygynous societies are not polygynous at all because it's a status that is reserved for the richest and most powerful. From a reproductive point of view, polygyny is more of a success for women, but, Barash argues with some understatement, even when it is in women's economic interest, ‘polygyny is not generally in their psychological interest’. Most of the time polygynous marriages result from coercion, either directly from parents and brothers, or more generally from a socio-economic system that is weighted against them. Historian-philosopher Denis de Rougemont has compared polygyny to rape, inasmuch as they are both ‘an indication that men are not yet in a stage to apprehend the presence of an actual person in a woman’.
In Indonesia, the largest country by population where polygyny is still legal, women often protest in the streets against it
All the same, it turns that there's plenty of evidence that women, too, have a long, long history of seeking out multiple partners, albeit in ways that are much more secretive than men. (This is a difference related to sexual jealousy and violence, and which probably has to do with the facts of parenthood – women know that their children are their own, but men can never be sure unless they watch their partners very closely.) One of the most interesting factors in this story is the fact that H. sapiens females are unusual – almost unique – in not advertising their ovulation. Women do not develop huge red backsides like baboons when fertile, which, knowing the fashion industry, is on balance probably a good thing. It has been posited that this ‘secret’ ovulation has roots in polyandrous tendencies – males would never know exactly when they should be guarding their mates, making it easier for women to slip away and get knocked up by someone fitter nearby.
More concretely and more interestingly though, ovulation apparently has much more of an effect than we realised. A now-classic 2007 study of topless lap-dancers in Albuquerque which looked at ‘tips received by these women as a function of their menstrual cycle’ found – to the great surprise of both researchers and dancers – that they received significantly more tips when maximally fertile. (Miller et al., 2007)
It has further been found that, when ovulating, women are more likely to initiate sex, to touch men in social situations, to prefer traditionally masculine traits such as beards or deep voices, to find male creativity attractive (artistic or verbal for example), to travel further from home and to watch erotic movies. This has led some scientists to say that perhaps human females do have a kind of oestrus after all. So effective are these largely-unconscious signals that it's been shown that both men and women find even photographs of ovulating women more physically attractive than photos of the same women when not ovulating!
Now, what are we to do with all of this information? It is clear that people could, if they wanted to, use it to prop up all kinds of tired and damaging stereotypes. As always, the cautions about generalised statistics apply here. I am not a violent person; I'd go further and venture that most men are not killers. But that doesn't invalidate the point that men are vastly more homicidal than women, because this is a trend that emerges at the level of communities and populations, not individuals. Similarly it's clear from walking into any bar that human beings are overall a species where men compete with other men for access to women, even though it should be apparent from all of our experience that there are innumerable cross-currents and individual counter-examples.
That being the case, are these statistical conclusions actually any help to us? Well, maybe. It could be helpful to have some biological context for the conflict that many people feel in relationships, and which may ultimately come down to the fact that both men and women have evolutionary predispositions to seek more than one mate, while simultaneously being predisposed to want a partner who is rigorously faithful. The modern polyamory community has been struggling for some time to formulate a theory of how to deal with these kinds of jealousies in an open and honest way – though Barash himself is sceptical about polyamory as a workable model for relationships. There is a reason we have stopped living in openly polygamous communities, and clearly there are considerable benefits from monogamy too – pair bonding, coparenting, romantic love. Barash seems to feel that monogamy is on the whole a good thing for us as a social animal, despite the inhibitions it represents on our ‘natural’ tendencies.
Polygamy may be good for reproductive success – but
A lot of couples now have a pretty good understanding of these conflicts and inclinations, and one thing this book does not do is spend much time considering the different ways modern relationships are adapting to it all – not just polyamory (which is emotionally very challenging) but also things like the rise of ‘monogamish’ relationships (a word that Hannah and I quite like, without really wanting to define it). But beyond sex, Barash's approach, examining biological causes without discounting the importance of social structures, is quite productive and allows him to come at old debates from a slightly different angle. On male genius and overachievement, for example:
Note that this analysis stresses the social conventions that contribute to these double standards, but – unlike a traditional social-sciences narrative – it also goes further, to think about the biology underlying these social conventions. To sum it up very bluntly: men and women have the same intellectual and creative potential, but men are biologically more inclined to show off.
The debate over all these issues will rumble on, but most of us, as individuals dealing with other individuals, have to come to our own conclusions anyway about what inclinations, desires, fears and distresses are important to us and the people we're close to. Taking a dispassionate look at the science never hurts for that process, and in my opinion this book is about as dispassionate and neutral as any arguments about this stuff can be.
This is a contentious area, especially when it comes to sexuality, and the confusion over it all has led to a rather unbecoming digging-in of opposed positions. The line from many social analysts now is that gender differences are mainly down to culture and upbringing, and this position is also the one that is most politically correct – which has nothing to do with its validity, but it confuses the issue by making some people more likely to agree with it and others more likely to challenge it for this reason. Meanwhile, attempts to posit hardwired, biological reasons for gender differences have a tendency to be over-speculative – and thus dismissed as ‘evo-psych bullshit’ by those who wish to believe that society and upbringing are all-powerful.
The evo-psych bullshit position and its sexual implications are epitomised in the bestselling Sex at Dawn, which argued that humans are naturally polyamorous because dude, did you see that documentary on bonobos? While the opposing position is epitomised in Cordelia Fine's very well received Delusions of Gender, which showed to most people's satisfaction that there is, in fact, a lot of stereotyping and unconscious bias involved in the testing of gender issues and neurology more generally: more than likely, everyone has the same brain and is taught to use it differently by social convention.
Now along comes David Barash offering the Third Way no one knew they wanted. Certainly, as a biologist, he has a lot more time for evolutionary and primatological evidence than most social scientists do, though he is disarmingly nervous about admitting it. Perhaps it's just a rhetorical tactic, but I found it very endearing to see him almost on the point of apologising about where the data lead(s); ‘it is downright dreary,’ he says, ‘to have the same basic, male chauvinist distinctions between men and women, boys and girls, confirmed in study after study, starting in very young childhood, but there's no way around it.’ He is well aware of the dangers of being misrepresented as offering some biological ‘justification’ for sexism, and he's at pains to point out that he is not arguing
that “biology is destiny,” but quite the opposite, that we are most free from biological constraints in proportion as we understand those inclinations and predispositions with which evolution has endowed us.
Barash's position, to put it simply, is that social conventions may indeed be responsible for many of the observed differences between male and female behaviour – but that these conventions in turn have arisen as an expression of biological predispositions. He makes the very simple but very powerful point that if social structures alone were responsible for these things, then we might expect to see different attitudes in different cultures around the world. But we don't. The sad fact is that patriarchal mindsets and attitudes – including male violence, women as resources, sex as currency, male possessiveness and jealousy, female fondness for male wealth and status, male fondness for female youth and beauty – are ubiquitous wherever we look at human societies throughout history and around the globe – and they persist even when social enlightenment would wish to discourage it. And behind them all is the spectre of ‘polygamy as the default setting for human intimacy’.
Let's quickly canter through a few of those issues. Male-male violence – well, here's a depressing and well-known fact: 95 percent of homicides, wherever and whenever data exist, involve young men killing other young men. Different societies of course have vastly different attitudes to violence – in Iceland there are 0.5 homicides per million people, whereas in most of Europe it's closer to 10 per million, and in somewhere really nasty like the United States the figure is 100 per million. But the proportion committed by men relative to women remains constant, which suggests that something deeper than culture is at play. In Barash's view, the reinforcement provided by social attitudes to this stuff – the way young boys and girls are taught about conflict and aggression, for instance – is more of a symptom than a cause; indeed,
a study of the aggressive behavior of Norwegian pre-school children found that little boys were reprimanded more than girls for their aggression—in psych-speak, they were “negatively reinforced”—and yet they remained consistently more aggressive.
Research into sexual preferences is equally disheartening. David Buss's famous study of 37 different human societies found that women across the board ‘consistently chose mates based on their financial wherewithal, ambition and industriousness’; a similar study involved showing women pictures of men in smart suits and Rolexes and men in Burger King uniforms and asking which they would rather date. The results may seem obvious, but this obviousness is itself quite telling – especially when men choose mates on completely different grounds, consistently plumping for ‘physical attractiveness and relative youth’. This disparity goes even in societies like Sweden, where women have essentially the same economic and social status as men.
Sexual dimorphism – the fact that women and men look different – is another universal. Men are bigger than women, and proportionally much more muscly even when size differences are accounted for. And a lot of this is still being selected for – women cross-culturally, when given the choice, prefer taller partners to shorter ones, for example.
You may be asking what the hell any of this has to do with polygamy. A lot, it turns out. In particular, social polygyny – one man with a harem of women – correlates very strongly with almost all of these factors: violent male-male competition and male aggression, intense ‘mate guarding’ or sexual jealousy, increased sexual dimorphism, and a general trend across evolutionary time whereby women are seen as resources and compelled to find high-status mates who can provide stable environments for child-rearing. (Polyandry – one woman, many men – is also part of the story, but I'll come to that later.)
And, of course, there's the brute fact of polygyny itself, which appears in societies everywhere as soon as the historical record pops into existence. Again, this is not something that has emerged from individual social conventions – it is absolutely cross-cultural. Historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has pointed out that in simple societies like the Yanomamo of Venezuela, or the !Kung of Botswana, the strongest men keep up to ten women; larger societies, in Polynesia for example, had guys at the top with up to a hundred women; and in huge empires such as those in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Inca Peru, and many subsequent empires, powerful men sometimes kept thousands or even tens of thousands of women. The evidence, Barash believes, is overwhelming that Homo sapiens was primarily a polygynous species until into the historical era, and that this has unfortunately (and it is unfortunate) left both men and women with a complicated inheritance of inclinations and predispositions which in many cases we would rather not have.
Unlike the authors of Sex at Dawn, Barash is not pointing to polygamy with any excitement: biology is not used here as a tool to justify a behavioural choice. Men who like the sound of ‘harem-keeping’ are probably imagining that they would be the ones with a stable of women on tap, but in fact most men in polygynous societies are not polygynous at all because it's a status that is reserved for the richest and most powerful. From a reproductive point of view, polygyny is more of a success for women, but, Barash argues with some understatement, even when it is in women's economic interest, ‘polygyny is not generally in their psychological interest’. Most of the time polygynous marriages result from coercion, either directly from parents and brothers, or more generally from a socio-economic system that is weighted against them. Historian-philosopher Denis de Rougemont has compared polygyny to rape, inasmuch as they are both ‘an indication that men are not yet in a stage to apprehend the presence of an actual person in a woman’.
In Indonesia, the largest country by population where polygyny is still legal, women often protest in the streets against it
All the same, it turns that there's plenty of evidence that women, too, have a long, long history of seeking out multiple partners, albeit in ways that are much more secretive than men. (This is a difference related to sexual jealousy and violence, and which probably has to do with the facts of parenthood – women know that their children are their own, but men can never be sure unless they watch their partners very closely.) One of the most interesting factors in this story is the fact that H. sapiens females are unusual – almost unique – in not advertising their ovulation. Women do not develop huge red backsides like baboons when fertile, which, knowing the fashion industry, is on balance probably a good thing. It has been posited that this ‘secret’ ovulation has roots in polyandrous tendencies – males would never know exactly when they should be guarding their mates, making it easier for women to slip away and get knocked up by someone fitter nearby.
More concretely and more interestingly though, ovulation apparently has much more of an effect than we realised. A now-classic 2007 study of topless lap-dancers in Albuquerque which looked at ‘tips received by these women as a function of their menstrual cycle’ found – to the great surprise of both researchers and dancers – that they received significantly more tips when maximally fertile. (Miller et al., 2007)
It has further been found that, when ovulating, women are more likely to initiate sex, to touch men in social situations, to prefer traditionally masculine traits such as beards or deep voices, to find male creativity attractive (artistic or verbal for example), to travel further from home and to watch erotic movies. This has led some scientists to say that perhaps human females do have a kind of oestrus after all. So effective are these largely-unconscious signals that it's been shown that both men and women find even photographs of ovulating women more physically attractive than photos of the same women when not ovulating!
Now, what are we to do with all of this information? It is clear that people could, if they wanted to, use it to prop up all kinds of tired and damaging stereotypes. As always, the cautions about generalised statistics apply here. I am not a violent person; I'd go further and venture that most men are not killers. But that doesn't invalidate the point that men are vastly more homicidal than women, because this is a trend that emerges at the level of communities and populations, not individuals. Similarly it's clear from walking into any bar that human beings are overall a species where men compete with other men for access to women, even though it should be apparent from all of our experience that there are innumerable cross-currents and individual counter-examples.
That being the case, are these statistical conclusions actually any help to us? Well, maybe. It could be helpful to have some biological context for the conflict that many people feel in relationships, and which may ultimately come down to the fact that both men and women have evolutionary predispositions to seek more than one mate, while simultaneously being predisposed to want a partner who is rigorously faithful. The modern polyamory community has been struggling for some time to formulate a theory of how to deal with these kinds of jealousies in an open and honest way – though Barash himself is sceptical about polyamory as a workable model for relationships. There is a reason we have stopped living in openly polygamous communities, and clearly there are considerable benefits from monogamy too – pair bonding, coparenting, romantic love. Barash seems to feel that monogamy is on the whole a good thing for us as a social animal, despite the inhibitions it represents on our ‘natural’ tendencies.
Polygamy—both polygyny and polyandry—really does lead to a kind of “war between the sexes,” whereas monogamy leads to shared interests.
Polygamy may be good for reproductive success – but
although “good” for the future of the relevant genes, this is a far cry from anything remotely approximating moral or ethical desirability.
A lot of couples now have a pretty good understanding of these conflicts and inclinations, and one thing this book does not do is spend much time considering the different ways modern relationships are adapting to it all – not just polyamory (which is emotionally very challenging) but also things like the rise of ‘monogamish’ relationships (a word that Hannah and I quite like, without really wanting to define it). But beyond sex, Barash's approach, examining biological causes without discounting the importance of social structures, is quite productive and allows him to come at old debates from a slightly different angle. On male genius and overachievement, for example:
I submit that the minds of women are every bit as capable of such creativity as are the minds of men, but that to an extent not commonly found in women, men are encouraged, or in some cases, even driven by their biology to act upon, and, moreover, to publicize whatever distinctive qualities they possess. And of course, such behavior is encouraged—even admired—in many cultural traditions as well, in ways that counterpart activities by women are not.
Note that this analysis stresses the social conventions that contribute to these double standards, but – unlike a traditional social-sciences narrative – it also goes further, to think about the biology underlying these social conventions. To sum it up very bluntly: men and women have the same intellectual and creative potential, but men are biologically more inclined to show off.
The debate over all these issues will rumble on, but most of us, as individuals dealing with other individuals, have to come to our own conclusions anyway about what inclinations, desires, fears and distresses are important to us and the people we're close to. Taking a dispassionate look at the science never hurts for that process, and in my opinion this book is about as dispassionate and neutral as any arguments about this stuff can be.
October 3, 2016
Chauvinistic garbage includes giving justification to violent and abusive men, implying that somehow staying with abusive men increases the women's evolutionary fitness. Also a chapter on how men are biologically more likely to be geniuses then women, and how homosexuality arose a result of selecting for for more cooperative warriors. Then why do many other animal species like frogs also exhibit homosexuality? Seriously, back this stuff up.
Disgusting conjectures spewed out as pseudoscience.
Disgusting conjectures spewed out as pseudoscience.
February 21, 2018
I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
This was...though I did not read all the way to the end...utter patriarchal crap.
I do not know why I am surprised, but there you go.
#honestreview
This was...though I did not read all the way to the end...utter patriarchal crap.
I do not know why I am surprised, but there you go.
#honestreview
July 22, 2023
Evolutionary psychologist David P Barash gives us the comprehensive case for humans being naturally polygamous, with more evidence than you might want. Barash challenges two competing narratives about human nature those in the west are most familiar with: that humans are either by nature monogamous or promiscuous. The former monogamy owes to the dominance of custom from the Greco-Roman past as well as from Judeo-Christianity. The latter promiscuity is the of hope of social radicals and egalitarians who see marriage as despotic and unnatural.
Barash's thesis is that humans are naturally inclined toward polygamy, both polygyny and polyandry, due to our primate heritage, and that universal monogamy for everybody is a social imposition, though not exactly unnatural. Barash's case has two major lines of evidence: 1) lingering differences in males and females called dimorphism and 2) comparative anatomy with ape relatives.
The basic argument for the first line of evidence is that with polygamous species males face greater competition against other males for reproductive partners. The ratio of male to female partners is limited by the fact that a human female can only give birth 9 months at a time from a single male partner. So if one male has exclusive access to several females, the other males are left out of the gene pool. This would incentivize males to develop stronger bodies to compete against one another for mates since the competition isn't "fair." The expectation is for men to be physically larger than women, take longer to mature, and be more violent in a polygamous species
The physiological differences between men and women are more striking than I realized. Men are on average five inches taller than women and 10-20% larger overall, but when fat is discounted, men are 40% heavier, with 60% more muscle mass and 80% more muscle in the arms. The male-female difference in crime is 10 to 1. The difference is slight in petty crime, greater in robbery, even greater with assault, and most dramatic in homicides. Homicide rates are very different in Iceland and Honduras but ratio the same. So this strongly suggests humans are by nature polygamous.
It isn't as if females are inclined to monogamy and males to polygamy though. Though overt polyandry, several male partners for one female, is rare, it is practiced covertly. This is obvious given the existence of adultery and legal divorce. Through divorce in fact one woman can over her lifetime have offspring from several male partners. This points to a predisposition to polygamy being human and not just male nature.
The second line of evidence is comparative anatomy with primates. Gibbons are monogamous and their females are equal in size to males. Gorillas are polygamous and males are larger than females. The dimorphism among humans suggest our ancestors were closer to the gorilla. Chimps and bonobos are the closest to us genetically and have multiple sex partners. They however openly practice promiscuity among both males and females rather than taking mates. This is because male competition occurs among their sperm. If humans were closer to the chimp model of promiscuity, male sperm count should be pretty large. It is in the middle. The evidence is that we are mildly polygamous, or serially monogamous.
A survey of 849 societies found that prior to western imperialism, 708 (83%) had polygamy. One half were usually polygynous and one half occasionally so, though most men end up with one wife. 16% were officially monogamous and fewer than 1% polyandrous. Most men in a polygamous society however don't have more than one wife. A harem is for men of wealth and power. The case Barash is making isn't that everybody was polygamous, just that it was practiced in some way for those who could afford it.
There are strong forces which induce humans to pair bonding and monogamy. Pair bonding is affective and monogamy is political. The "four horsemen" which promote monogamy are parental attachment, mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. Humans are born into the world helpless and develop strong attachments with their caregivers, which in turn shapes our future relationships to greater emotional dependency. This condition elicits greater male provision of resources to children. Mirror neurons are a proposed explanation for empathy by exciting the same brain activity when observing somebody else as if we are doing the same action, which makes interpersonal relationships possible on a deeper level. Our brain's neuron connections grow and brain regions develop in response to continued interaction. The hormones oxytocin for females and vasopressin for males induce positive feelings from partner from physical arousal.
Strict monogamy as opposed to pair bonding however is political. Following Freud's speculations Barash argues that social and legal monogamy arose as a form of social leveling, to ensure equal access among males for females to maintain social peace and harmony. Polygamy means having a large portion of males condemned to bachelorhood with no prospects of accumulating wealth. Societies with mass polygamy were tyrannical and highly stratified. Polygamy is currently largely practiced by fringe religious traditional groups. It is possible that democracy cannot work with widespread polygamy, as mutual consent of all parties to one another is easier in monogamy, though it seems to me that mass polygamy is more a consequence than a cause of social inequality as providing for a few hundred wives would be quite expensive in a hunter gatherer society. Prior to such accumulation of wealth humans were mostly serially monogamous with maybe a few having more than one or two partners.
"Monogamy may therefore have emerged as a sop to men, reducing the number consigned to frustrated bachelorhood, in a kind of unspoken social bargain whereby powerful men gave up the overt prerequisites of polygyny in return for obtaining a degree of social peace and harmony."
Barash even speculates that the drive to accumulate wealth derives from our polygamous heritage.
"We've seen that polygyny in particular is a direct outgrowth of high male variance in reproductive success. Is it possible that income and socioeconomic inequality- not just the tolerance of such differences, but the establishment of circumstances underlying their very existence- is associated with a polygynist mindset, whereby some individuals accrue more than others? Certainly it is more than their "fair share." It seems at least possible that capitalism's fondness for more...is a consequence of an evolutionary process that has- at least in the past- rewarded those who obtain more."
Barash makes a novel argument for homosexual behavior as possibly being adaptive from our polygamous heritage, with group selection logic:
"Homosexual men living in a polygynous society might experience an advantage over their hetero counterparts if they evoked less competition from dominant males, as well as perhaps experiencing less male-male competition generally...On the other hand, for their frequency to be maintained, genes conducive for homosexuality would have to experience more than a reduced disadvantage; they would have needed to project themselves, somehow, into the future. Among possible mechanisms, the one most clearly associated with polygyny is based on the conjecture that if these men were at least somewhat inclined to bisexuality as well, they would likely have experienced at least some reproductive opportunities, especially, especially because as identified homosexuals, they wouldn't be guarded against to the degree that horny heteros would have been."
The Abrahamic god is also speculated to have some of its appeal from the harem alpha ape past.
"Much in the evolutionary psychology of Homo sapiens renders our species susceptible to God as portrayed in the Abrahamic religions. We are deeply sensitive to dominance hierarchies and especially to the need to respect the silverback make and his prerogatives. We are subject to sexual impulses that in our evolutionary past contributed to the success of our ancestors but that also risked serious trouble is they were not employed cautiously; hence, we are endowed with urges that are powerful but that we also recognize as potentially dangerous to ourselves, especially if they evoke jealous anger from the powerful male.
"In his book The Naked Ape, zoologist Desmond Morris wrote that religion's extreme potency is simply "a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group."
Extrapolation to culture though takes us to cultural evolution through memes which isn't biological though influenced by biology. The argument would be that we are predisposed towards certain memes like patriarchal religion or worship/attraction of successful men. That men are socially valued for competition and women for fidelity would be explained by the polygamous urges.
I think the case Barash makes is less surprising than he makes it out to be. Human nature is multifaceted and it seems we have some predispositions toward polygamy, but I think it's really for most of us serial monogamy of having multiple partners over a lifetime but one, overt, partner at least at a time while maybe a few for the powerful. Our primate common ancestry could very well have been polygamous, I think it's plausible. I think that the transition to being human induced us to become more monogamous during the Pleistocene but that the rise of civilized life and wealth activated or reactivated these powerful tendencies toward polygamy, and a moral-social revolution changed it to official monogamy.
"Here, then, is something of a monogamy bottom line: human beings have several deeply evolved predispositions, which don't always coexist comfortably. In particular, we are almost certainly endowed with a string inclination for pair bonding, piled on top of alongside or incorporated within and sometimes without another, contradictory inclination: for multiple sex partners. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, do we contradict ourselves? Very well, we contradict ourselves. We are vast; we contain multitudes, which include simultaneous contradictory impulses toward both polygamy and monogamy."
Barash's thesis is that humans are naturally inclined toward polygamy, both polygyny and polyandry, due to our primate heritage, and that universal monogamy for everybody is a social imposition, though not exactly unnatural. Barash's case has two major lines of evidence: 1) lingering differences in males and females called dimorphism and 2) comparative anatomy with ape relatives.
The basic argument for the first line of evidence is that with polygamous species males face greater competition against other males for reproductive partners. The ratio of male to female partners is limited by the fact that a human female can only give birth 9 months at a time from a single male partner. So if one male has exclusive access to several females, the other males are left out of the gene pool. This would incentivize males to develop stronger bodies to compete against one another for mates since the competition isn't "fair." The expectation is for men to be physically larger than women, take longer to mature, and be more violent in a polygamous species
The physiological differences between men and women are more striking than I realized. Men are on average five inches taller than women and 10-20% larger overall, but when fat is discounted, men are 40% heavier, with 60% more muscle mass and 80% more muscle in the arms. The male-female difference in crime is 10 to 1. The difference is slight in petty crime, greater in robbery, even greater with assault, and most dramatic in homicides. Homicide rates are very different in Iceland and Honduras but ratio the same. So this strongly suggests humans are by nature polygamous.
It isn't as if females are inclined to monogamy and males to polygamy though. Though overt polyandry, several male partners for one female, is rare, it is practiced covertly. This is obvious given the existence of adultery and legal divorce. Through divorce in fact one woman can over her lifetime have offspring from several male partners. This points to a predisposition to polygamy being human and not just male nature.
The second line of evidence is comparative anatomy with primates. Gibbons are monogamous and their females are equal in size to males. Gorillas are polygamous and males are larger than females. The dimorphism among humans suggest our ancestors were closer to the gorilla. Chimps and bonobos are the closest to us genetically and have multiple sex partners. They however openly practice promiscuity among both males and females rather than taking mates. This is because male competition occurs among their sperm. If humans were closer to the chimp model of promiscuity, male sperm count should be pretty large. It is in the middle. The evidence is that we are mildly polygamous, or serially monogamous.
A survey of 849 societies found that prior to western imperialism, 708 (83%) had polygamy. One half were usually polygynous and one half occasionally so, though most men end up with one wife. 16% were officially monogamous and fewer than 1% polyandrous. Most men in a polygamous society however don't have more than one wife. A harem is for men of wealth and power. The case Barash is making isn't that everybody was polygamous, just that it was practiced in some way for those who could afford it.
There are strong forces which induce humans to pair bonding and monogamy. Pair bonding is affective and monogamy is political. The "four horsemen" which promote monogamy are parental attachment, mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. Humans are born into the world helpless and develop strong attachments with their caregivers, which in turn shapes our future relationships to greater emotional dependency. This condition elicits greater male provision of resources to children. Mirror neurons are a proposed explanation for empathy by exciting the same brain activity when observing somebody else as if we are doing the same action, which makes interpersonal relationships possible on a deeper level. Our brain's neuron connections grow and brain regions develop in response to continued interaction. The hormones oxytocin for females and vasopressin for males induce positive feelings from partner from physical arousal.
Strict monogamy as opposed to pair bonding however is political. Following Freud's speculations Barash argues that social and legal monogamy arose as a form of social leveling, to ensure equal access among males for females to maintain social peace and harmony. Polygamy means having a large portion of males condemned to bachelorhood with no prospects of accumulating wealth. Societies with mass polygamy were tyrannical and highly stratified. Polygamy is currently largely practiced by fringe religious traditional groups. It is possible that democracy cannot work with widespread polygamy, as mutual consent of all parties to one another is easier in monogamy, though it seems to me that mass polygamy is more a consequence than a cause of social inequality as providing for a few hundred wives would be quite expensive in a hunter gatherer society. Prior to such accumulation of wealth humans were mostly serially monogamous with maybe a few having more than one or two partners.
"Monogamy may therefore have emerged as a sop to men, reducing the number consigned to frustrated bachelorhood, in a kind of unspoken social bargain whereby powerful men gave up the overt prerequisites of polygyny in return for obtaining a degree of social peace and harmony."
Barash even speculates that the drive to accumulate wealth derives from our polygamous heritage.
"We've seen that polygyny in particular is a direct outgrowth of high male variance in reproductive success. Is it possible that income and socioeconomic inequality- not just the tolerance of such differences, but the establishment of circumstances underlying their very existence- is associated with a polygynist mindset, whereby some individuals accrue more than others? Certainly it is more than their "fair share." It seems at least possible that capitalism's fondness for more...is a consequence of an evolutionary process that has- at least in the past- rewarded those who obtain more."
Barash makes a novel argument for homosexual behavior as possibly being adaptive from our polygamous heritage, with group selection logic:
"Homosexual men living in a polygynous society might experience an advantage over their hetero counterparts if they evoked less competition from dominant males, as well as perhaps experiencing less male-male competition generally...On the other hand, for their frequency to be maintained, genes conducive for homosexuality would have to experience more than a reduced disadvantage; they would have needed to project themselves, somehow, into the future. Among possible mechanisms, the one most clearly associated with polygyny is based on the conjecture that if these men were at least somewhat inclined to bisexuality as well, they would likely have experienced at least some reproductive opportunities, especially, especially because as identified homosexuals, they wouldn't be guarded against to the degree that horny heteros would have been."
The Abrahamic god is also speculated to have some of its appeal from the harem alpha ape past.
"Much in the evolutionary psychology of Homo sapiens renders our species susceptible to God as portrayed in the Abrahamic religions. We are deeply sensitive to dominance hierarchies and especially to the need to respect the silverback make and his prerogatives. We are subject to sexual impulses that in our evolutionary past contributed to the success of our ancestors but that also risked serious trouble is they were not employed cautiously; hence, we are endowed with urges that are powerful but that we also recognize as potentially dangerous to ourselves, especially if they evoke jealous anger from the powerful male.
"In his book The Naked Ape, zoologist Desmond Morris wrote that religion's extreme potency is simply "a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group."
Extrapolation to culture though takes us to cultural evolution through memes which isn't biological though influenced by biology. The argument would be that we are predisposed towards certain memes like patriarchal religion or worship/attraction of successful men. That men are socially valued for competition and women for fidelity would be explained by the polygamous urges.
I think the case Barash makes is less surprising than he makes it out to be. Human nature is multifaceted and it seems we have some predispositions toward polygamy, but I think it's really for most of us serial monogamy of having multiple partners over a lifetime but one, overt, partner at least at a time while maybe a few for the powerful. Our primate common ancestry could very well have been polygamous, I think it's plausible. I think that the transition to being human induced us to become more monogamous during the Pleistocene but that the rise of civilized life and wealth activated or reactivated these powerful tendencies toward polygamy, and a moral-social revolution changed it to official monogamy.
"Here, then, is something of a monogamy bottom line: human beings have several deeply evolved predispositions, which don't always coexist comfortably. In particular, we are almost certainly endowed with a string inclination for pair bonding, piled on top of alongside or incorporated within and sometimes without another, contradictory inclination: for multiple sex partners. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, do we contradict ourselves? Very well, we contradict ourselves. We are vast; we contain multitudes, which include simultaneous contradictory impulses toward both polygamy and monogamy."
March 21, 2019
Fascinating content, but it reads like a research paper, and thus took me two months to finish. I learned a lot though. Very thought provoking. we really are all just animals
February 6, 2016
Polygamy might sound like an unlikely topic for one of the most interesting scientific books of the year but Out of Eden is just that unlikely gem.
The concept of polygamy is such a serious taboo in Western society that some people might find even the thought of it uncomfortable. However, as this book so helpfully points out, knowing our evolutionary history as animals is vital to understanding ourselves today as sentient humans. What this book never does is morally judge or try to “solve” the problems of our society. It is by no means a justification. It draws a very clear line between biology and morality.
We are not bound by our biology because we are no longer animals, but our societies, our deepest fears and desires are all rooted in our biology – our biology that is definitely geared towards being polygamous. Polygamy can not only explain infidelity but also: murder, violence, sexism and a whole host of other ills that seem to block our path to a more enlightened future.
Recognizing polygamy as central to the human reproductive system is like finding a skeleton in our collective closet: terrible yet riveting. Thankfully Out of Eden takes us on a journey from the biological facts of how scientists have worked out we are evolutionary polygamous to the traditional societies that practice polygamy. The ills of the world that we seem to accept as inevitable human evils are framed scientifically in the context of being a polygamous species and from a scientific point of view these problems start to make sense.
Personally I found this book guided me through one of the most fascinating journeys into human biology. Written in a easy to read style with a generous sprinkling of dry humour, this book is well worth the read.
The concept of polygamy is such a serious taboo in Western society that some people might find even the thought of it uncomfortable. However, as this book so helpfully points out, knowing our evolutionary history as animals is vital to understanding ourselves today as sentient humans. What this book never does is morally judge or try to “solve” the problems of our society. It is by no means a justification. It draws a very clear line between biology and morality.
We are not bound by our biology because we are no longer animals, but our societies, our deepest fears and desires are all rooted in our biology – our biology that is definitely geared towards being polygamous. Polygamy can not only explain infidelity but also: murder, violence, sexism and a whole host of other ills that seem to block our path to a more enlightened future.
Recognizing polygamy as central to the human reproductive system is like finding a skeleton in our collective closet: terrible yet riveting. Thankfully Out of Eden takes us on a journey from the biological facts of how scientists have worked out we are evolutionary polygamous to the traditional societies that practice polygamy. The ills of the world that we seem to accept as inevitable human evils are framed scientifically in the context of being a polygamous species and from a scientific point of view these problems start to make sense.
Personally I found this book guided me through one of the most fascinating journeys into human biology. Written in a easy to read style with a generous sprinkling of dry humour, this book is well worth the read.
September 26, 2016
This book is a collection of outdated, sexist ramblings that excuses misogynistic behavior and violence as a natural occurrence that should be expected of men. David Barash often ignores the influence of societal pressure, culture and human psychology as a means of understanding the complexities of sex, relationships and desire, and instead focuses heavily on the human physiology and behavior of other mammals.
Throughout the book are misguided and prejudiced assertions such as, "We should not be surprised to find that aggressiveness is widely- and all too correctly- seen as manly and its alternative, timidity, as womanly;" and "It is more logical for one man to mate with multiple woman, than to have one woman mated to several men."
The reader must even suffer a long section that talks about various laws that made it legal for a man to kill his adulterous wife and how this should be unsurprising because of a man's apparent natural heightened inclination towards sexual jealousy.
Overall, this is a male-centered, patriarchal book that toutes sexual freedom for men while putting women's needs, desires and wellbeing in the backseat.
Throughout the book are misguided and prejudiced assertions such as, "We should not be surprised to find that aggressiveness is widely- and all too correctly- seen as manly and its alternative, timidity, as womanly;" and "It is more logical for one man to mate with multiple woman, than to have one woman mated to several men."
The reader must even suffer a long section that talks about various laws that made it legal for a man to kill his adulterous wife and how this should be unsurprising because of a man's apparent natural heightened inclination towards sexual jealousy.
Overall, this is a male-centered, patriarchal book that toutes sexual freedom for men while putting women's needs, desires and wellbeing in the backseat.
October 16, 2020
Well researched, well-argued book about the origins of human sexual behavior. Most of its conclusions fit well with what can be observed.
There's one thing, though. The whole book is an acerbic response to "Sex at Dawn". Alright. So, promiscuity/polyamory is not "natural" for humans, we are being told a hundred or so times. Alright. But then, in the last few chapters, the author tries his very best to defend and praise monogamy (which also appears "biologically unnatural"), because of its societal advantages.
So, despite all his claims of objectivity and care when touching a sensitive topic, the author has a mild but noticeable "conservative" bias.
Also, the book is quite repetitive. Took some effort to finish.
There's one thing, though. The whole book is an acerbic response to "Sex at Dawn". Alright. So, promiscuity/polyamory is not "natural" for humans, we are being told a hundred or so times. Alright. But then, in the last few chapters, the author tries his very best to defend and praise monogamy (which also appears "biologically unnatural"), because of its societal advantages.
So, despite all his claims of objectivity and care when touching a sensitive topic, the author has a mild but noticeable "conservative" bias.
Also, the book is quite repetitive. Took some effort to finish.
April 30, 2023
I tend to agree. Enjoyable science writing for the general public. Evolutionary history of sexual/status male/female structures and the capacity for adaptations within the inherited frame. No longer earth-shattering to me; that was when I read Judith Rich Harris - The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do many years ago.
October 25, 2019
‘The Naskapi tribesman who was taken to task by an early Jesuit missionary in North America, and seeing the priest’s dismay at the group’s sexual promiscuity and uncertain paternity, responded: “Thou hast no sense. You French people love your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.”
This book helps to shine a light on some of the more esoteric characteristics of the human condition which although often suppressed, inhabit the psyche of all humans who tread the earth.
When considering human social habits it is sometimes necessary to look into our evolutionary history and because the evidence here is often sparse there will inevitable be some speculation involved when making conclusions. I was left a little unsatisfied, so to speak, because of the speculative nature of much of the content here. The author refers on a number of occasions to the fact that there is a speculative element in his writing. At the end of the chapter on Monogamy he states:
‘Much of the preceding is speculative, although plausible. It should at least be clear, however, that biology does not foreclose monogamy.’
What is certain is that our modern social landscape is very varied and complex, especially when considering the diversity of civilisations and cultures within human society as a whole and that exceptions to any rule are inevitable.
A story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, is worth repeating here and illustrates perhaps one of the better shots we may get at the truth:
A young girl is troubled by a recurrent dream in which two wolves fight viciously with each other. Seeking an explanation , she goes to her grandfather, highly regarded for his wisdom, who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: “The one you feed”.
The ideas on the roles of marriage and monogamy in modern society are interesting. Do they form part of a conspiracy to maintain the modern western conservative economic capitalist model? The author writes ‘Maybe it’s not religion that is the opiate of the masses, as Marx claimed, but monogamy.’
Also mentioned is DRD4, a version of the dopamine receptor gene, occurring on chromosome 11 and found in all people, although individuals vary in how many times this gene is repeated. One might expect that individuals with multiple repeats of DRD4 would also be more likely to go skydiving, or to enjoy roller coasters. Nor is it that they necessarily have a higher sex drive, or a genetic proclivity to extramarital sexual exploits as such; rather, they crave novelty.’
This book helps to shine a light on some of the more esoteric characteristics of the human condition which although often suppressed, inhabit the psyche of all humans who tread the earth.
When considering human social habits it is sometimes necessary to look into our evolutionary history and because the evidence here is often sparse there will inevitable be some speculation involved when making conclusions. I was left a little unsatisfied, so to speak, because of the speculative nature of much of the content here. The author refers on a number of occasions to the fact that there is a speculative element in his writing. At the end of the chapter on Monogamy he states:
‘Much of the preceding is speculative, although plausible. It should at least be clear, however, that biology does not foreclose monogamy.’
What is certain is that our modern social landscape is very varied and complex, especially when considering the diversity of civilisations and cultures within human society as a whole and that exceptions to any rule are inevitable.
A story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, is worth repeating here and illustrates perhaps one of the better shots we may get at the truth:
A young girl is troubled by a recurrent dream in which two wolves fight viciously with each other. Seeking an explanation , she goes to her grandfather, highly regarded for his wisdom, who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: “The one you feed”.
The ideas on the roles of marriage and monogamy in modern society are interesting. Do they form part of a conspiracy to maintain the modern western conservative economic capitalist model? The author writes ‘Maybe it’s not religion that is the opiate of the masses, as Marx claimed, but monogamy.’
Also mentioned is DRD4, a version of the dopamine receptor gene, occurring on chromosome 11 and found in all people, although individuals vary in how many times this gene is repeated. One might expect that individuals with multiple repeats of DRD4 would also be more likely to go skydiving, or to enjoy roller coasters. Nor is it that they necessarily have a higher sex drive, or a genetic proclivity to extramarital sexual exploits as such; rather, they crave novelty.’
September 18, 2024
Stunningly well researched, disquieting in its implications - David has a deep respect for the reader, so he exhaustingly lays out the evidence before raising the naturalistic fallacy and arguing that what ought and what is are two different things. A lot of the reviewers on here likely rage quit before reaching that concluding section, and I get it - this is some dark shit, and anyone believing that biology should be a source of morality is going to get some insane ideas from this book (best to hide it from the incels, lol). But the unfortunate reality is that these are the tendencies we've inherited, and the best way to overcome our biological tugs is to know which direction they're pulling us in.
I'm struck by how horrifically, hilariously poised our nature is - we tremble on a thin wire between two extremes. We are such deliriously confused, conflicted animals.
I'm struck by how horrifically, hilariously poised our nature is - we tremble on a thin wire between two extremes. We are such deliriously confused, conflicted animals.
April 28, 2023
Pompous ego-stroking garbage
February 14, 2016
I received a copy of Out of Eden from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Like most people in America that are married, I'm in a monogamous marriage. This is my second marriage, and my husband Sean's first. My first marriage didn't end due to cheating, irreconcilable differences, things like that. I left due to abuse, with Sean's help. Years later we ended up married, but that's a story for a different review where it would be relevant.
I've read and researched the different ways humans form relationships, and the monogamy debate has come up several times. It has always interested me, since mating among humans is different across cultures. Each culture has its own way of doing things, and all those cultures get by with their various traditions and ideas. Out of Eden talks about many different cultures throughout human history, including present day, across the world.
I am a monogamous creature, and it has nothing to do with culture or upbringing, or my religion. I've examined this within myself a lot as I've researched this, and life situations have lead me to know that monogamy is right for myself. Sean is the same way. We were friends for a while before we were together, and that was brought up. He had no reason to tell me anything different, regardless of how we felt about each other. So here we are, in a monogamous marriage.
I decided to read Out of Eden because it's a new publication on an "old" subject - well, old to me, since I've researched this. I did enjoy the book as a whole, but there are a few things that set me back a bit.
The chapters are extremely long. They seemed long to the point that they were drawn out. Several examples are given for each chapter, which I appreciate, but after a while, I wanted to get on to the next chapter and next subject. I think they could have been shortened and still made the same point.
The writing style was hard to read at times. Some sentences are not only long, but have several parentheses and I had to go back to the start of the sentence to pick it apart in order to understand it. It isn't that I didn't understand the content, it was the way the sentences are structured. I believe the sentence structure is what made the chapters so long. This goes on through the entire book, not in a few places or even here or there. It persists throughout.
I love and appreciate any book with scientific evidence, and Out of Eden provides that in a ten fold. Everything is examined scientifically, and it's done very thoroughly. The issue I see is that this could overwhelm a reader as some points go on for quite awhile. That also goes back to how long the chapters are and the sentence structure. I see a lot of readers putting this down in frustration, and not picking it up again. The scientific terms give the impression that the layman reader would have a rough time with this, and would be referring to their dictionary quite often while reading Out of Eden.
This is one of those books that I would be recommending on an individual basis. Out of Eden is not going to be a book that anyone interested in polygamy and monogamy can read due to the things above. It will take someone at least moderately versed in evolutionary biology, zoology and anthropology to read this one. It is very interesting and I enjoyed it, but I feel like the reader base is limited.
Like most people in America that are married, I'm in a monogamous marriage. This is my second marriage, and my husband Sean's first. My first marriage didn't end due to cheating, irreconcilable differences, things like that. I left due to abuse, with Sean's help. Years later we ended up married, but that's a story for a different review where it would be relevant.
I've read and researched the different ways humans form relationships, and the monogamy debate has come up several times. It has always interested me, since mating among humans is different across cultures. Each culture has its own way of doing things, and all those cultures get by with their various traditions and ideas. Out of Eden talks about many different cultures throughout human history, including present day, across the world.
I am a monogamous creature, and it has nothing to do with culture or upbringing, or my religion. I've examined this within myself a lot as I've researched this, and life situations have lead me to know that monogamy is right for myself. Sean is the same way. We were friends for a while before we were together, and that was brought up. He had no reason to tell me anything different, regardless of how we felt about each other. So here we are, in a monogamous marriage.
I decided to read Out of Eden because it's a new publication on an "old" subject - well, old to me, since I've researched this. I did enjoy the book as a whole, but there are a few things that set me back a bit.
The chapters are extremely long. They seemed long to the point that they were drawn out. Several examples are given for each chapter, which I appreciate, but after a while, I wanted to get on to the next chapter and next subject. I think they could have been shortened and still made the same point.
The writing style was hard to read at times. Some sentences are not only long, but have several parentheses and I had to go back to the start of the sentence to pick it apart in order to understand it. It isn't that I didn't understand the content, it was the way the sentences are structured. I believe the sentence structure is what made the chapters so long. This goes on through the entire book, not in a few places or even here or there. It persists throughout.
I love and appreciate any book with scientific evidence, and Out of Eden provides that in a ten fold. Everything is examined scientifically, and it's done very thoroughly. The issue I see is that this could overwhelm a reader as some points go on for quite awhile. That also goes back to how long the chapters are and the sentence structure. I see a lot of readers putting this down in frustration, and not picking it up again. The scientific terms give the impression that the layman reader would have a rough time with this, and would be referring to their dictionary quite often while reading Out of Eden.
This is one of those books that I would be recommending on an individual basis. Out of Eden is not going to be a book that anyone interested in polygamy and monogamy can read due to the things above. It will take someone at least moderately versed in evolutionary biology, zoology and anthropology to read this one. It is very interesting and I enjoyed it, but I feel like the reader base is limited.
May 25, 2024
Seems to be a good-faith, nuanced portrayal of the current scientific literature on this topic. It's good to know the scientific facts... but on this particular matter I think biology is by far the less important of the nature-culture dyad. I'm overall skeptical of evo-psych and other attempts to assign a singular essence to "human nature." One of the truths I find recurring in many domains is as follows: humans change according to the demands of their (natural+cultural) environment.
I won't dwell on the point, but it greatly informs what we make of this information.
In short, factors such as greater diversity in mitochondrial DNA than Y-chromosome DNA, sexual dimorphism such that men are larger than women, a greater male propensity for violence, among others suggest that overt polygyny was common among our ancestors. The facts that women have no obvious estrus period & can be certain of their offspring while men cannot suggest that concealed polyandry coexisted with that. Additionally, examination of other animal mating systems & looking at our own hominin lineage reveals that monogamy as we know it is exceedingly rare. The book spells out the science quite nicely so I won't go into it, but the implications are fairly interesting.
Chief among these consequences is the fact that sex-based biological differences do exist and are far-reaching. While there are social constructions, for instance of "masculinity," that increase the male tendency towards violence, the fact that such tendencies are almost universal across cultures suggests they have some biological basis. In other words, the common belief that nurture is the only source of difference between the sexes (referred to as the presumption of "equipotentiality" in the book) is sadly invalid.
Thus we move from a Lockean "tabula rasa" system to a Leibnizian "veined block of marble." But where our author deserves credit (that many reviewers here fail to acknowledge) is in is steadfast belief that "biology is not destiny." In other words, we shouldn't fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy. The polygynous system that has left an imprint on our current evolutionary form did not constitute a "just" system; a minority of men used violent coercion to create their harems, and a sizable portion of the male population had no opportunity to reproduce at all.
This book was not written to advocate for such a system, but rather to heed the advice of the Delphic oracle and "Know Thyself." After all, if our goal is to create an ethical society, we must first examine our inclinations before we can attempt to transcend them. I think this book does a fine job at this, but frankly I wish it was less meandering throughout.
I won't dwell on the point, but it greatly informs what we make of this information.
In short, factors such as greater diversity in mitochondrial DNA than Y-chromosome DNA, sexual dimorphism such that men are larger than women, a greater male propensity for violence, among others suggest that overt polygyny was common among our ancestors. The facts that women have no obvious estrus period & can be certain of their offspring while men cannot suggest that concealed polyandry coexisted with that. Additionally, examination of other animal mating systems & looking at our own hominin lineage reveals that monogamy as we know it is exceedingly rare. The book spells out the science quite nicely so I won't go into it, but the implications are fairly interesting.
Chief among these consequences is the fact that sex-based biological differences do exist and are far-reaching. While there are social constructions, for instance of "masculinity," that increase the male tendency towards violence, the fact that such tendencies are almost universal across cultures suggests they have some biological basis. In other words, the common belief that nurture is the only source of difference between the sexes (referred to as the presumption of "equipotentiality" in the book) is sadly invalid.
Thus we move from a Lockean "tabula rasa" system to a Leibnizian "veined block of marble." But where our author deserves credit (that many reviewers here fail to acknowledge) is in is steadfast belief that "biology is not destiny." In other words, we shouldn't fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy. The polygynous system that has left an imprint on our current evolutionary form did not constitute a "just" system; a minority of men used violent coercion to create their harems, and a sizable portion of the male population had no opportunity to reproduce at all.
This book was not written to advocate for such a system, but rather to heed the advice of the Delphic oracle and "Know Thyself." After all, if our goal is to create an ethical society, we must first examine our inclinations before we can attempt to transcend them. I think this book does a fine job at this, but frankly I wish it was less meandering throughout.
August 27, 2016
This gets a 4 star in my book because it taught me a few things and slightly shifted my worldview. I most admired how well the author substantiated his claims - many of which could be easily misconstrued as misogynistic - with droves of evidence and clarifying statements. In a way, part of this book was refuting much of feminism's claims that gender is a social construct. In today's pro-feminism world (of which I count myself a citizen), I applaud the author for going against the grain and being a contrarian. He has done so not simply to make noise, but because he seems to have a strong, logical, possibly even correct point. Overall, the book was a masterpiece in constructing an argument. My complaints: it was mostly stuff I'd heard before, with only a few bits that were novel to me. A lot of the middle of the book got repetitive. Nonetheless, it was worth it for the conclusions, which tied things up nicely and gave me some peace of mind towards human nature. Without too many spoilers, the bottom line is that nature is not destiny, and just because something is natural doesn't mean it is right.
December 24, 2015
I received a free copy of this book on Netgalley.
Really interesting look at polygamy as both a biological and social construct through time, culture, and species. The author teaches psychology and holds a degree in zoology so is uniquely qualified to draw human parallels from the animal kingdom, which adds a great deal of depth to the book. I have a reality show problem that I like to pretend is a bit of anthropology and very much enjoy watching the dynamics of polygamy on various reality shows and that is why I was initially interested in this book. The book however was so much more than that. Have already recommended to a friend and shared some really cool tidbits while reading. A bit on the heavy side for popular science but really a good read if a bit jargony at times especially in the early chapters. Fascinating reading about how biological pressures induce and reward polygamy and also mongamy and how there are real chicken and egg questions at work in this. Super interesting
Really interesting look at polygamy as both a biological and social construct through time, culture, and species. The author teaches psychology and holds a degree in zoology so is uniquely qualified to draw human parallels from the animal kingdom, which adds a great deal of depth to the book. I have a reality show problem that I like to pretend is a bit of anthropology and very much enjoy watching the dynamics of polygamy on various reality shows and that is why I was initially interested in this book. The book however was so much more than that. Have already recommended to a friend and shared some really cool tidbits while reading. A bit on the heavy side for popular science but really a good read if a bit jargony at times especially in the early chapters. Fascinating reading about how biological pressures induce and reward polygamy and also mongamy and how there are real chicken and egg questions at work in this. Super interesting
January 28, 2016
Hmmmm... this was an interesting read but I'm not quite sure how to review this book. Out of Eden by David P. Brash is an interesting book about an interesting topic yet I found myself annoyed with the writing style too much to really enjoy the book.
The author uses slang words or more conversational tones to drive the points home which I found distracting and annoying. I thought that the slang really detracted from the educational aspects of this book. Even though the topic was fascinating, and not one that I know a lot about, I really couldn't get into this book because of the authors writing style.
Regardless, this is still an interesting read and if you're the kind of person who isn't bothered by an authors interesting writing style then definitely read this book. Otherwise, if you're like me and are easily distracted from the point by an authors choice of words then steer clear.
A received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The author uses slang words or more conversational tones to drive the points home which I found distracting and annoying. I thought that the slang really detracted from the educational aspects of this book. Even though the topic was fascinating, and not one that I know a lot about, I really couldn't get into this book because of the authors writing style.
Regardless, this is still an interesting read and if you're the kind of person who isn't bothered by an authors interesting writing style then definitely read this book. Otherwise, if you're like me and are easily distracted from the point by an authors choice of words then steer clear.
A received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
November 9, 2016
As humans we wonder about our ability to make free choices versus our biological needs and drives. Inborn with us is our sex drive, biological imperative and very strong. Which dictates many of the behaviors we act upon. This book is outstanding in reviewing behavior citing numerous sociological studies of various human tribes and societies along with animal behavior studies. It has not only a very comprehensive view of the mammal side of our behavior but also many literary quotes pulled in from literature. I most strongly suggest reading this book for the incites to the nature of man.
March 20, 2016
hogwash...this is hardly science or unbiased telling like it is...
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July 15, 2016306.8423 B2259 2016
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