Comments on: Slate On Polygamy

By: Mike Heinz

Mike Heinz — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:05:14 +0000

Elrod,

I think you have an astonishingly singular idea of how people MUST behave. I didn’t realize people were so hard wired.

By: Elrod

Elrod — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:45:31 +0000

Polygamy may serve natural needs in certain pre-civilized settings, but in a stable civilization it serves no social purpose. Jealousy means one of the “partners” will ALWAYS get shafted. After all, marriage is about total and complete commitment between two people. How can three people give the same level of commitment to one another? It’s impossible, for the same reasons that contracts are, by nature, two-directional and not three-directional.

By: Mike Heinz

Mike Heinz — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 03:34:24 +0000

Justin,

I agree that polygamy is going to come up again – whether or not it is similar in some way to gay marriage, once the barriers are broken by one it will be much easier for the other to do it again.

I have to say that Slaten has a very silly point of view. Does he really argue that gender preference in sexual relations is open to variability but that the NUMBER of mates is hard wired by human nature?

Does he know anything about human history? Or the mating behavior of most of the other primates?

I could build a pretty strong argument that polygamy is a much more “natural” state of human affairs than monogamy – particularly in environments where survival is difficult, large families are valuable and young males are more useful as hunters/warriors than as redundant sources of sperm…