[UUPoly-L] What are human beings?

[bear@pagansexcult.org]

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007, Kelly Cookson wrote:

> People
> also form socially monogamous marriages, but engage in moderate amounts of
> extramarital sex and variable amounts of divorce. That means sexual monogamy
> and lifelong relationships are not biologically natural
> for people.

I try not to nitpick, but I think your net is cast a bit too
wide here.  SOME people engage in some amount of
extramarital sex and/or ever have a divorce.  Others do not.

Sexual monogamy is as natural as breathing for some people.
We do tend to lose sight of that since we're hanging out
with people whose mileage varies a lot, but it's true.

Reasoning from the specific to the general requires a lot of
different instances, and isn't good logic if there's a
statistically significant number of instances you're
ignoring or failing to explain.  In this case, you're
ignoring the instances of people who actually *do* lifelong
sexual monogamy and do it reasonably happily. They may not
be the majority, but they are statistically significant, and
you can't conclude anything about "people" in general unless
you include them in your sample.


(The following is speculation: this is me personally
explaining a lot of anthropological history and not, as far
as I'm aware, a consensus view by anthropologists).

I think H. Sapiens is best characterized as a highly
adaptable species, with most individuals capable of
functioning in several different modes of family structure
and relationship models, and capable of being socialized
into any of them.  Usually a culture will select one,
or very few, of these modes as its "norm" and then socialize
most people capable of adopting it into adopting it.

Some conflict and internal turmoil is guaranteed by the fact
that, given any particular family structure and relationship
models, there exist of some individuals who cannot be
socialized to happily function in it.  For example, consider
a lot of us dealing with the present social norm of
monogamy.  This very turmoil is itself valuable to the
tribe/clade/culture since it prevents stagnation, allowing
cultures to evolve and change in just a few generations
(starting from the seed of whoever the current "maladapted"
individuals are) when conditions change requiring a
different social norm.

The old social norm, of lifelong social monogamy (sexual
monogamy was never as strictly required) worked well in the
context of (other) shared values and extended-family
dwellings.  As these things decline, conditions change
requiring a new social norm.  And starting with the
maladapted who have never really been capable of functioning
well in that paradigm (which is to say US), more people are
now adopting and exploring alternatives and the
"anti-socialization" (social stigma) against alternatives is
beginning to erode.  This is the early stages of how a
culture and society adapts to changed conditions by adopting
a new norm.

                         Bear