The Evolutionary Roots of Love, Sex, and Jealousy
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The kind of evolutionary origins of sex for obvious reasons, propagation of species, but why parent bonding, why love, why why do we need all this extra stuff? Why not just swap your genes? Helen and others argue that we started to see social monogamy in our species history around 4 to 4.4 million years ago. What's interesting about that is only about 3% of mammals engage in social monogamy, about 15% of primates. But what's important there is biologists and anthropologists, when we talk about
monogamy, we don't do it in the sense that we often hear in the colloquial use of monogamy. We actually talk about two different levers of monogamy. When you look at the satisfaction rates of people in monogamous relationships and negotiated consensual non-monogamy relationships, they're the same. There's really no differences. And I think that that's so important because it blows up sort of
two arguments about if you have a moral argument about monogamous relationships, that they're so much better than any other structure, well, it turns out that satisfaction rates are the same. But the other argument that we'll sometimes see is sometimes folks who are non-monogamous will take a view that, well, monogamy is this shackle that it's imposed by society and you just have to get rid of it. And then we can just be have free love and we'll be more happy. Well actually you're not any more happy. So the satisfaction rates are the same.
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