Eduardo Porter: Tales of Republicans, Bonobos and Adultery
... It is hard not to be bemused by the contrast between the straight-and-narrow political persona of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and his messy, steamy circumstances. Still, I am somewhat perplexed by the surprise and the outrage over a transgression that has been around forever.
We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were 40. Even if we account for men’s propensity to brag, there is still a lot of illicit sex going on.
So it is curious how American society arrived at its current moral positions.
It’s been nearly 40 years since the biologist Robert Trivers posited that the evolutionary imperative to maximize offspring would lead to mostly promiscuous males and nonpromiscuous females. Because males only invest a small amount of sperm in reproduction, philandering increases their reproductive success. Females, who invest much more time and energy in each offspring, would prefer one high-quality mate.
But females could be unfaithful, too, if it improved their chances to pass on their genes. Female bonobo chimpanzees have sex with dozens of males to obscure the paternity of offspring and thus stop males from killing infants to get their mothers to stop breastfeeding and become fertile again.
Human strategies have responded to similar considerations of reproductive success. Polygamy stretches back at least thousands of years to the Babylonian empire, not only because powerful men wanted as many women as they could afford and could impose their will on. Even when women had a choice, it could make more sense for them to be the second wife of a rich man than the first wife of a poor one.
The anthropologist Laura Betzig is quoted as saying, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?” ...
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We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were 40. Even if we account for men’s propensity to brag, there is still a lot of illicit sex going on.
So it is curious how American society arrived at its current moral positions.
It’s been nearly 40 years since the biologist Robert Trivers posited that the evolutionary imperative to maximize offspring would lead to mostly promiscuous males and nonpromiscuous females. Because males only invest a small amount of sperm in reproduction, philandering increases their reproductive success. Females, who invest much more time and energy in each offspring, would prefer one high-quality mate.
But females could be unfaithful, too, if it improved their chances to pass on their genes. Female bonobo chimpanzees have sex with dozens of males to obscure the paternity of offspring and thus stop males from killing infants to get their mothers to stop breastfeeding and become fertile again.
Human strategies have responded to similar considerations of reproductive success. Polygamy stretches back at least thousands of years to the Babylonian empire, not only because powerful men wanted as many women as they could afford and could impose their will on. Even when women had a choice, it could make more sense for them to be the second wife of a rich man than the first wife of a poor one.
The anthropologist Laura Betzig is quoted as saying, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?” ...