I want to teach you all a vocabulary word – or a vocabulary phrase, actually:
phenotypic plasticity
The reason I want you to know this is that I’ve been attempting to read “Sex at Dawn,” a book that argues (as far as I can tell) that we are not designed for monogamy but rather for, I guess, non-monogamy in whatever form that might take. I can’t tell you specifically what it is the book says we’re meant for because I’m having a really hard time getting through it. Because it pisses me off.
It pisses me off because we live in this moment of cultural awareness, where people are ditching their running shoes and running barefoot, like we did on the savanna, in our earliest evolutionary days; we’re ditching bread and eating “paleo,” like our pre-agricultural revolution evolutionary forebears; and apparently we’re looking to our pre-historic, pre-agriculture ancestors for tips about love and relationships.
It makes sense for nutrition and shoes in a way that it does NOT, for love and relationships. It is both lacking in science and hopelessly misguided. Lacking in science: our social structure doesn’t leave a fossil record, so anyone who proposes an idea about how we lived on the savannah is basically just making up a plausible story. Misguided: welcome to phenotypic plasticity.
Phenotypic. As in phenotype. The observable manifestation of a genotype. The color of your eyes, your height, your immunity to infectious disease, your temperament.
Plasticity. Flexibility. Adaptability. Changeability.
Phenotypic plasticity, then, is the capacity for a phenotype – the observable expression of a gene – to vary depending on the context in which is develops and expresses itself.
Imagine if the color of your eyes were determined not just by your parents’ genes but by your level of nutrition early in life. That’s the kind of thing.
It turns out that, very approximately, the more complex a trait is, the more plastic it is likely to be. Unsurprisingly, human sociosexual systems are MASSIVELY plastic.
What influences human sociosexual systems? Christ, a BUNCH of things. Population density and resource abundance are two biggies – and resource abundance appears to be relative rather than absolute, so even the unprecedented abundance of the C21st western world can be interpreted biologically as scarcity, if you’re among the “have nots.”
The result is that for most (about 80%) of human history (and I do mean history), we’ve been a nominally polygynous species. That’s our mid-level abundance structure. When resources became more abundant, we transitioned into a model of nominal monogamy. And in circumstances of extreme resource paucity, we generate polyandrous cultures. (There’s only one example that I’ve read about, the one in Tibet, in which multiple brothers marry one woman.)
Before then, what social structure did we have? FUCK KNOWS. I enjoy Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s picture of us as tribes of women and children, visited by wandering males. But there’s no more reason to believe that theory than any other.
And extant pre-literate cultures don’t provide one helpful model to follow, they simply VARY. Just one example: the Canela of Brazil include in their wedding vows, “Don’t be jealous of your spouse’s other sex partners.”
This is easy to understand in the context of nutrition: traditional Esquimo diet consists almost exclusively of fish and other sea-dwelling animals, because that’s what’s available, right? Until we developed agriculture, we ate what we could get.
With sex and love, it’s less directly about what our environment affords and more about how the affordances of the environment shape resource distribution among the population of humans.
(Obviously it’s all much more complicated than this.)
So no. We are not “meant” to be monogamous, nor are we meant to be polygynous or polyandrous or polyamorous or anything else. We are meant to be successful at bearing, birthing, and raising offspring to reproductive age, who then bear us grandchildren. And we, as a species, will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
I “love” when someone asks me “Do you believe in monogamy?” Well, I can disbelieve all I want, but somewhere there is someone practicing it.
I am completely with you for the bulk of the argument, but I’ve never heard of this before:
_When resources became more abundant, we transitioned into a model of nominal monogamy. And in circumstances of extreme resource paucity, we generate polyandrous cultures._
Any references where I can go to read up on this in more detail?
The book I like best is called “Why Sex Matters,” by Bobbi Low. She was on the dissertation committee of one of my dissertation committee members, so I have an academic heritage to the book, which just means my assessment of the book is colored by the fact that I was trained by the people she trained. So of course I like it.
Thanks! I’m usually pretty skeptical of evolutionary psychology (especially when it comes to describing modern gender differences in terms of evolutionary sex differences), but I might give this a shot.
I have been following your blog for quite a while now, wanting to leave a message about how I admire what you are doing. So I thought I’d take the opportunity now that I have something quite definitive to say, and that is that I have read bits and pieces from that book, ‘Sex at Dawn’, and couldn’t quit laughing. I appreciated what the author was trying to do, but I agree with it being nothing more than a plausible story, especially one that would be so readily accepted by many now that people feel more free to be open about what they want sexually.
you know this is what gets me. Why do these people want to appeal to nature so damn badly? Nature gave us arsenic and fucking nightshade. Nature gave us bubonic plague and ebola for crying out loud. Why on earth do these people want us to return to a world that in a lot of ways has a lot invested in many of us DYING before we can reproduce?
I think it’s just an outgrowth of the age-old temptation to appeal to authority–any authority–rather than going though all the effort of citing actual evidence. God and Aristotle don’t work so much anymore, so nature is winning big. Like Emily says, it has a little more relevance when applied to things that are both testable and relevant to the modern world, like diet or running mechanics, but really only as guides for further inquiry until some actual scientific data is generated to back up the arguments.
okay but why does the need to appeal to authority exist at all? What evolutionary development made that something which sticks with some people and not others? I find the appeal to nature argument just about as ridiculous as appealing to some made up deity who lives in the sky.
Well, it’s one of the earliest rhetorical gambits we learn growing up, isn’t it? A three-year-old can grasp the nuances of “because I say so,” or “because that’s the way it’s done.” It takes a lot more savvy to really come to grips with, “because that’s the most ethical action,” or “because the preponderance of evidence points to this action being the most beneficial.”
I agree that the second two are objectively better, but the first two had a head start getting carved into our brains.
I agree. I thought the authors drew too many conclusions on the chimps vs. bonobo behavior. Rather than say chimps do X, bonobos do Y therefore… I would want to go look for some chimps doing Y and bonobos doing X (or even Z.) I don’t have a biology background but to me it seemed like a possible explanation is that chimps/bonobos can do X/Y/Z depending on their environment.
hear, hear.
and great term.
Oh thank goodness you’re reading this. I mean, I’m sorry it’s frustrating for you and everything, but ever since I heard of this book I’ve been wondering what you’d think of it. I’m polyamorous and quite a few people I know have been telling me this book is fantastic because it ‘proves’ that we were ‘meant’ to be polyamorous. I haven’t had the time to read it myself yet, but statements like that set off my BS sensors.
I agree with the statement above (actually I agree with all of them) that this is the good old appeal-to-authority fallacy in action. If it’s ‘natural’ then we can’t help it, which means we are not the “bad” people that flouting convention makes us. Way to get yourselves off the hook.
Personally, I’d rather take active responsibility for my life and choices.
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I love this post. It’s probably the first writing on the subject I’ve seen that shames neither monogamous people nor poly people (and nobody else, either). I’ve been monogamous since I started dating but am considering trying out a poly dating style, and I don’t like to think that I’ve either A) spent all this time as a brainwashed idiot or B) am now considering embarking on a shameful, Godless lifestyle.
I’m totally with you on this. I spent two years in a monogamous relationship which has now slowly evolved into an physically open relationship (in which full discolsure remains central). My partner has never had an issue with the idea, but it took me all this time to get past my cultural inhibitions of what a ‘relationship’ meant to me, and then apply it to us as a unit.
I don’t find that either frame of mind can be harmful, unhealthy, or more ‘natural’ than the other. I think it all comes down to how you are feeling in a relationship, where your boundaries lie, and how communication flows within said relationship.
Thank goodness for this post! Ever since Dan Savage started touting this book like some freaking sex-bible I was waiting for someone to eloquently analyze this.
Granted, I did not read it myself – but anything that appeals to “nature” as the be-all-end-all explanation for the behavior of modern man, or in any way evokes evo-psych is a load of bs in my book.
And those ancestral diets are fads, too. We have no effin clue what people really ate thousands of years ago, since we a) have next to no physical evidence (save for, maybe, the odd corpse conserved by ice or a moor) and b) human societies vary so wildly that you could either be living off blood and milk, or honey and tropical fruits exclusively – because somewhere, this was the diet of a specific tribe.
In short, what you said. Only less eloquently.
I couldn’t agree more, Emily. While the specifics of marital customs amongst tribal (hunter/gatherer) peoples varies tremendously, there is a distinctive soft polygymy that often arises when resources are abundant. That being said, it doesn’t take much stress in the local economy to shake that up very quickly. It isn’t until grain agriculture takes place, with its attendant prosperity, that we see things settling down into soft monogomy — and then things start getting highly class-dependent, as well. The number of children goes up. Then industrialization hits, and after the culture stabilizes the number of kids goes down and serial monogymy usually sets in. But any number of cultural factors can influence how that develops, religion being foremost after resources.
While trying to pin down paleosexuality is going to be a frustrating and fruitless affair, it is intriguing to consider how to model it. For 90,000 years or so we wandered the planet in groups of less than 100, with very limited contact between tribes and extremely limited mating possibilities. When you probably won’t meet more than 300 people in your entire lifetime, you are going to end up mating with whomever you can however you can. And in a time of scarce resources, no doubt that kept things interesting, romantically speaking.
Excellent post!
Is anyone really surprised that this book is popular? It tells a lot of people something they dearly wish to hear: That they are off the hook for wandering eyes (or other body parts) because, hey, they can’t really help themselves.
Find some new way to absolve people of personal responsibility – especially one invoking “science” – and you too can move a lot of books, no matter how ham-handed the underlying anthropology.
I totally agree with what your response. I’ve been “trying” to read this book, too, and though I find it interesting I do not believe that we should let this history determine our society of the present. We’ve evolved, like it or not; and the relationships we have are by CHOICE, whether it be mono or poly. Doesn’t matter if we agree or don’t, we have a choice and both are being practiced today.
PC – my ancestors, known to ancient explorers as ‘the Carbohydrii’, lived entirely off popcorn. Proper popcorn, with real butter and salt, not that loathsome cheddar cheese-dust stuff.
The Romans made pretty short work of them, alas.
Also, I dinnae think evo-psych is all bad. Wouldn’t it be rather odd if the circumstances of our species’ evolution and development had NO lasting imprint on how our minds work?
I have a problem with “men do X and women do Y because of EVOLUTION” claims because they are so often silly or made in bad faith. I’d hesitate in condemning the entire evo-psych enterprise though, lest we fall into our own dogmatic trap of accepting evolution only “from the neck down.”
That is the siren song of evo-psych, because our brain is undeniably an evolved object, so the reasoning goes that we should be able to look at it through an evolutionary lens. The problem is in the practice. As Emily says, there aren’t that many behaviors that leave traces in the fossil record, so the “evo” part is severely handicapped right from the start. On the other hand, what we “know” about psychology is mostly determined by studying a very peculiar creature, the Western university undergrad. We’re only now starting to find out just how poorly our psychological findings generalize across the entire human population.
When we can’t even properly study the psychology of people that are living right now, why should studies of our prehistoric ancestors be any better?
Bear in mind that sapien psychology is the most plastic and exponentially changeable mentality in the known cosmos. So our Evo-Psycho has outdated most books and theories by the time they are published. Especially fringe species like myself (WAYYY off the median).
“Before then, what social structure did we have? FUCK KNOWS.
Wonderful. “How dare you apply common sense!”
Have you read ‘Paleo Comfort Foods’? It’s a cookbook–I kid you not.
*I* was ordained by the universe to be a Rock-n-Roll Slut.
WHY do so many books on sexuality and evo-psycho focus on normal people? Is it to sell books?
i’m glad for the recommendation of WHY SEX MATTERS. i read and enjoyed SEX AT DAWN — but i have zero background in the topic, and (odd?) i took from it pretty much what you said, that people behave differently depending on their societal/cultural needs. aaaactually, what i really ended up wondering about was their fixation on agriculture and its rise as the doom of mankind, along with our sexuality. am trying to find a book on that!
I understand that “(by which I mean history)” meanst that we are talking about the 80% of a small little percentage of the whole time people have spent in this planet (the majority being prehistory), but could you insert a clarification in the text itself? I want to link this to some people and I think it’s not obvious enough. Or, if I understood it erroneously, then please clarify this one.
I had a lot of issues with the book myself, but I found it far more thoughtful than you’re giving it credit for, and it does spend a lot of time discussing the difficulty of knowing how people behaved in pre-history; it’s relatively transparent about that. You openly acknowledge you haven”t finish reading it, so perhaps you missed those sections. This is also notable, because the conclusions in the book aren’t really that far from the conclusions you describe here–essentially that human sexuality is far more plastic than current evolutionary biologists often claims is a big part of the SEX AT DAWN. The book spends a lot more time picking holes (just like Emily here) and undermining other claims by PInker, et. al, than offering a cohesive counterview. It argues that monogamy isn’t a given (so do you), that human sexuality, particularly women’s, is very flexible (so do you), and that humans have been having a lot more sex with a lot more partners than is usually credited. There’s some other theories that it offers up (nothing that revolutionary when you really think about it), but mostly it’s an attack on contemporary views. Real conversation starter, and hardly seems worth getting angry at…
I liked the book. I think your arguments are valid, but I also think there are some good arguments in the book. I didn’t get so much from it that ‘we were never meant to be monogamous’ but that ‘the standard narrative of what is ‘natural’ for humans is flawed’. It seems to be arguing for exactly what you are: our mating behaviour has changed drastically throughout our history, and that there is a lot of variety within our species; shoehorning everyone into the monogamy box and expecting everyone to fit in ‘naturally’ is a bit unrealistic. Also, it also seemed quite critical of evolutionary psychology, if I recall. My biggest criticism of the book was how bloody repetitive it was. I felt like each chapter was an article written for a different magazine.
It’s good to hear that it’s not actually advocating strictly for one alternative!
If the message of the book is your primary concern, then you’ve nothing to worry about. The book is more into empty platitudes like “to thine own self be true” than advocacy. I’m more interested in the theory part.
This (PDF) is the only review I’ve seen of the book by someone in the field. It addresses the “biased reporting of data, theoretical and evidentiary shortcomings, and problematic assumptions misleadingly put forth as well-supported hypotheses” of some of the anthro in the book.
What I noticed most about the book was the selective presentation of facts, everything twisted and snipped just so. That’s not what pissed me off, although it did make reading the book rather like banging one’s head against a wall. What pissed me off about this book was the way it trivialized sexual violence–scare quotes around the word rape, making jokes about women being required to participate in sequential sex rituals, cautioning against seeing sexual violence in chimp behavior, attributing the disconnect between women’s psychological and physiological experiences of arousal to societally driven sexual repression rather than to a very, very long history of women not always having much say in when and with whom they engage in sex, and so forth.
My primary concern has actually been that it seems to be entirely missing some really important science, but I’m pretty horrified by what you say about the authors joking about sexual coercion, etc.
Thanks to abcXYZ for posting the pdf of the Ellesworth’s review “The Human That Never Evolved.” I found that most informative.
Hi Emily,
You have a great blog I am looking forward to reading more of it. Your comments on Sex at Dawn is what got me here, and I understand your reaction but I think you missed the mark by just a bit. The problem has nothing to do with biology, phenotypic plasticity, or anything else scientific. It’s a moral mistake. Ryan and Jetha argue that our ancestors did X therefore we should do X because it’s right and natural. David Hume pointed out the problem with these kinds of arguments a long time ago. They rely on a subtle shift from “is” to “ought” that has no legitimacy. Just because something is doesn’t mean it ought to be; facts and values are different things.
Similarly, earlier commenters who criticize evolutionary nutrition and psychology on the ground that “We can’t know what our ancestors ate or how they lived” also mistake. No one has ever been able to show that a fact is unknowable, so that line of reasoning doesn’t get you very far. You have to criticize premises specifically. In the case of what our ancestors ate and how they interacted, it turns out we do know quite a bit. If you are interested, on the diet google Loran Cordain and on the social structures see Christopher Boehm.
I added Bobbi Low’s book to my Kindle list and hopefully I’ll get to it in a few weeks. Thanks for the recommendation.
What a pity! I was so happy with your Blog. You have intended to disqualify a paradigm-breaking book. I still like your entries, but I can see that not even you were able to set free from cultural, traditional narratives. It’s so easy to look around and find that throughout our Real History (10000 years of agricultural cultures) in all levels of all kinds of societies sex has always been “a problem”! “Sex at Dawn” is the first attempt at trying to make us conscious of the fact that the “traditional” narrative is trying to force us into believing that “monogamy” is the ultimate perfect bonding system for humans, whereas a number of factors are yelling at us, with red and yellow warning lights, that something must be wrong with the bonding system we are trying to define as “the perfect natural human system”. I hope you will read the book again. The world needs deep thinkers, like yourself, understanding the message conveyed in this book to those who don’t want to get stuck in the “Yucatán”…
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