Sex and the Myth of Monogamy

I have just read (1) a brief description of Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s book “Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality”. I haven’t read the book yet, but will do so in the next few weeks. The point is this: once agriculture started us down the road to the current iteration of civilization, the sexual process quickly became a control issue. And men co-opted the control. Rules all over the place favoring men in multiple and frequent sexual encounters while women were relegated to monogamy. Why? Well, like so many other issues, science chimed in (probably more like pseudoscience really, because there is no quantifiable data) and made the case for men spreading genes far and wide while women limited the distribution of their genes to get security.
This flies in the face of the sexual habits of every species of primate. Primates breed freely. Period. Statements like “Bonobos are Promiscuous” carry not only a description of to whom a given chimp will breed, but also a value judgment that implies that there is something wrong with promiscuity. Well folks, there isn’t anything at all intrinsically wrong with it. It violates CULTURAL norms in many societies, but it doesn’t violate biological norms. In fact it IS the norm, biologically speaking.
So you got to take your hats off to Daniel Quinn one more time: before the agricultural revolution we were primates living like other primates. Afterwards, we invented rules and gods (Gods if you prefer) to impose slavery on each other. Women enslaved to men and men enslaved to other men and cultures enslaved to other cultures. In many ways we would be much better off if we never learned to grow things, and stuck with hunting and gathering. Better for us, better for other species and better for the planet as a whole.
1. http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=131728279
Image: blog.newearthmusichall.com

Beaver Consultant? You Betcha!

My neighbor called the other day with a question about her beaver. I thought “now how does she know I am a Beaver Consultant?” I went over and took a look: Nice. Big too.
My career in beaver consulting got its start when a county recreation manager called and asked if I had any experience with beavers. I told him I had observed them on many occasions and knew something about them. The problem, he said, was with the county swimming lake. At times there were so many beavers visible that nobody wanted to swim. Instead they just walked around trying to get a good look or even a picture of a pretty beaver. I went out and I can tell you there were some fine beavers out there. Eventually we came up with a plan to solve the problem. It turned out that several neighboring counties had similar problems, and I became the “Resident Beaver Expert”.
I heard about another consultant who got a call: “Do you know anything about tits?” Well, he just happened to be a tit expert. The woman told him her tits were not as perky as they had been, and looked sort of dull. She said that she had done everything she could think of, including special vitamins, and nothing seemed to work. After taking a look at them, the expert recommended a diet of sun flower and millet seeds enriched with multivitamins and minerals, and some meal worms if available.
In a few weeks, a follow-up call confirmed that her tits were much perkier, their color was better and they were singing more than before.
(My neighbor’s beaver was a beautiful 3’ carved sculpture of a North American beaver Castor canadensis, and the tits in question were titmice and chickadees, respectively Baeolophus bicolor and Poecile carolinensis)
Additional information on tits can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_(bird)
Additional information on beavers can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver
Image beaver: paradeofflesh.com
Image tits: zazzle.com