Is evolutionary selection pressure creating family breakdown?

[Boojatta]

It seems very uncommon for one woman to have six or more children, so it's much more likely that a man will have six children by having divorces and remarriages rather than a single wife.

[Orrex]

1. Darwin was a total playa, if that's what you mean

And I don't mean "playa" as in Spanish beach, either.

[cliffordu]

2. Lol. Yes, yes he was.....

[Orrex]

4. Hey, aren't you the guy whose mom has the big...

Nah!

[cliffordu]

7. My mom says she's gonna KICK YOUR ASS.

[Deja Q]

14. Darwin wouldn't have survived his own theories.

That or the other stereotype, all geniuses are eccentric to the point they get killed off because they ain't "normal".

[Posteritatis]

3. Very uncommon *now*

Take a look at a nineteenth-century census and you'll be in for a bit of a surprise.

[Boojatta]

6. Yes, now. That's the point.

A new trend may be emerging just when some people had thought that human evolution had ended.

[MineralMan]

5. What's uncommon is a man wanting

six kids to pay for. More common is men getting a divorce and marrying a woman who already has a couple of kids from her previous marriage. Then, there's the next divorce, and the one after that.

Darwin didn't get a divorce, if I'm not mistaken. He married his cousin, and they had 10 children. I'm thinking that he'd disapprove of your suggestion that men get married and have children with serial wives. He probably wouldn't mind, though, if a guy married his cousin.

Marrying your first cousin is legal in 27 states. Did you know that? What do you think the Darwinian consequences of marrying your cousin might be?

[Boojatta]

9. "your suggestion that men get married and have children with serial wives"

It's not my suggestion. It's my observation of what might be happening.

[theoldman]

11. A greater chance of mental illness.

Even people in the jungle figured this out thousands of years ago.

[Xipe Totec]

8. My great grandfather was a serial monogamist

Married seven times.

Had children with all his wives.

We're still trying to put together the complete genealogical tree.

His great-great grandchildren (so far) are past 500!

No, he was not a Mormon (only one wife at a time).

:P

(edit to add, never divorced, raised and cared for all his children).

[Orrex]

12. His great-grandchildren are past 500?!?

That's pretty damned old!

[Xipe Totec]

13. He, he, in number, not age!

:P

[Maru Kitteh]

23. Never divorced? Married 7 times? Sounds like a serial murderer, actually.

Any thoughts of that?

[Xipe Totec]

24. Well, he did earn the nickname Blue Beard

But nothing was ever proven.

[Mike 03]

10. From an evolutionary standpoint, marriage is unfavorable to the male's hardwiring, but favorable to

the female's hardwiring.

The bottom line is that marriage is a social construct invented to settle property and inheritance issues.

The desire for lifelong mating does appear in some species and is adaptive in many ways. But clearly it creates a duality, an internal conflict between primal drive and conscience/social interest.

Fascinating question. This is much more stimulating than reading many of the other posts here lately.

[Deja Q]

16. And I thought marriage was just about turning a female into a piece of property.

It's rather nice to read more perspectives on the issue than the typical militant ones.

[Lost-in-FL]

17. But there are others that say that from an evolutionary standpoint...

humans are hardwired for monogamist relationships. Why? Because having one partner guarantees more viable offsprings and conserves energy that could be utilized chasing for multiple partners. That is why many species, including humans keep one partner for life.

[Crunchy Frog]

19. I disagree.

I think that humans are biologically predisposed to long term pair bonding. Marriage is merely the institutionalization of this already existing pattern. Most aspects of human behavior are not hardwired, although there are strong predispositions.

Men are not like male chimpanzees that do it with any available female at any possible opportunity. Their relatively small testicle size reflects that.

[Mike 03]

15. The key phrase in your post is "family breakdown"

It's that word "Family."

That is the fulcrum of the entire debate. Is the creation of families innate, or are they a prime example of adaptation, or are they artificial constructs.

My personal opinion is that they are prime adaptations, in the best interest of everyone concerned, but since they oppose innate instructions from the basest portion of our brains, successful families, though incredible, will be less common than unsuccessful families.

[Crunchy Frog]

18. This has gone on throughout human evolutionary history.

There has always been selective pressure for men to father children outside their main partnerships. This is the first time in our species history that paternity can be accurately determined and fathers held accountable for child support. It's therefore more likely that a man will be financially ruined by persuing multiple divorces and remarriages.

Did you know that male primate testicle size actually correlates with species specific breeding patterns? Human testicle size is what you would expect of a species that pair bonds, but gets it on the side where possible. Much smaller than that for Chimps and Bonobos.

BTW, there has been little change in the number of children likely to survive to reproductive age, which is what natural selection acts on, rather than simply the raw number of children produced.

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. Are you assuming that the tendency to have children by remarriage is inherited?

If not, I don't see where evolutionary selection pressure comes into it.

[Boojatta]

21. I'm assuming that there's an inherited tendency to produce offspring.

If I'm wrong about that, then you can probably throw Darwin's theories out the window.

An inherited tendency to produce offspring explains the establishment of a new relationship and the production of more offspring with a new spouse. The only question is whether or not there's a heritable component to a tendency (or lack of tendency) to maintain long-term relationships.

If young children easily find wolves to raise them and then are just as likely to pass on their genes as children who are raised by human beings, then the bond between children and parents might be of no significance. However, it seems more likely that the bond between children and parents is significant and inherited. Perhaps there's no inherited predisposition to form weak or strong spousal bonds, but this also seems unlikely.

[Boojatta]

22. Kick