youthfulness is likely the result of monogamy. Because men are choosing a lifelong partner, there is added pressure to choose someone young who will be fertile for many years. In more promiscuous species, biologists have found that the males exhibit no bias for younger partners. In addition, women have their own set of preferences, which they cling to just as tenaciously. For example, height. Women are nuts about it. Although that seems shallow, especially when the guy can just buy lifts, height is an excellent evolutionary indicator of health. In fact, demographers use height as one measure to judge national health and prosperity. Unfortunately, the national news on this front is not good. The United States once had the tallest and healthiest citizens in the world but now ranks near the bottom of industrialized nations. While other nations have been tacking nearly an inch per decade onto their average (due to things like better access to health care and a more equitable division of wealth), Americans haven’t done so since the 1970s so that northern Europeans now tower an average of three inches over us.
None of this means that men and women don’t value many of the same things. Both sexes, for example, place importance on dependability and stability. But in far more cases than the casual observer may suppose, the sexes are driven by fundamentally different urges.
All of this contains one important lesson for men and women. Hearing women complain about how men prefer younger women or men complain about how women only care about money is probably as old as civilization. Evolution has planted those desires so deeply into us that it’s a waste of energy to fight them. The simple truth is that you are not going to change such fundamental drives, and any change that does occur will happen slowly over many generations. You may wish for men and women to be different, but if you want to succeed in the Darwinian world of dating, you must deal with them as they are.
A Brief Intermission to Consider the Question of Monogamy
BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, WE SHOULD EXPLORE PERHAPS the most basic question about the relationship between a man and a woman in today’s society: just how suited are we for monogamy?
SLIGHTLY POLYGAMOUS MAN
You don’t need the last chapter to realize that men—and women—cheat in such astonishing numbers that it makes one wonder how any couple manages the feat of staying together. The truth is that monogamy is a highly unusual arrangement in both the animal kingdom and the human world. Ninety percent of animal species are polygamous. For mammals, the trend is even more pronounced—97 percent are polygamous. A look back through time reveals that monogamy is also extremely rare in human societies. In one study of past and present societies for which anthropologists were able to collect data, they found that 980 out of the 1,154 societies allowed men to have more than one wife. That’s almost 85 percent! Of course, that statistic hides the fact that even in polygamous societies, monogamy is the norm. Multiple wives are expensive, and usually only 5 to 10 percent of the men can afford more than one wife, so most of the men are (and were) monogamous whether they wanted to be or not. And polygamy is not just men with multiple wives (known more precisely as polygyny). You can also find a few examples of societies where women have more than one husband (polyandry). This tends to occur in extremely difficult conditions when several men, usually brothers, are needed to produce enough food to raise one child, such as certain societies in Nepal.
But you don’t have to rely on anthropological evidence to see our proclivity for polygamy. Our polygamous past is literally written onto our bodies. To answer the question of just how monogamous we are, we need to make another foray into the world of biology. One fairly good indicator of the extent of polygamy in a species is the size
None of this means that men and women don’t value many of the same things. Both sexes, for example, place importance on dependability and stability. But in far more cases than the casual observer may suppose, the sexes are driven by fundamentally different urges.
All of this contains one important lesson for men and women. Hearing women complain about how men prefer younger women or men complain about how women only care about money is probably as old as civilization. Evolution has planted those desires so deeply into us that it’s a waste of energy to fight them. The simple truth is that you are not going to change such fundamental drives, and any change that does occur will happen slowly over many generations. You may wish for men and women to be different, but if you want to succeed in the Darwinian world of dating, you must deal with them as they are.
A Brief Intermission to Consider the Question of Monogamy
BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, WE SHOULD EXPLORE PERHAPS the most basic question about the relationship between a man and a woman in today’s society: just how suited are we for monogamy?
SLIGHTLY POLYGAMOUS MAN
You don’t need the last chapter to realize that men—and women—cheat in such astonishing numbers that it makes one wonder how any couple manages the feat of staying together. The truth is that monogamy is a highly unusual arrangement in both the animal kingdom and the human world. Ninety percent of animal species are polygamous. For mammals, the trend is even more pronounced—97 percent are polygamous. A look back through time reveals that monogamy is also extremely rare in human societies. In one study of past and present societies for which anthropologists were able to collect data, they found that 980 out of the 1,154 societies allowed men to have more than one wife. That’s almost 85 percent! Of course, that statistic hides the fact that even in polygamous societies, monogamy is the norm. Multiple wives are expensive, and usually only 5 to 10 percent of the men can afford more than one wife, so most of the men are (and were) monogamous whether they wanted to be or not. And polygamy is not just men with multiple wives (known more precisely as polygyny). You can also find a few examples of societies where women have more than one husband (polyandry). This tends to occur in extremely difficult conditions when several men, usually brothers, are needed to produce enough food to raise one child, such as certain societies in Nepal.
But you don’t have to rely on anthropological evidence to see our proclivity for polygamy. Our polygamous past is literally written onto our bodies. To answer the question of just how monogamous we are, we need to make another foray into the world of biology. One fairly good indicator of the extent of polygamy in a species is the size
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