Are Humans NATURALLY promiscuous?

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I was wrong not to acknowledge that. But I still maintain that the question is far too complex for a multiple choice poll.

Well, a lot of people are choosing "other."

We may have seen Bateman's principle at work among 19th century American slaves. A slave woman's marriage had no legal bearing: she and her children were legally her owner's property. She was generally expected to produce a new child every year or two, to expand her owner's wealth. She may have had a big incentive to seduce her owner, and to make sure than many of her children were also his children (in both senses of the word), to secure potentially better treatment for herself and for her children. Some slave owners (like Thomas Jefferson) may have even been more likely to manumit slaves that they had personally fathered.

Still, it seems to have more of a sociologic than biologic basis.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha5T9LE_qHc[/youtube]

The funny thing is, for centuries and centuries religions punished the promiscuous now the promiscuous are getting even by punishing the chaste.

Everyone has the right to pursue the sexuality they're most content with, but most people only prefer monogamy because of social conditioning, If you apply my logic to your life, you'll look less like a sheep and more like a human (and you'll get a degree in engineering, rather than a humanistic field)—so by all means, feel free to do so.

We've been polyamorous for almost 200,000 years; the ancient Egyptians believed in birdheaded gods for roughly 2,000 years, and their religion gained few followers outside of Egypt.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dar ... lygamous-0
http://lionguardians.wildlifedirect.org ... -marriage/
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/16/opini ... gamy-laws/

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npB4XfBTICA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09_49KL6pgM[/youtube]

Well I guess this means since humans have believed in supernatural deities for thousands of years it must be correct and all the atheists are mistaken because humans have believed in supernatural beings since as far back as anyone knows....so all you atheists are unnatural and it's a natural state to believe in God or gods.

When two psychologists start writing books like this and making statements basing them on psychology (aka assumptions based on observation) rather than actual scientific research I just toss at them one of Von Daniken's books and see if they catch my drift.

I was trying to understand what you were saying. You mentioned biological differences in terms of women only being fertile certain times of the month, while men are always fertile. You went on to say this:



Which is basically a statement of Bateman's principle. This does imply that from a reproductive point of view, a female's optimal reproductive strategy is to be choosy, rather than promiscuous because she is better of having repeated intercourse with the male with the best genes. However, I was pointing out that even from a reproductive point of view, this is not always the case, as you'll see in the articles that I linked to. Also, those articles are not even specifically talking about humans. Even in animals, there are some species in which it is reproductively beneficial for females to mate with multiple males instead of just finding the "fittest" one. That's why polyandry exists in a lot of animal species as well.

Yes, there are differences between men and women's sexuality but I'm not sure what your point is here, regarding how it relates to promiscuity, at least in terms of why you brought up Bateman's principle.

Last edited by Jono on 05 Feb 2014, 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Haha, no you won't. You have no idea whether it is to do with social conditioning and what you have said is pure speculation. Everything is human. Monogamy appears 'human', which is a stupid word anyway, since it was created by human beings in the first place. What a patronizing thing to say. What do you mean you'll get a degree in engineering degree? What an extremely odd thing to say. Plus, I may not want one.

Haha, congratulations for missing the point again completely about gods being natural, haha. I meant that we have also believed in gods for thousands of years and many tribal societies have believed in gods and supernatural deities for thousands of years, which makes believing in god a natural state. Thus according to your view, which is that every social behaviour that is the oldest is also the most natural, atheism is completely unnatural. I do not wish to carry on this debate anymore as it is getting slightly irritating.

Exactly, I can imagine in the future those who monogamous being almost punished for not being promiscuous in the same way that feminism was praised in the sixties and now people are slowly turning against. Ah, how predictable humanity is in its Hegelian ways!

In a traditional marriage there is a 50 percent chance of divorce that has devastating financial consequences because it results in a single woman who must take care of her family.
In a communal marriage you have a hundred men that vow their financial support to each and every woman of the commune. If one man decides to leave the commune this type of divorce is less devastating because we still have 99 men to support each and every woman.

Yet we call this bigger form of a family "cheating". From the perspective of the big family the cheaters are the ones who refuse to share.

You also look like a sheep by your society telling you that you should be polygamous. That becomes a form of social conditioning in itself. I hate the word 'sheep'. It is just a ridiculously patronizing word used by those who wish to gain some sort of superiority over those they feel are inferior. We are all sheep to some extent and it is impossible to acknowledge the many ways in which you have been influenced by your culture. You are as much as a sheep as anyone else yet you may not realize it. In some sense none of the thoughts we have are our own since we have been victims to social programming from a very early age.

How dare you say I am a sheep for being in a relationship and less human for it, you disgustingly vile human being. I am finished with this debate.

Last edited by fibonaccispiral777 on 05 Feb 2014, 7:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

The statistics you have given to do not intrinsically show that polygamy but only show that marriage is not natural and anyway we have no idea the many complex reasons and variables responsible for such marriages breaking up and are applying our own connotations to such statistics. Furthermore, the people that broke up from those relationships may have entered other pair-bonding partnerships. We have no idea and it is not enough to say that fifty percent of marriages break up as evidence that polygamy works. Many people in polygamous relationships may end up leaving certain partners. Also, there are still fifty percent of people who do stay together and may be perfectly happy. To be honest, I do not know what your point is? A few societies have bigger families, so what? Such societies are also slaves to tradition and whacky cultural conditioning. I do not know other societies are seen as being more natural than ourselves and tribal societies as being somehow untarnished from any conditioning whatsoever. 'From the perspective of the big family the cheaters are the ones who refuse to share"- Haha, how ridiculous. That is not cheating and it is equally selfish to force someone into a s sexual paradigm they do not want to be in.

The western world does not like this idea of 'communal' living. It would make people harder to control. It is easier to control people when you divide them into the smallest units and keep them separate.