{"id":285269,"date":"2011-03-01T06:07:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-01T06:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/01\/polygamy-said-to-be-good-for-men-bad-for-women\/"},"modified":"2011-03-01T06:07:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T06:07:20","slug":"polygamy-said-to-be-good-for-men-bad-for-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/01\/polygamy-said-to-be-good-for-men-bad-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Polygamy said to be good for men, bad for women"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You Are Here: Home<\/a> \u00bb Africa\/International<\/a> \u00bb Polygamy said to be good for men, bad for women<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t \tPage last updated at Tuesday, March 1, 2011 6:06 AM \/\/ <\/span>\n\t\t\t <\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Mormon shift from polygamy to monogamy in the 1800s reduced sexual pressures on men by more than half, according to a new study.<\/p>\n

The change closed the reproductive gap between men with many wives and men with none. It also brought men\u2019s competition for wives in line with wives\u2019 competition for husbands.<\/p>\n

The research also revealed that while polygamous men had dozens of children, the practice of having multiple wives (and thus sexual partners) had the opposite effect on women: For every wife added to the fold, the average number of children per wife dropped by one.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more wives a woman\u2019s husband has, the fewer children she is going to have personally,\u201d study author Michael Wade, a biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, told LiveScience. \u201cThat\u2019s interesting, and evolutionary biologists would say then that polygamy is good for males and maybe not so good for females.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wade and his colleagues reported their findings in the March issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.<\/p>\n

Polygamy to monogamy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mormons make an excellent test case for evolutionary biologists for two reasons, Wade said. First, they keep precise genealogical records. Second, Mormons are a rare example of a group of people who changed their mating practices. In 1862, Congress made polygamy illegal in U.S. territories, including the Mormon stronghold of Utah. In 1890, the Mormon church issued a declaration ending the practice. Of married men born in 1833, almost 18 percent had multiple wives, Wade and his colleagues estimate. By a few decades later, less than 1 percent of married men were in polygamous relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere with this single population there\u2019s a change, an externally driven change, in the system of mating from polygamous to monogamous,\u201d Wade said. \u201cAnd even better, nothing else changes. They don\u2019t change their lifestyle, they don\u2019t change what they eat, or where they live.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers decided to find out how the change affected the evolutionary pressures on Mormon men and women, particularly sexual selection, in which there is competition between males (or females) to win a mate. It\u2019s this pressure that explains a male peacock\u2019s glitzy tail. Polygamy exacerbates such sexual selection. After all, for every man with five wives, there are four men with no wives at all. Thus, the multiple-wife system separates men into those with huge amounts of offspring and those with no children at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bigger that difference, the stronger selection is,\u201d Wade said.<\/p>\n

To measure selection, the researchers pulled genealogical data on almost 150,000 men and women born between 1830 and 1894 and almost 635,000 of their offspring from the Utah Population Database \u2014 a sample size 18 times larger than those of all previous studies on the topic combined. The researchers used U.S. Census Bureau data to round out their estimates of the number of people who never had children. They also corrected for \u201cserial monogamists,\u201d or people who had been widowed and remarried, but weren\u2019t involved in polygamous relationships.

Many questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the men who acquired lots of wives also produced more children. For each additional spouse, a man could expect about six more kids. Each wife in the relationship could expect to produce an average of one fewer child for every additional wife.<\/p>\n

When polygamy was outlawed, the reproductive gap between successful polygamous men and wife-less singletons plummeted by 58 percent, the researchers found.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you only have one partner, the maximum [number of offspring] for the male is going to be the same as the maximum for the females,\u201d Wade said. So the end of polygamy brought the genders into line, he said. \u201cThe variation from one male to the next with monogamy becomes almost equal to the variation from one woman to the next with monogamy.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s no surprise, said Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the research. Historical Mormons are particularly interesting to study, Harpending told LiveScience, because there is little question as to the paternity of offspring. In other polygamous cultures, Harpending said, marriage doesn\u2019t always mean sexual exclusivity, making similar studies difficult.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the best that this has ever been done, and it\u2019s very impressive,\u201d Harpending said of the study. However, he cautioned, the variation in reproductive success seen in the Mormon population doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that evolutionary selection is taking place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe guys that have three wives may have three wives because it\u2019s simply random or because they\u2019re better at something,\u201d Harpending said. \u201cIf it\u2019s because they\u2019re better at something, then that\u2019s changing the gene pool and that\u2019s selection. If it\u2019s just random \u2014 my Uncle Charlie helped me buy a farm and I got three wives \u2014 then that doesn\u2019t change the gene pool.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are also alternative explanations beside selection to explain findings like the cost of extra wives for women, Harpending said. Perhaps those women\u2019s husbands are older and less fertile, or perhaps they\u2019d previously been widowed and had thus missed a potentially fertile year, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I\u2019d like to see done is life histories of women, so we could ask, \u2018What\u2019s the effect of being widowed?\u2019 \u2018What is the per-year birth rate for a woman, age-corrected and correct for husband\u2019s age?\u2019\u201d Harpending said. \u201cThere are so many questions.\u201d
Source: Live Science<\/p>\n

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