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The foundation of Western Civilization, the nuclear family, is currently under attack from both ends of the political spectrum.
On the Left, founding feminist authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan have argued that marriage and motherhood confine women to inherently exploitative, unpaid domestic labor that reinforces patriarchal gender norms.
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On the Right, the manosphere argues that marriage doesn’t work because women always seek higher-status men, leaving most males excluded, while changes in divorce law have turned commitment into asymmetric risk instead of mutual obligation.
Feminists believe marriage was invented by men to control women and that before marriage existed, women slept with whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and children were raised communally.
The manosphere believes women are naturally promiscuous, always seeking higher-status men, and that monogamy for most men is therefore impossible.
The reality is that both the feminists and the manosphere are wrong. Humans are naturally monogamous, and compared to other animals, we are actually very good at it.
If anything, one recent study covered by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post understates just how good at monogamy humans are.
The Washington Post’s headline was typical: “How monogamous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers.” The body of the article goes on to report how University of Cambridge evolutionary anthropology professor Mark Dyble took genetic data from 35 species, including humans, to determine what proportion of the population consisted of full and half-siblings, the thinking being that species that are more monogamous tend to have a greater number of siblings that share both parents, while those that are promiscuous have more half-siblings.
“Humans ranked seventh among those analyzed with 66 percent full siblings,” the Washington Post reported, “making us slightly less monogamous than the Eurasian beaver but more so than the Lar gibbon, meerkat and red fox.”
The problem with this framing, however, is that it leaves out the way human cultures vary and the huge effect culture can have on how monogamous people are. The study, to its credit, acknowledges this problem, noting that “high rates of polygynous marriages are correlated with more paternal half-siblings.”
This makes sense, of course, because the more wives a man has, the more half-siblings he will produce, while in a strictly monogamous society, almost all children would be full siblings. I say almost because both men, usually through violence, and women usually through childbirth, occasionally die during their reproductive years (especially in pre-industrial societies), and the surviving spouses can remarry, thus producing half-siblings even though both spouses honored their till death do us part pledge.
Unfortunately, while the study mentions the effect that polygamy can have on the proportion of half-siblings in a population, the media write-ups do not. And as the study notes, polygamy was far more prevalent in the past than it is today. “Polygynous marriage (where a man is married to more than one woman at the same time) is permitted in approximately 85% of a representative sample of pre-industrial societies,” the study accurately notes.
But if 85% of all pre-industrial societies were polygynous, then doesn’t that show humans are naturally polygynous, like gorillas? No, it does not, because “pre-industrial” does not mean “pre-agrarian,” and it is the sedentary agricultural line that really separates polygamous culture from monogamous ones.
Most nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes are fiercely egalitarian and monogamous, while almost all pre-Christian agricultural societies were highly unequal and polygamous. Think of any past empire on any continent. Whether it is Hammurabi’s Babylon, the Maurya Empire in India, the Qin Dynasty in China, the Mali Empire in Africa, the Vikings in Europe, or the Aztecs in Mexico, these were all polygamous societies where wealthy and powerful men amassed many wives and had many half-siblings.
For most of the roughly 300,000 years of human existence, our ancestors lived in small, nomadic bands that were comparatively egalitarian and strongly monogamous. It was not until the dawn of agriculture that there was enough inequality for wealthy and powerful men to start hoarding multiple wives. But then, for the next 10,000 years or so, polygamy was the norm. It was not until Christianity reintroduced monogamy to humanity that most people began to live with monogamous norms again. As late as 1800, most countries still allowed polygamy. But then, as the Christian West grew powerful, the rest of the world copied us, and polygamy was outlawed in Japan in 1880, then Russia in 1920, then Thailand in 1935, then China in 1950, and India in 1955. Today, just 25% of the world’s population lives in countries where polygamy is legal.
In other words, this study, placing us below beavers but above gibbons when it comes to monogamy because only 66% of offspring in the human populations studied were full siblings, sells our monogamous potential short. The societies studied were not monogamous, and therefore, we should expect a high percentage of half-siblings.
When monogamous societies are studied, however, the percentage of extra-pair paternity (where a child is genetically fathered by a man other than the mother’s socially recognized long-term partner) is low, usually around 2%. By contrast, the extra-paternity rate in some polygamous societies is as high as 50%.
Our closest great ape ancestor, the chimpanzee, does live in a promiscuous setting where females mate with multiple males, often at the same time. But these matings are far less consensual than feminists would want them to be, and chimpanzee mothers not only receive no help in rearing their young, but are often actively thwarted by higher-ranking females in the group.
What separates us from our ape relatives is monogamy and the long-term project of cooperative care between mother, father, and extended family that comes with it. We are not stronger or faster than apes; our brains are larger thanks to the extra care, protection, and calories fathers and their extended families provide mothers. And with those bigger brains, humans are better able to communicate with and learn from one another, enabling us to invent all the technology that allowed us to conquer the world.
Are humans more likely than meerkats and beavers to create new polygamous cultures that deviate from the monogamous ones that created us? Yes. But not all cultures are created equal. Some have proven themselves to be better for human flourishing than others. Monogamous cultures have lower rates of crime and violence, as well as higher rates of trust, economic growth, and happiness.
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Monogamy is not a fragile cultural illusion imposed against human nature; it is one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary and civilizational achievements. Across cultures and time, societies that embraced durable pair-bonding and paternal investment produced safer communities, healthier children, and more prosperous economies. History, biology, and anthropology all converge on the same conclusion: stable monogamy channels human instincts toward cooperation, investment, and progress.
Humans are not merely capable of monogamy — we excel at it when our institutions support it. The real mistake would be abandoning what has worked for millennia in favor of ideological fantasies. If we want human flourishing to continue, the task is not to dismantle monogamy, but to rebuild the social, legal, and cultural conditions that allow it to thrive.
