Okay, my brain is off-the-wall sometimes. I was watching some sort a show about Bradd Pitt and Angelina Jolie and thought. “Dang, guys are just pigs. All we think about is sex. Our nature is to be promiscuous.” Brad had left Jennifer Aniston to be with a “better” (?) woman, Angelina.
Something, though, made me think that wasn’t quite right: WOMEN should tend to be more promiscuous than men. Here’s my thoughts, ignorning the obvious moral concerns and thinking anthropologically:
Consider a society of people. That society will have a bell-curve distribution of traits, with some butt-ugly morons and some beautiful geniuses. To maintain social cohesion, as well as to provide for the best environment to rear children, that society arranges itself as mating pairs, as we would say, husband and wife. The husband provides protection and livelihood for the family, and the wife bears and rears the children.
Here’s the catch, though–the wife needs the husband to provide the environment to rear the children, but it’s to her advantage to mate with the best male possible to produce the strongest offspring. Once that secret tryst has her pregnant, she can go back to her husband, who will raise that child as his own.
This has some practical problems–if the local gene pool isn’t homogenous, you could have troubles with eye color, hair color, or even racial features that would be a dead giveaway. However, some cultures (particularly some African tribes) the above scenario does occur.
…and I’ve watched enough Jerry Springer to know that it happens in our society too.
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Anyway, just an interesting thought in terms of how bad human nature can be.