I’ve been hearing a lot about a book called Sex at Dawn.  It basically takes the Evolutionary Psychology approach to sex, not something new, and gives it a socialist spin to the greed-gene’s capitalist spin.  It also rails against the traditional religious views of sex, aka its bad and shameful.  Given my psychological and anthropological educational backgrounds it hits at a crossroads of my interests.

From what I’ve gleaned it proposes this: During much of human evolution our species and related descendants, lived in small egalitarian foraging societies.  In these societies everything was shared including sex, and things only changed once the societies became more agrarian and ownership of things became more plausible (nomadic life is not conducive to carrying around lots of crap), and in some ways necessary.

Despite most of the arguments and exerts from the book I see, seem to say people are natural poly-amourus they apparently do give a disclaimer at times to the gist of:  We’ll we’re not really sure where monogamy fits in.  Probably because the evidence shows there are happy monogamous couples, just as there are unhappy ones.

I think one fallacy in this line of thinking is looking at what’s natural for humans.  Which is to suggest there is only one natural way.  I feel we’re a species of conflicting desires, and a lot of conflicts come about because what we want comes at the cost of what someone else wants.  Monogamy looses some benefits, while gaining others, and polygamy looses some while gaining others.

What if people could have their cake and eat it to?  How many people would prefer they were polygamous, but their partner were monogamous?  If that’s a basal desire doesn’t that make it natural?