LogFAQs > #951261515

adjl posted...

Evolutionary psychology is a pretty vague, inconclusive field, but speaking very broadly and without any definite examples, there's an argument to be made in some cases that desiring monogamy (and, more saliently, tending toward biparental care) is a behaviour that provides a selective advantage. It also provides individual advantages, certainly (and some degree of selfishness is also a behaviour that provides a selective advantage), but the benefit doesn't entirely stop there.

Of course, none of this changes that Muscles has committed the incredibly common fallacy of believing that evolution is performed for the "good of the species." That's an entirely backwards interpretation of the causality: It's not a matter of fitter individuals having more reproductive success, it's a matter of defining more successful individuals as fitter, which in turn increases the frequency of their heritable traits.

That's more or less what I was getting at - hence the qualifier "purely from a sexual perspective" on the statement that promiscuity is advantageous. There are other, non-sexual reasons why monogamy can be beneficial, such as offspring raised by two parents being more likely to survive to breeding age than those raised by one or simply left to fend for themselves after birth, but that gets into a whole host of new conversations on social structure, competition for resources, and so on.

The point is, individuals won't go against their own interests for the good of the species under natural selection; the idea is that evolution will favour those traits that benefit both the individual and the species.

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