Lots of things are natural (e.g., breathing), but the things that are naturally homogeneous across humans aren't things we argue over much.

The things we argue over the most will be the most evenly divided by nature.

The relevant point of Caplan's comment is he seems to think just letting everyone have the freedom to choose whatever contract they prefer is ok. But the point is that the choice of societal rules affects behavior at the margin. People likely to be tempted but made worse off by polygamy might even prefer a world in which people are constrained from becoming polygamists. There are network externalities to allowing or disallowing multiple partners legally.

This is similar to debates about easy divorce. The old claim was that since divorce was rare liberalizing divorce would primarily benefit those stuck in horrible marriages. But in fact there is evidence that liberal divorce laws have affected a much larger fraction of the population than once thought. Even if you disapprove of divorce, your decisions about marriage to someone who also thinks like you will be changed in equilibrium in a world where divorce is easy.

Non-libertarians think it is both moral and sensible and in fact, obligatory for the state to have a say in what sorts of contractual marriage arrangements are both permissible and to be encouraged. In some cases, ESPECIALLY if some proponents of monogamy are the most likely to have polyamory tendencies.

I have heard many non-hippie non-conservative people, on subjects as diverse as nutrition and King Lear, using the word "natural" to mean good/worthy of approval, and "unnatural" to mean bad/to be shunned. Many of them have persisted to do so even in the face of the non-meaning of the word being explicitly pointed out to them. "But it's just un/natural," they say.

Are they victims of an inevitable progression in specialization of careers leading to specialization of opinions? Do modern material conditions encourage homogeneity less than those of old?

Guys, remember that one of the main products of polygyny in the population as a whole is horny lifelong bachelors. It's demographically inevitable except with very high male mortality. When choosing fantasy universes, don't be too sure that you'll be one of the lucky ones in it.

There's an ancient model for promiscuity among sailors, merchants, and caravaneers. "A girl in every port" isn't just a cliche, and in the case of a successful merchant, the realtionships might be legalized at both ends under different legal systems.

Islam had and may still have a system of temporary wives to preserve nice boys from vice. When Ibn Battuta travelled through the Mongol Empire in the guise of a Koran scholar, at various stops he was provided with temporary wives.

In folk discourse, "natural" tends to mean either "inevitable" ("get used to it!") or "good". What it does mean is either "possible in the real world" or "something that happens without conscious human intervention." A lot of progress consists of suppressing and destroying "the natural" -- e.g., (following Haidt) elaborate rules about purity and chastity, fossilized authority hierarchies based on age and kinship, and the predatory solidarity of small groups.

And note that many of the natural principles suppressed by modernizing communists are also suppressed by modernizing capitalists. Marx basically considered himself the next stage of progress after capitalism, which he supported against all more traditional forms of society.

Some people are definitely more monogamous than others. The question for the evolutionist is, "What strategy is more successful at producing offspring in the modern age with birth control?" In the past, I'd be willing to bet that there was a significant correlation between a person's number of sexual partners and the number of kids. Now with birth control, all bets are off. I tried a quick Google search for correlations between sexual partners and birthrates, but came up with nothing.

Will our future be one of monogamous pairs, polygamous men with several wives, along with many men without, or a complete free-for-all of polyamorous men and women? Only time will tell.

chemdude, audacious epigone has posted stuff from the GSS showing that monogamists are more fecund.

Fertility is controlled at the uterus, not at the testes. You don't need many men at all for fertility purposes (look at stock breeding). What you primarily need to do is physically support and protect the mothers and children. Semen is cheap and plentiful.

Somewhere in the heavy metal fantasy novel male brain still lurks the idea that a society where men have twenty wives will have twenty times as many children. (Even in a slavetrading polygamous society that imports wives, supporting the mothers and children is the key variable.)

Sorry to harp on this, not directed at anyone here, but it's a fairly stubborn and pervasive error.

Thanks, Razib

john, male and female monogamists are more fecund according to the GSS.

male and female monogamists are more fecund according to the GSS.

Is this on average, or overall?

Even if monogamists are on average more fecund, if non-monogamists are more fecund overall the trend could still be dysgenic.

just follow links here. in any case, i'd hold off on using terms like "dysgenic" in regards to mating strategy. you can safely assume that most GNXP readers consider lower intelligence defective or disadvantageous despite its greater fitness value, but i don't think we can assume that the polygamists here are so thin that they wouldn't take offense at being called part of a dysgenic trend (though most GNXP super-sluts are surely to use protection, so irrelevant in any case. our readers simply are disinclined to breed, period).

Well, at least one female reader is not disinclined to breed. I've done my part and my daughters are doing theirs.

Is the disinclination to breed based on the male nerd factor here... or what?

I seriously do not understand.

If a man has a hundred wives, besides making about 99 men theoretically celibate, he's also got a big job ahead of him, and he's not going to give equal attention to every one of the hundred. Thus, even though he'll be triumphant in passing on his genes, he'll almost certainly do a poorer job at keeping his wives pregnant than 100 men would.

One thing I learned when I got married was that, contrary to the high school scare stories, it can take months of hard work to get a woman pregnant when that's what you're trying to do.

The record male fertility I've heard of was a N. African petty sheikh with 800 children.

Are we debating sociosexual preference outcomes on fitness or fecundity? While these are commonly used as equivalent terms their difference may be very significant here. For fitness you really want to measure not just your own reproductive success, but also the success of your progeny. It doesn't help to spawn more offspring than will come to reproductive maturity in a fit and healthful state with an attitude to do the same. If monogomists are better able to do this, then evolution will reward whatever genetic influence there might be that leads to or enables such behavior.

Is the disinclination to breed based on the male nerd factor here... or what?

I think a lot of the younger male readership just haven't gotten around to it yet. I've done my part (3 kids) and I think a lot of the other 40+ guys here probably have some kids as well.

"Is the disinclination to breed based on the male nerd factor here... or what?

I seriously do not understand."

Donna, I think I remember Razib doing a survey a while back on the number of children that readers of this forum have, so his comment about us being disinclined to reproduce is based on that data. If I remember correctly, it was starkly evident that this forum should have a label on the back: "Warning, the reading of this forum has been found to inhibit get-some." Or perhaps it is the want-some that is inhibited.

Though in actuality, I'm sure that the correlation between low fecundity and the reading of this forum and is more a co-morbidity thing, rather than cause and effect.

Humans are supposed to have good Theory of Mind, but I think even that is a little outmatched by the enormous sample space of possible choices available in a post-industrial consumer society living well above the margins of subsistence.

I've considered that claim before, and posted my thoughts about it here - basically, I'm not sure that there's any particular reason to think that we have theory-of-mind at all. People just aren't very good at dealing with individuals whose beliefs and opinions don't match their own - much less individuals whose thought processes may be fundamentally different, as in autism.

Couldn't we just be referring to our own models of ourselves to figure out what other people are likely thinking and doing?

Is the disinclination to breed based on the male nerd factor here... or what?

I seriously do not understand.

I think it's more the fact that most women don't want to breed with us. There are no cheerleaders for the chess team.

Well, I do have kids. Maybe I'll have more to make up for a fellow science geek with none.

Both male and female nerds tend to be very uninterested in the kinds of things involved in courtship, e.g. looking good and having a nice line of chat. At the same time, many nerds fantasies are normal, meaning that they are not interested in other nerds.

Many nerds also have more interesting things to do than raise families, which is very time-consuming.

There are attractive nerds, as well as attractive non-nerds who are attracted to nerds, but nerds often have a bad attitude on top of everything else.

I hear these same arguments from people who advocate HBD like half-sigma, amerika.org, mencius moldbug, etc, etc.