This week in lecture we talked about the relationship between sexuality, innocence, desire, and monogamy. The professor was clear in her views that there is no natural, biological explanation for monogamy, and that these constraints we place on our sexual habits of reproduction are socially created. I think that an argument could be made for the biological explanation, though.
A species' main purpose, on the most basic level, is to reproduce and procreate. However, in the process of fighting for evolutionary survival, species sometimes modify their habits or anatomy to scoot their species along evolutionarily. Some of these habits include relationships that have formed among individuals that make procreation and reproduction more easy, like monogamy. The anthropological explanation is that having one partner ensures parental responsibility. If monogamy is assured, and individuals are biologically focused on passing down their genes to the next generation, then the biological parents will spend more time and energy in raising their young, in hopes of their survival. There has also been many studies that assert that having two parents around makes for increased resources of time, money, energy, attention, knowledge, etc. for the child, which has a positive impact towards child development and growth.
Societal stability, in my opinion, supports evolutionary survival. As animals, we humans have also created norms to manage stability among our relationships. Whether they have gone too far is debatable. Perhaps these habits that we have formed do not support our lifestyle anymore, and I agree that these norms to some extent have hampered our ability to progress, but that does not take away from the argument that it is biologically and evolutionarily desirable for some amount of societal stability to occur within a species.
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