Ha, made you look! But I actually am going to talk about adultery.*
So, I've been reading a book called "The Red Queen" lately; it's an utterly fascinating book about evolutionary biology and human sexuality. At one point in the book, the author discusses what is the "natural" sexual arrangement for humans, considering why some human cultures have been monogamous, others polygamous, and very few others polyandrous.
Statistically, our modern culture is one marked by monogamy as the norm, but featuring frequent and widespread adultery by both genders. The question to pose, then, is why this is the way we operate.
For men, it's simple: we act like sperms, and our chances of passing on our genes to the next generation is increased exponentially through sexual promiscuity.
For women, who act like ova, wide sexual promiscuity holds less appeal, because not only is her ability to bear children limited by her birthing cycle, but also sexual promiscuity carries with it the risk that her mate will abandon her and not care for her children.
Therefore, it benefits women to mate with monogamous men, who will stick around to care for the children. This in turn provides a benefit for men to adopt monogamy as their sexual practice, because the most desirable females will require it of their mates. In such circumstances, only the more powerful males will be able to engage in polygamy, since their genetic viability will be manifest.
This would work fine, except for two things.
Firstly, since women require monogamy of their men, they will therefore be forced to compromise genetic viability for willingness to care for children. In other words, women are forced to settle for less genetically viable men. This gives them an incentive to commit adultery with more genetically viable men. And statistically, women who are committing adultery are more likely to have s e x with their paramour during ovulation than any other time of the month. If they become pregnant in this period, they are statistically more likely to be pregnant by the lover rather than the husband. For this reason, upwards of 10% of the human population are fathered by people other than the person they believe their biological father to be.
Secondly, although certain evolutionary benefits are achieved through monogamy, a cost-benefit analysis of adultery for men demonstrates adultery to be extremely genetically profitable to men who are able to increase their number of mates by duplicitously cuckolding their wives. The proviso that more mates = greater chance of genetic survival holds true here as ever, the only restriction being that men must deceive their wives in order not to lose her as a partner.
Naturally, then, whilst it is in the genetic interest of each marital partner to commit adultery, it is also in both their interests to prevent their partner from committing adultery. This explains why women reject adulterous males and compete with and intimidate her husband's paramour(s). It explains male rivalry and/or violence against potential rivals. It also explains why males copulate with their wives frequently and at all periods of the menstrual cycle, since women have concealed estros (i.e., they don't display indicators that they are ovulating). Moreover, evolutionary biology suggests that the shape of the penis developed in order to enable men to physically remove from the woman's vag.na the semen of other men who may have compulated with their wife. Additionally, the vast majority of sperm cells actually do not attempt to fertilise the ovum; their purpose is rather to destroy and/or block competing sperm cells from other mates. And, the amount of sperm ejaculated during intercourse is affected by whether the male has been with the female recently; thus, if the husband has been away from his wife all day, he will ejaculate more sperm than he would if he had been with his wife all day, in an attempt to "flood the market" and thusly to defeat any rivals his wife may have copulated with whilst he was out of her presence.
This is all, of course, post hoc theory, and as such, it suffers from certain philosophical shortcomings related to its potential unfalsifiability. However, assuming arguendo that this theory is potentially correct, its explanatory power is extremely great.
Yesterday I pointed out in another blog's comments that it is interesting that people in the online dating world widely decry adultery and lying, yet seemingly paradoxically indicate pro-adultery propensities, viz. choosing scenes from movies like "Unfaithful", "Closer", or "Last Tango in Paris" as their favourite on-screen s e x scene.
In light of these considerations, I hope it is clear that there really is no paradox here; it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view.
*I'd like to forestall the obvious reactions that I'm anticipating by pointing out that none of these considerations advocates or decries adultery. My "adultery is good" comment was a JOKE. These are simply non-normative statements of fact and theory.
