Slashdot Mirror
Possible Monogamy Gene Found In People
Calopteryx sends in a New Scientist summary of research from Sweden pointing toward the existence of a gene that influences monogamy in men. (The article doesn't mention women, and the study subjects were all men at least 5 years into a heterosexual relationship.) "There has been speculation about the role of the hormone vasopressin in humans ever since we discovered that variations in where receptors for the hormone are expressed makes prairie voles strictly monogamous but meadow voles promiscuous; vasopressin is related to the 'cuddle chemical' oxytocin. Now it seems variations in a section of the gene coding for a vasopressin receptor in people help to determine whether men are serial commitment-phobes or devoted husbands."
The pussy gene.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Anyone want to start suggesting a relevant text for the update to the americans with disabilities act
Cruise TT
I see a whole brave new world of testing before pre-nuptials . . . But, if I have a defective gene, will that qualify me as handicapped under something like ADA? Will there be a high risk pool that I will be forced to "date" out of? So many questions . . .
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
which renders someone unable to get any at all.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
In the early 60's we got birth control pills, which (some say) facilitated women being promiscuous. Now, we have 'husband control pills'
What happens if we miss a day? Do we take two then next and use alternate husband control methods. -- Sarcasm transmits across TCP/IP as well as it does other media
When confronted by large quantities of beer protein.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
In my case, it's a "Martha" that has the greatest influence over my monogamous inclinations.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
monogamy in general seems to be a mirage
there are of course places in the world where polygamy is openly accepted, but in places where monogamy dominates publicly, everyone is polygamous in secret
and i am talking about men AND women. male polygamy gets more attention only because male polygamy is more public, male sexuality full of more bravado. women are just better at keeping secrets
and it makes perfect sense for men and women. men for for the obvious ability to spread more genes, and women for access to more resources, or simply to get better genes in secret than the genes of the publicly acknowledged mate (it has been speculated something like 10% of children before the era of genetic testing were raised by fathers who weren't really their genetic fathers)
i think that any gene that regulates vasopressin simply regulates how discrete or not discrete a male is going about being secretly or openly polygamous
there is just too much incentive, genetically, to spread your seed as wide as possible, no matter what
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's not the cuddle chemical we used when I was in college
Just as a guess, which strategy works better (from a 'survival of the genes' perspective) probably varies in different circumstances. This would explain why neither gene sequence has dominated.
Now your GF/Wife will want you to take the "Cheating bastard" DNA test too.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Shouldn't evolution sided with either monogamy or polygamy? I mean even if there is only a one percent difference between the successor rates should that have not been reflected by now?
If monogamy or the lack thereof were genetic and there were an evolutionary advantage to either strategy, then you're right: that should have been reflected in the general population.
Since it doesn't seem to be, that would seem to indicate that perhaps there is no evolutionary advantage to either side. With no advantage, there is no pressure for humanity to tend in one direction or the other. That could yield a pattern closer to what we are seeing now.
No. It shouldn't have, because either strategy can lend itself to evolutionary success for men.
If you're a powerful man, polygamy is an excellent strategy. You want to be impregnating every woman you can get your hands on, and you can by force and/or intimidation (among other motivators). Genghis Khan is an exemplar of this (at least according to one study that something like 6% of the world's men are his descendants). With that many kids, you don't need to invest very much in making sure each kid survives long enough to reproduce.
If you're a powerless man, then your best strategy is monogamy: you aim to have one woman who you reproduce with, and devote lots of time and energy into making sure that those kids survive. This leads to the nerds who will love a woman forever and stick with her through sickness and health.
If you're somewhere in between on the power scale, then the strategy seems to be pretending monogamy while having at least one mistress on the side. The theory here is that you get the greater number of kids and genetic variation from having more partners, but a fallback position of the kids from your "monogamous" relationship. Hence middle-management types cheating on their wives.
I am officially gone from
I seriously doubt that humans were holding on to each other for lifetimes before the dawn of religions. After all, the whole idea of staying together forever and ever is all taken from a few books that people wrote hundreds of years ago.
Let's say that we go 10,000 years back. Why would a man not screw around as much as possible? And if love existed, who's to say that it lasted for long periods? I remember reading an article that stated that "love" is a chemical reaction that lasts roughly six months, given or take a couple of months. I guess it's enough time to bond and mate.
Maybe this "monogamy gene" relates to something totally different, but has altered effects because of traditions that have grown with religions?
Full Tilt
In our current society, monogamy makes more sense.
Until you see the hot little redhead that just moved in across the street from me. Then polygamy starts looking pretty damn good again.
Because which strategy works better would depend on what strategy everyone else in the local population is following. You end up with an stable equilibrium proportion where both strategies work equally well, all things being equal, but if you perturb it slightly the one becomes slightly more advantageous than the other and reproduces faster until the equilibrium is restored.
Does this mean we may be able to finally develop a cure for monogamy?
Interesting question. The answer, though, is more interesting still: various flavors of "not necessarily".
The adaptive value of a trait can and does vary depending on its environment and the environment is different depending on how common the trait is. For traits having to do with deception, you tend to see some sort of equilibrium. Typically, a naive and honest population does better than a dishonest and suspicious one, because they don't waste resources on deception and deception detection. If, however, a lone cheater shows up in a naive and honest population, the cheater will do extraordinarily well. This will cause cheating to increase in frequency, and will create a selective pressure in favor of being able to detect cheaters. Sometimes, the cheaters tip the balance, and a naive and honest population becomes a suspicious and deceptive one, sometimes cheater detection is good enough to wipe out the cheaters, and often the two traits find an equilibrium point. The suspicion required to eliminate all cheaters will be too costly to be adaptive; but cheating will only work sometimes, and on a limited scale.
With the possible exception of simple deleterious mutations, traits are not absolutely better or worse, their value depends on their environment, and their environment depends in part on them. Just looking at the values of the traits at the beginning isn't good enough, you need to use a game theory approach, and look at the value of the traits across repeated rounds.
Being polygamous I wonder if I have this gene...hehe I know my wife her girlfriend, and my two other partners don't. ;)
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
One researcher found that the overwhelming contribution to the increased rate of divorce is the modern concept of marriage for love instead of position/wealth. The current divorce trend is simply the end result of a curve started in the years following the civil war.
So if these conservatives want to go back to an idyllic time with low divorce & happy families - I say bring back arranged marriages.
And the women, they're looking for a powerful man to knock them up, and a nice dedicated man to stick with her and raise a family.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think you might be wrong there.
In a welfare/socialist society, polygamy and promiscuety make more (evolutionary) sense for men.
Which would you rather be: 1) the guy that sleeps around with lots of women and gets lots of kids, or 2) the guy that stays with a single woman and gets taxed to death to support all the single mothers, left over from the first guy.?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
How about 3) the guy that sleeps around with lots of women and has no kids?
Effective birth control exists. Use it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This is slashdot. Which means that a lot of those non-polys ain't mono, they're zippo.
If I had one of those monogamy genes, I'd want to help it thrive - so I'd go find a bunch o' girls and get 'em pregnant...
Bow-ties are cool.
Since it doesn't seem to be, that would seem to indicate that perhaps there is no evolutionary advantage to either side. With no advantage, there is no pressure for humanity to tend in one direction or the other. That could yield a pattern closer to what we are seeing now.
Or it could be that it's a mixed strategy equilibrium in which case it makes sense for a certain percentage of people to be monogamous and the rest not to be.
Would one non-monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise monogamous society? Possibly -- he'd be able to father more children that way. Would one monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise non-monogamous society? Possibly -- since everyone else doesn't really stick around to take care of their kids, his children would be better cared for and thus more likely to survive.
If those two statements are true, you'd expect some sort of mixed strategy equilibrium.
See:
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (the book -- I haven't read the article of the same name).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Mixed_strategy