People disregarded blood ties at times, but that doesn't matter when they typically didn't and because people generally believed they were actually valuable. It doesn't need to be true absolutely for it to be a guiding force on society.
Do you have any evidence it was a guiding force in society? Perhaps a specific example could allow us to analyze whether blood ties really were highly important and a "guiding force on society".
Because the Habsburgs helping their relatives gain a throne and all its vast wealth is totally disregarding their well-being. People believed it was valuable, therefore in their society, it was valuable. This seems related to the insane logic that reduces religion to just a tool people used instead of something people believed in and valued and directed the politics of entire empires.
On the contrary I do believe that religion had an influence on politics and that the ruling class often took their religion and culture very seriously. But I don't believe that blood ties were nearly as effective as you portray them to be. The Buyid family immediately breaking apart and literally every single succession war in existence is evidence of that.
You are arguing that polygamy is evolutionarily effective (which doesn't make sense because social practices aren't organisms so "fitness" doesn't apply at all) and was effective at creating blood ties but A. Europe built its entire political structure around blood ties and didn't use polygamy at all and B. blood ties weren't sustainable as stabilizing tools anyways.
If you're arguing a practice is necessary or required then exceptions to the rule, especially if exceptions can be found in entire continents (such as Europe or Japan), then your claims make little sense. Polygamy can't be argued to be necessary for establishing blood ties (of which it wasn't even commonly used) if you could establish blood ties without polygamy. Even in the Middle East polygamous relationships with multiple women weren't for forming alliances. It turns out that wealthy families don't want their daughters be the second or third wife of someone.
You're trying to project modern concepts on pre-modern people.
Oh please. Pointing out that Westerners would call those practices polyamory (because it fits the definition) isn't projecting anything. It's like saying that comparing European kings to Islamic emirs is projecting European concepts onto the Islamic world. Practices aren't exclusive to specific cultures, there are overlaps between them.
Polyamory, by definition, is just a family structure where men and women both could have multiple partners. The indigenous societies in the map Citrakayah posted allowed for men and women to have multiple partners. By definition, we would call it polyamory. Just because we're using an English word to describe a practice doesn't make it projection anymore than translation is projection.
Incidental relationships being tolerated doesn't make a society polyamorous because we don't actually see these societies functioning any different than other polyandrous societies
Prove it? This is another unsubstantiated claim. In the map, both men and women specifically have extramarital sex. Polyandry is a practice where multiple men marry the same women. The fact that it is extramartial sex is evidence enough that we aren't looking at polyandry. Furthermore, you are only assuming that all of those indigenous groups which tolerate extramartial sex are polyandrous. You have no idea. You couldn't even name a single one of the groups represented on the map.
In a majority of the geographical locations of the indigenous peoples that permit extramartial sex, polyandry isn't even useful. Most of those locations are plains or forests, not heavily mountainous areas. Arable land is rather common. There is no incentive for polyandry. Over and over, you continue to display a significant amount of ignorance and presumptuousness in regards to how these societies function while knowing absolutely nothing about them.
If your concern is in being right, what is the point in making assumptions and pretending as if these societies were all polyandrous?
The late 80s vintage Handbook of North American Indians edition on the Arctic societies (Inuit and Aleuts) brings up their practice of polyandry many times, but it wasn't a dominant feature. Basically, how is this any different than the modern West which tolerates polyamory along with other non-tradition lifestyles but it isn't dominant in any way?
None of the groups, in the map, which practice extramartial sex were Artic societies. You clearly haven't bothered to look at the information posters who are far more knowledgeable than you have posted.
Now this I will accept, more societies at the fringes might be able to practice polyandry in the sense of also tolerating polyamorous relationships (which appears to be the case since I still can't find evidence of an exclusively polyamorous society). But it's not something that seems feasible to exist in large swathes of land.
No. It has to be popular. If people can find a way for the Monaco to take over France, you can find a way to make polyamory more popular. There have been polyamorous societies that do not practice polyandry (see the database Citrakayah posted) and polyandry is not a pre-requisite for polyamory. Biological justifications, thus far, have fallen apart throughout this thread (using that is the equivalent of using phrenology to explain why you can't make a POD for the Caliphate taking over Europe). Right now you're just denying the information (or rather refusing to look at it).
That doesn't exist for obvious reasons, but we can assume other less provocative examples of societies don't for the same reason, just like how wheeled organisms don't exist in nature. And incidentally that might be a good example, since why you're pointing out partial exceptions in terms of polyamory, there are partial exceptions to wheeled organisms like pillbugs, but that's all they are--partial exceptions.
Except that you can't because, once again, there are more factors to why something might not exist
especially if it is a social practice than "inefficiency" or because human beings are biologically incapable of it. Of course, arguing that something is inefficient is very different from saying its outcompeted however dumbing reasons for non-existence down to "it wasn't effective" with "effectiveness" being undefined makes no sense.
Even you are just arguing that it doesn't exist for a reason. What that reason is, you don't know but you assume it cannot be changed or that it is ingrained (ala environmental or biological reasons). You fail to consider other alternative explanations even though you yourself state you can only speculate on the reasons why.
As for partial exceptions, precedent is used all the time in ATLs to explain why this or that could be possible. Even if there is partial precedent, writers frequently leverage that precedent to expand it fully and examine its consequences. An ATL would look at pillbugs and use that as a base for a wheeled organism; to showcase how it is possible. In the case of polyamory, we have actual examples of men and women having multiple partners being normalized in societies. That is very different from a wheeled organism.
Ah, but the European world outcompeted the Islamic world in the long term, hence why they were able to partially colonise it. Evolution in cultures is dependent on a number of factors, not reducible to a simple invention.
1. What does that have to do with the printing press? The printing press is a piece of technology. It doesn't have anything to do with Europe. China invented it before Europeans, it just didn't use it because Chinese characters were too complicated. I was asking you whether the printing press was less inefficient compared to scribes because of this context and you talk about Europe? That makes no sense.
2. Printing press is not a culture bro. It's a technology. WTF are you saying here? What does "outcompete" mean too? What is your standard for "success"? You take for granted words which you do not define and which, outside of biological contexts, mean nothing. "Competition" in biology just refers to survival. It doesn't even mean resource competition or fighting, it just means survival. If a frog survives the winter while a bug does not, the frog has "beat" the bug. And European governments colonized the Middle East. The entire society obviously didn't and was probably suffering just as much as the colonized if the predominance of socialism in Europe at the time is to be of an indication.
Sure, you can't totally reduce biology to the natural environment, but it's nonsense to try and minimize it's influence on how a society emerges. Successful societies were successful for a reason.
Ah yes, because successful societies are just biologically better than other societies.
This response does not address anything I've said. I wasn't even talking about biology but rather cultural barriers to different, new practices. Literally, the printing press example I gave is a good demonstration of this. The sanctity of the Qur'an and the difficulty of translating Arabic to printing presses led to their ban. These are cultural factors. Human biology is what allows society to emerge period. And existing practices and societies give us the tools to make a POD for more popular polyamory.
I see that map. It correctly points out examples of people punishing adultery by women more then men (including sources I have literally read in the case of the Pacific Northwest natives), but as far as I can tell, there's no indication that these societies were necessarily encouraging adultery among either gender even if they tolerated it when it happened. Powerful women existed in many societies, and they could bend the rules.
What are you talking about?
The Nama, Manchu, Chukchi, Huron, Aweikoma, Mende, Maasi, Toda, Kazakh (well apparantly one specific Kazakh tribe), Lepcha, Andamanese, Hadza, and Lesu all allow for extra-martial sex for both men and women. They don't punish adultery for women more than men (and pointing this out is irrelevant to the conversation). I think it would be projecting too much to assume that it is adultery.
Your entire argument against this being the case is "powerful women could bend the rules" which doesn't make sense since this is a standard applied to all men and women and you'd be making a huge assumption based on nothing to claim that powerful women, in every single society that allows extramartial sex, made this rule. That is a huge assumption that you're only making because the evidence doesn't conform to your existing beliefs.
And some of the sources may be misinterpretations given two random examples from that map (the Huron and the Kazakh) are cited respectvely as a 1634 French account (which had many misinterpretations which only later generations of anthropologists put into context) and an 1885 Russian account which having read other late 19th century anthropology likely includes misunderstandings.
Could you perhaps cite the specific account? I would like to read it myself. I also want to know how you know it is a French and Russian account as I couldn't find any such information on the database. I believe that this is actually a really strong argument you've made but doesn't invalidate the other examples.
Yes, via force, ideology/religion, and literally mass migration, the Arabs enforced their lifestyle on the Persians. Converts looked toward Arab culture since Arab cultural bias is rooted in Islam. And unsuprisingly, the Arabs culturally melded with the Persians hence why "Perso-Arabic" culture dominated in many Islamic societies. And likewise unsurprisi
Perso-Arabic culture only exists in Iran and its adjacent areas. It doesn't exist in the Arab world. It was also something that emerged over time and didn't exist until much later. Either way, the Arabs literally imposed inefficient cultural practices that would've otherwise been destroyed because they didn't want to get rid of them. That is evidence enough that there is no such thing as a hierarchy of "social practices" where some are better than others.
Sounds like you're just talking about American abstinence-only education which I don't feel like debating the pros and cons of here. But it's interesting since people regard "shotgun marriages" as a con of abstinence-only education when from an evolutionary standpoint, that means pro-abstinence policies are working by forcing the man to provide for the woman, leaving him to the mercy of her relatives if he's a poor provider, and allowing his relatives to provide for his wife.
I'm talking in general actually. What comes to mind is Middle Eastern societies. Furthermore, shotgun marriages are super rare. It is more rare for the man to dip than to marry the woman who they had sex with or raped.
And, if evolution was a sentient deity, surely it would've figured out that abstinence was a long term bad idea. Or, perhaps, evolution has nothing to do with social practices. Evolution might actually only apply to biology rather than human societies because, of course, human social practices don't work like organisms.
Nah, that's impossible. Evolution must be applied to everything, including stuff which it doesn't apply to. Evolution, instead of an explanation for how species emerge and change, should be a vague metaphor applied to everything because evolution clearly is the best explanation for every single thing in existence. Clearly. Join me for my dissertation on how physics emerged because life outcompeted black holes and ate their family.
Patriarchy favours a ruling class of males who are obliged to provide for the women
Lol. Ok sure. Totally.
You are absolutely assuming that evolution is sentient because you ascribe to evolution a level of intelligence it doesn't have. Evolution only applies at a species wide level and it only cares about survival. It doesn't matter whether a woman was raped and she can't provide for her child, as long as someone out there is having children then the species survives. Evolution continues to exist. It doesn't matter whether or not you have a super tough, alpha male who is super cool or sway, if they die to a falling tree they have no fitness.
And, once and for all, evolution does not apply to social practices. Social practices do not obey the dynamics of organisms because they are not organisms. Treating them as organisms and treating aggregations of organisms as single organisms is ridiculous. Evolution only explains how species change, it isn't a value system nor does it apply to anything which does not have cells.
For all intents and purposes, social practices are far too immaterial to be applied to evolution. if you apply it outside its context, all you get is a vague metaphor which you could apply to literally anything and use to justify anything. You aren't some down-to-earth realist because you apply evolution to the world like paint on a wall, you're either stupid or have been misled.
I'm using "group" in the anthropological sense of a single unit of society (and in the examples I was referring to, a band or a tribe, yes they would be "mini-states or governments" who are separate)
That isn't specific enough because tribes can be composed of multiple groups. "Groups" are artificial, they're made up. I can break down any body of people into groups. I also wouldn't call tribes governments because governments are something specific and aren't composed of the entirety of a society.
My point is that human beings are interdependent. That is what decides what groupings we should be focusing on and this interdependency makes group vis group competition make no sense. Even if you focus on scarcity, once again, scarcity doesn't go away if your group appropriates some resources. Then you have to fight inter-group and by that point I wouldn't call that one single group nor would I say there is much benefit to the grouping. It just makes no sense.
All societies have scarcity, and even if your group is a factory, then that factory is in competition with other similar factories--in today's globalised society then it's the entire planet. Maybe they compete with factories owned by the same company in the same region--if they adopt a bad practice, they are forced to change, lest they eat the cost of inefficiency which may lead to the factory closing.
Market competition, of which is informed more by property laws and exchange norms (i.e. firm-based organization), says nothing about how interdependent human beings are. A majority of capitalist scarcity isn't even real; just look at how a majority of food goes wasted because it isn't profitable to keep them on the shelves while people starve on the streets or how homes are left empty because they have value to their owners that way than if they were occupied while homelessness hits record highs. This is entirely artificial, borne out of social structures rather than nature.
And, once again, I must state that social factors influence behavior just as much as environmental factors. Conflating the two or ignoring the former doesn't change the fact that they are distinct.
It's no surprise that patriarchal societies have violence between men over who gets to marry whom, or allow a male relative to use violence against an abusive in-law. Patriarchy being globally common is because men are the biologically stronger sex who can impregnate multiple women and aren't incapacitated for nine months with pregnancy.
Patriarchy is a social structure, specifically a hierarchy. It can't be established through force. Authority is command not force. Being "stronger" means nothing, especially given how human beings are highly dependent upon other people for their survival. A man, for all intents and purposes, is incapacitated without other people. Even hermits live in proximity to towns. Women aren't the only ones dependent upon other people. Also, in nearly every patriarchal society, men do not fight other men over who gets to marry whom. Women generally get to choose and, if they don't, then men wouldn't have a reason to fight in the first place.
Patriarchy's popularity cannot be reduced to this. I suggest you find a better explanation.
Postclassic Mesoamerica was near the limits of population and suffered from frequent droughts, so these wars would clear out resources for the Aztecs and their allies along with acting as a devastating reinforcement of Aztec ideology to allies and enemies alike. It probably evolved from ritual cannibalism which functioned pretty the same, but in smaller scale (as seen among the Polynesians). Overcoming the cannibalism taboo seems to be a very powerful thing psychologically, as evidenced by what modern cannibals (the sort who needed to eat a comrade in a survival situation) have said, or the historic Hamatsa society in the Pacific Northwest where a sort of cannibalism was an initiation rite.
Who said anything about wars? I was talking about human sacrifice of which has religion reasons behind it rather than evolutionary ones. You need to explain that and also you need to provide evidence rather than armchair history.
Everything you state here is inaccurate given the existence of harems, concubines, female-selective infanticide, and reducing my argument to "lol sex." I don't feel like refuting it since it's just based on misunderstanding.
Harems only existed among rulers. Do you have any evidence of harems being popular among everyone with wealth in Islamic society? A wealthy individual would literally bankrupt themselves if they tried to have as many wives as the Ottoman sultan. A majority of concubines were foreigners rather than native Muslims. You were literally not allowed to enslave Muslims and they certainly wouldn't be wives if you did.
And female-selective infanticide is a bigger argument against you (and wasn't nearly as a big issue as you think it was). You're basically pretending that because some people practiced female-selective infanticide, this means that there were too little women to go around in the entire Muslim world which is not only completely ridiculous (because it would mean that every single baby girl who was born in the Islamic world had to be killed for several decades before it would become a problem) but also is completely false.
Female selective infanticide is literally prohibited in the Qur'an. If it was practiced, it was not practiced enough to completely reduce the number of women in the Middle East. It is even less practiced in contemporary times. There is absolutely no possible way polygamy is the main reason for social unrest throughout Islamic history. The minute Islam emerged, it would be impossible.
I never said that's the sole reason, it's just a cause of it
It isn't though. The Zanj Rebellion was a slave rebellion caused by the maltreatment of slaves in the swamps of Iraq. The Abbasid revolts were against the tyrannies of the Mut'azila. Polygamy barely existed during the emergence of ISIS.
You have no evidence for your claim, you're just talking out of your ass and coasting off of Western stereotypes about Muslim societies hoping no one calls you out. And then you assume I'm the dumbass for questioning your claims when all evidence points to polygamy not even being common during its heyday let alone in 2014.
nd it's one that's been noted for decades by those political analysts and historians given your average suicide bomber is an unmarried man in his 20s.
So? Most reactionaries are unmarried? Does America practice polygamy because most shooters are unmarried? When you consider that these studies are done on suicide bombers in foreign countries rather than in the Islamic world, it is clear that the data is skewed.
Also, ISIS fighters are very different from suicide bombers. Most of them are affiliated with tribes and are married. Furthermore, obviously a young person is more likely to take on risky behavior than older people. Most anarchists in 20th century Europe were young but had relationships (whether they were married or not is another question) and yet bombed cafes anyways.
Please try and understand my arguments before you call me "ignorant" or "stupid".
You're moving goalposts. You said polygamy caused this. You said, and I quote:
Monogamy might be the most advantageous for complex societies because it deals with the problem of unmarried young men lacking reason to settle down which can be plausibly blamed for revolts in Caliphate, the Taiping Rebellion, Islamist extremism (unmarried men make up a number of ISIS/Al-Qaeda fighters), incels, etc
Which obviously indicates that, if Middle Eastern societies were monogamous, they would not have these problems. However, nearly every revolt in the Caliphate had nothing to do with polygamy nor is polygamy even common enough in the contemporary Middle East to explain Islamist extremism. You backpedaled and made an argument completely different from what you initially said.
Enough about them that I can judge a society as "simplistic" compared to modern Western society, which is the most complex society that has ever existed by virtue of its diversity, all-encompassing scale, and sheer scope of different relationships between people and organisations that goes into creating modern society.
So what? It's more complex because there are more people involved? Really? Your standard for complexity is very low.
Bullshit. Please don't reply to this post if you're just going to misinterpret me for whatever reason.
Bro you think everyone had multiple wives. That is evidence enough you don't know jack shit. You think Islamist extremism is caused because Islamic societies weren't monogamous (when, by the time ISIS came around, no one was polygamous). You're completely out of your depth.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
