Ross, Cody T. and Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique and Seung-Yun, Oh and Bowles, Samuel and Beheim, Bret and Bunce, John and Caudell, Mark and Clark, Gregory and Colleran, Heidi and Cortez, Carmen and Draper, Patricia and Greaves, Russell D. and Gurven, Michael and Headland, Thomas and Headland, Janet and Hill, Kim and Hewlett, Barry and Kaplan, Hillard S. and Koster, Jeremy and Kramer, Karen and Marlowe, Frank and McElreath, Richard and Nolin, David and Quinlan, Marsha and Quinlan, Robert and Revilla-Minaya, Caissa and Scelza, Brooke and Schacht, Ryan and Shenk, Mary and Uehara, Ray and Voland, Eckart and Willführ, Kai Pierre and Winterhalder, Bruce and Ziker, John (2018) Greater wealth inequality, less polygyny: rethinking the polygyny threshold model. Interface, 15 (144). pp. 1-15. ISSN 1742-5662

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Abstract

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea—based on the polygyny threshold model—that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human populations. Our analysis shows that with the shift to stratified agricultural economies: (i) the population frequency of relatively poor individuals increased, increasing wealth inequality, but decreasing the frequency of individuals with sufficient wealth to secure polygynous marriage, and (ii) diminishing marginal fitness returns to additional wives prevent extremely wealthy men from obtaining as many wives as their relative wealth would otherwise predict. These conditions jointly lead to a high population-level frequency of monogamy.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	School of Educational and Social Sciences > Department of Educational Sciences
Date Deposited:	02 Feb 2021 11:13
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2021 11:13
URI:	https://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/id/eprint/4774
URN:	urn:nbn:de:gbv:715-oops-48558
DOI:	10.1098/rsif.2018.0035
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