So I was thinking - it's really amazing what boring classes at college can do for your thought life, pity they don't work that way for my sex life. Anyway, I suppose everybody here is familiar with the genetic theory of human mating strategies :
Sperm is cheap to produce, so men seek sex with as many women as possible to maximize the amount of children. On the other hand,
women can only have a few children, so they seek the best possible males, maximizing the quality of their children.
On the other hand, humans are not completely products of our genes. If we judge by other primates, and oversimplify a little, the equilibrium state in a tribe is for an alpha male to have all the females, with a bit of illicit sex on the side. Clearly this does not favor the ninety percent of males who are not getting any, or very little. (As an aside, vestiges of this system can still be seen in high schools, not the most civilized of places, where a few males get all the sex, and most have none).
I wonder, then, if monogamy could be seen as a stratagem of the beta males and the females, against the alpha males? The beta males get regular sex, which they would not have under the old system. The females get help in raising their children, which a single alpha cannot supply for the whole harem - not, at any rate, as efficiently as a beta who can concentrate his whole attention on one nuclear family. The alphas get nothing, but they are a small percentage of the population and cannot very well work together anyway, since they seek a winner-takes-all situation.
Is this theory useful for understanding our behavior? I do not offer it as a replacement for the purely genetic theory, but a supplement.
Of course, the interests of betas and females are not totally identical here. The female would still prefer the alpha to be the father of her child; she just wants the beta to supply the resources and care to raise it. Which seems to fit in with the chaperonage systems seen in many patriarchal systems, the stigma of bastardy, and the absolute prohibition on adultery.
Much more interesting than astrophysics, for sure.