Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Suglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: we were just talking before this podcast about the George
Speaker 1: Michael video for Freedom. It's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't ever. I just remember seeing it on TV
Speaker 1: back in the old days, when you know, I had
Speaker 1: nothing better to do than to watch lots and lots
Speaker 1: of MTV. I think it's vintage nineties, isn't it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was definitely vintage nineties. That would have been about
Speaker 1: the right time frame. But it was, as I remember,
Speaker 1: a pretty sexy video. And they're all sorts of sexy
Speaker 1: things going on in it, and uh and and at
Speaker 1: one point George Michael writes a word on the back
Speaker 1: of his wife's or girlfriend's back, right, yeah, actually his
Speaker 1: then girlfriend's back, and the message is monogamy. And it's
Speaker 1: interesting because, as you say, it's a very sexy video,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who are um seem
Speaker 1: to be expressing their sexual liberation right, which which in
Speaker 1: a sense George Michael would do later for real. And
Speaker 1: it's different context yeah. Uh, not not a boudoir, but
Speaker 1: at least to the American public, it would be in
Speaker 1: a stall, which is fine. Whatever. The point is is
Speaker 1: that the video is interesting because it seems to be
Speaker 1: about sexual liberation and yet they bring up the point
Speaker 1: of monogamy, right, Yeah, and what is the relationship actually
Speaker 1: between these two things. Not that we're saying that George
Speaker 1: Michael video from the early nineties has to really have
Speaker 1: a compact, solid message about the way the world works,
Speaker 1: but it's fascinating in a light of this podcast where
Speaker 1: we were discussing the topic of monogamy, yeah, which we
Speaker 1: actually decided that we would dedicate a whole podcast too,
Speaker 1: because we recently recorded um a podcast about same sex
Speaker 1: pairings in the animal world or a game animals if
Speaker 1: you read animals, right, which again carries a lot of
Speaker 1: uh you know, anthropomorphic package with it. Yeah. And it
Speaker 1: was interesting because we we were talking about the las
Speaker 1: and albatrosses in oah Who, Hawaii, andty three of that
Speaker 1: population is actually same sex female female pairings. And some
Speaker 1: of these albatrosses or these birds have been together since
Speaker 1: they started studying them nineteen years previous to so it
Speaker 1: could have been that these birds work together for much
Speaker 1: longer than that. But the point is just that monogamy
Speaker 1: seems to be in nature, it seems to be in
Speaker 1: different species, and humans really try hard, I think to
Speaker 1: be monogamous. I'm try harder than others. This is true, um,
Speaker 1: but we're not always very successful. So we want to
Speaker 1: talk about that today, right, so animals, let me just
Speaker 1: run through a few favorite examples of monogamous creatures. You
Speaker 1: have given apes. You have wolves, termites, couties, barnet owls, beavers,
Speaker 1: bald eagles, golden eagles, condor swan, broga cranes, sandhill cranes, pigeons,
Speaker 1: red tailed hawks, black vultures, and apparently three percent of
Speaker 1: the four thousand metal species are monogamous. Of course, Homo
Speaker 1: sapiens aren't on that list, but we'll discuss that a
Speaker 1: little more as we go. Some of the examples that
Speaker 1: I came across in the researcher were pretty pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: The black vultures, for instance, discourage infidelity. All nearby vultures
Speaker 1: attack any vulture caught philandering, and that was interesting. For
Speaker 1: all their disgusting corpse seating there, they're they're strict moralists.
Speaker 1: For me, one of the most amazing examples of the
Speaker 1: mate for life species is easily the angler fish. To
Speaker 1: refresh that, it's about the size of a teacup deep
Speaker 1: sea animal, frightening horror show jaws with big teeth and
Speaker 1: a lighted lure that hangs in front of its face.
Speaker 1: It's one of those. It's like one of the favorite
Speaker 1: deep sea fish of all like ten year old boys.
Speaker 1: So that kind of has like a lantern. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: has like a little lantern in front of it, and
Speaker 1: then idea is it attracts fish and then it eats
Speaker 1: it with its frightening jaws. So you have the female, right,
Speaker 1: and then you have the male who's kind of a
Speaker 1: little guy. And what he'll do is he'll come up
Speaker 1: and he'll he will latch on to the back of
Speaker 1: the female, but it's with his sharp teeth, all right,
Speaker 1: and then he just keeps hanging on. Gradually he grows
Speaker 1: into the female, like physically his skin grows into hers.
Speaker 1: The fuse together. He ends up getting his food through
Speaker 1: a common blood supply, His eyeballs atrophy, his his organs
Speaker 1: waste away, and he eventually becomes a sperm producing organ.
Speaker 1: Like the only thing that really stays intact or the testes,
Speaker 1: so he mates for life, but it's it's really hard
Speaker 1: to imagine. Yeah, it's because he's fused to her physically
Speaker 1: and they become a single organism basically, and so you know,
Speaker 1: it's up in the air whether that is a life
Speaker 1: worth living. Yeah, I mean talk about loss of identity
Speaker 1: and a committed relationship. In a sense, it's like like
Speaker 1: two reactions to it. To really anthrom Morphies, It's like,
Speaker 1: on one hand, the male Engler fish is kind of
Speaker 1: like the ultimate do nothing husband. You know, we're always
Speaker 1: he's there. It's just his He's just a pair of
Speaker 1: testes that's feeding off of her. But then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's like a he's kind of put in
Speaker 1: his place, like all right, like he's he may not
Speaker 1: have any other purpose, so he's just reduced to his
Speaker 1: his one thing and just becomes basically an organ. I
Speaker 1: was to say, it doesn't even he can't even get away,
Speaker 1: he can't even have some me time. Um, yeah, that's amazing. Well,
Speaker 1: this isn't quite as traumatic that I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 1: Prairie voles, Okay, because these guys of North American prairie
Speaker 1: vowlts spend their entire adult life with one partner, and
Speaker 1: researchers thought that was pretty interesting. He wanted to get
Speaker 1: in the mind, so to speak, of these prai volts
Speaker 1: and try to figure out what made them so monogamous.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that the monogamous males have high
Speaker 1: levels of the hormone vassa prison in their brains, and
Speaker 1: promiscuous male bowls have a low level of vasa prison
Speaker 1: in theirs. And so what they began to think is that, well,
Speaker 1: perhaps this is a good explanation, this high level of
Speaker 1: basic person in males. What about humans? And it can't
Speaker 1: It's not really an apples to apples things some people
Speaker 1: like to extrapolate and say, well, maybe that's the same
Speaker 1: thing with with humans. Um uh. And while voles are
Speaker 1: social creatures like humans, they do have a very different
Speaker 1: brain from ours. That's pretty obvious. And in particular, periy
Speaker 1: vols brains are studied with receptors for vasa prison and oxytocin,
Speaker 1: and that's really what results in that high pair bonding instance.
Speaker 1: Um So, I think it's interesting. Again, I feel like
Speaker 1: people extrapolate those results sometimes and try to say that
Speaker 1: humans have the same situation going on since we also
Speaker 1: have basic person in oxytocin. But you know, it's hard
Speaker 1: to say at least the jury is out. But the
Speaker 1: idea is, especially with the voles, is it's this bonding
Speaker 1: that's taking place and it's resulting favorable chemicals in the brain.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a drug to them exactly. That's the
Speaker 1: they're part of. The reward center is going nuts every
Speaker 1: time they get a little oxytose in the based person. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense that they would want to stay in
Speaker 1: a you know, for lack of other terms, a committed
Speaker 1: relationship because they're getting something out of it. And in fact,
Speaker 1: if you look at number of the North American Poles
Speaker 1: are monogamous, then that bears out this whole idea that
Speaker 1: they're getting something out of it. But according to the
Speaker 1: Population Reference Bureau, the probability of an adult a human
Speaker 1: getting married um and and presumably being monogamous at some
Speaker 1: point during their life is still nearly But the problem
Speaker 1: here is the of these marriages and then divorce, which
Speaker 1: points to this this whole idea that we really do
Speaker 1: want to be monogamous. Maybe there are benefits for us
Speaker 1: which will discuss, but again we're still not great at it.
Speaker 1: We'll just leave this to another animal, that being them
Speaker 1: the gray lag goose. Yes, yeah, also another highly social creature.
Speaker 1: Researchers that Austria's Conrad Lorenz Research Station found that while
Speaker 1: some birds, some of these birds remained calm and flight,
Speaker 1: others were extremely stressed. And they wanted to find out,
Speaker 1: and they implanted heart rate monitors in twenty five of
Speaker 1: the geese, and they found that the geese who were
Speaker 1: in monogamous relationships I guess you could say, had heart
Speaker 1: rates about ten percent lower during flights than the heart
Speaker 1: rates of single birds here right, And again again it's
Speaker 1: not apple staffles with humans. You can't say it works
Speaker 1: with these geese. So this must be what's going on
Speaker 1: in humans. But it is interesting to look at that
Speaker 1: there they are less stressed out there and they're not
Speaker 1: you know, I mean they know what they're doing that
Speaker 1: evening right, Yeah, exactly pizza in a movie. But also
Speaker 1: this is interesting. While resting, the female heart rates rose
Speaker 1: when their mates were more than a few feet away,
Speaker 1: but stressed them was lowered when their mates returned. And
Speaker 1: this is from Claudio posture. She's an ethologist at Austria's
Speaker 1: research station, the Austria Konrad Lawrence. She said, an increase
Speaker 1: in heart rate is an investment. You'll have more energy available.
Speaker 1: But if you don't do that, if you're in safe mode,
Speaker 1: you'll save more energy which could have a long term
Speaker 1: advantage for you. So in the animal world this makes sense.
Speaker 1: If you're pairing up, you're probably you know, uh, safer right,
Speaker 1: safer in numbers, and you don't have to expend a
Speaker 1: lot of energy looking behind your back right. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: even on a you know, on a human level, it's
Speaker 1: like people who are paired up, they can sort of
Speaker 1: double team problems. Um, you know that, and you can
Speaker 1: let your guard down a little know on the other
Speaker 1: person's looking out. I guess, I guess we don't. We
Speaker 1: don't we tend not to sleep in shifts in human relationships.
Speaker 1: You don't know? Oh yeah, I don't either. It would
Speaker 1: be weird. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of data out there that says that people are
Speaker 1: on couples. Men and women who are married tend to
Speaker 1: live longer, especially men. And some of this though, they'll
Speaker 1: eat to the social network, social support system that's in
Speaker 1: place that helps to reduce stress and helps to bulster
Speaker 1: up your immune system. Actually, so in humans, there are
Speaker 1: definitely reasons where you can see what this would be
Speaker 1: an advantage to become part of a monogamous pair. Huh,
Speaker 1: But then why I stop there? Why marry one person?
Speaker 1: Why not marry several and then just read the benefits?
Speaker 1: Oh well, we'll talk about this right after your break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and uh, we've been talking about
Speaker 1: I mean, the podcast is about monogamy, but in attempt
Speaker 1: to understand monogamy, we have to discuss its opposite number.
Speaker 1: That's right, and more specifically polygyny, which is different from
Speaker 1: polygamy in the sense that polygony is based on one
Speaker 1: male with several females, right, Polyamory is a whole another
Speaker 1: thing here. Polyamory is many different people participating in different
Speaker 1: configurations of relationships. There are actually usually monogamous. But just
Speaker 1: wanted to point that out that we're talking more about
Speaker 1: polygyny here. In a paper called The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,
Speaker 1: authors Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richardson said
Speaker 1: that they wanted to try to get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of why we are not exclusively a polygynous society, you know,
Speaker 1: in all cultures across the world. And they say that
Speaker 1: the anthropological record indicates that historically, approximately eight of human
Speaker 1: societies have permitted men to more than one wife, and
Speaker 1: both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggests that large absolute differences
Speaker 1: in wealth should favor more poligionious marriages. Yet monogamous marriages
Speaker 1: have spread across Europe and more recently across the globe,
Speaker 1: even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. They wanted to
Speaker 1: know why because it seems on paper like, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: you just have a poligonous societ? Right? Those were the stakes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And why why doesn't someone like Donald Trump have just
Speaker 1: multiple multiple wives? Right, I mean at one time as
Speaker 1: opposed to serious right, right? Yeah? And that's particularly the
Speaker 1: case with powerful men, right because the more wives, more
Speaker 1: wealth uh u mss, the more stature. And some people
Speaker 1: would say that women would be attracted to that powerful
Speaker 1: man and would want to align in that configuration of
Speaker 1: polignous marriage because you would reap the benefits of that.
Speaker 1: It's just from slate dot COM's is polygamy really so awful?
Speaker 1: Women are usually thought of as the primary victims of
Speaker 1: polignous marriages, but as cultural anthropologist Joe Henrich the guy
Speaker 1: we started talking about documents, the institution also causes problems
Speaker 1: for the young, low status males, denied wives by older
Speaker 1: wealthy men who have hoarded off women, and those young
Speaker 1: men create problems for everybody. Yeah, so we're getting to
Speaker 1: the meat of it right here. Well I can I
Speaker 1: can't help, but I'm sure a lot of people have
Speaker 1: already are already thinking of the HBO series Big Love,
Speaker 1: which dealt with this kind of situation among an offshoot
Speaker 1: of mainstream Mormons, a fictional group in this particular TV series.
Speaker 1: But you see that even in this the show, which
Speaker 1: I found the first few seasons rather enjoyable of character
Speaker 1: development standpoint, But you would have like one individual, like
Speaker 1: the villain of the show, has multiple lives of varying ages,
Speaker 1: and then at times the younger men are not I mean,
Speaker 1: they end up having to leave because they don't have
Speaker 1: the opportunity to claim a wife. So you end up
Speaker 1: having like wife monopolization by the older members of a society.
Speaker 1: Exactly right there, there's a dearth of women available, and
Speaker 1: hen Rich and Boyd and Richardson say that when you
Speaker 1: have unmarried men and you have a scarcity of women, um,
Speaker 1: that is correlated with increased rates of rape, fact murder,
Speaker 1: and substance abuse. Right because on one lover, you're gonna
Speaker 1: you're level to uh partake of more risky behavior because
Speaker 1: you don't have as much at stake. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't have this, you don't have an vestment in family,
Speaker 1: an investment in family, you don't have investment in children.
Speaker 1: You probably don't have like a well decorated house or anything.
Speaker 1: You know, uh, you know it's the toilet is probably disgusting.
Speaker 1: All these things. And and then I suppose you are
Speaker 1: really focused on climbing up the ladder, you're going to
Speaker 1: be more willing to take those risks to get the
Speaker 1: kind of financial footing that you would be required to
Speaker 1: claim one of these lovely ladies. That's right, you may
Speaker 1: steal right to try to accumulate wealth. Um. Also, they
Speaker 1: said that these guys would engage in crimes to not
Speaker 1: only just a math enough wealth to attract women, but
Speaker 1: also kidnap other men's wives, which saying that here in
Speaker 1: the United States seems kind of crazy to say that
Speaker 1: out loud unless you're talking about bora. But um, you
Speaker 1: know this is is another instance why this doesn't really
Speaker 1: work across the scales, although there are some instances where
Speaker 1: a plug in as society could work. We know that
Speaker 1: of the most community in China, um, and that is
Speaker 1: a matriarchal society. And that's one where I don't know
Speaker 1: if you would call it we actually wouldn't even call
Speaker 1: it polygionist, very polygamous. But in that society, women have
Speaker 1: decided that they won't pair with men. They will have
Speaker 1: sex with men or even relationships or or have a
Speaker 1: mate in a man, but that man does not live
Speaker 1: with them. Um, if they have children with that man,
Speaker 1: he does not raise them. In that society, men are
Speaker 1: more useful as uncles. So the uncle's actually helped to
Speaker 1: raise the children and not that the actual um father
Speaker 1: of those children. And it's a very peaceful society. And
Speaker 1: um it's become a bit of a something for for
Speaker 1: tourists to to sort of ugle. But's but speaking of
Speaker 1: the of the children's interesting, some of these studies we're
Speaker 1: looking at the dealt with the the effect on the
Speaker 1: children in these situations like that. More related to the
Speaker 1: amount of attention they can get and how much how
Speaker 1: much time has spent on the children in a poligonius
Speaker 1: family versus a monogamous family. Yeah, yeah, children definitely suffer
Speaker 1: in this scenario. Henrich cites a study of nineteenth century
Speaker 1: Mormon households and forty five of them are headed by
Speaker 1: wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and forty five are
Speaker 1: headed by poor men, generally with one wife. And what
Speaker 1: they found is that the children of the poor men
Speaker 1: with one wife actually feared a lot better than the
Speaker 1: wealthy polgynous fathers. And the reason is that they think
Speaker 1: that those even though they are wealthy and they had resources,
Speaker 1: they were still spread thin the the pollagonius fathers, and
Speaker 1: they weren't able to invest that much time in their children. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, if there's just the one, it's easy to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be at your karate practice. But if they're like
Speaker 1: fourteen of them, you might not make a single karate practice, right.
Speaker 1: And and this is so important in children's development, but
Speaker 1: even with their language skills, is to have that one
Speaker 1: on one time with their parents in order to get
Speaker 1: a hold on, you know, the building blocks of the world.
Speaker 1: So if you don't have that attachment to your parents,
Speaker 1: then it's possible that you would have some um issues
Speaker 1: and actually developing. And what they found is that the
Speaker 1: pork is actually live longer than the wealthy kids. And
Speaker 1: then the other part of this too is that you
Speaker 1: have women kind of getting the short stick and poligonous marriages. Um,
Speaker 1: that would seem obvious right right, because there they end
Speaker 1: up they're sort of traded off at a very young
Speaker 1: age two older men. They're they're treated like a commodity
Speaker 1: as opposed to an individual in these cases. And and
Speaker 1: I mean you can just easily imagine like it's going
Speaker 1: to be a rare sixteen or even like eighteen year
Speaker 1: old it's going to really have the like, the the
Speaker 1: assurance to really stand up a to uh an older
Speaker 1: older man in one of these societies. But then and
Speaker 1: then be two other women that are already a part
Speaker 1: of that family. That's true that one of the studies
Speaker 1: we were looking at actually pointing out the like in
Speaker 1: a In the particular study, there were there were no
Speaker 1: examples of sister wives the lack of a better word,
Speaker 1: the TLC show that you're referring to, Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean I think sister wife was the term, the term
Speaker 1: but um, but there were no examples of the sister
Speaker 1: wives all getting along well, like like the situation tended
Speaker 1: to breed a certain amount of contempt among the ladies,
Speaker 1: that's right, they said. Henrich said that an ethnographic surveys
Speaker 1: of sixty nine polygamous cultures, they reveal no case or
Speaker 1: no cases where cowife relations could be described as harmonious,
Speaker 1: which again would makes sense because everybody's trying to uy
Speaker 1: for resources and time. So you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: everybody's sitting around come each other's hair, um and and
Speaker 1: singing come buy. I yeah, but then again, I mean
Speaker 1: I also can't help but you know, I mean, having
Speaker 1: not analyzed that study in enormous detail, but you know
Speaker 1: what relationship is could be described as when everything her harmonious,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's like, are they applying a separate
Speaker 1: standard to these, uh, these these families, and they that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be applying to a study of the monogamous.
Speaker 1: Well see, And now to go back to monoga's relationships,
Speaker 1: particularly in the United States where the divorce rate is
Speaker 1: so high, there are a lot of psychologists that will
Speaker 1: point to this and say, uh, the reason why we
Speaker 1: can't stay monogamous is because we have these ideals of
Speaker 1: what a relationship should be, and we can't necessarily suss
Speaker 1: out the reality versus the fantasy. Um. And that's of
Speaker 1: course not part and parcel of every divorce that happens.
Speaker 1: But they say a lot of that is involved in
Speaker 1: why we decide part ways. The society says that we
Speaker 1: should be able to achieve this, but then our brains
Speaker 1: and our behavior patterns they all end up pointing in this, uh,
Speaker 1: this rather different direction. Yeah. So, I mean, part of
Speaker 1: it is, you know, just genetic, right in terms of
Speaker 1: what sort of directs our behavior on an individual basis,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying wholesale males and females. And then part
Speaker 1: of it is cultural, what we've leave we need for
Speaker 1: ourselves out of a relationship and what a relationship means
Speaker 1: to us. Yeah, I guess, I guess. The thing is
Speaker 1: it just seems like it does seem like a no
Speaker 1: brainer that while like a relationship between two individuals is
Speaker 1: going to have a certain amount of complexity to it,
Speaker 1: a certain you know, a certain amount of ins and
Speaker 1: outs for every additional person added to that relationship, even
Speaker 1: if they're you know, in the status they have the
Speaker 1: status of a sister wife as opposed to like a
Speaker 1: full pledge, you know, equal part of this uh, this
Speaker 1: this unit. Uh, it's just going to breed more and
Speaker 1: more complexity and more and more feelings of distrust or
Speaker 1: you know, etcetera. Which is probably why if you if
Speaker 1: you look back, um, of the human species, why we
Speaker 1: have been primarily monogamistic. It used to be that we
Speaker 1: thought that because we were trying to uh spread our genes,
Speaker 1: and that men were certainly you know, going after more
Speaker 1: women to procreate with them in order to do that, UM,
Speaker 1: that we really run from more of a polygenous society.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the stats, and this is
Speaker 1: really interesting, this is from a Life science article, it
Speaker 1: says that we've pretty much always skewed monogamous. Dr Damian
Speaker 1: the Buddha, an investor investigator at the Saint Justine University
Speaker 1: Hospital Research Center, headed team that analyzed genomic data from
Speaker 1: three population samples Africa, Asia and Europe and um completely
Speaker 1: monogamy would yield a one to one breeding ratio right um.
Speaker 1: The study found that the breeding ratio varied between one
Speaker 1: point one and one point four according to population. So
Speaker 1: one point one in Asia, one point three in Europe,
Speaker 1: and one point four in Africa. And those stats really
Speaker 1: don't point to an overtly polygamous um society overall for
Speaker 1: the human species. So to your point less complex than
Speaker 1: he is probably better, right at the end of the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't you know, necessarily for the question about why
Speaker 1: we can't always, uh stay monogamous or why some people
Speaker 1: can um. But it's certainly a field that is ripe
Speaker 1: for more investigation. Well, let's look forward into the future.
Speaker 1: What does the future hold for monogamy? Okay, we've talked
Speaker 1: about in our Birthday Candles podcast about the very real
Speaker 1: possibility that we might live to five hundred years, the
Speaker 1: ripe old age of five hundred years, maybe even a
Speaker 1: thousand years, depending on how well we can maintain ourselves
Speaker 1: right with the current technology, and then the technology in
Speaker 1: the next fifty years a hundred years, right, And if
Speaker 1: and if two individuals can grow apart over the course
Speaker 1: of say a decade, then they're definitely there's definitely a
Speaker 1: higher risk they're going to grow apart over the course
Speaker 1: of five hundred years. Uh. And this assuming that the
Speaker 1: you know, there's enough neural plasticity in play that one
Speaker 1: is changing and that these four hundred year old individuals
Speaker 1: are not just sort of neurologically mummified versions of the
Speaker 1: past self. You know. But but assuming you know, life
Speaker 1: continues and people are pursuing interest in all, and you
Speaker 1: could easily imagine that that from century to century, or
Speaker 1: even from half century to half century, you're growing into
Speaker 1: new people, and then by necessity you're you're pairing up
Speaker 1: with new people. It's I mean, think about how much
Speaker 1: you change from age of twenty to thirty and imagine that,
Speaker 1: you know, like you say, a turning five hundred and
Speaker 1: then you know two hundred years later, Uh, you're going
Speaker 1: to have a completely different perspective and probably you're going
Speaker 1: to have many different partners. Right, So does monogamy exist
Speaker 1: in the future. I think it's what we're asking, um
Speaker 1: And already, I mean, there have been people who say
Speaker 1: we should have marital term limits. Um. You know, for
Speaker 1: us now like fifteen twenty year contracts um in which
Speaker 1: couples agree to invest time to sustain a family and
Speaker 1: to be together. So the question is what does that
Speaker 1: look like in the future, And um, you know, what
Speaker 1: about reproduction because this is this A lot of this
Speaker 1: is predicated on reproduction, right, like pairings get together because
Speaker 1: there are a lot stronger together to raise a family.
Speaker 1: This is the sort of evidence that we've been looking
Speaker 1: into in the animal world and and uh with humans.
Speaker 1: And so you know a lot of people are saying
Speaker 1: that reproduction is going to start to happen in the
Speaker 1: labs much more so than it is today. Right, I
Speaker 1: mean it's already becoming more of a situation where I
Speaker 1: mean reproductive choices such as artificial extamination, the use of
Speaker 1: donor eggs, the use of surrogate mothers, and then of
Speaker 1: course widespread adoption. Uh. These are all examples of where
Speaker 1: the classic model I feel of of the family unit
Speaker 1: and uh, end of reproduction has shifted somewhe So you know,
Speaker 1: it's easy to mention the future it will continue to
Speaker 1: shift well, and especially I mean we're talking about possibly
Speaker 1: having a uterine replicator, so you could actually just date
Speaker 1: a child again in the lab. So to your point,
Speaker 1: how does that shift society if you no longer have
Speaker 1: to pair up in order to at least accomplish some
Speaker 1: of these aspects of life. Yeah, I mean society has
Speaker 1: always changed with its technology, and it's gonna continue to
Speaker 1: do so, even as the technology affects such, you know,
Speaker 1: such basic human activities as the spreading of one's jeans.
Speaker 1: And as we discussed um in the Ladies on Planet
Speaker 1: Earth podcast, that we already see a trend in which
Speaker 1: women are choosing not to marry or mary later since
Speaker 1: they're better educated and they have better earnings. So just
Speaker 1: you know, present day, you know, you wonder how much
Speaker 1: of monogamy is going to stay the same, at least
Speaker 1: as how we perceive monogamy. So do we end up
Speaker 1: becoming the angler fish where ladies are the man is
Speaker 1: just basically reduced to some tests in a tube somewhere,
Speaker 1: and it's just like a race of ferocious ladies with
Speaker 1: sharp teeth and glowing things protruding from their forehead. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know. That's kind of living in
Speaker 1: the deep ocean. I mean, I gotta say, that's that's awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean, get me wrong, out of my husband. I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily want him to glom onto my bath. Um,
Speaker 1: but that that makes for a nice little short story
Speaker 1: right there. The anglic fish one of the nature's nature's
Speaker 1: wonders all right, Well, let's call over the robot. I
Speaker 1: have a couple of quick messages here to read, all right.
Speaker 1: These are both in response to our hugged Out podcast
Speaker 1: we heard from a listener, Amanda. Amanda Ryson says, I'm
Speaker 1: a hugger exclamation point. I grew up. I grew up
Speaker 1: in a family that did not hug. My sister that
Speaker 1: is eleven years older than me, cannot stand to be touched.
Speaker 1: So when I came around, I was a shocker to everyone.
Speaker 1: Me wanting hugs and touch so much got me the
Speaker 1: nickname clean on awesome. Well that's a yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: That's interesting that Amanda sinthing him because it reminds me
Speaker 1: of Actually, I received a text message from my sister
Speaker 1: related to this, and my sister Ali rideson and says,
Speaker 1: just listen to your podcast on hugging. I have a
Speaker 1: picture of the three of us here on my desk.
Speaker 1: Who's referring to herself, me and our sister Lucy, who
Speaker 1: my sister Alex, and this calls loopers. She says, I
Speaker 1: have a picture of the three of us here on
Speaker 1: my desk. In it, you were giving me a side hug,
Speaker 1: which the awkward hug that I my mom. Uh and
Speaker 1: uh he said, and Loopers is standing a foot away
Speaker 1: because she's she's not a hugger. So what about Alian?
Speaker 1: She does she engage in like a hug hug? You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Um, she's definitely a hugger. Uh, definitely
Speaker 1: more so than uh than me or Lucy. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: so so I guess you that there's three hugs, so
Speaker 1: I mean, and you can sort of, I guess you can.
Speaker 1: You might be able to make some argument about like
Speaker 1: birth order there because I'm the oldest and I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of an awkward hugger. Lucy is the middle child.
Speaker 1: She's not a hugger at all. He doesn't really like
Speaker 1: to be touched. And then Ali is certainly the more
Speaker 1: gregarious of the three of us, and she's she seems
Speaker 1: like a like a she's definitely more of a hugger.
Speaker 1: She's more apt to talk about her feelings and all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that might be Geneticamly, she might be the double
Speaker 1: G variant that we're talking about, and so she's got
Speaker 1: the receptors for it, and she might be a hug junkie.
Speaker 1: She could be. She was also born in Canada. I
Speaker 1: don't know, like she was she was born. What happen
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense at all, doesn't I don't know. And
Speaker 1: we have to scar Canadian listeners if they're all there's
Speaker 1: something in the water of well. I know that generally
Speaker 1: the stereotype of the Canadian is that the Canadians more reserved.
Speaker 1: Like the Canadian hug is not a thing, right, I
Speaker 1: have not heard of I've heard of Canadian bacon, but
Speaker 1: not the Canadian hug. Yeah, I don't know. Well, Canadians
Speaker 1: can straight me out on us, or my sister can
Speaker 1: straighten me out if she hears this. It's some more
Speaker 1: texts about it. But anyway, so there you go. There's
Speaker 1: some some feedback on the Hugs episode. If you would
Speaker 1: like to share some feedback on hugs, on monogamy, on
Speaker 1: angler fish and they're strange ways, then you can find
Speaker 1: us on Twitter, where we are Blow the Mind. You
Speaker 1: can also find us on Facebook. Just do a search
Speaker 1: on Facebook for stuff to Blow your Mind and you
Speaker 1: will probably find us, And you can also send us
Speaker 1: an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
Speaker 1: from the Future. Join How Stuff Work staff as we
Speaker 1: explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.