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Edited the Robert Heinlein mention.
As to Heinlein's religious beliefs, see this FAQ.
His writings (with the arguable exception of "For Us The Living") did not claim that unconventional marriages are inherently superior to monogamous marriages. He described several dysfunctional or exploitative polygamous arrangements ("To Sail Beyond the Sunset" and "Friday" come to mind).
The paragraph as previously written might be thought to imply that Heinlein was a member of the Libertarian Party. As far as I know, he was not.
Removed until corroborated or made npov at the very least:
In mammals, proportion of sizes between males and females correlates with number of females that one male copulates with.
This criterion, as applied to humans, suggests that 2-4 wives per man (small polygyny) are natural state, and polyandry is completely unnatural.
Muslim limit of 4 wives per man is an argument that might confirm this result.
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We've achieved NPOV in the main page, I think, but at the cost of what amounts to a brief dictionary definition.
Regarding the correlation of male-female sizes and the number of partners that are involved in mating, I believe that Jared Diamond discusses this subject at some length in one of his books (maybe "The Third Chimpanzee", but I don't remember for sure). Examples among primates include gorillas, where the size difference is so great between the sexes that the males basically maintain harems. I am not so sure about the 2-4 wives part, though. Diamond argues that humans have a natural inclination towards mild polygamy, correlated with the slightly greater size of human males to human females. What I don't know is whether this theory is widely accepted or not, but it Diamond offers an evolutionary explanation for it. So perhaps one could cite Diamond in this article and mention that this is what he has argued regarding the subject.
So waddaya think? Have I managed to retain NPOV while expanding the dictionary definition? --the Epopt
- Polygynous societies are about four times more numerous than monogamous ones. In 1994, Theodore C. Bergstrom noted in his paper "On the Economics of Polygyny" (U. Mich. Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Working Paper Series 94-11) that "Although overt polygamy is rare in our own society, it is a very common mode of family organization around the world. Of 1170 societies recorded in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, polygyny (some men having more than one wife) is prevalent in 850."
I find the above puzzling, and I would like some confirmation that the conclusion, "Polygynous societies are about four times more numerous than monogamous ones," is one to which most anthropologists would subscribe. Here are some relevant questions:
- What percentage of people in the world at present have more than one spouse? (This is surely at least as important a statistic as the percentage of polygamous "societies.")
- How is "society" definied in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas?
- Are modern industrial societies included in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, and according to the atlas, how many of them are there? How many of such societies are polygamous? (Surely that's of interest to people who consider their peers to be members of industrial societies as opposed to pre-industrial societies.)
- What time period does the study consider?
- What percentage of men in a society must have more than one wife in order for the society to be considered polygynous? Is Utah a "society" and would it be counted polygynous today just because it has a handful of polygamists?
Without answers to questions like this, the above quote really looks like pseudoscience. If you're going to make dramatic claims, in order for them to square with the neutral point of view policy, you've got to supply the relevant context.