I made “The Red Queen” my “bathroom book”, so I’m still reading it and probably will be for some time. I found out that we have only two sexes because of compromises necessitated by conflicts between cytoplasmic genes. Species engaged in fusion sex that did not settle on the male with small manifold gametes and the female with a few large gametes tended to be wiped out by competition between genes from the organelles. I don’t really understand it all that well, but I’ll take the author’s word for it.
I have finally reached the part where all the background about sexual selection is applied to humans, and I am learning quite a bit that surprises me. I did not know that ruling elites over the millennia had so damn many wives and concubines and that so many lower class men were forced into celibacy as a result. Having a royal ancestor would be the norm rather than anything special given the breeding prowess of kings and emperors. Even ostensibly monogamous medieval lords kept harems of “serving girls” and sired large broods of bastards.
If you were a lower class schmendrick in such a highly polygynous society, investing in daughters would be the best way to make sure that you had many descendants. Your son might not breed at all, but your daughter had a shot at being concubine to a powerful man. Peasants would, therefore, tend to leave their wealth to daughters and to exhibit more of a matrilineal family structure in the lower classes while the upper classes, where males could expect to have many mates, would do the opposite and invest in sons. Elite families would be patrilineal.
Foragers tend to be monogamous since there is not much chance to accumulate the wealth needed to support multiple wives. Farmers can get richer and support several wives at the expense of their less fortunate or capable fellows. Warlords, with their hoards of treasure, can accommodate hundreds or thousands of wives and concubines.
Enforced monogamy benefits those men who would be left without a partner in a polygynous society. It restricts the strategic options of women who, to paraphrase one of the quotes in the book, might rather be the second or third wife of John Kennedy rather than the first wife of Bozo the Clown.
Enforced monogamy also makes hypergamy more difficult for women since it means that the highest social class will be more apt to intermarry within itself rather than to look for wives in the lower orders. In a polygynous system, middle class women might become supernumerary wives to rich and powerful men rather than settling for some mook from their own class.
It looks to me as if enforced monogamy is bad for women and good for less attractive men. I probably benefit from it whereas Mrs Vache Folle could have done way better in a polygynous society.
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Seems to me you'd also enjoy reading Sperm Wars.
There's a bit more to it than that. At the level of sex in various species, the mechanism isn't always the same as the XX and XY system in human beings. Birds and some reptiles invert that, with females carrying the sex determining gene, and crocodilians don't use that at all but use developmental cues to select sex. Some insects like bees use yet another variant, with single or double sets of chromosomes indicating male/female and developmental cues selecting fertile queens versus (usually) infertile workers. Many of these allow for occasional fatherless offspring, which as males permit isolated females to start breeding normally.
More importantly, human beings aren't as simplistic as monogamy/polygamy either. Many cultures had a separately driven male shortage, e.g. endemic warfare led to deaths of young men or they selected many eunuchs or diverted people into monastic life. With that, even with celibacy, it wasn't the inaccessibility of females that drove any celibacy but the celibacy or other shortfall that drove the polygamy. In turn, economic factors played a part.
Even leaving that aside, unmarried mothers of aristocratic bastards might later become wives of less important men, like William the Conqueror's mother; most of her descendants would have been less aristocratic. Or, the bastards might have gone into the Church too, with the mother being less likely to have a full family. There were lots of variations, all tending to reduce the likelihood of aristocratic lineages spreading and making up for the shortfall of wives for lesser men (in the case above, William was an only full child with two half brothers - but one of those went into the Church, while William didn't).
It all comes down to allowing for the effects of age as well as sex on the demographics.
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