The conventional wisdom goes like this: Men have two mating strategies, "cad" and "dad". "Cad" means go around and have sex with as many women as possible, and "dad" means hold onto your one mate and take care of the kids.
Are these strategies genetic? Obviously, many men have both urges at the same time, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a strong genetic component at work. When I lived in Japan, I saw many men (including myself) confronted with near-infinite opportunities for sexual variety. Some took the bait, to the tune of three or four women per week, while others simply got a girlfriend and were satisfied. Some men were just natural "dads".
So here's my thought. With the spread of birth control, cad-hood rarely results in pregnancy anymore. Women who have affairs or casual sex don't want to be saddled with a kid whose dad is almost guaranteed not to stick around and help, so they make sure to take the Pill before they have their flings. Cads are still out there, inseminating away to their hearts' content, but their seed is withering on the vine. Not that they necessarily care; nature made us want sex a lot more than it made us want kids. The link between sex and kids has simply been broken.
Most pregnancies are now planned. That means most children are the children of "dads" - i.e., men who want kids. Logic dictates that "cad" genes will now be slowly pushed out of the gene pool.
What does this mean? Is the future a world where most men really want monogamy, instead of simply obeying the dictates of religion or morality? Will an increasingly small number of cads be increasingly happy as they service the casual-sex needs of more and more women? Eventually, will there be the Last Cad, Wilt Chamberlain to the hundredth power, blissfully cavorting with an infinite queue of frustrated housewives until his genes too go down to oblivion?
Well, maybe not. There will always be a few condoms that break, a few Pills that fail, and more than a few dumb teenage girls who forget to use either. Polygamy genes, like life, will find a way. But it's a little comforting to think that our future may have a few less broken homes, a few less marriages shattered by affairs, a little less cheating, beating, and sneaking around.
Update: A friend writes:
i think you're suffering from a bad sampling error in your birth control argument...most women don't use the pill and huge swaths of the human population (china/india/africa/middle east) don't have ready access to the pill anyway...Well, he's right about the huge swaths. But fertility transitions are happening everywhere, and the Pill isn't near the only form of birth control (an even more popular one is abortion, Japan's substitute for the Pill). I think my basic idea - that the more women control their pregnancy, the fewer cad genes get passed on - still stands.
Bonus Reading Guide
1. A new report in the Economist assesses that most rich people in the new China got that way through corruption. And an interesting post on Marginal Revolution shows just how much of China's wealth flows to Communist Party members. And here's an interesting article about how Western China scholars are managed by the Party.
2. A (non-Muslim) German judge recently denied an abused wife a divorce, on the grounds that the Koran allows wife-beating. In a hopeful sign for European integration, Muslim groups were the first to get outraged.
3. Noah contra Confucius: A blog post at Passport gives an interesting quote by Confucius - "If [the people] are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a sense of shame and come to you [the ruler] of their own accord." In other words, Confucius say: "You ain't just gotta do what I say, you gotta like it."
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