Nicholas Wade

So Europe became monogamous essentially under the influence of the church.

And then in quite recent times, monogamy sort of spread, presumably by example, to India and China.

So now almost all the world

is monogamous.

And all this represents a sort of great big constraint on the natural male impulse to have as many wives and children as possible.

That's right.

And this is one way in which we have transcended our evolution to great advantage.

These monogamous societies are much more stable and more productive.

And another major example of the same thing is tribalism.

So the whole world used to be tribal in between when hunter-gatherers settled down at the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago to tribalism.

to one or two millennia ago now, all human societies were tribal.

And tribalism is a very successful way and effective way of running a society because it sort of keeps law and order without any police force or courts or laws.

And it's very good at defense and it has many superb advantages such that it's very hard to get rid of.

So there's a wonderful book by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, where he describes how the major civilizations of the world in different ways got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy.

In Europe, it was done by the church.

So the early Europeans were all tribal.

And...

In those days, it was often quite hard to produce a male heir because people died very young.

So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe.

So there were stratagems for like adoption or marrying your cousin for keeping wealth inside the tribe.