William Costello

And rather than being focused on causing trouble...

out there status-seeking, trying to find mates, competing with each other, they were focused on their family unit, and then, like you said, moving beyond the family unit to their society, and those cultures flourished.

And you do see that in the ethnographic records that cultures that practice monogamy began to flourish.

And Jordan Peterson gets in trouble for this because he says, oh, socially enforced monogamy, but that's a well-established finding in the literature that that caused cultures to flourish.

Okay.

So the first question is that, yes, in any society where you have this surplus population of unpartnered young men, you're in cells, it's called young male syndrome and they cause a lot of trouble.

And cultures throughout history had all sorts of cultural institutions to try and deal with this surplus population before even monogamy took hold as like a cultural norm.

You might send your surplus population of young men off on exploring adventures.

You might send them off raiding war.

Well, you want not necessarily kill them off.

You might find something more useful to do with them.

If they're exploring, they could actually find something useful.

Or if they're raiding other villages as Vikings or warriors, it's more useful to you than them just dying.

But yeah, primarily it's better than them causing trouble at home.

Yeah, so the main reason throughout our ancestral history is to get mates, to get brides.

And there's the Yanomamo tribe in, I think, Bolivia and Venezuela.

And there was an anthropologist called Napoleon Chagnon, and he was studying them.

And they got into a conversation, and he asked them, why do you go to war?

And they all said...

to get mates, to get brides.