Mistress and slave have had a
rather low key weekend so far here in River City. Friday involved dinner at
home and an evening at a local jazz club, where my lovely Mistress caught more
than a few eyes. In an odd coincidence she ran into a woman who was an underclassman
at her small liberal arts college. I wasn’t flattering when I whispered that
Mistress looked much younger than her supposedly younger friend.
Saturday I spent the morning with a
cute grandson, and returned around 1 pm for an afternoon in bed….both of us
needed the R&R. And we were thrilled to dodge a dreaded bullet. The couple
who insisted we join them for dinner and a night at the symphony cancelled!!
(Happy dance from Mick, who is not
much of a classical music buff!)
That left our evening open for a
movie and a stop at Mistress’s favorite ice cream parlor, just a short walk up
the street. Much more relaxing!
But today’s blog is not about Mick
avoiding Segovia and dinner at a dreary country club. It’s about one of our
little fascinations here at UCTMW – the science behind cuckolding! And an article in yesterday’s NY Times
shed some historical light on the phenomenon under the headline: “(Fathered by the Mailman?#55FFFE) Fathered By the Mailman? Mostly an Urban Legend.”
It turns out some crackerjack
scientists have done some intensive DNA and genealogical studies and discovered
that the likelihood that someone else fathered a guy’s child are actually
pretty low:
“In a commentary in Trends in Ecology and Evolution,
Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues argue that it’s long past time to toss out
frequent cuckoldry as a myth. Studies relying on different methods in different
cultures all point to cuckoldry rates of less than 1%.”
Apparently that’s not only true in
the more “civilized” world, but also in less “developed” societies. (the
difference is apparently based on the frequency in neighborhoods with fast
food restaurants and obese people). The tell is us pathetic human males have
rather lazy sperm --
Beverly I. Strassmann, a University of Michigan anthropologist
who gathered the data on paternity rates in Mali,
agreed that widespread cuckoldry “was an urban legend. It seemed to have a life
of its own.”
The evidence of low rates of cuckoldry comes not just from gene
studies, she noted. In species where females mate with many males, the males
tend to evolve sperm that are good at competing for fertilization. The males
may produce large amounts of sperm, for example, and a high percentage swim
well.
Humans, however, don’t rate in the sperm department.
“It’s of amazingly low quality,” Dr. Strassmann said. “Half the
sperm can be duds; they can have two heads; they can be defective in all sorts
of ways.”
The only way for men to have evolved comparatively ineffectual
sperm, she added, was for them to have experienced high rates of paternity over
time.
I’m having trouble getting my head
around what my lazy, ineffectual, two headed sperm have to do with
the likelihood that someone else is having fun with my wife.
Maybe one of our commenters can explain that to me.
But I digress. The more interesting factoid is that some
human communities are more inclined to cuckolding than others:
It’s not that widespread cuckoldry doesn’t exist in some
cultures, Dr. Larmuseau said. Some South American tribes with high rates share
a belief that more than one man can contribute to the formation of a fetus.
But Dr. Larmuseau suspects that these populations are the
exception, not the rule. Humans have evolved to avoid cuckoldry, he said,
because of our peculiar biology.
Human infants are born quite helpless, compared with the
newborns of other animals, and they need a lot of food over a long period to
fuel the growth of their calorie-hungry brains. Mothers needed fathers to help
find the food.
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COMMENTS
“Babies really need good investment from the fathers,” Dr.
Larmuseau said, “and the paternity has to be very sure in order for them to
make those investments.”ckoldry rates of about 1 percent.
Of course, all of this is based on
history, not the evolution of community values in the 21st Century.
And it relates to reproduction, not recreational sex! While the rate of cuckoldry may have been historically low
for women in their child bearing years, it says little about women of a certain
age who, like Mistress, have the occasional itch for a little sexual variety that
just needs to be scratched. Or
husbands who get a strange thrill when their wives grab for a little extra
gusto via a sidedish.
We may need some more social
science research to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.
