In a period of time where most wish to enjoy their life to the fullest it seems that monogamy is becoming rather extinct, especially for younger generations. The hook-up age has been consuming the lives of many young people and several have given up in long-term exclusive relationships. Furthermore, there is also to issue of infidelity. Sometimes, they may actually engage in monogamous relationships but end up cheating on their partners which goes against the concept of monogamy. So are animals and humans made to be monogamous? If so what can cause monogamy?

According to CNN, only 3 to 5% of all mammal species on earth “practice any kind of monogamy”. Additionally, only one species is considered to be highly inclined to monogamy in the animal world. That species is called the prairie vole whose rate of monogamous relationships is extremely high compared to other animals.  This extremely small percentage in the findings leaves us the question of whether we are also included in that small percentage of monogamous inclined “animals”.

In this article in The Guardian, Christopher Opie, an anthropologist at University College London performed a study attempting to find out which of the most probable theories in the scientific world concerning monogamy were compatible with animals that are prone to monogamy. Three of the most likely theories for the cause of monogamy are as following: The offspring might be demanding and so the prospect of monogamy and parental fidelity might be consistent with successful reproduction and care of offspring, “male guarding” might occur in the case where males might stay close to protect their mates against male rivals and the third is that males seek to protect their offspring against other males of the same species that might kill off the offspring so that the females will become fertile and they will have the chance to impregnate them. When I read these theories I definitely thought that the first theory was probably the most well-founded because even now we see in human relationships that if parents stay together to care for their children together in the same household,  the children usually have greater chances to develop successfully into adults.

For example, in this study in the Europe PubMed Central, children in nuclear families were generally found to be less likely to be in poor health, lack health insurance, demonstrate poor behavior and be more likely to have behavior and emotional issues in the past 6 months. This study seemed to not suffer from the Texas sharpshooter problem or the file-drawer problem since the this study took into account various factors like race, sex, Hispanic ethnicity, family income and poverty status to analyze specifically the “physical health and limitations, access to or utilization of health care, and behavior or emotional well-being for children under age 18”. Therefore they were very specific about what they were truly analyzing and the elements they would observe, negating the presence of the sharpshooter problem. They also used to same criteria for nuclear and nonnuclear families which would also extinguish any sharpshooter problems. However, thought this study seemed to be properly randomized, they used a widely-given survey to evaluate these factors for one child of each household, which doesn’t take into account other children in the household which could impact the findings of this study. Also, we don’t know what questions were asked in the study or if the participants interviewed suffered from participant bias when getting questioned by the interviewer. We also don’t know if the study suffered from research bias, where maybe the interviewers unconsciously displayed certain traits or even distinct tones of voice that could’ve affected the participant’s answers to the questions.

Going back to the original study, I thought the first theory was the correct one about animals staying in pairs and monogamous relationships for the betterment of their overall offspring. Opie and his group of researchers conducted an experiment by taking “a family tree of 230 animals, including lemurs, bush babies, monkeys, apes and modern humans, and collected information on their mating behavior, rates of infanticide and paternal care.” He ran a simulation that showed evolution for these animals from 75 million years ago till now. He ran this simulation several times to try to fully grasp why these species evolved to be relatively monogamous. His findings showed that what lead to monogamy was high rates of infanticide, which means that animals would kill other’s offspring. Therefore, the fathers stayed with the females to protect them and their offspring from other males attempting to procreate with the impregnated females. His conclusion was that what made them stay monogamous was the instinct to care for their offspring and ensure a successful development and upbringing when it came to them.

However, we cannot truly count on this study because some of the animals studied were not truly monogamous and it was an observational study and not an experimental one. An observational study has more room for third confounding variables and can often be prone to error and chance because no experiment is being conducted to collect concrete data. For example, a third variable could be the animal’s respective mating seasons and how that affected their behavior toward monogamy.

There are still many valid reasons as to if humans and some animals are truly monogamous and what causes monogamy in the animal kingdom. Scientists still don’t have a concrete answer to this question but they’ll keep on conducting studies and meta analysis on these studies to identify what factors truly influence monogamy.