Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

Polygamy or as it is sometimes called plural marriage, is one man with many wives. It is an extension of monogamy and approved of in the old testament, along with holding of slaves. It is inherent in the Judeao-Christian-Islamic patriarchical religions. It is also a key element of Mormonism, which is a psuedo-Christian sect, one that is the largest fastest growing religions in the United States. While the Mormons today renounce polygamy, it is in Utah where it is practiced the most, as it once was in Canada.

It is not the communist polygamy that Engels speaks of as existing prior to the privatization of property relations. That form of common property holding was held by women, and was the basis of matrilinear descent.

Nor is it polyamoury the movement begun in the sixties with the writings of Robert Rimmer and Robert Heinlein. The new ployamoury movement is about equality, and open marriage, a recognition that monotheism=monogamy. While real human relationships are communal, cooperative and voluntary. It is the libertarian ideal of Free Love taken to its logical communist conclusion.

See my aticles: Marx on Bygamy and What Has Love Got To Do With It.

So polygamy is back in the news again..... Whats interesting is that it is being discussed in the context of rights. Womens and childrens rights versus religious rights (of the religious right, since Mormons are strong supporters of the neo-con right). The B.C. government avoids the religious issue by dealing with it as a criminal case of abuse.

Polygamy violates rights: Ottawa

Study says Canada breaking international law by turning blind eye to polygamist communities
A Canadian report says that the country's laissez-faire attitude towards a polygamist community violates its obligation to protect women and children.

The practice of polygamy is illegal. But men in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints have been allowed to have multiple wives without prosecution, Canwest News Service said.

"Polygamy is a violation of international law," Rebecca Cook, a University of Toronto law professor who wrote the report, said. "Canada has an obligation as a matter of international law to take all appropriate steps."

Her report was commissioned by the former Liberal government.

BC attorney general says he's more worried about sex assault than polygamy

But what about the boys eraised in polygamous marriages?

Global Televsion does a documentary on the fact that patriarchical religious polygamy replicates the pack tradition of other species like male lions, where the old men chase away the younger men to keep their pride to themselves. As it is written in the Old Testament. All the patriarchs who had multiple wives were the old men of Judah.

'Lost boys' of polygamy tell their stories
It's simple arithmetic in polygamous societies such as Bountiful, B.C. Some men get many wives, others get none.

It's usually older men who get second, third and sometimes more wives -- brides who are usually teenagers.

Left behind are angry, frustrated young men. Not only can they not choose their mates, they have been told that it's against Church rules to date or even socialize with girls their age.

A few lucky young men do get wives. But it can feel like entrapment. One day they wake up and are told they're marrying a stranger for "time and all eternity" in the words of the fundamentalist Mormon faith's marriage ceremony.

There was one exception, to David and the patriarchs practice of polygamy. Solomon who was crowned by his mother and who practiced a different kind of polygamy, one that recognized the power and prestige of the priestesses of the Goddess cults that surrounded Jerusalem. Solomon was a matriaist, and followed matrilineal descent for his power base, hence Israel was finally at peace with its neighbours and Solomon could build the famous temple that would become the icon for all time for the power of Israel within Jewish and Christian mythology. See my article: Historical Revisionism

Back in February the right wing neo-cons were outraged over the initial report that found polygamy did not violate Canadian laws because of the contradiction between religious freedom, something of course they demand we practice as long as its their brand of Judeo-Christianity, and criminal civil law. Hence the Cook report.

They used the inital report to denounce Canada's liberal same sex laws as leading to the decline of Western Civilization, that is the acceptance of polygamy. Except that they avoided dealing with ther simple fact that polygamy is based on the Old Testament testament teachings, whether it is practiced by Mormons, who like them are social conservatives, or by Muslims, who like them are Abrahamic patriarchs.

In the case of Stanley Kurtz he deliberately confused polyamoury with polygamy. His purpose was clear, to attack open marriage as advocated by the polyamourists, to attack free love, just as his predecesors did a century ago when they attacked the free love movement that was about allowing women the right to choose whom they married and the right to divorce. See my Happy Birthday Mrs. Satan.

February 03, 2006, 8:05 a.m.
Dissolving Marriage
If everything is marriage, then nothing is.

Ultimate Goal

Bailey may not openly flog her ultimate goal of abolishing marriage in this report. Yet what Bailey’s up to is clear enough when she carefully describes a 1998 report by the British Columbia Law Institute in which a “significant minority” of members favored a “multiple domestic partnership” system detached from the patriarchal “baggage” of traditional polygamy. This is exactly what Bailey is hoping to establish. Yet she brackets the proposal by saying that at the moment there is “no demand” for such a system.

Not so, as this 2005 Macleans article on Canadian polyamory explains. According to Macleans, polyamory “seems increasingly common” in Canada. And as organized polyamory groups proliferate, there has already been discussion “about creating a system of legal contracts around issues such as child custody and family rights.”

Since polyamory is free of the “patriarchal baggage” attached to traditional polygamy, most of the arguments against multi-partner unions in the four just-released polygamy reports would not apply. Of course there are arguments against polyamory, it’s just that liberal law professors don’t know how to make them. In any case, Bailey is shrewd enough to see that, if she can only get Canada to set aside its laws against polygamy, the goal of supplementing (and eventually replacing) marriage with a modern domestic partnership system (allowing any combination of number or gender) would be achievable.

I’ve focused on Bailey, while touching only lightly on the three other polygamy reports. Yet taken together, these four extraordinary documents launch a serious public debate about polygamy. (I’ll have more to say about the other reports in time.) The four Canadian polygamy studies are a time-capsule from the future, a preview of the argument we’ll be having should same-sex marriage be fully established here in the United States. Once we’re there, we’ll be well on our way toward “removing conjugality as a marker for determining legal rights and obligations.” Translation? By now I think you get it.

A marriage of many?
Is gay marriage a slippery slope toward legal polygamy, or are conservative warnings a red herring?

By RYAN LEE
Friday, February 24, 2006

Each time Dani Eyer attends a forum to advocate marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples, she knows the first question to expect at the end of her speech.


A 'Conservative' Shows Her Liberalism, Opposing Polygamy Rights
Date: Feb 16, 2006
Word Count: 3000 words
Cross-Reference: Debra Saunders, "same sex marriage", polygamy rights


Three's a crowd, four's a marriage
*HBO's "Big Love" probes the polygamists next door. It's family values of the provocative kind.

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Marx on Bigamy

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): I'm sick of these conventional marriages. One woman and one man was good enough for your grandmother, but who wants to marry your grandmother? Nobody, not even your grandfather.

[to Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead]

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): You know, you two girls have everything. You're tall and short and slim and stout and blonde and brunette. And that's just the kind of a girl I crave.

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): Why, you've got beauty, charm, money! You have got money, haven't you? Because if you haven't, we can quit right now.

Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont): I'm fascinated.

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): I'm fascinated, too. Right on the arm.

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): [to Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead] Let's get married.

Mrs. Whitehead: All of us?

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): All of us.

Mrs. Whitehead: Why, that's bigamy.

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx): Yes, and it's big of me too.

Animal Crackers 1930

Well as I predicted the Blogging Tory's have blown up over the Supreme Court Ruling that Swinger Sex is Ok cause we're Canadian.

And as I predicted this decision has seperated the libertarians from the Family Values (patriarchical monothiests) coalition of the right.

And of course just as they did in opposing Same Sex Marriage the FV crew raise the spector of bigamy, polygamy, and incest. The latter is just plain stupid, but well what do you expect from folks who will grasp at anything outrageous to say to obscure the point. It's called fearmongering.

As to bigamy, see Marx above. Polygamy is refered to in the old testament, and as practiced by Mormons, and some Muslims, is an extension of patriarchical monogamy into plural monogamous realtionships.

What the right whingers really are refering to is neither, it is rather the concept of the open marriage or the idea of a communal love realtionship; polyamoury. Well swinger sex has had that connotation ever since the sixties when Robert Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land.

It’s hard to gauge just how profound an effect Stranger in a Strange Land has had on Western society (it’s still early yet). It came out in 1961, and was swiftly embraced by the emerging counterculture, so becoming a best seller. The word “grok” entered into the youth’s vernacular (however briefly), and doubtless many aspiring humans-who-would-be-Martians begun to greet one another with the knowing catch phrases, “Thou art God,” “Share water, “ “Never thirst,” and so forth. It’s easy to see why. Stranger in a Strange Land is the most fully convincing Utopian vision, in literature or in any medium, that I know of. It encapsulates the more progressive and creative aspects of cultural “revolution,” and celebrates what were soon to become (again, however briefly) the most treasured tenets of the Sixties rebellion: mind expansion, individual responsibility, and free love.

In 1962 Robert Rimmer published his polyamourous novel The Harrard Experiment.

Intertwined, too, were new ways of social and sexual relating, as written about in Robert Rimmer's "The Harrad Experiment." And here grew the seeds that gave birth to the modern womens movement, the gay movement and new male/female consciousness. Summer of Love

Twenty years later, in 1981, Gay Talese published his now famous journal of his journey through America's sexual underground; Thy Neighbor's Wife which covered the swingers movement, wife swapping, and the then embryonic polyamourous movement.

Talese's book begins with the creation of Playboy magazine and the begining of the sexual revolution ten years later in the sixties. He then documents the movements of heterosexual experimentation with new sexual and human relationships.

What is important to remember is that even with the advent of Playboy magazine, which had as one of its editors libertarian sci-fi author Robert Anton Wilson, that through out the sixties the battle for free speech was also the battle for sexual speech.

Someone once asked me about "1960s porn films." There wasn't actually such a thing, strictly speaking, in North America until the late-1960s. Sexual speech can generally be considered to have been criminalized until then. John Harris Stevenson,
NOTES on the HISTORY of PORNOGRAPHY

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.
Paul Goodman

The sexual revolution was further promoted by the increased knowledge of sexuality promoted by the publication of the Kinsey report, the advent of birth control and a broader acceptance of contraception, the idea that sex was for pleasure not just procreation.

These ideas were not new, they had existed since the 19th century particularly in the socialist and anarchist movements. Anarchists then were attacked for believing and supporting Free Love which in the sixties would be known as open marriage.

With the summer of love 1967, and the hippie movement came the public exposure of the sexual revolution, which coincided with the rise of Alternative religions, paganism in particular, and with the idea of communes, communalism, the rise of the New Left and the embryonic revival of feminism

Oh that libertarian Heinlein little did he know what he unleashed on the world with that ground breaking novel. Actually he did, he often portrayed open, free love relationships in many of his novels.

"I've had people offer to explain Stranger in a Strange Land to me. I was simply writing a novel, but apparently I clicked. (April 1980).

One of the adovcates of pagan polyamourism was the Church of All Worlds influenced as they were by Stranger in a Strange Land.

If any work of fiction will earn Robert Heinlein a permanent place on the collective bookshelf, it is going to be Stranger in a Strange Land, for the impact it has made on American society. If a person has not managed to read Stranger by now, then he has at least absorbed a bit of it osmotically, for it flows throughout our cultural consciousness. Perhaps least of all, it anticipated Nancy Reagan's reliance on astrology and spawned the water bed and the neologism "grok," (Heinlein's Martian verb for a thorough understanding), though "grok" would never have taken hold, had the young rebels of the 1960s not discovered Stranger as their counterculture bible. Some went even further and formed "nests" and churches based on what they found in Stranger; perhaps the most famous instance of that is the Church of All Worlds, a pagan group who lifted its name and logo intact from the book. Stranger has also begun to be included in many canonical college reading lists, and Billy Joel saw fit to mention the title in his 1989 Top-40 hit about history, "We Didn't Start the Fire."

The womens movement and the gay movements that resulted from the sexual revolution of the sixties have now broadened into movements around open flexible personal relationships and a growing bisexual movement that sees gender roles as socially constructed.

In many ways these the feminist sex positive movements developed out of the work of Betty Dodson, following in the footsteps of Wilhelm Reich and anarchist psychotherapists like Paul Goodman and the Gestalt. movement.

A search for the ultimate motives of human conduct cannot
disregard pleasure which many eminent minds have considered to be the
fundamental motive, or at least an important one. Others, to be sure,
have held that pleasures is the outcome rather than the motive or goal of
human striving. But both sides are agreed that there is some relationship
between pleasure and striving.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that many human strivings bear
some kind of reference to pleasure, and likewise that many pleasures
bear some reference to striving. These references are both certain
enough to exist, and obscure enough as to their nature, to present a
genuine and inescapable problem.

Since the days of Aristippus, thinkers have wrangled over the issue of
hedonism. The longevity of the problem bears witness to its importance
as well as to its elusiveness. Like many another time-honored
philosophical problem, the question of pleasure and striving seems to
have been caught in a dilemma neither side of which is truly satis factory.
We shall have to recast the problem. We recognize its existence, but
refuse to strangle it with ill-suited concepts. We propose first to learn
the facts themselves by conducting a comprehensive phenomenological
analysis of the statics and dynamics of pleasure.

While those who believe that we strive for pleasure go under a definite
label, „hedonism,“ the other side which regards pleasure as a byproduct
of successful striving has no distinctive name. „Anti-hedonism“
would be too broad a designation. One may challenge hedonism without,
for that reason, pledging oneself to accept the reverse relationship
between pleasure and striving. Many explanations of pleasure
have been proposed that would be compatible with an anti-hedonistic
position, and yet do not trace pleasure to successful striving.
Metaphysical theories such as Spinoza’s derivation of pleasure from a
transition to greater perfection, physiological theories like those of
Lehmann or Freud - in terms of neural metabolism or „excitation,“
psychological theories tracing pleasure to some sort of harmony
(Herbart, Lipps), value-theories like Scheler’s in which pleasure is
regarded as a „sign“ of felt value, and, last but not least, those many
biological theories ascribing pleasantness to what is beneficial to the
organism - these and similar views do not hold the second alternative:
that pleasure is a by-product of successful striving. Yet they are
perfectly compatible with an anti-hedonistic position. Therefore, since
anti-hedonism is not a precise name for the second alternative, I propose
to call it hormism, following the lead of the latest of its greater
representatives, W. McDougall.1 Hormism, then, is the theory that
pleasure occurs when a conation, i.e., some striving for an object or
goal, is being successful, while displeasure occurs when a conation is
being frustrated.

2. Like the majority of the great rivers of thought, both hedonism and
hormism have springs in the gigantic mountain range of Aristotle’s
philosophy. One spring of hedonism is the book De Anima: „Desire is
the craving for the pleasant“; while those of hormism are in the
Nichomachean Ethics: “Pleasure is the consummation of activity.“

On Pleasure, Emotion, and Striving by Karl Duncker 1941

Anarchist attitudes towards free love, and the positive liberating experience of the sexual revolution were docmented in the seventies by Dr. Alex Comfort in his book; The Joy of Sex.

And this is the crux of the libertarian conflict with those who would impose their morality of false virtue on the rest of us. Their virtous morality denies pleasure, pleasure is to be delayed, all is pain and sin, pleasure is for the hereafter, as Joe Hill wrote 'pie in the sky when you die'. It is the protestant work ethic the core of modern capitalism, that seperates work and play, pleasure and stimulation, into wage slavery for the paycheque.

For anarchists we believe that love should be the condition of companionship, and that love is free, not subject to state or church recognition. In fact it is the recognition of common law, or custom versus legal sanction. This is known as Free Love.

Free Love was the harbinger of feminism in the 19th and early 20th Century, its advocates were feminist socialists like Victoria Woodhull, Stella Browne, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollanti.

It was the bane of church and middle class morality of its day. Today with the liberalization of social relations, the acceptance of no fault divorce and common law relations and even birth control, we forget that these were the social outrages of a mere 40 years ago, and the social improprieties and moral turpitude of the past century. The social outrage of editorialists, church leaders and politicians, was heaped on the advocates of Free Love. Today it is this same outrage that vents against Gay Marriage.

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

And we can now add to that those in such a moral huff over the Supreme Court ruling that legalizes group sex, and recreational sex, which will end uncalled for police vice raids on gay Bathouses as well as on straight swingers clubs.

For those who talk about freedom and choice it is ironic that they demand the State impose their moral values on the rest of us. This debate seperates the libertarian wheat from the reactionary conservative chaff.

The monothiest monogamists who value the property relations of marriage are right to be afraid. Their social relation is reliant on private property, and the owning of people as property (women and children). It is a fragile myth that denies the indivdual members their freedom.This is not a free relationship between free individuals. It is a socially constructed role, where individuals are enslaved to their gender, not to their ability or talents. It is a relationship of oppression.

The reactionaries have tried to bury the sexual revolution by linking it to violence against women (pornography), child sexual abuse (accusing gay men of being pederasts, or 'recruiters'), aids, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, blah, blah, blah. The sexual revolution continues, it went back underground but there are liberating relationships that challenge the old family values of the bourgoise and their religious apologists. The Supreme Court decision allowed for an individuals right to choose their sexual partners and to practice recreational sex. Something Canadians would not have been able to do without the Charter of Rights.

One day polyamoury will have its day in court. For like its predecesor, primitive communist familal relations, polyamoury reflects in the present what maybe a future form of communistic love and sharing.

"Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it."

- Wilhelm Reich

Also see:

Whose Family Values?



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Polyamory is not Polygamy

More on the polygamy slippery slope

A surprisingly good debate between two Blogging Tories and a gay libertarian on the issue of polygamy, plural marriage/polyamory, and gay marriage.

See my posts:

Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

Marx on Bigamy

The Sexual Revolution Continues

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Polyamory Is Good For The Genes

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Polyamory Is Good For The Genes

But bad for the males. But with multiple partners it is likely more male babies would survive to replace them. While it is not truly polyamory it is the earliest form of polgamy, that of polyandry where a female has many mates. It is also the form of human sexual relations in what Engels called primitive communist societies.

Free loving mums have healthier babies

Promiscuous females are more likely to give birth to fitter offspring than their monogamous sisters, an Australian study shows.

Paternity tests showed that the sperm of some males was far more successful than others, and most importantly, that babies fathered by these males were twice as likely to survive, said Fisher.

Despite the advantages to the species from free love, males usually died due to exhaustion and aggressive encounters with other males after a single, torrid mating season.

Also see:

Free Love

Marx on Bigamy

Whose Family Values?

The Sexual Revolution Continues

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PATRIARCHICAL CHATTEL OWNERSHIP* NOT POLYAMORY

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Polygamy is illegal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, it is still practised by two percent of the population, like in the church of self-styled pastor Zagabe Chiruza, in the eastern city of Bukavu.

VIDEO https://www.africanews.com/embed/1889604

In 2012, he married three women at the same time in his church. Pastor Zagabe Chiruza, leader of the "Primitive Church of the Lord" is convinced that Polygamy is a divine institution.

"This is the message of the end time. The others who hunt us down, that's their business, but we must go to the end and show the people of God the truth, which is the teaching of polygamy. Meaning a man can marry more than one woman although society is against it, others don't care" he said.

Three live with him under the same roof in Bukavu, the fourth in Bujumbura, Burundi, where some of his children are studying. Yaëlle, one of the wives says she lives in harmony with her co-wives but the situation is different with her neighbours.

"When I was still alone at home, I had a good relationship with all the neighbours. But when my husband got married to other women, all the neighbours cut contact with me, they all ran away. Nowadays, we only greet each other on the way, but they don't visit us anymore, that's how it is."

In an interview with Catholic priest Raymond Kongolo, he explained "Polygamy is a human institution that goes back a long way in our African and traditional Congolese culture". Adding however: "it is not a divine institution".

According to the American research centre Pew Research Center, about 2% of the world's population lives in polygamous households and it is in Africa that the practice is most widespread (11%).

*LIKE SOME MORMONS AND MUSLIMS

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/10/polygamy-is-not-polyamoury.html

 POLYAMOURY IS NATURAL & PRODUCTIVE

Sharing the love helps male acorn woodpeckers father more chicks

Males in polygamous breeding groups with one or two other male woodpeckers sire significantly more chicks over their lifetimes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SMITHSONIAN

 

IMAGE: ACORN WOODPECKERS DOING THE SPREAD-WING DISPLAY. RESEARCHERS HAD LONG ASSUMED THAT ACORN WOODPECKERS OPTING FOR A RARE FORM OF POLYGAMY, IN WHICH CO-BREEDING SIBLINGS ARE FORCED TO COMPETE TO MATE, WERE MAKING AN EVOLUTIONARY COMPROMISE. TO RESEARCHERS, THIS SIBLING RIVALRY SEEMED LIKELY TO RESULT IN INDIVIDUAL WOODPECKERS LEAVING BEHIND FEWER OFFSPRING EACH YEAR THAN IF THEY HAD OPTED FOR A MORE TRADITIONAL COUPLED PAIRING WITH A GUARANTEED OPPORTUNITY TO MATE. TO BALANCE OUT THIS SHORT-TERM LOSS OF EVOLUTIONARY FITNESS, RESEARCHERS HYPOTHESIZED THAT THE WOODPECKERS’ POLYGAMY MUST CONFER SOME INDIRECT OR LONG-TERM ADVANTAGES BUT QUANTIFYING THOSE BENEFITS IN WILD POPULATIONS BEFORE THIS STUDY HAD PROVEN EXTREMELY CHALLENGING. BUT NOW, A NEW STUDY PUBLISHED TODAY IN THE JOURNAL PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B SUGGESTS THAT EVEN COMPLEX COOPERATIVE BREEDING STRATEGIES MAY OFFER DIRECT EVOLUTIONARY BENEFITS OVER AN ANIMAL’S LIFETIME, AND PERHAPS OFFERS CLUES INTO HOW SOCIAL BEHAVIOR FIRST EVOLVED IN HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS. THE STUDY FINDS THAT MALE ACORN WOODPECKERS BREEDING POLYGAMOUSLY IN DUOS OR TRIOS OF MALES ACTUALLY FATHERED MORE OFFSPRING THAN MALES BREEDING ALONE WITH A SINGLE FEMALE, CONTRARY TO CONVENTIONAL THINKING AMONG BIOLOGISTS THAT MONOGAMOUS MALES NECESSARILY PRODUCE MORE OFFSPRING THAN THOSE IN POLYGAMOUS GROUPS. view more 

CREDIT: COPYRIGHT STEVE ZAMEK

A new long-term study led by Sahas Barve, a Peter Buck Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, finds that male acorn woodpeckers breeding polygamously in duos or trios of males actually fathered more offspring than males breeding alone with a single female, contrary to conventional thinking among biologists that monogamous males necessarily produce more offspring than those in polygamous groups. For females, polygamy is less of a slam dunk but co-breeding duos left behind the same number of offspring as the birds that coupled up, while female trios left behind fewer offspring than either group.

The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that even complex cooperative breeding strategies may offer direct evolutionary benefits over an animal’s lifetime, and perhaps offers clues into how social behavior first evolved in humans and other animals.

The love life of the typical acorn woodpecker is a complex, polygamous affair. A common arrangement for a male of this species, which inhabits oak savannas from Oregon to Colombia, might be ruling over a patch of woodland alongside two of his brothers and a pair of sisters from another family that the brothers all mate and raise chicks with. Some of the group’s offspring may even hang around their childhood territory for years, not to breed with their parents or aunts and uncles, but to help raise the next generation before striking out to become breeders in other groups.

Researchers had long assumed that the woodpeckers opting for this rare form of polygamy, in which co-breeding siblings are forced to compete to mate, were making an evolutionary compromise. To researchers, this sibling rivalry seemed likely to result in individual woodpeckers leaving behind fewer offspring each year than if they had opted for a more traditional coupled pairing with a guaranteed opportunity to mate. To balance out this short-term loss of evolutionary fitness, researchers hypothesized that the woodpeckers’ polygamy must confer some indirect or long-term advantages, but quantifying those benefits in wild populations before this study had proven extremely challenging.

“For the longest time we have thought polygamous breeding was a compromise, and breeding as couples was considered the gold standard for leaving behind the highest number of chicks,” Barve said. “But you can’t really test that without super-detailed, long-term data. Fortunately, that’s exactly what we had for this study.”

The data underpinning this research spans more than 40 years and tracks 499 individual birds over their entire lifetimes at the 2,500-acre Hastings Natural History Reservation in the Carmel Valley along California’s central coast, where a rotating cast of some 150 scientists and interns has been observing acorn woodpeckers since 1968. Researchers working at the Hastings Reserve recorded each bird’s reproductive output from their first attempt to their last along with information including territory quality, group composition, social standing and genetic data linking parents to their offspring for birds hatched between 1984 and 2006.

CAPTION

Female (left) and male (right) acorn woodpeckers. A new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that even complex cooperative breeding strategies may offer direct evolutionary benefits over an animal’s lifetime, and perhaps offers clues into how social behavior first evolved in humans and other animals. The data underpinning this research spans more than 40 years and tracks 499 individual birds over their entire lifetimes at the 2,500-acre Hastings Natural History Reservation in the Carmel Valley along California’s central coast, where a rotating cast of some 150 scientists and interns has been observing acorn woodpeckers since 1968. Researchers working at the Hastings Reserve recorded each bird’s reproductive output from their first attempt to their last along with information including territory quality, group composition, social standing and genetic data linking parents to their offspring for birds hatched between 1984 and 2006.

CREDIT

Copyright Steve Zamek

Researchers had traditionally explained the evolution of the woodpeckers’ polygamous co-breeding with a concept known as kin selection. In this view, cooperative breeding could have arisen and perpetuated itself among the woodpeckers despite reducing the number of offspring an individual bird parented because even if a male loses out on a breeding opportunity to one of his brothers, the resulting chicks will still carry a portion of that lonely male’s shared DNA. Also, if the unmated male helps raise and support his nieces and nephews, he also increases the chances that they survive and reproduce, passing on a portion of his DNA to the next generation.

Another idea was that the polygamous birds were trading the relative certainty of parenting offspring in a couple for the increased odds of controlling a territory chock-full of acorns afforded to them by teaming up with their brothers or sisters. Strength in numbers is important for these woodpeckers because of the vicious, bloody battles they must fight to win territories with the best granaries. These granaries are trees, usually dead, that have been plugged full of thousands of acorns over many years by the woodpeckers living in their vicinity. Presiding over a granary that is well-stocked can make or break a group’s ability to reproduce during lean years when acorns are less abundant. 

The multi-decade data set from the Hastings Reserve allowed Barve and his collaborators to finally assess whether breeding cooperatively was as costly as researchers had long assumed. To do this, the team compared the number of lifetime offspring produced by woodpeckers that did their breeding in pairs with the number produced by birds engaged in some form of cooperative polygamy.

The research team’s analysis revealed that individual males that bred as co-breeding duos and trios left behind 1.5-times more direct offspring than single-breeding males. The study also finds that these co-breeding males tend to spend two to three extra years as breeders compared to their paired-up counterparts, which may be responsible for the increased reproductive success over the co-breeding birds’ lifetimes.

Female woodpecker duos and single-breeders each left behind roughly the same number of young over their lifetimes, but those that bred as trios produced 2.5 fewer chicks. Barve said that while these figures for female birds might not seem as convincing, the co-breeding duos may still be leaving behind a more substantial genetic legacy than their single-breeding counterparts by helping their closely related co-breeders’ chicks survive. The same could be said of the males, which would endow cooperative breeding with even more substantial advantages.

CAPTION

Male (left) and female (right) acorn woodpeckers. Researchers had traditionally explained the evolution of acorn woodpeckers’ polygamous co-breeding with a concept known as kin selection. In this view, cooperative breeding could have arisen and perpetuated itself among the woodpeckers despite reducing the number of offspring an individual bird parented because even if a male loses out on a breeding opportunity to one of his brothers, the resulting chicks will still carry a portion of that lonely male’s shared DNA. Also, if the unmated male helps raise and support his nieces and nephews, he also increases the chances that they survive and reproduce, passing on a portion of his DNA to the next generation. But now, a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that even complex cooperative breeding strategies may offer direct evolutionary benefits over an animal’s lifetime, and perhaps offers clues into how social behavior first evolved in humans and other animals. The study finds that male acorn woodpeckers breeding polygamously in duos or trios of males actually fathered more offspring than males breeding alone with a single female, contrary to conventional thinking among biologists that monogamous males necessarily produce more offspring than those in polygamous groups.

CREDIT

Copyright Vivek Khanzode

“We thought acorn woodpeckers lost out on fitness by breeding cooperatively, but we show that breeding in these larger cooperative groups is actually better than breeding in pairs,” Barve said. “This is something that hasn’t been shown before because it’s so hard to get strong enough long-term data to really study it. In that sense, our findings also highlight the value of long-term research in animal behavior.”

Barve added that researchers may no longer need to invoke kin selection as a mechanism for how this cooperative trait evolved and persisted in acorn woodpeckers.

“Acorn woodpeckers have some of the most complicated social systems of any organism,” Barve said. “And these findings help us understand how this social system might have evolved, while opening up the possibility that cooperative breeding behaviors may be more beneficial than previously thought in other species as well. It could even help explain why sociality evolves so commonly throughout the tree of life.”

Funding and support for this research were provided by the Smithsonian and the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2021.0579

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Lifetime reproductive benefits of cooperative polygamy vary for males and females in the acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Aug-2021