I thought the approach to the question was informative and clever and sort of puts things on a continuous scale as it probably is. The most interesting thing to me probably is that within-human, across-site variation was about the same as across-species variation was, at least when looking at species with some amount of pair bonding. So I'm not sure you can really can characterize humans as being one thing or another uniformly.
I don't think this paper will end the endless arguments about the nature of human monogamy for a couple of other reasons though:
First, the focus on genetic relatedness solves some problems but creates others. For one thing, it doesn't really address behavior, which is what's actually of interest. Even if each human pair mated for life, if, say, males were dying at high rates compared to females, before females were out of reproductive age, you'd still end up with serial monogamy probably and higher rates of half-siblings. My guess is within-pair mortality affects his results to a nonnegligible extent.
Second, looking at the figure, it seems an entirely different perspective on it is that full-sibling rates were about 66% or so, which is still much less than 100%. My guess is how much we look like other species is an entirely different question than how close or far we are to some ideal, for whatever reason.
I guess the paper seemed interesting to me but the spin was kind of odd. But maybe that's inevitable.
I find this ranking rankling because it doesn't take into account sex-based differences in monogamous behaviour. For example, the last animal in the list with the lowest score (red-tailed fox) is present only because the female fox is indeed extremely promiscuous. Male foxes on the other hand, are almost 100% monogamous, choosing not to mate even if they are widowed. I guess the same also happens for the grey wolf, where pack leaders can access multiple female wolves, which inherently forces the latter into a monogamous relationship.
The study is here (the doi was broken for me): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/292/2060/202...
I thought the approach to the question was informative and clever and sort of puts things on a continuous scale as it probably is. The most interesting thing to me probably is that within-human, across-site variation was about the same as across-species variation was, at least when looking at species with some amount of pair bonding. So I'm not sure you can really can characterize humans as being one thing or another uniformly.
I don't think this paper will end the endless arguments about the nature of human monogamy for a couple of other reasons though:
First, the focus on genetic relatedness solves some problems but creates others. For one thing, it doesn't really address behavior, which is what's actually of interest. Even if each human pair mated for life, if, say, males were dying at high rates compared to females, before females were out of reproductive age, you'd still end up with serial monogamy probably and higher rates of half-siblings. My guess is within-pair mortality affects his results to a nonnegligible extent.
Second, looking at the figure, it seems an entirely different perspective on it is that full-sibling rates were about 66% or so, which is still much less than 100%. My guess is how much we look like other species is an entirely different question than how close or far we are to some ideal, for whatever reason.
I guess the paper seemed interesting to me but the spin was kind of odd. But maybe that's inevitable.
doi?
I find this ranking rankling because it doesn't take into account sex-based differences in monogamous behaviour. For example, the last animal in the list with the lowest score (red-tailed fox) is present only because the female fox is indeed extremely promiscuous. Male foxes on the other hand, are almost 100% monogamous, choosing not to mate even if they are widowed. I guess the same also happens for the grey wolf, where pack leaders can access multiple female wolves, which inherently forces the latter into a monogamous relationship.