Well, I’m glad science cleared that up for us. According to a recent TED talk by psychologist Christopher Ryan (and as reported by the Mail Online), monogamy is not biologically natural for human beings, male or female—it’s not genetically hardwired! All this time I thought I got married because I was biologically predisposed to reduce my sexual options to one person for the rest of our lives. But now I know better: apparently human urges are not always in line with moral strictures or social structures, which actually impose an outside order upon our biological/genetic predispositions.
Of course, since whatever is (biologically) natural is good, this means we should all move towards sexual promiscuity and away from the shackles foisted on us by society and morality, right?
To be fair, Ryan himself doesn’t actually take that perspective on ethics and puts a nice caveat at the end of the video, but the way the Mail Online presents his talk is quite suggestive of just that sort of breathless, “Omigod! We’re predisposed towards promiscuity but have been fooled by society into thinking otherwise!” perspective. At any rate, the idea that human beings might have immoral urges natural to their biological predispositions is positively shocking.