But Honey, I Thought You Meant "Socially" Monogamous!
Someone needs to tell the NY Times that "social monogamy" and "sexual monogamy" aren't the same thing.
When I posted an earlier version of my recent take-down of Carl Zimmer’s New York Times piece on monogamy a while back, a reader named Katherine Haines, wrote to the Times, asking, essentially, WTF? Ms. Haines asked them to clarify the reasoning behind Zimmer's contention that “nine percent of mammals are monogamous,” whereas most biologists put the number at around a third of that.
Surprisingly she heard back from The Times. They said that Zimmer’s source for that “nine percent” was a paper published in Science called, “The Evolution of Social Monogamy in Mammals.”
The Times wrote:
Mr. Zimmer interviewed multiple scientists for his article, many of whom are quoted, and read papers in peer-reviewed journals. He concedes that, not surprisingly, there is some some debate in the scientific community on what the right definition of monogamy should be. … But the fact that Dr. Ryan doesn't necessarily agree with the definition that other scientists use does not mean Mr. Zimmer doesn't understand science.
Neither I nor Ms. Haines accused Mr. Zimmer of not understanding science, but it appears that he didn’t understand that “social monogamy” and “sexual monogamy” are two very different things.
Social monogamy is about who you went to the party with. Sexual monogamy is about who you snuck off into the coat closet with. Social monogamy, in other words, is about appearances; sexual monogamy is about sex, DNA, mating — the gears that make evolutionary wheels spin.
They’re as different as China and Chinatown.
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