Talk:Monogamy in animals

Why this article was written
I am currently rewriting the article on monogamy. I was going to include a section on the evolution of monogamy. However, monogamy is such a large topic that the article has grown quite long. The evolution of monogamy seemed a good section to break out into an independent article.

Title style
Anyone object to an article rename to "Evolution of monogamy" (lower case 'm')? FT2 (Talk 15:12, 30 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I was about to suggest the same thing myself, following WP naming conventions. --Calair 08:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)


 * "Evolution of monogamy" matches the contents of the article better. I came here expecting to read about "Monogamous pairing in animals" but most of the article is concerned with the sexuality of prehistoric humans. I cannot offer to clean it up as I know nothing of the subject but thanks to anyone who does! --CyHawk (talk) 03:21, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Evolutionary pressures towards monogamy
Ive added a very short section on this, an expert is needed to expand on it properly.

Encyclopedia format?
The article reads more like a discussion debate page then an encyclopedia article. Having parenthesis with counter points and arguments have no reason to be in the article.

This article needs to be deleted
The article isn't named correctly. It's spelled "monogamous", not "monogamamous". I took the liberty of transcribing the article to Monogamous pairing in animals. It's the same article, with the right title. Mgerb (talk) 23:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * For future reference: Please don't do that. If an article is misnamed, you can rename it by moving it. Transcribing it causes problems with the page history. I've fixed this one already. FreplySpang 00:14, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. That was good response time, too. Mgerb (talk) 00:48, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Bonobos are monogamous?
Hi, search the page for "Bonobo" and you'll see that they are said to be monogamous in the article. However this differs very much from what is said on Bonobos. Shouldn't that be corrected on either page? --5.145.128.4 (talk) 21:01, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Bonobos are promiscuous
The article is categorically wrong in claiming that Bonobos are monogamous, when they are famous for the exact opposite. I've edited out the parts mentioning the Bonobos. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.225.80.55 (talk) 17:37, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Beaver population confusion
At the very end of the "Monogamous species" section, there are two conflicting statements. It says that the population of the European beaver is scarce because of it being monogamous and then goes right away to say the population is climbing because of it's monogamy. Which one is it? Population scarce because of monogamy or climbing because of it? It hardly makes sense that population would rise when there is monogamy. If anything biological fitness exists where there is more genetic diversity.

Lead Section
The introduction is concise and introduces the topic of discussion, but what about adding some more sentences to introduce the sections throughout this page? Would that be beneficial, or over-detailing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Caitlinmball (talk • contribs) 18:41, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Monogamy in humans
"Humans, which have a socially monogamous mating system, have moderately sized testes." It's true that many human mating systems have marriage between one man and a woman, but there are also plenty of ancient societies (and a few modern systems) where a man is allowed to marry two or more women. This is especially true for males of a higher rank, such as kings, who often had one lead wife, but had many other wives and concubines as well. There are also other systems, such as those in ancient Greece, when a man was expected to have one main wife but also could have concubines, sex with slaves, visit prostitutes, and even have a younger boyfriend, and these were expected of him. Socially these weren't cheating, and this means that there is some degree of social polygyny as well. I think this statement should be amended to include this fact, but I'm not sure how well it'll be received. Wacape (talk) 05:57, 9 May 2023 (UTC)