4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
75% Science 25% Speculation **Caution**, May 4, 2008
This review is from: Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce (Paperback)
The book is full of interesting data. I fell in love with the book but sadly you have really read it. The author tries to express her ideas as scientific or historic facts. Here are a couple of examples of her writing.
I will maintain that monogamy, or pair bonding, is the hallmark of the human animal, there is no question that a minority of men and women follow other sexual scripts. Page 66
On the same page she states, Only 16% or 136 of 853 cultures that exist are monogamous. 84% of the cultures permit a man to take more than one wife at a time. In Africa 25% of all older men, have two or three wives at once.
On page 154 the author states her theory:
Like pair bonding in foxes, robins, and many other species that mate only through a breeding season, human pair bonds originally evolved to last only long enough to raise a single dependent child through infancy, the first four years, unless a second infant was conceived.
On the same page the author states the following;
How serial monogamy evolved can only be surmised. Our earliest ancestors probably lived in communities much like modern chimps. Everyone copulated with just about everybody else, except with mother and close siblings. Then gradual monogamy emerged. The lifestyle of olive baboons provides a fascinating model, however, for how pair bonding, the nuclear family, and divorce could have evolved in these primal hordes.
On Chapter 10 the author states
At times in history the Egyptians, Iranians, Romans, and other sanctioned brother-sister incest for special groups such as royalty. But with these curious exceptions, mother-son, father-daughter, and brother-sister mating have been forbidden; incest taboo is universal to humankind. It is fair to assume that the human incest taboo had emerged among Cro-Magnon or long before-for several reasons. (This is an unsubstantiated opinion without any scientific base.)
But the best is in Chapter 15;
After the reformation marriage became a civil contract, rather than a sacrament, for Protestants. So beginning in the 1600s women in non-Catholic countries could obtain a divorce from civil authorities. In fact, divorce rates clearly fluctuated throughout the centuries following Christ's call for monogamy.
:
In here the author did make a statement, which is based on false premises. In the Bible there is not a single attributed statement to Christ about monogamy. What Christ said was that a man should never divorce a woman. Why? Up to that point in history the sole source of food, shelter, and protection of women was the man. In the Jewish society, and Christ was speaking to the Jews, woman was a non-entity without any rights to property or rights whatsoever. Therefore, a divorce was the equivalent of an assassination. In a divorce a woman was thrown outside the protection of the family and household and left to the elements of nature and for other men, and wild beasts to ravish her.
So after reading the book and taking 29 pages worth of notes in MS Word I can say that the book is a defense of monogamy and feminism in which the author had gone to extremes to try to justify her ideas. But after a thorough reading I can say that her research is great but it is a piece that has to be taken with great and extreme caution. If you do not have any real religious and scientific background you can end up beliving everything stated in the book.
Nevertheless the book is good one, but not for ignorant! I really like the book, but not her struggles trying to justify monogamy and her femenist ideals. You cannot change or alter reality to accommodate your beliefs, and that is what she did!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
At times entertaining, overall poor science, October 7, 2006
Author has obviously read Margaret Mead & "The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People" by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, and borrows her facts generously from the sources above.
However, while the above authors base their findings on hard science and/or personal observation (no matter how disputed Mead's work is these days), Helen Fisher is guilty of "bad science". At times, she leaps into definitive statements without any explanations or proof, at others she seems to start with a desired conclusion and then "stretches" her cases to fit the pre-made mind.
For example, she quickly dismisses group marriage with words "In fact, no Western experiment in group marriage has managed to thrive for more than a few years.", based on the single leader commune sucess rate (which fits more into a modified polygyny format). There are a number of serious studies of group marriage that document a very different picture of the sucess rate of these kinds of relationships, one of well known being a wonderfully thorough "Group Marriage - marriages of Three or More People, How and When They Work" by Larry L; Constantine and Joan M. Constantine. Author is obviously ignorant of this book and other such sources.
If you wish to read an entertaining book by an author who's well read but also bases her statements on the strong personal bias, Anatomy of Love is a good one - it'll get you emtionally involved, and probably scribbling your own responses on the edges of the pages. However, if you are looking for "hard" information on the subject, I suggest you go directly to the sources the author has used.
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