Advice on monogamy from the animal kingdom
by Amanda Gefter
New Scientist caught up with husband-and-wife writing team David Barash and Judith Eve Lipton to discuss their latest book, Strange Bedfellows: The surprising connection between sex, evolution and monogamy. We ask them what we can learn about monogamy from other species, and how writing a book about monogamy affected their own marriage.
Your last book, The Myth of Monogamy (W. H. Freeman, 2001) talked about the rarity of monogamy in nature. What made you decide to write another book on the subject?
David: Intellectual honesty or a scientific balancing of the scales if you will. Myth of Monogamy was looking at the glass half empty, at the problems that biology poses for monogamy, but we were aware that monogamy, for all its difficulties, does happen. It happens in animals, it happens in humans. We didn't want to give the impression that it's impossible.
Judith: There were both scientific and personal reasons. We thought it was important to point out that the promiscuous behaviour we were describing in ducks, for example, doesn't necessarily hold for people. David and I have been married and monogamous since 1977.
