Sunday, 4 August 2013
Eye on science: Monogamy may sound sweet, but why it evolved isn't
Posted on 13:00 by Unknown
Because primates breast-feed their offspring for a long time, even for years, and competing males kill off infants if the dad doesn't stick around to fight them off.
Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: Yahoo News / AP
By Seth Borenstein | July 29, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Only a few species of mammals are monogamous, and now dueling scientific teams think they've figured out why they got that way. But their answers aren't exactly romantic.
The answers aren't even the same.
One team looked just at primates, the animal group that includes apes and monkeys. The researchers said the exclusive pairing of a male and a female evolved as a way to let fathers defend their young against being killed by other males.
The other scientific team got a different answer after examining about 2,000 species of non-human mammals. They concluded that mammals became monogamous because females had spread out geographically, and so males had to stick close by to fend off the competition.
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