 Hey, I'm Kathy. I write about sex and politics. I was curious about if society got better, more prosperous, more peaceful by making monogamous marriage and norm by taking some extraneous males out of society, then would it not follow that a social norm that has one female with multiple husbands would be even better? Because we've got pretty good evidence that extraneous females are not particularly problematic to society. And it would help get rid of the remaining extraneous males. Right. So yeah, that's a great question. So here's the issue. So when I assemble this argument, I'm taking what we know about evolutionary biology and about male-female differences. And you very rarely see polyandrous societies. So in the anthropological record, about 0.3% of human societies have polyandry. And those societies don't have lots of polyandry. They have a sort of non-trivial proportion of polyandry. The elite males in those societies are still often polygenous. And there's lots of monogamous marriage. And so from a sort of fitness point of view, males can create children with a number of different females simultaneously. So there's a big advantage to polygeny. Females, there's no advantage to her from a fitness point of view of having multiple husbands because the husbands will invest in the children according to the degree to which they see themselves as the father. And so if you have multiple husbands and they're all having sex with the wife, then the degree to which they see themselves as the father will get smaller. So she doesn't get any more investment in the children by having multiple husbands. So she has no incentive to be the husbands and the males aren't going to like it. So it's only in certain ecological contexts where you really need two or more males to run the households that you see this pop up. And the men are usually brothers, which helps reduce the conflict of interest over paternity.