Latest Monogamy Stories

BioMed Central A female great tits' (Parus major) appearance is shown to signal healthy attributes in offspring in a paper in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology. The black stripe across her breast and white patches on her cheeks correlate to a chick's weight at two weeks and immune strength respectively – though the former seems to signal a genetic benefit and the latter can affect an 'adopted' chick's health, suggesting nurture is involved. Taking two mothers...

University of Pennsylvania Breaking up is hard to do — and can be detrimental to one’s reproductive fitness, according to a new University of Pennsylvania study. Focusing on wide-eyed, nocturnal owl monkeys, considered a socially monogamous species, the research reveals that, when an owl monkey pair is severed by an intruding individual, the mate who takes up with a new partner produces fewer offspring than a monkey who sticks with its tried-and-true partner. The findings...

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Coffee Meets Bagel, a social dating site that utilizes its members' social graphs to find daily matches, today announced the results of its survey on the effects that online dating has on singles. Findings include what users are looking for out of online dating services, how online dating affects their views on long-term relationships and their outlook on dating in today's society. Coming off the heels of the recent controversy...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Some women in a relationship may refer to their cheating male partners as dogs, but a new study shows that women may have to start calling their men who stray something else if they want to be more accurate. Scientists at the Ohio State University studied urban coyotes living around Chicago and found them to be 100 percent faithful to their mating partner, according to a new study in the latest edition of the Journal of Mammalogy....

People who were sexually unfaithful without their partner's knowledge were less likely to practice safe sex than those who had other sexual relationships with their partner's consent. They were also more likely to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of the encounter. In a study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers from the University of Michigan, USA, found that condom use for vaginal and anal sex was 27% and 35% lower in sexually unfaithful...

John Neumann for RedOrbit.com Chest-thumping and grunting alpha males, a study suggests, may be losing the battle for preferable females to males who can demonstrate caregiving and the ability to provide for a family, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team says they have demonstrated mathematically that the transition to pair-bonding was based on female choice and faithfulness, so that providing for females became a...

Faithful females who choose good providers key to evolutionary shift to modern family, study finds In early human evolution, when faithful females began to choose good providers as mates, pair-bonding replaced promiscuity, laying the foundation for the emergence of the institution of the modern family, a new study finds. The study helps answer long-standing questions in evolutionary biology about how the modern family, characterized by intense, social attachments with exclusive mates,...

In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage. That is a key finding of a new University of British Columbia-led study that explores the global rise of monogamous marriage as a dominant cultural institution. The study suggests that institutionalized monogamous marriage is rapidly replacing polygamy...

Grim economic times could cause men to seek more sexual partners, giving them more chances to reproduce, according to research by Omri Gillath, a social psychology professor at the University of Kansas. Men are likely to pursue short-term mating strategies when faced with a threatening environment, according to sexual selection theory based on evolutionary psychology. When made to think about their own death, which mimics conditions of "low survivability," Gillath and his colleagues...

  It's all about the grandkids! That's what a team led by an Indiana University biologist has learned about promiscuous female birds and why they mate outside their social pair. Many humans find the idea of mating for life a romantic ideal, but in the natural world, non-monogamous relationships may have their benefits. According to new research published online Aug. 31 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, IU postdoctoral research associate Nicole Gerlach and colleagues have uncovered...