Whatever, I’m sick of some outliers discounting something that works as a whole. I don’t take your conjecture to be true. Even hunter gatherers societies that exist today, including uncontacted tribes have two modes of family. Nuclear/extended or polygamous. Those forms are inherent and what humans naturally coalesce around.
> I’m sick of some outliers discounting something that works as a whole
Whatever. I’m sick of the disinterested majority pretending real problems don’t exist and actively working against systems that would help more people, more fairly, because they’re not willing to use their imagination and compassion.
Your use of hunter-gather societies is a distraction. We don’t need to lean on poorly understood histories when we have contemporary examples to work with.
Also, “nuclear/extended” is two distinct categories, not one. And “polygamous” is a subset of polyamorous and carries some unhealthy ultra-patriarchal connotations and assumptions (I mean, I’m making some assumptions about what you mean).
Even if that's true (a big if), all we can infer is that that's what hunter / gatherer societies seem to naturally coalesce around. It's not what modern society is coalescing around. Some folks take that as a sign that modern society is fundamentally flawed, but I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society than a random person in a pre-historical hunter gatherer society. Perhaps that's just my bias towards modernity though.
The argument under consideration is that if our social lives are too different from those of our ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that will lead to widespread mental-health problems like addiction and suicide. (The study of existing hunter-gatherers is relevant because we cannot go back in time and study our ancestors in detail.)
Your "I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society than a random person in a pre-historical hunter gatherer society" has no relevance that argument.
Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the time. We live in a different environment (one that I have zero interest in destroying in favor of trying to recreate some imagined ideal from prehistory), so the naturalistic fallacy is what has no place here.
The naturalistic fallacy: because something (e.g., marriage) has been part of life for so long, it must be good.
The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto alcohol and heroin.
That may be the hypothesis that you are entertaining, but that’s not the comment I was responding to.
Nor is it a particularly well-formulated or convincing hypothesis, your cherry-picked examples notwithstanding. We don’t have evolutionary-timescale experience with medicine, electricity, the written word, or democracy either. How we think prehistorical people groups may have arranged their societies is almost completely irrelevant for modern policymakers, which is what this article is actually about. We have a long list of better ways to make this decision than “Hmm, well, how do uncontacted Amazon tribes of a few dozen people structure things? Perhaps we should just copy that in our nation of 300 million people?”
