Geography certainly has had a huge effect on societal development: the Hawaiian islands' warm (year-round) climate, fertile volcanic soil, and remote location free from competition from outside cultures (until Captain Cook) enabled their culture to develop this way, no doubt.

However, the point is that we can look at societies like this, especially isolated ones, and see that human behavior does not have to conform to a certain pattern seen in other (typically western) societies, and instead we can see some extremely different dynamics. This proves that what we think of as "natural" may not be natural at all, just a product of our geography and society.

I'm not even going to bother looking at some bullshit from the Christian Broadcasting Network. You're talking about a business run by a man who's a con artist, blames 9/11 on gay people, and uses his riches (from all those tithes he insists people owe to him) to finance business interests in Africa with the likes of Robert Mugabe. You're a fool if you think anything to do with him has any veracity at all.

a) Go back far enough in time, and the Hawaiians "stole" it from someone.

This is quite likely false. All the available evidence points towards Polynesians being the first settlers on the various Pacific islands. Unless you want to argue that they stole it from whatever native land animals lived there (boars? I don't think Hawaii ever had a lot of fauna).

I have to disagree about women fighting over the alpha males. Not all women are that attractive, so in a free-for-all society, the most desirable people of both sexes are probably going to want to spend their time with each other. Why would the alpha males want to run around banging every homely chick who asks? So those women will be forced to start looking at alternatives unless they want to be celibate.

It is also an excellent way to enforce the equality that is so important to large ant like societies. To sustain a large ant like society we need ways to turn individuals into cogs, I would hazard that marriage does this.

Well given that monogamous marriage has mostly failed these days for various reasons, do you have any thoughts about how future society needs to develop?

I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.

I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.

Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.

Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.

It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.

the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.

The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.

But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.

I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.

The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.

You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?

I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.

The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.

I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.

That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.

I do agree we have a population problem at present, but it's because we don't use our resources well and we don't manage ourselves well; we still have to coexist with our natural environment, and we're screwing that up badly. We should be able to develop the knowledge and technology to coexist better with the environment, and later perhaps build our own habitats (including in space) instead of taxing the natural one here so badly, but for now we're acting like it's 1500 even though our population is far, far larger and our technologies far more polluting.

You seem to be arguing that monogamy is a good thing, which it is not. A 50+% divorce rate proves this.

In primitive communities, old women didn't need "one and only one man" to provide for her. The whole village provided for everyone. What you contend is an advantage is only so in Randian societies where people don't look out for each other, and everyone is out for himself.

Your comment also has a bit of very obvious misogyny in it.

Also, agriculture was a giant detriment to human societies at first. It didn't give people leisure time at all; they had to toil endlessly making crops grow. Before this, they just went into the wild and picked naturally-growing fruits and seeds and hunted animals. The only reason people stopped being hunter-gatherers was because their populations grew too large for their environment, and agriculture made it possible to sustain much larger populations. In addition, people lost a foot of height when they switched to agriculture, because hunter-gatherer lifestyles were far more healthy and nutritious. It took millennia for people to reach the average heights they had before the invention of agriculture.

Because Europeans were sexually frustrated and channeled their energy into conquering, while the Hawaiians sat around in a paradise (Hawaii is warm and fertile year-round, unlike Europe and most other places) having orgies and generally being happy and not feeling any need to go steal other peoples' land and resources?

Societies expect various things of adults that involve resisting animal instincts.

And how exactly do you know that these primitive societies are the ones expecting things which resist animal instincts, and that other societies (with men hoarding women and restricting their sexuality) are the ones which aren't? How do you know you don't have it backwards?

Or maybe both societies are resisting animal instincts: maybe the pro-sex societies are resisting mens' instincts, while the anti-sex, pro-monogamy societies are the ones resisting womens' instincts.

Oh bullshit. *Most* cops are evil. Any time a cop does something evil, and his fellow cops defend him, don't testify against him, lie in testifying against him, or refuse to take a stand against him in any way, that makes *all* off them (in that department) evil.

This "small percentage" bullshit is just that, and I'm sick and tired of morons like you spouting that crap. A few bad apples spoils the entire bunch, and that's what's happened with cops. Departments which don't make sure to keep their ranks clean of the bad ones become departments full of bad cops, and that's how most police departments are in the US. There might be a few good one out there (which you never hear about because they don't have any problems), but they're a minority of the population of cops, since all the worst police departments are the ones in big cities, especially the LAPD and NYPD (which is trying to claim that murders in NYC are up because of marijuana legalization in Colorado).

This has nothing to do with races. Races of people are not governmental, hierarchal organizations. There is no "chief" in charge of all black people, but there is a police chief in charge of every police department.

There's nothing ironic about your comment. Yes, everyone knows that Russia isn't exactly a nation that values free speech. It's also one of the few places where Snowden could go because the US has so much power over other nations (look at all the supposedly-human-rights-respecting European nations like Sweden which happily allowed the US to illegally abduct people and take them to black sites for torture, called "extraordinary rendition"), since Russia does not do extradition and likes to thumb their nose at the US, and is also a place where the CIA is not about to go abducting people since the repercussions if it was discovered and publicized would be utterly catastrophic.

The fact that Russia would not treat a whistleblower of its own secrets kindly is completely irrelevant, because Snowden is not a Russian and would never be employed in such a capacity in Russia.

Non-brown-skinned cops *are* evil. However, cops are not normal people, and the rest of us, regardless of our ethnicity, are not responsible for their behavior (beyond the collective responsibility we bear towards controlling our governments).

Resolving conflict through violence, males procreating with as many females as possible and preventing others from doing likewise, extreme tribalism etc.

The pre-European-contact Hawaiians and many other indigenous cultures (pre-European-contact usually) completely disagree with you. In Hawaiian culture, they didn't even have marriage; people just had sex with whoever, whenever, no one knew who kids' fathers were, and the kids were raised collectively by their villages. In some South American tribe, people think kids can have multiple fathers, so women wanting a kid have sex with a bunch of different men they like, hoping to endow the child with traits from each of them.

It's only various expansionist cultures which pushed the idea that women are owned by men and their sexuality is to be controlled by them.

Snowden does not work for the Russian government, nor is he ever likely to. What he's been doing for a job over there, I'm not sure, but I'm quite sure they're not going to employ him in a job doing the same thing he was doing in the USA. At best, he can just work in private-sector jobs there which have nothing to do with the government.

Yes, if he exposed government corruption in Russia, he wouldn't be treated well. But why would he ever be in a position to see such corruption and expose it?

The US has a nasty history with regard to slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples, but that doesn't have much bearing on its current culture.

I'm not talking about Scandinavian culture 100 years ago, only right now.