The Dysgenics of White Polygamy

How polygyny destroys the meritocracy of selective breeding

This is a logistical discussion, not a moral one; the morals of polygamy are very clear, and only Arab religions promote it. It is wholly foreign to European nature, cultures, and religions. But certain posters in our spheres have begun advocating polygyny, especially for the sake of eugenic health. There are a great many #WhitePolygamy memes. They’re often good posts. However, the push towards polygyny for eugenic ends is short-sighted and counterproductive. At least some posters seem (and claim) to be wholly serious, and I understand their reasoning. Strong arguments have been put forth by Mikka, especially as a continuation of meritocracy into the marital sphere; but meritocratic justice as an end in itself, without limits or purview, only serves to dismantle a eugenic or meritocratic system. The dysgenic features of polygamous mating should require little to no explanation or elaboration; however many choose to downplay or ignore its effects. The negative effects of polygamy seem so incredibly obvious that I find it hard to believe that anybody genuinely believes what they’re arguing. I am certain that Mikka was far too intelligent to hold a firm conviction here. Yet I still encounter requests to discuss the topic, and people still argue it. This article is almost surely a waste of time, and so will be short.

Polygamy inevitably leads to a genetic bottleneck, and no amount of merit-based polygamy will ever break the bottleneck. The Middle East is not an argument for or against meritocracy; but it does demonstrate the absolute and inevitable death-march of polygamy. No matter how the patriarchs of any family are selected, their genetic impact is roughly the same on a long enough timescale.

The highest presence of consanguinity is not merely in undeveloped areas like Southern India, or Nigeria. It is—without fail—highest in overwhelmingly Muslim countries which practice polygamy. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, most notably; alongside Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, and Mauritania. The UAE stands out as a relatively developed country with an extremely high inbreeding coefficient. Though GDP is vastly insufficient as a wealth indicator, the UAE had a higher GDP per capita than Mississippi (low bar albeit) in 2021. No amount of wealth or education will ever be sufficient to overcome the genetic bottleneck caused by any form of polygamy - be it polygyny or polyandry.

Let’s move forwards with the assumption that it is polygyny which is being discussed; polyandry would be a disgusting and longhoused arrangement, and wife-rotation would be equally—if not more—disgusting and longhoused while invoking a similar genetic bottleneck. Polygamy will make little impact on population size, assuming healthy fecundity and stable fertility rates. In some dire circumstances polygamy will impact the population size; such as in the aftermath of a war, where the populace’s sex ratio has been significantly damaged. This is often the reason for the material necessity of polygamy in the ancient world. However, once again, this is a discussion of polygyny; polyandry could almost never be feasibly beneficial.

This practice exists almost exclusively among the incredibly wealthy and elite in history, however, and is never widespread. Biblical figures, for example, took many wives for the sake of war efforts, and only in exclusive and highly relegated positions such as King Solomon (notably though, Solomon is used as an exemplar of the issue with extensive polygamy). There is also the issue of caste; a child born to a Roman’s slave will not enter the gene pool of the Roman aristocracy. In a meritocracy, such a question is eliminated. But moreover, this still poses issues to a large and—more importantly—maintained scale. If the goal is eugenic procreation, then it is better to limit or entirely curb the reproduction of certain castes or individuals; something which will occur naturally as there are less available wives. When this occurs, reproduction is increasingly weighted towards higher value individuals. But the same increase of population weight leads to a closer concentration of genetic proximity. The genetic effect of a meritized distribution of wives is no different than a selection borne of royal power.

And as I said, polygamy as a nature or a desire is foreign to Europeans. This is why it was relegated almost entirely to wielders of political power. “Their [the Germanics’] marriage code, however, is strict, and indeed no part of their manners is more praiseworthy. Almost alone among barbarians they are content with one wife, except a very few among them, and these not from sensuality, but because their noble birth procures for them many offers of alliance.”¹ Further, “They receive one husband, as having one body and one life, that they may have no thoughts beyond, no further-reaching desires, that they may love not so much the husband as the married state.”² Though the sub-Mikkanites might disregard religious or moral claims, and scoff at tradition, they would certainly hesitate to praise Arabs for a unique cultural genius. And the natural aversion to polygamy maintained the genetic health of the European populace for thousands of years.

We can examine this on a smaller scale to gain a clear idea of the way this effect is played out. Take as an example a society of 200 people, split evenly along lines of sex. If 50 men take all 100 women as wives and the other 50 men do not reproduce, you have actually eliminated far more than half of the genetic diversity. Half of the patrilineal diversity has been eliminated, but more still has been eliminated because there are many more citizens who are now paternal (but not uterine) siblings. The genetic diversity has not decreased in equal proportion to the amount of people taken out of the gene pool, as it would if 50 men and women were barred from reproducing. If 20 males take all of the wives and each have the same number of children, then any given child has a 5% chance of being half-siblings with any other given child. If this is weighted, so that one male takes 10 wives, another takes, 9, and so forth, then you are eliminating even more genetic diversity in proportion to the amount of men who procreate: the genetic population would be more highly concentrated in only a few men’s offspring.

And the increase of wives does not proportionally decrease fecundity. In a study of Jordan, monogamous wives had a fertility rate of 10.5, while in bigamous marriages the senior wife had a fertility rate of 8.1, and the junior had a fertility rate of 8.6.³ In other words, the splitting of time between two partners does not prevent an individual from a disproportionately high reproductive impact. This is a study of Jordanians; but after all, one would expect a very mild exponential decay of fertility rate per partner as the number of wives increases. Further, monogamy prevents specific individuals from drowning out the genetic diversity of the populace by reproducing throughout their entire adult lifespan. Any amount of polygamy increases the genetic impact of the polygamous individual far beyond a healthy standard of genetic distance.

If this process is repeated over multiple generations there is obviously an exponential compounding. I sketched out a very small and very rough example of polygyny’s effect on consanguinity over multiple generations, which some people may need.

Though the lines are not easy to follow in this size, careful examination might show you one thing: by the third generation, any man who is fit to reproduce does not have the ability to marry anyone who is not descended from one of his four grandparents, even if the additional sons were reintroduced to the gene pool. If each reproduction-worthy male married daughters of only one family, the effects would be staved off for only a very short time. But the bottleneck tightens even further moving forwards, if polygamy is not immediately done away with. Even so, the damage is done and it will take decades or centuries for natural genetic diversity to return to a healthy level. Though this graph is incredibly small and the shrinkage of a bigamous population’s genetic diversity would be confounded by larger population size, the principle remains the same; and its exponential nature means that in any large population, the shrinkage of genetic distance between individuals increases rapidly, so as to functionally catch up with a smaller population’s. Every person will be cousins or half-siblings within a few generations, and Arabization of the gene pool necessarily occurs.

The extent of the exponential increase of genetic proximity occurs in direct relation to the amount of wives which men take. If for example a society has an exactly balanced number of men and women, then any polygamy practiced by any man deprives a number of men (equal to the number of additional wives taken) of reproduction. This therefore leads to a necessarily increased proximity of genetic relation. Barring incredibly low population sizes, this is not an issue if monogamy is practiced: if women die and some men have nobody to marry, or if there are more men than women and some men cannot marry.

Because of this, the eugenic solution would not be to reward a man with multiple wives, but to reward the highest value male with the highest value female (value taken in regards to genetic desirability); the second highest value male with the second highest value female; and to bar any reproduction by people under a certain threshold. Certain populations would inevitably be excluded from reproduction, as there may be more reproduction-worthy males than reproduction-worthy females, or vice versa. But to preserve the eugenic genetic distance necessary to avoid congenital defects, these would have to go without marrying.

The argument of genetic engineering is the last logical objection; that technology which has advanced beyond a certain point—presumably developed as a result of a more intelligent population—could certainly eliminate congenital defects. In such a scenario, however, reproduction would be neither meritocratic or eugenic. The logical conclusion of such technology and such a goal would merely be to clone the most eugenic specimen endlessly: or reach a point at which the eugenic value of reproduction is irrelevant because each fetus could be engineered so as to be “perfect.” In such a situation it could not be meritocratic to reward some men with more wives than others. If we disregard moral considerations, then in such a society any amount of wives ought to be provided to any man in equal lot as he so chooses. For, given the possibility of cloning, numeric limitations would cease to exist. But it would be more than pointless, it would be counterproductive: there would be no reason for women to exist at such a point. If the pleasure provided by one wife—either sexual, non-sexually physical, or emotional—is not a distraction, then to have multiple most certainly is. And without the goal of childbearing, or at least intimate one-on-one companionship, the pleasure derived from multiple wives is merely a yawning abyss of distraction and abasement.

But genetic engineering is a sideline argument. If reproduction ought to exist for the sake of eugenics, as it must at the current point, then the genetic bottleneck created by polygyny (and even remarriage to a degree) is the unstoppable death-knell of hereditary health. If certain men and women were simply barred from reproduction, then the remainder must be consigned to childlessness. If the above mentioned society of 100 men and 100 women allowed half of their men and half of their women to reproduce, and did not delve into the unspeakable and gynocratic options, this would decrease genetic diversity in equal proportion to the decrease in the size of the genetic pool. But then we have returned to monogamy.

1. Tacitus, Germania, Ch. 18
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0083%3Achapter%3D18

2. Ibid., Ch. 19
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0083%3Achapter%3D19

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/effects-of-polygyny-and-consanguinity-on-high-fertility-in-the-rural-arab-population-in-south-jordan/55AA02180E04F487A41655AF247922E3