Myths of Infidelity | Psychology Today
is deeply flawed. The author's statement:
"Most species of birds and animals in which the male serves some useful function other than sperm donation are inherently monogamous. Humans, like other nest builders, are monogamous by nature, but imperfectly so."
has been shown to be untrue by research based on DNA analysis which has, in fact, shown the opposite. In all pair-bond species the authors studied the females were found to be inherently non-monogamous (i.e., not faithful to their long-term mates). This finding included pair-bond species usually thought of as monogamous such as Swans. The authors found that on average (as I recall), 40% to 70% of the offspring of any given pair-bond couple were sired by a male other than the resident male (in effect, the husband).
Editorial comment: among human couples, a much smaller percentage of offspring are sired, on average, by men other than the woman's long-term partner (e.g., husband), because of birth control (I speculate) and also because human females often copulate when they aren't fertile while the females of other species generally copulate only when they're fertile (I also speculate).
See:
"The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People,"
by David P. Barash, Ph.D., and Judith Eve Lipton.
This book is available at modest cost via (e.g.) Amazon.com .
A rather detailed review, in the form of a downloadable doc file, can be found here:
www.unm.edu/~hebs/pubs/Miller_2001_MythOfMonogamyReview.doc
See also:
"Insatiable Wives: Women Who Stray and the Men Who Love Them" by David J. Ley (2009, 291 pp. [hardcover]).
Sorry to throw cold water on the "humans and other pair-bond species are inherently monomagous" myth, but there you have it.
—Custer