Paper 82 Overview: The Evolution of Marriage

Marriage began because of the biological fact that humans have two sexes. It developed as humans tried to adjust to their need to mate and have children. Marriage is not part of biological evolution, but it is the foundation of all social progress and will continue to exist in some form.

Religious, social, and educational groups are important for civilization, but the family is the most important teacher. Children learn most of what they need to know about life from their families and neighbors. Early humans passed on their culture through the family, which is why family education must be protected and maintained.

Marriage started as a reaction to the fact that humans have two sexes - male and female. It is not part of biological evolution, but it is necessary for social evolution and will always exist in some form. Marriage created the home, which is the greatest achievement of human evolution.

While religious, social, and educational institutions are essential for civilization to survive, the family is the most important civilizing force. A child learns most of life's important lessons from family and neighbors. Early humans effectively passed on their culture through the family even with simple social systems.

The drive to mate is strong enough to bring men and women together to have children. This instinct worked well long before humans developed ideas about love, devotion, and loyalty in marriage. Mating is a natural drive, and marriage is what society created to manage it.

Sex was not a strong passion for primitive peoples - they simply accepted it as natural. The intense focus on sex in more civilized peoples came from mixing different races, especially when the nature of people was changed by the imagination and beauty appreciation of the Nodites and Adamites. The red man had the highest standards about sex among early races.

The story of how marriage evolved is really the history of how society controlled sex through social, religious, and civil rules. Nature doesn't recognize individuals or morals - it only cares about reproduction. Nature demands reproduction but leaves society to solve the resulting problems.

This creates an ongoing conflict between basic instincts and developing ethics. Early races had few rules about sex relations. Today, primitive groups like the Pygmies have no marriage customs. Free love was never accepted above the level of savagery, and as groups formed in society, marriage codes and restrictions began to develop.

Marriage is society's answer to the constant biological urge humans have to reproduce. Mating is natural for everyone, and as society evolved from simple to complex, marriage evolved as an institution along with it. Wherever social evolution reached the stage of creating customs, marriage appeared as a developing institution.

There have always been two separate parts of marriage: the rules governing the outer aspects of mating, and the private personal relations between men and women. Individual people have always rebelled against the sex rules imposed by society, which is why there has always been conflict about sex. When respected, social customs have enough power to control sexual urges.

Marriage has always been closely connected to property and religion. Property has made marriage stable, while religion has made it moral. Primitive marriage was an investment and a business arrangement rather than a romance.

Ancient marriages were planned by the group, parents, and elders for the benefit of the group. The fact that property rules helped make marriage more permanent is shown by marriage being more stable among early tribes than among many modern peoples. As civilization advanced and private property became more recognized in customs, stealing became the greatest crime.

Early humans noticed that mixing races improved the quality of their children. It wasn't that marrying relatives was always bad, but marrying outside the family was usually better. Society developed rules that restricted sex relations among close relatives.

People who married outside their group were more adaptable and better at surviving in a difficult world. Those who kept marrying close relatives, along with their customs, gradually disappeared. Advanced peoples also observed that excessive inbreeding sometimes resulted in general weakness.

There are no pure races in the world today. The original colored peoples have only two races still existing - the yellow man and the black man. Even these two races are mixed with extinct colored peoples. The so-called white race comes mostly from the ancient blue man but is mixed with all other races.

Today's prejudice against "half-breeds" and "mongrels" exists because most modern racial mixing happens between the lowest quality members of each race. Poor offspring also result when inferior members of the same race marry. If the highest types of different races could mix, there would be less objection to limited race blending.