"Yeah, of course." 

Plop. "None of these cultures stabilized as having hit on the more successful solution with regards to the organism's constraints?"

"Monogamy or polygyny is pretty stably successful when you don't have birth control, it's just everything got shook up when that happened." 

"Is strict polygyny preferred because you can have the same size generation while applying a strong filter to the quality of fathers?"

"Enh, I dunno if quality filter is the thing--it works better than polyandry because stable partners are preferred over a free-for-all and in polyandry some women are partnerless and you don't have the same size generation, theoretically polygynous societies mostly worked out to most men having one wife and the rich ones having more." 

"So it's sort of like a weak version of the credit auction filter? Depending on how they make their money."

"Sorta probably I guess?" 

"What's the disanalogy you're seeing?"

"...Probably mostly the depending on how they make their money part, like, a lot of the rich people in general were kings or otherwise nobility, it wasn't exactly the free market." 

"Blues actually have a markedly reduced spring severity than everyone else because they've had to be concerned about dividing their estates among their heirs for a long time!"

"Yeah, we don't have that. The single most genetically successful known individual in history was a warlord named Ghengis Khan, I dunno what percent of the world's population is descended from him but it's kinda ridiculous." 

"Huh. He... just didn't worry about dividing up whatever he was warlording?"

"He had a fuckin' huge empire, I think all his legitimate sons got something but I wouldn't be shocked if the ones born to women he wasn't married to got, like, either nothing or just a lil' nepotism." 

"His sons?"

"Uh, yeah, that'd be one of the weird gender things, for a buncha cultures at a buncha points in history women couldn't really...inherit land and titles, things were super patrilineal and what title a woman had had more to do with her husband than her dad." 

"Huh. Where'd that come from? Naively I'd expect it the other way because maternity is certain and paternity isn't necessarily."

"That's sorta actually why! See, if a man had power, he could keep tabs on his wife and make sure she wasn't up to anything that might result in misplaced paternity. In some countries cucking the king was an executable offense." 

"Huh. I can see that but the expectations happening to line up that way to begin with is odd."

"There's also a hormone difference between the sexes that results in men being statistically stronger, that might have anything to do with it considering how much war there was way back when." 

"- how odd, I wonder why that is? It's not true in Amentans at all."

"Yeah, we're way more sexually dimorphic than you are. Not, like, enough to make us not extremely low-budget aliens, our dudes look like Amentan dudes with dye jobs, but the distribution curves are way different."

The evolutionary biologist nods at the nearby translator dude who looks like an Amentan dude with a dye job. "There are some very sexually dimorphic animals, but most people think it'd be less likely that such a species would evolve intelligence."

"I mean, we're a lot less sexually dimorphic than...why can't I think of any examples less extreme than angler fish. Uh, it really is a statistical difference, lotsa women are stronger than lotsa men, and I think there were some hypotheses at one point that dividing tasks might have been a meaningful step on the road to outcompeting other hominids?" 

"How so?"

"I don't remember exactly...maybe it was just hunting, not task division specifically, the other hominid from that example just ate plants? This was a while ago in a book for laypeople."