The Evolution of Marriage

82:0.1Mar­riage—mat­ing—grows out of bi­sex­u­al­ity. Mar­riage is man’s re­ac­tional ad­just­ment to such bi­sex­u­al­ity, while the fam­ily life is the sum to­tal re­sult­ing from all such evo­lu­tion­ary and adap­ta­tive ad­just­ments. Mar­riage is en­dur­ing; it is not in­her­ent in bi­o­logic evo­lu­tion, but it is the ba­sis of all so­cial evo­lu­tion and is there­fore cer­tain of con­tin­ued ex­is­tence in some form. Mar­riage has given man­kind the home, and the home is the crown­ing glory of the whole long and ar­du­ous evo­lu­tion­ary strug­gle.

82:0.2While re­li­gious, so­cial, and ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tions are all es­sen­tial to the sur­vival of cul­tural civ­i­liza­tion, the fam­ily is the mas­ter civ­i­lizer. A child learns most of the es­sen­tials of life from his fam­ily and the neigh­bors.

82:0.3The hu­mans of olden times did not pos­sess a very rich so­cial civ­i­liza­tion, but such as they had they faith­fully and ef­fec­tively passed on to the next gen­er­a­tion. And you should rec­og­nize that most of these civ­i­liza­tions of the past con­tin­ued to evolve with a bare min­i­mum of other in­sti­tu­tional in­flu­ences be­cause the home was ef­fec­tively func­tion­ing. To­day the hu­man races pos­sess a rich so­cial and cul­tural her­itage, and it should be wisely and ef­fec­tively passed on to suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions. The fam­ily as an ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tion must be main­tained.