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WrongBot comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong
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Sex at Dawn doesn't talk about any modern social models. One of its central points is that the lives of hunter-gatherers were radically different from the lives of everyone born after the adoption of agriculture.
The authors aren't making any moral claims, so far as I'm aware. They're just trying to figure out how evolution shaped our sexual psychology; while this should probably tell us quite a bit about how to conduct our sexual affairs in the modern world, that's a topic they touch on only very briefly, and they draw no particular conclusions.
That's only true if one accepts the basic evolutionary psychology premise that we have a strong bias towards a particular pattern such that any other pattern will cause unhappiness and psychopathology. What if psychopathology comes from conflict between individual idiosyncratic sexual feelings (caused by early, incorrectly locked-in interpretations of group norms?) and group norms?
I don't accept that premise and I still think it's a point worth investigating. It's obvious that monogamy does make many people happy, but justifying it by an appeal to nature that isn't even true does few favors to the >50% of people who have been failed by the ideal of life-long monogamy.
It's as good an explanation as any other, I suppose. Ryan and Jetha do talk a bit about paraphilia in men, but that chapter disappointingly lacked the rigor displayed elsewhere, so I wasn't planning to discuss it.