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(19.2KB, 280x345) >>15733 (OP)
>It's biologically hardcoded
Not really. Polygamy arises in the context of nomadic lifestyles. Often in pastoralist societies, but also in shifting horticulture societies, which honestly is why we see it mostly practiced today by muslims (pastoralists) and sub saharans (shifting horticulturalists).
It arises because in these societies, men will do the migratory work, while women will stay behind in sedentary settlements. For example, in pastoral contexts, you'll often have a summer pasturage and a winter pasturage. Well, the men drive the herds between those two places, and end up having a wife in each of them, e.g. like the berbers do.
In shifting horticulture, instead of rotating crops, the men will basically work an area one year and deplete the land, and then migrate elsewhere, and so on until they finally rotationally migrate back to where they started, with the land having laid fallow while they were working other plots. In this scenario too: you leave the pregnant women behind in sedentary outposts, acquiring a new wife at each stop.
This doesn't cause problems because the men are taking wives in genetically diverse and distant regions.
When you move into true sedentary agriculture, though, problems arise. Firstly is the issue that only wealthy men will be able to afford multiple wives. This isn't nomadicism where having other wives is a convenience for a migratory man, but it's a cost now. So only a limited pool of wealthy men get multiple wives. Secondly, this leads to lesser men getting no wife at all, due to sex ratios.
This leads into the real issues: firstly, incels. They can either revolt, or conquer surrounding nations to find reproductive success. This is unstable and unsustainable in the long run. Secondly, genetic bottle-necking. If only a small caste of rich men are reproducing, this quickly causes inbreeding in the society.
Unrelated, but you also end up with inheritance law problems. Does your elder son by your second wife get all the lands, or does your younger son by your first wife? The elder son is likely advantaged and could kill the younger son, but the senior wife likely has a large pool of social and political allies with whom to kill the elder son. We can see historical stories like this, for instance, in the consolidation of King Solomon's reign, where he has to defeat the elder sons of his father David who were born of different mothers.
And as cultures become more sedentary, that's when you start seeing things like limitations on who is allowed to practice polygamy, how many wives they're allowed to have (e.g. islam caps it to 4 wives in the modern era, hinduism historically had limits from 0-4 based on caste, the frankish nobility once practiced it, but not the commons, etc) until eventually you reach a point where institutionalized polygamy goes away entirely.
