But really, surely they should be in separate palaces. An heir and spare shouldn’t have to live cheek by jowl in adjacent flats like characters in Bridget Jones’ Diary.

Over countless generations, our female ancestors most likely to have children who survived to pass on their genes were those whose emotions pushed them to hold out for commitment from a high status man

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

You see liberated women today – do their “emotions” push them to “hold out for commitment”? Absolutely not – women’s emotions push them to party (have fun while signaling sexual availability to high status men) until their looks have degraded to the point where they’re invisible to high status men at which time they look for commitment purely as a way to get out of the drudgery of working.

Given that this is the actual observed behavior and that this behavior would leave women with lots of dead kids in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness the only conclusion is that women’s behavior was only part of getting commitment because the fact that commitment being necessary for her children to survive is true.

The solution to the riddle is that women’s behavior has been chosen to solve the problem of finding the sexiest mate possible and it was up to the men in her life (her father, primarily) to ensure that she secured commitment. Her job was to push her father to get her married off by committing acts of escalating outrageousness until her misbehavior got a reaction.