polygamy is more natural than monogamy

What doe it mean for something to be natural, or of the natural world? Nature can be such a broad definition that because it's been left ambiguous my opponents claims are unclear. For example, the claim Hydrogen is more natural that Technetium[1] is true if Technetium is unnatural because it is "caused by man", and nature is defined as not caused by man. However, Technetium is natural if we use the broader definition supplied by natural philosophy to denote everything within the universe as natural as compared to the supernatural, or outside the laws of nature. Which definition that is the actual intent of my opponent will dictate whether, or not each practice is natural, or unnatural. How is polygamy more natural than any other natural practice? Unfortunately, natural is a binary attribute. You are either natural, or unnatural. Something that is natural is more natural than an unnatural thing because 1 is greater than 0. However, something that is natural is only equivalent to something else that is natural when we are comparing the virtue of naturality. In other words one is always equal to one. If we take a reductionist perspective we might be able to come up with a percentage for some things when they are composed of natural, and unnatural parts. However, I do not see any indication that either practice would be a mixture of natural, and unnatural. If the only thing my opponent has to denote "more" is quantity of practice then there is several problems. My opponent has left polygamy, and monogamy ill defined. Most definitions would include the number of wives as a result of marriage. However, marriage is strictly a human thing, and would exclude all animal examples. Depending on what the definition of natural is I might be able to say that both are unnatural because marriage is caused by man. This would leave them both as equivalent, but unnatural. I suspect my opponent maybe using the number of sexual partners to define polygamy since that is the only way to include animals into the debate. This is still a huge problem because it red flags a selection bias in my opponents argument. How do we account for sexual bacteria? They are strictly monogamous because once they have sex the prior organism no longer exists[2]. They're like salmon in that they can only have sex once in their entire life. It becomes a game of which animals do we count, and how do we count them. Do multicellular animals have a higher vote than unicellular animals? Even if this were an acceptable method of gauging somethings natural quality, or quantity it is impossible to come up with an unbiased method of accounting for all life past, and present to do the comparative of their sums. It would be an unprovable claim. If my opponent isn't using the sexual partners definition, and is actually using marriage then the claim that polygamy is widely practiced now is in question. In China, and most of the world polygamy is illegal[3]. Most of the world outside of northern Africa, the Middle East, and a handful of others have it outlawed in some fashion. At that point any comparison to the animal kingdom is invalid since marriage is strictly human. My position is that monogamy and polygamy are both equivalent in their virtue of natural. They are either both unnatural, or both natural. There is no valid method to attribute one as more than the other. At this point all the evidence my opponent has presented is opinion, and hearsay. Referencing a primate study without actually linking to it is pointless. It could easily indicate contradictions in my opponents argument, or might not even exist in a state that supports my opponents argument. [1] http://www.wisegeek.com... [2] http://bugs.bio.usyd.edu.au... [3] http://www.china.org.cn...