Final answer:
Polygyny involves one man with multiple wives, often leading to a households with a wife hierarchy, while polyandry involves one woman with multiple husbands, which is rare and usually happens to ensure equal property inheritance and resource sharing. Polygyny is about resource provision by one male without much paternal care, seen in some natural mating systems. In polyandry, a female mates with several males, possibly resulting in shared parental care.
Step-by-step explanation:
When we compare and contrast polygyny and polyandry, we are examining two forms of polygamy based on the gender of the individual with multiple spouses. Polygyny, the more common form of polygamy, involves one man being married to multiple women. This arrangement often leads to a hierarchy of wives, individual housing for each wife and her children, and a system where the husband alternates visits to his wives or lives separately. Benefits of polygyny include a maximized labor force, shared resources, and extensive kinship networks.
Conversely, polyandry is a far less common arrangement where one woman is married to multiple men. This is often seen in societies with scarce resources or a female scarcity, and it's most commonly practiced as fraternal polyandry, where the husbands are brothers. It brings advantages such as minimized population growth, shared land inheritance among brothers, and equal resource distribution within the family. However, in polyandrous mating systems, parental care falls on multiple husbands instead of a single male.
In nature, polygynous mating can take various forms such as resourced-based polygyny, harem mating structures, and lek systems, all emphasizing the role of the dominant male and limited parental care by males. In contrast, a polyandry mating system in nature usually involves one female mating with multiple males, leading to a scenario where multiple males might contribute to parental care.