A very basic question: in "The Ways of Love," (see here) Terangi Maclaren, survivor of The Enemy Stars, asks it of an Arvelan couple whose biology makes the nuclear family their most fundamental social unit whereas the structure of human families has changed throughout history and is changing now.
But I do not think that there is any answer to Maclaren's question. Human beings are differentiated from all other Terrestrial species by the fact that we change our environment with hands and brain and that we do it together. Thinking about our environment gives us Reason while society gives us Morality. By social morality, I mean not just arbitrary tabus but common interests and mutual obligations which can only exist in a social context.
Cooperative environmental alterations (redecorating, if you like) must be common to all technologically civilized species? But in addition the Arvelans have biological features that oblige them to live and work as indissoluble couples, not as plastic individuals capable of functioning within widely differing social arrangements - that's us.
Anderson's Merseians, Ythrians of the New Faith and Arvelans are all monotheists but how different:
the God steels the Race;
God the Hunter stoops on all;
God is love and love is mostly sex...
A Terrestrial monotheist seeking a basis for interstellar ecumenism would encounter major problems.
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