From: John E. Rylander <rylander@prolexia.com>
>Interesting and somewhat critical ;^> article in The New Republic, a
leading
>center-left, neoliberal political-intellectual journal.
>
>http://www.thenewrepublic.com/040300/coyne040300.html
>
>The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology.
>Of Vice and Men
>
>By JERRY A. COYNE
>Issue date: 04.03.00
>Post date: 03.26.00
>
>A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion
>by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer
>MIT Press, 272pp.
A very interesting article. I haven't read Thornhill and Palmer's book, but,
by Coyne's account, it sounds like a sloppy and unscientific piece of work.
I notice that Thornhill (I'll leave out Palmer for brevity) draws a
distinction between the "byproduct hypothesis" and "direct adaptation", and
Coyne seems to accept this dichotomy. However, I'm not convinced that the
distinction is a real one in this case. Consider the following two possible
scenarios:
A. Males, at some stage, evolved a drive to mate with females, but only
willing ones. Subsequently, they evolved an additional drive to mate with
unwilling females (i.e. to rape).
B. Males evolved a drive to mate with females, willing or unwilling.
Opportunities to mate with unwilling females may have been less common, due
to the practical difficulties. Perhaps males also evolved an aversion to
mating with unwilling females (raping), because of the danger involved, but
perhaps this anti-drive was only partial, so instances of rape still
occurred.
In scenario A, the evolution of rape would clearly be a case of "direct
adaptation", and is presumably what Thornhill is proposing (though that's
not entirely clear to me).
But, in scenario B (which is more plausible to me), should rape be
considered part of the original direct adaptation for mating? Or should it
be considered a byproduct of that adaptation? It's not clear, and the
difference is perhaps only a semantic one.
So I think there is some muddled thinking go on here, on the part of both
Thornhill and Coyne. But my main criticism would be of Thornhill, for
blowing up this dubious dichotomy into a major issue, and trying to make
prescriptive assertions on the basis of it.
Incidentally, I was amused by the following gem from Coyne: "The best
approach to stopping crime, for example, seems to be the pragmatic one: do
what works best, regardless of the crime's evolutionary underpinnings." So,
the best approach is to do what works best! Duh.....
Richard Wein (Tich)
See my web pages for various games at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~tich/
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