Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Has evolution ensured survival of the rapists? Plus: Kiddie sales force is exploitation; hot and bothered over RealDolls sex dolls.
Mar 2, 2000 |
Born to rape?
BY MARGARET WERTHEIM
(02/29/00)
Margaret Wertheim's measured review of "A Natural History of Rape" was on target, but it could have been a lot stronger in its questioning of Thornhill's supposed science. Needless to say, as the author of "Against Our Will," I read Thornhill's mishmash very closely and caught him in many errors. My review appears on my Web site, susanbrownmiller.com
-- Susan Brownmiller
If you really want to win the holy war against the evolutionary psychologists a much better refrain would be "True, but irrelevant," as opposed to screaming "Holy apostasy!" After all, even arch-Darwinian Steven Pinker agrees that cultural explanations of human behavior eclipse Darwinian explanations. But rape (not to mention murder, theft and a thousand other human behaviors) exists throughout all human cultures and throughout all of human history. If Wertheim doesn't think there is an evolutionary explanation for the biological basis of rape, where does she think it came from? Original sin? Maybe rape was created when Eve ate the apple. If anyone is a New Fundamentalist -- upset by scientists treading on their holy turf -- it would Wertheim.
-- Steve Clymer
Why couldn't rape be explained by both genetic and cultural factors? They're not mutually exclusive! The most logical explanation to me is that genetic factors drive men toward wanting sex but that social conditioning from an early age (usually) holds us back from using violence to get it.
This all brings to my mind the words of the ancient Greek satirist Horace, who said, "A fool, in avoiding one extreme, will embrace the opposite extreme." Could it be that Wertheim is as nervously defensive over the encroachment of biologists on the traditional realm of the social sciences as biologists are eager to expand their own turf?
-- David Lichtenberg
To be honest, I don't much care if rape is natural or not. So is killing in self-defense. If it's "natural" for a man to rape me, it's equally "natural" for me to kill him for trying. Nature or nurture, he's out of the gene pool if he tries it.
Besides, it's also "natural" to drop one's pants and take a dump right where one is standing and yet we manage to shoehorn that particular urge into a socially acceptable shape.
I also find it amusing that a man can get away with saying, "All men are rapists," in effect, whereas Andrea Dworkin gets skewered for merely implying the exact same thing. The problem that most men seem to have is not that women think all men are rapists; they're perfectly happy if the whole world regards them as rapists. What they don't like is when we don't put up with it anymore.
-- Janis Cortese
An intellectual blindness to the reality and social impropriety of such a horror as rape turns the authors into apologists for the behavior of criminals and decimates their credibility in their own scientific communities.
As a biologist, I would never have made such a disgusting, socially deterministic suggestion without enough evidence to act as a solid firewall against the hailstorm of criticism that I would be deservedly calling down upon myself. These gentlemen's opinions and conclusions should be rejected out of hand of course, but they should be pitied for wasting their time deluding themselves.
-- Gregory Dyas
Rape is not even particularly good strategy for fertilization, as the human male does not have a strong indication of when the female is fertile. The best reproductive strategies requires the male have exclusive access to the female during her entire menstrual cycle, thus guaranteeing that he will be the biological father to the child. This gives us a valid evolutionary psychology explanation to much of human reproductive and sexual behavior, from going steady, marriage, harems, to the traditional honeymoon.
In mankind, sex is not only about reproduction, but also the basis of long-term male-female relationships, needed for successful raising of offspring. The fairly continuous sexual availability of the human female keeps the man around, even during pregnancy and nursing. Rape destroys relationships and weakens societies. Remember how rape was used in Bosnia as a weapon to destroy Muslim society. Well, rape has little to do with reproductive success, but a great deal to do with another form of human interaction: violence.
-- Charles Stetler
How is it evolutionarily beneficial for a male to rape when the possibility of incarceration or permanent removal from society (i.e. capital punishment) is greater than the possibility of procreation? When excluded from society, the rapist has fewer opportunities to pass along his genes. Therefore, the gene that selects for the tendency to rape fades into the background, because it isn't passed along as readily, while the gene that selects for either monogamy or promiscuity becomes prominent, because these are more socially acceptable methods of passing along genes from one generation to another. Darwinian evolution does not exist in a vacuum when it comes to the human race. Whether Thornhill and Palmer want to admit it or not, society plays a role in behavioral evolution. And it doesn't take a Ph.D. in biology to figure it out, either.
-- Brian Spears
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