At this site I learned today that rape has an evolutionary basis, at least according to some book they are railing against.
In an effort to appear “balanced” and “objective”, the writers note that “most evolutionary biologist reject” the premise of the book. They even reference an article in Nature that debunks the premise of the book.
However they go on with this gem
(bolding is mine)
I could quite easily ignore these fundamentalist cranks, except that I discovered this site because MY BOSS is a subscriber and I noticed the url bookmarked on his workstation.
Now I have the disturbing knowledge in my head that my boss is a Bible Literalist. I’m afraid now that he thinks “facts are irrelevant”
Ask them to explain, using evolutionary theory, why people would commit suicide before they reproduce.
What they’re not seeing, of course, is that you can be as logical as you want, but if your premises aren’t true, your conclusions don’t mean a damn thing.
There are no “moral implications” of Darwinism. This is yet another attempt by a group of alleged scientists to shoehorn a theory into an area it was not meant to explain. What makes this even more laughable (or more frightening, depending on one’s perspective) are the Fundamentalists (or even anti-Darwinists in general) who pick up tripe like this and run with it, using it is to justify their opposition to evolution.
Wrong. Not only wrong, it doesn’t result in an “agonizing dilemma for evolutionists.”
Nature:
This statement is equivalent to saying, “Jorge chews with his mouth open, it must be an adaptive trait.” It’s a behavior, to be sure, but is likely just along for the evolutionary ride, being driven by more important factors which are being selected for.
Nurture:
This also ignores the social aspects of our behavior and seems to assume a simple genetic seed. The rapist may well have inherited genetic traits that could have yielded a healthy adaptive personality if it weren’t for some aspect of his upbringing. Broken axels aren’t a design feature of Porsches, but if I take one off-road, I may well end up with one.
There are evolutionary psychologists who aren’t social Darwinists, Darwin’s Finch. It’s not unreasonable to think that the human brain would have been as subject to natural selection as any other part of us. Social behavior didn’t come into being out of thin air.
OK, scratch my opening line. That’s what I get for responding on impulse. I stand by the rest of my post, however.
While there are behaviors (including certain aspects of social behavior) which can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, I feel it is erroneous to think that all psychology (and, by extension, all social behavior) can be understood within such a framework. Our brains are the products of evolution, but they are more than the mere sum of their parts.
I agree, and I agree with the rest of your first post as well.
I think the main reason the discipline is even called evolutionary psychology is that the sociobiologists had created such a bad reputation for themselves.
I happen to have met Randy Thornhill, one of the authors of the book in question, many years ago when I was in graduate school. Even back then he had a reputation as a Male Chauvinist Pig of the first water.
Here’s a review of the book by a scientific publication, American Scientist. It’s ironic indeed that fundamentalists often pick the least scientific scientists to draw lessons from about what science means.
Even if rape has some basis in biology, rape in modern societies probably has as little to do with any original adaptive value as Jeffery Dahmer’s activities have to do with the adaptive value of cannibalism in the Old Stone Age.
If I’m following their “reasoning” correctly, then would an acceptable statement be “OK, if you’re right, if evolution is correct then rape must be beneficial in some sense, then explain your stance. Tell me, why did God create rapists? What purpose does it serve God to create them?”