I give up. You win: rape is obviously evolutionary, simply because it’s about sex. I’m obviously backward in my thinking that to even consider that without a genetic component rape cannot be subject to selection. One might as well argue that plastic surgery is a viable evolutionary strategy, as it, too, can significantly increase one’s odds of reproducing in certain circumstances.
I tire of stating the same thing again and again, and having it fall on deaf ears. Everyone wants to argue for evolution being only about the spreading of genes, while presenting no evidence that the behavior in question has anything to do with those very genes. If I haven’t gotten my point across by now, it isn’t going to come across.
This a long thread, and if I missed this somewhere amidst all the points and counterpoints, please feel free to putz me.
However, one thing that seems to have lispped through the cracks is that the factors that induce a rape vary widely. A few different circumstances have been mentioned, but I haven’t seen any investigation into the different types of rape. That may be far more illustrative of whether it is sociological or genetic. Compare:
Guy #1: non-violent 90 lb sissy. He couldn’t over power the average woman even if he tried. However, at a party he sees a chick passed out in a bedroom and thinks to himself, “Hey, why the hell not?”
Guy #2: pathological psycho. Breaks into unknown woman’s home, beats her, rapes her, KILLS, her, and leaves. (Not much chance of conception there.)
Guy #3: Married creep. Coerces his wife into sex because he figures it’s he right. Wouldn’t dream of raping anyone other than his wife, because he’s a ‘nice guy.’
Guys #4, #5, #6: Teenagers. Bored and a little drunk, they go visit Suzie the local Floozie. She tells them to get lost. They get pissed off and start smacking her around. A chain of one-upmanship leads to a gang rape.
Guy #7: Soldier. After a brutal battle where he sees a lot of his friends killed, his side is victorious. Exhausted, traumatized, and angry, he spots a civilian woman of the ethncity of their beaten foe. He decides to get back at his enemies one more way, and rapes her.
There are no doubt more distinct scenarios. To lump the crime of rape into one pile without looking at the different types is useless. A lunatic who rapes elderly women is driven by different compulsions than a guy who drugs a woman to rape her or one who rapes a woman in wartime. To try to determine the root cause of all rapes without comparing the incidence in other cultures is worse than useless.
In wartime, the soldiers of the voctors almost always rape the women of the losers. That and only that COULD have an instinctual and hence genetic component (just like genocide), since it has happened throughout history and seems to know no cultural boundaries. Peace-time civilian rape which is obviously much more common in the western world that wartime rape these days, is MUCH more complicated and almost certainly due primarily to sociological or pathological factors. After all, people have been beating each other up or slaughtering each other in war forever. Is there any one single reason that would cause one person to murder or assault another in a non-war setting? Duh, no.
Rape and murder are similar in the sense that the victim has been completely dehumanized and likewise break a whole slew of societal taboos…unless you do them to the enemy tribe. Then it’s cool.
I am sorry that you have decided to not play any more, Darwin. Before you go please let me clarify just a little bit.
No one else but you is saying that only one level of analysis is potentially fruitful when considering rape. No one is saying that cultural selection or psychopathology cannot ever play a role. We object to the categorical statement that the evolutionary perspective should be dismissed. That you know what “it most assuredly is not.”
Maybe we can illustrate with your namesake species. There beak variation and use is the key to survival. There are multiple potential solutions to survival on that desert island in the heart of the Galapagos. A bird can have a big deep beak and go after the tough seeds (the only ones around after long drought periods), or a long narrow beak to get through the cactus spines, and so on. The key in tough times any way is to pick have a peak designed to a specialist’s function. Yet even among Darwin’s Finches beaks are used in a variety of ways according to the needs of the circumstance. The largest and toughest seed is the caltrop, a pod which breaks down into sections each containing several seed. These sections are called called mericaps. It takes a lot of force to open one of those suckers. Big beaked birds will more likely survive to reproduce again. But some medium sized birds (fortis) can survive by developing a different strategy (and I presume that the strategy or at least the capacity to develop it is inheritable), they use their beaks to crush smaller seeds, as usual, but they will take the mericaps and brace them against the ground with their feet and peel them apart with their beaks. For them the ability to use their beaks in different ways depending on the circumstance is an evolutionary advantage. A fortis that crushes when presented with smaller softer seeds, and peels when presented with mericaps, is at an advantage to those who only crush. Even though there is usually more small seeds available and crushing is overall a superior strategy.
The human beak equivilent the human mind. But unlike Darwin’s Finches we have thrived not by being specialists but by being extremely flexible in our behaviors, using different strategies in different circumstances. There is no requirement to have reproductive strategies be an either/or. It is instead a situation of having different tools to choose between. And we need not be aware of the evolutionary pressures that have made us more likely to pull out one tool in situation A vs a different one in situation B, for those choices to have been influenced by natural selection (yes acting on genes or on combinations of genes). In this case one strategy may very well be a moderately effective addition to the male reproductive toolbox in circumstances that may not have been too infrequent throughout our evolutionary timescale (tribal war in particular), but be morally reprehensible.
brane (are you are physicist?),
You are right that it is important to understand how something evolved over tens of thousands of years living in tribal settings manifests itself in the very different environments of today’s world.
Guy 1 plays into the evolutionary scenerio quite well. Obviously. His chances for consensual sex are not diminished and he adds the chance of reproductive success from this action.
Guy 2 does not. But such is rare. Fewer than one in five hundred rapes include murder, and only 4% include serious injury (according to Pinker).
Guy 3 is somewhat neutral if one presumes that he has enough sex with her to allow for conception but not enough to satisfy his drive.
Guys 4 through 7 are all probably percieved by the individuals as being similar to the war circumstance. Pumped up males feeling aggressive in a gang and feeling that there is little chance of punishment.
Unnumbered guy who rapes the elderly woman. Also rare. The evolutionary perspective fails to explain. Child sexual abuse, not so rare. The evolutionary perspective also fails to explain. Other than a drive displaced by some pathologic process.
Yeah, cause, yknow, rapists never have any sex by any other means, no sirree Bob!
And furthermore, if only a small percentage of a population want to copulate with a given person, and most of them are sterile, expanding one’s horizons will increase the chances of spreading your genes, whether or not it is more likely than consensual sex to cause pregnancy.
To sum up, would you disagree that the chances of pregnancy in X instances of consensual sex is EQUAL TO the chances of pregnancy in X instances of consensual sex + Y instances of rape? If so, how?
Why do males have sex with other males? I guess sex must not be an evolutionarily heritable characteristic.
Anyway, like homosexuality, it is not impossible for it to have both a genetic and psychological component. In fact, it would make evolutionary sense, much as autolytic tendencies among film bacteria is a fine line between self-sacrifice and greed (you don’t want a zero percent chance to autolyze under stress, but not a %100 chance either.)
If the tendency only shows up under stress, it would be biologically useful in only the situations it has shown itself to be useful under.
The same can go for a whole slew of other psychosexual characteristics such as homosexuality and incest. They could be advantageous at some times, disadvantageous at others. It is not impossible that some of us could have a genetic tendecy to be more disposed to these behaviors at certain times, but which will not always manifest itself.
Chicken, meet Egg. You need to go beyond ethology.
Bright Plummage, for example, can indicate good health and relative freedom from parasites. Once mate selection for bright plummage becomes fixed, it becomes possible to bait-and-switch… it’s adaptive to have bright plummage, even the expense of good health or fighting parasites.
Simply saying “Well, girls like big guys and guys like small girls… ergo sexual selection could account for dimorphism” doesn’t provide any reasoning why this would have ever come about in the first place. If you’re just plucking scenarios out of the air with no reasoning, you can swap it around and show how sexual selection could lead to big girls and small guys- with girls hunting and guys gathering, etc.
Keep in mind you’re dealing with reported rape. Rape might be less prevalent in the statistics of Saudi Arabia because raped women are sometimes murdered by their own families to expunge dishonor… which would reduce the reporting of rape in two ways. Similarly, “violence and the act” might merely represent the rule for reported rape. It cases where there’s a significant element of prior and on-going mind games, the victim might be manipulated into not reporting, or not viewing it as rape. “Acquaintance Rape” flies in the face of the conception of rape as a girl being dragged into an alley by a stranger and ravished. Coercive rape can be no more than getting someone in a position where they view their choice as between violent rape or pseudoconsentual sex. How does “he would have just raped me if I had resisted” get written up? Simple, it doesn’t.
I find criminals interesting and I’ve read a lot of books about convicted killers and rapists trying to figure out what makes them do the things they do. I don’t buy into it being in their genetics for one second.
First of all, a good percentage of, if not most, rapists (of both males and females) have wives and girlfriends of their own.
I am not very good at finding online cites for these things. I found general websites that supported it:Here.Here.Here.
And one study of Convicted Rapists in Massachusetts which found that 46% were married or had been married when they were committed. I think it is safe to assume that some of those who were not married had girlfriends. Some other sites said that 22% of rapists in prison were currently married with children, but I was unable to find a government or other reputable source to back that up.
Evolution does not base itself on human reasoning. Evolution does not think. There could be any number of possible explanations – evolution favors men big and strong enough to protect their womenfolk, evolution favors women who won’t hog too much of the mammoth from the manly hunters, etc. – but we will never know what these might be. But it’s obvious enough that women often favor men larger than they are when it comes to consensual sex. This happens much, much more frequently than rape. If sexual dimorphism in humans is the result of any kind of sexual selection at all, I see no reason to theorize that it’s due to the comparatively rare instances of big man/small woman rape rather than the frequent instances of big man/small woman consensual sex. Sexual dimorphism may make it easier for the average “big man” to rape the average “small woman”, but if anything that would seem to indicate that rape is the effect of sexual dimorphism rather than the cause.
Uh, yes, that was pretty much my point. This “rape is evolutionary” scenario has been plucked out of the air with no reasoning. We could use the same “logic” to come up with an “evolutionary explanation” for why woman-on-man rape is the most common kind (even though it isn’t), or for any other kind of human trait or behavior, real or imaginary. But logic does not work by taking the conclusion and reverse-engineering the premises. It’s easy to come up with a perfectly valid argument that way, but it’s unlikely to be sound. It’s just bad science.
Evolution by natural selection is a powerful optimizing design process. While it’s true that the designing and optimization occurs without thought or planning, it gets rather long winded to try to phrase things in such a way.
“Evolution kills small females”, for example, is wildly inaccurate. Obviously a great many small females survive to a ripe old age… and when small females die they’re killed by drowning, sickness, predators, old age— the list goes on and on… but you’re not going to find “Evolution” on any death certificates. “Smaller females as a group have a higher mortality than average or larger females as a group. As such we would expect to see the frequency of alleles indicating small females maintained in the genetic structure of the population at a level comparable to that attainable by the differential mortality and it’s mode of heritability… probably slightly above the background generated by genetic drift.”
The above is just a response to a pet peeve about people stopping in the middle of a discussion about evolution, where it’s obvious no one is implying evolution is a concious actor, and pointing out the invalidity of an inference no one is making.
Evolution favors women strong enough to protect themselves. Evolution favors women who can hunt their own mammoth. However, evolution favors something else more than either of these… that tends to result in smaller women.
The Situation: Males and Females are on average the same size. The numbers of weak womenfolk in need of protection by strong men is exactly equal to the number of weak manfolk in need of protection by strong women. These aren’t humans, obviously- sexual dimorphism didn’t develop in humans… it was present in its current form before humans.
Females being smaller than males serves to no survival advantage. In other cases where sexual dimorphism is observed, it’s the case where the female is larger than the male… apparently as a store against the larger role she plays in reproduction, both in a purely biological sense and to the extent of providing for and protecting young offspring.
Smaller females are an oddity that invites explanation.
How are they (or were they) adaptive?
The obvious answer for the origin of sexual size dimorphism would be that a pregnant female, no matter how strong, may be unable to defend herself without endangering the pregnancy. It would thus benefit her to seek out male partners big and strong enough to help protect her while she’s pregnant. It wouldn’t hurt if he stuck around until the kids were big enough to fend for themselves, either. Many mothers would be willing to die to protect their young, but if the mother dies before the young are self-sufficient then they’re doomed unless another adult is around to take care of them.
The male needn’t be bigger than the female to do a good job of defending her and her offspring. Even a very small, weak male partner would be more helpful than no one at all. Although sexual selection in humans tends to favor large men, smaller men still reproduce quite often. Human males are not really all that much bigger on average than human females. (I am not an especially large woman, but there are plenty of adult men smaller than me.) But it’s to the female’s advantage to choose the most helpful mate she can get, and all other things being equal this would often mean one of at least the same size as herself if not bigger.
As obvious as this explanation seems it may not actually be true, but since when it comes to consensual sex women tend to favor larger men just about anything would make more sense than your bizarre “men are bigger than women because big men can rape more women and thus have better reproductive odds” theory. Since you’re so keen on having reasons for evolution, what reason could there possibly be for women to evolve to favor men who are better able to rape them? Rape just doesn’t make sense as a reason for sexual size dimorphism in humans, and you’ve got nothing to support the theory that it does other than the existence of sexual size dimorphism itself! You don’t even have evidence that there a bigger difference in size between male rapists and their female victims than there is between consensual heterosexual partners.
So if sexual size dimorphism pre-dates humans, which it clearly does, how can it be the result of rape among humans?
Funny how well it’s worked out for so many species, then. If there’s no advantage, there can’t be any serious disadvantage either.
Sure…in spiders. I cannot off-hand think of any mammal species for which this is true – either males and females are the same size, or the males are bigger. There may be some mammals with big females/small males, but this is the exception rather than the norm.
A trait doesn’t have to be adaptive in order to exist. Evolution doesn’t think, remember? It merely has to be not so maladaptive as to prevent itself from being passed along.
I feel I didn’t stress this point enough, so I wanted to come back and give it some more emphasis. I don’t have any particular faith in the story I sketched out for how sexual size dimorphism may have arisen; it was just a possibility offered in response to the claim that consensual sex couldn’t lead to sexual size dimorphism.
Any argument that rests on the presumed behavior of our prehistoric ancestors is going to suffer from a major flaw – we have virtually no evidence as to what the behavior of early humans and proto-humans was like. Almost anything beyond “they cared for their children” or “they obtained food to eat” is going to be speculation. We certainly don’t know how they handled sexual relationships. I think it’s foolish to look to this time period for explanations for modern sexual behavior, not just because it’s unclear that such behavior is caused by inheritable factors in the first place but because there’s no way of knowing the details about what prehistoric sexual behavior was like. Since we’re here today we know they must have engaged in reproductive sex at least some of the time, but beyond that we’ve really got nothing but guesses.
Prediction: Most species in which we observe the small female sexual dimorphism should form co-supportive mating pairs.
[QUOTE=Lamia]
The male needn’t be bigger than the female to do a good job of defending her and her offspring. Even a very small, weak male partner would be more helpful than no one at all. Although sexual selection in humans tends to favor large men, smaller men still reproduce quite often. Human males are not really all that much bigger on average than human females. (I am not an especially large woman, but there are plenty of adult men smaller than me.) But it’s to the female’s advantage to choose the most helpful mate she can get, and all other things being equal this would often mean one of at least the same size as herself if not bigger.
[QUOTE]
So, there shouldn’t be this influence in species where the male doesn’t hang around to help or where the female doesn’t seek it. Lions, for example, are all the same size.
What reason could there possibly be for males to evolve to favor females who eat them alive? Because it increases the reproductive success of that particular behaviour above zero.
That’s an excellent question. I urge you to propose it to anyone that’s been advancing such a theory. I haven’t specified species, though, so good luck on finding them.
Or the survival disadvantage is counterbalanced against a reproductive advantage. Some guy beats the crap out of some girl’s boyfriend, guy now has breeding rights to girl.
[QUOTE=Lamia]
Sure…in spiders. I cannot off-hand think of any mammal species for which this is true – either males and females are the same size, or the males are bigger. There may be some mammals with big females/small males, but this is the exception rather than the norm.
[/QUOTE[
Can you think of any that have smaller females but without the big protective male? I can think of one or two…
A trait that is adaptively neutral has no nonrandom mechanism to increase its frequency in the population.
If you didn’t mean to specify species, it was a rather poor choice to introduce the topic by mentioning humans. Since you seem a nice enough binary number I’ve been doing my best to try not to nitpick poor wording or apparent contradictions and just go with what seems to be your intended meaning, but you’re not making it easy for me. I’m really not clear on what your point actually is.
Since you’re a longtime member with a low post count, I’m assuming that you’re genuinely interested in the discussion here but not really experienced at participating. I wish there were a less condescending-sounding way to say this, but I’d suggest that you spend a little more time previewing and revising your posts for clarity (and coding, although everyone screws that up now and then) before submitting. If I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say then there must be other posters who can’t either, and that doesn’t make for good debates.
Thornhill’s the name if you want to look up his work. Since the start of this thread was primarily about rape in humans, it would make sense, I’d think, to mention a study about rape in humans being described as an evolutionary adaptation.
Rape doesn’t have to be the predominate form of reproduction for it to affect the characteristics of a population. Your first reply to me was in response to my reply to RindaRinda. Not Post #35.
Perhaps not with the culture of this particular MB, but I’ve been participating in discussion forums of one form or another for a bit. Most of them had edit functions, though.
Fair enough. Most of my previous post was lampooning your position by making a series of obviously incorrection conclusions based on it. The “strong protective male” scenario doesn’t work very well for species that still exhibit SF/LM sexual dimorphism, yet do not form cooperative mating pairs.
Lions, in particular, make a good counter-example. Females do most of the hunting and protecting of young. Pretty much the only thing male lions do is fight other male lions and mate with the females. Furthermore, female lions will often birth away from the pride, without the protection of the dominate male (or other females in the pride). And yet further, if the dominate male loses breeding rights to another male, the new male has been known to kill all of the cubs (the old male’s offspring), bringing the females back into heat.
No protection, a sap on resources, possible threat of infanticide… I fail to see how this big male paradigm is helping the females. Looking at it from the other angle, it make a lot of sense for the females to be ill matched to resist the male… and/or for males to be larger based on competition with other males. The “strong protective male” is protecting the females from little more than other males.
Males compete for breeding rights, but how does two males beating the crap out of each other have anything to do with the female if her free consent factors anywhere into the equation? Which is a lot of anthropomorphicizing, but we’ve already had that conversation.
OK. I said I was going to give up on this, but the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to let these points stand. So I’m back.
I’m not sure at all where you got that characterization from my arguments. I will repeat, once again what I have stated previously: I am not arguing what rape is, I am arguing for what it is not. I am very clearly not saying “only one level of analysis is potentially fruitful, etc. etc.”. I am saying the argument for evolution is not supported. That’s it. You wanna argue it’s biological, or neurochemical, or developmental, or environmetal, or psychological, or even that it’s a mish-mash of all of the above, feel free. What I am saying is that there is no evidence to support rape being an “evolutionary strategy”.
And why am I arguing that? For a few reasons. Firstmost, whenever you start slinging around terms like “evolutionary strategy” and “adaptation”, you are necessarily invoking the mechanism of natural selection. There are other mechanisms for evolution, but these do not result in adaptation or “strategies” (which is really just a long-term, species-based concept). Second, “evolution”, in it’s most reduced form, is simply the change of alleles in a population over time. So rape can result in evolution occuring, just as any form of reproduction can, but that is a very different thing from the behavior being governed by evolutionary (read: selective) pressures.
The third, and to my mind, most important, reason that I have been arguing the contra position is that “rape as evolutionary strategy” fails to actually exhibit any of the necessary prerequisites for natural selection. Simply allowing an individual to get laid where otherwise that individual might not get laid is insufficient (and I’m addressing you here, too, Ludovic). Contrary to what has been stated by the pro contingent here, evolution might well be driven by the ability to get laid, but evolutionary strategies are driven by selective pressures, and the simple fact is that any behavior which one wishes to label as “adaptive” must therefore ultimately be genetic in origin. And here, I am not referring to the simple desire to have sex; I am talking about the link to the specific behavior in question. It is not sufficient that sex be genetically hard-wired, rape behavior itself must be genetically hard-wired.
As it stands, the scenarios presented thus far are purely speculative in nature. Thought experiments may work in physics, but they suck as evolutionary explanations. The main issue here is that in order for any one hypothesis to gain favor, it must have evidence. And I have stated, numerous times, that one need only show some evidence supporting the “rape as evolutionary strategy” hypothesis for me to drop my criticism, yet no evidence has been presented. Instead, only more speculation. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, it’s hypothetically plausible. But neither of those means it is. As I’m sure you are aware, science doesn’t work like that. The scientific method does not stop at “form a hypothesis”.
Remember what happened to Alfred Wegener and his Continental Drift hypothesis? It was scoffed at for one primary reason: no mechanism. Sure, it explained a lot. Sure, it made good sense at an intuitive level. But without a means to move continents around, it was just speculative, and was subsequently dismissed.
Altogether too much of evolutionary psychology, and the hypothesis which is the subject of this thread in particular, suffers form the same problem: lack of a viable mechanism. In this case, no genetic origin for rape behavior is demonstrated, thereby leaving it isolated from the proposed mechanism of natural selection. As I’ve stated before: find that link, and you may have something. Without it, you are engaging in speculation, not science.
There is, however, still the requirement that reproductive strategies meet the prerequisites for natural selection. It doesn’t matter if they are sometimes implemented, or even if they are only rarely implemented. Once the selective pressures exert themselves, those strategies can be implemented. But, once again, they aren’t “strategies” unless they are governed by natural selection.
And, again, I will state that it is not enough that a reproductive strategy simply allow a male to reproduce. It must allow a male to reproduce preferentially. It must give him an advantage over his conspecifics. Simply allowing an individual to get one’s genes into the next generation (or even just increasing the chances of such happening) is not enough to be considered an adaptive trait. Otherwise, as I have mentioned, plastic surgery would have to be considered an adaptation. Becoming a rich doctor would likewise have to be one. So would driving a Porsche. But doing so would also completely undermine current evolutionary science, as all those examples go completely contrary as to how evolution has occurred.
I would disagree, since X+Y > X for any non-zero values of Y. But I would also state that this is irrelevant.
Where have I argued that sex is not evolutionarily heritable? You would do well to actually read my arguments, rather than make assumptions about them.
It is not impossible, nor have I said it was. What I have said, for the umpteenth time, is show me the genetic component(s).
You are correct; it is not impossible. But that doesn’t make it necessarily so, either. Speculation may provide a good starting point for scientific inquiry, but don’t mistake such speculation for actual science. I’m sure I don’t need to point out that creationists can similarly come up with all sorts of "could be"s or "it’s not impossible"s. Yet, whereas such ideas would be roundly trashed coming from a creationist, they are seemingly embraced here if the word “evolution” is attached to them.
Darwin, somehow we must be misunderstanding each other because we both are feeling like we are banging our heads against a wall.
I do not need to have a gene identified for the hypothesis of rape as an evolutionary strategy to be supported.
I need to support the contention that the tendency to rape can be based on an inheritiable factor or factors. Such a factor need not be specific to rape, it just has to result in rape.
And I have to show that such a factor would be adaptive in the circumstances that the human species found itself for most of its evolutionary history.
And I have to show that such a hypothesis fits the available facts better than any other extant hypothesis. To prove the hypothesis I’d need to be able to identify the factor.
So let us take on issue one. A whole slew of tempermental factors are highly inheritiable. Personality types. A tendency to be interested in music or art or math. Aggressiveness. Short attention span. Impulsivity. So on.
Young adult males tend to commit violent crime in all societies. Follow murder rates. Who commits the most murders? Young adult males. Is this a result of some common cultural attribute in all these societies that conditions all these blank slates to do this? Or is it the result of an inheritable biologic predisposition for this age group to behave in aggressive ways with an statistically increased frequency relative to other male age groups and to females.
Now then the second point has been beaten to death. But let us beat it again. Assume multiple tribes or extended kinships in an area which they warred with each other with some finite frequency. Let us say that Group One had some slight tendency to rape in time of battle. Maybe just a lack of inhibition in times of high testerone, or that violence really got them horny, it doesn’t matter what the mechanism is, as long as it was otherwise neutral if not positive to their reproductive success. But they had it and it was based on some inheritable factor. What would happen? During times of war they would rape Group Two’s women. A small percentage of those rapes would result in children, some male, who would grow up to be warriors for Group Two. It would result in children at no additional cost to the rapist. The other tribe would have been cuckolded, just as in the case of the bird that is able to lay its eggs in another bird’s nests and get that bird to invest resources in raising it. These Group Two warriors would go to battle against other tribes and do the same thing. The behavior would spread because having the behavioral tendency produced more copies of itself than not having the tendency. That is all that is needed for natural selection to occur.
And issue three, comparison to other hypotheses. Also covered already. They don’t fit the data; they only fit political agendas. I agree with the agendas; I don’t agree with making science fit an agenda.
So what do we have? We have a viable hypothesis, nothing more. A hypothesis that fits all the available data better than any other hypothesis but still just a hypothesis. It is supported but nothing more. What good is that? It guides the search for other data to support or falsify it is what. The current situation is that it is so politically unacceptable to posit that rape is result of evolutionary pressures, that no research is done to test it. Funny you should use the Continental Drift hypothsesis and how it was scoffed at. Of course he was right. And the point was that unless one looked for data to support or disprove it, one wouldn’t have found it. And of course Darwin didn’t have genes or DNA in hand either. But it guided future research which found the mechanisms of selection.
Ah, but see, that’s not my position. My position is that it’s possible to invent any number of plausible but mutually exclusive evolutionary explanations for any trait, real or not and inheritable or not. You can invent a rape-based explanation for sexual size dimorphism in humans, but it’s also possible to invent any number of consensual sex-based explanations, including but certainly not limited to the one I provided.
This sort of thing can be an amusing intellectual exercise, just as it can be amusing to invent an explanation “proving” that, say, Moby Dick is an extended allegorical response to The Communist Manifesto. (“Okay, so the white whale represents the spectre of communism, so Ahab must stand for the powers of old Europe…”) Or more on topic, I have heard some rather out-there Internet feminists seriously suggest that social perception of skirts as women’s clothes and social pressure on women to wear skirts exists because the patriarchy wants to keep women dressed in clothes that make them easier to rape!
These are all circular arguments that have precious little to do with logic or reality. It’s easy to reverse-engineer any sort of explanation you like for anything that exists, because your conclusion is guaranteed to be true. But claims that rape is an evolutionary adaptation need to be supported with some sort of actual evidence, not with nice-sounding explanations for how it might have come about. I don’t see that the currently available evidence supports anything stronger than “If rape is an inheritable behavior, it’s not maladaptive enough to have been elimated by natural selection yet.”
Female humans have much more body fat than male humans. They might not be bigger in terms of height or muscle, but the increased body fat helps in terms of gestation and feeding of the infant. So in this instance, I believe female humans evolved this way for a very good reason (even if in modern times, we’re now disliked for our natural body fat, but that is a whole other discussion).
One victim was told: “Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby…” The article says the rapes are intended “to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child’s ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.” Another rapist told his victim during the rape: “I will make an Arab baby who can have this land.”
No issue there. The rape scenario should generate no opposition from that position- it would merely be an example for that position. Anyway, seeing as how we seem to have nothing to disagree about…