In a society in which women don't have "the degree of power over which of their pregnancies come to term, and which of their babies survive," sexist scientists won't bother rationalizing rape as an "evolutionary strategy." Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer's article and others like them are a kind of rearguard response to the social changes that have already happened.
Les Schaffer sent Carrol & me an article in _Nature_ a while ago, which says:
***** In a famous paper published in 1979, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard University lampooned the tendency of some evolutionary biologists to explain every jot and tittle of organic creation in terms of inferred evolutionary adaptation. No matter how involved the justification, every feature of life had a good adaptive reason for its existence. Such reasoning, said Gould and Lewontin, recalls Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, who saw a noble purpose in any situation, no matter how ridiculous the reasoning - "our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles." <http://helix.nature.com/nsu/000706/000706-8.html> *****
I join Gould & Lewontin in their ridicule of evolutionary psychology's obsession with the idea of "pervasive utility" (the idea that anything and everything that an organism does can and should be explained in terms of inferred evolutionary adaptation). It's not just that the specific arguments made for an "evolutionary basis for rape" by Thornhill, et al. are wrong (though they are); the Panglossian reasoning that underwrites such arguments is wrong to begin with.
Yoshie