From Joanna to Miles:
> >would
> >make a lot more sense if rape was a cultural universal of
> >about equal prevalence throughout the world and history.
> >However, the evidence on this point is clear: the prevalence
> >of rape varies dramatically across culture, history, and
> >economic conditions.
>
>I argue in favour of keeping in mind that we're animal as well as conscious
>beings. It's one of those things that gets you into all kinds of trouble
>when you lose track of it. I also make a case for our ability to write our
>more unlikeable animal tendencies out of our history. It makes sense that
>this ability should express itself variously across varying conditions.
On the other hand, were we the kind of being whose behaviors were susceptible to the kind of explanation favored by evolutionary psychologists, we wouldn't be seeing men like Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer getting into rearguard action explaining rape as a product of evolutionary adaptation. Human beings not only act, but we like to _explain_ and (moreover) _justify_ what we do. Which animal besides human beings has ever gotten around to justifying power relations with an appeal to "nature"? As Kenneth Burke says, we are symbol-making, symbol-using, and symbol-abusing animals, and in this respect we differ from other species, and the recognition of this difference is no disrespect for Darwin, nor does it equal to theoretical erasure of biology.
Yoshie