Demonic Male. Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Houghton Mifflin. 1996.
The Dark Side of Man. Michael P. Ghiglieri. Perseus.1999.
A Natural History of Rape. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. MIT.2000.
Survival of the Prettiest. The Science of Beauty. Nancy Etcoff. 1998.
Why Sex Matters. A Darwinian Look at Human Nature. Bobbi S.Low. Princeton University Press.2000.
These books attempt "naturalistic" or sociobiological explanations of human social phenomena ranging from the ultimate in human ugliness; rape and violence to supposed ‘scientific' investigations into the nature of human beauty. Thornhill and Palmer focus exclusively on heterosexual rape and sexual coercion, Ghiglieri, Wrangham and Peterson have much wider scope focusing on the explanation of all kinds of human violence from war and genocide to fistfighting. The books deal almost exclusively with male behavior and explain violence and evil as products of male behavior. Etcoff attempts a refutation of Naomi Wolf's influential The Beauty Myth using the apparat of evolutionary psychology. The best book of the bunch is Bobbi S. Low's Why Sex Matters a scholarly review of the sociobiological arguments around sexuality. It is extremely repetitive and breaks no new ground though it can be read as a summary of work undertaken so far in game theory and behavior ecology. These books are an updated form of sociobiology that tries to take into consideration someof the often fierce criticisms of sociobiology made by S.J. Gould, R. Lewontin, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Hilary and Steven Rose as well as female sociobiologists like Sarah Hrdy and Jane Goodall. The authors try to move beyond genetic determinism and reductionism invoking culture as an explanatory foci, a positive feedback mechanism to natural and sexual selection. [see Fred Engels "The Transition of Ape to Man" for the classic account of culture as a positive feedback mechanism]
Although my formal training is as an analytical philosopher, I usually end up reading hundreds of books every year on every imaginable subject and these are some of the most atrocious books I've read in some time. Etcoff and Ghiglieri are particularly bad, the latter being one of the nastiest political reactionaries I've encountered in print in some time. Etcoff's book is descriptive rather than argumentative, very repetitive and makes Harlequin romance seem chock full of social-psychological insights. It is several hundred pages of this:
"Good-looking people are more likely to win arguments and persuade others of their opinion. People divulge secrets to them and disclose personal information...attractive people do tend to be more at ease socially, more confident and less likely to fear negative opinions. They are more likely to think that they are in control of their lives rather than pawns of fate and circumstance, and they are apt to be more sensitive..."p46-7
No argument or evidence necessary when you are an evolutionary psychologist with graduate degrees from Ivy League schools.
"Good looks are a women's most fungible asset, exchangeable for social position, money, even love. But dependent on a body that ages, it is an asset that a woman uses or loses...beauty is convertible into other assets that people covet, for example, wealth, connections, surplus suitors and so on."p66-7.
All well and good, but obviously, what about women who aren't so good looking? A lonely life on welfare? Isn't there something wrong with a situation where people are bestowed with assets solely by the way they look?
Etcoff's evidence consists in an "experiment" she undertook at a Boston hospital where she showed photographs of human faces to newborns. She observed that newborns tend to look longer at the good looking faces (the faces Etcoff thought were the best looking anyway.) This is supposed to prove that the power of physical beauty is somehow biological. Further, her book is full of statements like this:
"There is little evidence that women with greater intelligence have any advantage on the marriage market. On the contrary, in one recent study of more than ten thousand men and women in Wisconsin, women who had never married turned out to be significantly more intelligent than the women who had married."p66
Etcoff gives no citation for this study, insulating herself from basic criticism of how the study was done, who was chosen to participate etc. Nearly every other page, contains a "studies show..." or "one recent study shows.." without any citation as to who did the study, who funded it, where, and so on. So much for science.
The main criticism of these types of books is the authors provide zero empirical evidence for the sweeping generalizations and very strong claims they make about human nature and thus human social behavior. They can be taken as crude caricatures of Darwinian analysis, the type that led S.J. Gould to label an earlier generation of sociobiological analysis "cardboard" Darwinism in reference to the crude a priori speculative ultra-adaptationism that these authors all take.
Some readers may find the matter of fact and emotionally distant descriptions of violence offensive and in Ghiglieri's case gratuitous (for example his description of a rape by a male orang of a female human which adds nothing to his argument.) At times the authors seems to be trying to convince the reader of just how horrible and evil humans, particularly males are. An extended exercise in self-loathing.Each book was written with the goal of eradicating violence by trying to understand the nature and causes of it. Though these researchers have insight into violence, its history and why it occurs [especially in the much simpler and easier cases of non-human primates), the argument(s) are all fatally flawed and for the same reasons that earlier attempts at sociobiology have been wrong. Thornhill/Palmer and Wrangham/Peterson should be commended for the care and sensitivity with which they have presented their research, trying strenuously to avoid being labeled apologists for fascism, capitalism and other reactionary agendas. Ghiglieri,on the other hand, has a clear political agenda as is amply shown by his reliance on James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein for his empirical evidence. Ghiglieri even goes so far to say that "the most thoroughly researched recent book on crime and criminals is James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein's Crime and Human Nature." p 124. Given the kind of controversy it provoked and how discredited it is, the admiration shown for Hernnstein's work in the above quotation is not something most researchers would publicly admit. Ghiglieri is eager to show that it is the poor and disenfranchised who commit rape and other forms of violence and have the greatest potential and capacity for it. The other authors draw no such conclusions though their politics are implicit; each author could be accurately labeled an apologist for capitalism or the status quo on grounds that our biologically grounded and naturally selected human nature makes social order based on co-operation impossible or least very difficult.
The argument in each book is the same with slight variation. Male violence, war, genocide, rape and theft follow from the theory of sexual selection as defined and originally adumbrated by Charles Darwin in his seminal work The Descent Of Man:
" It is certain that with almost all other animals there is a struggle between the males for the possession of the female. This fact is so notorious that it would be superfluous to give examples. Hence the females, supposing that their mental capacity sufficed for the exertion of choice, could select one out of several males....This (sexual selection) depends on the advantage which certain individuals have over other individuals of the same sex and species in exclusive relation to reproduction...the males have acquired their present structure, not from being better fitted to survive in the struggle for existence (natural selection) but from having gained advantage over other males...There are many other structures and instincts which must have been developed through sexual selection--such as the weapons of offence and the means of defense possessed by the males for fighting with and driving away their rivals--their courage and pugnacity--their ornaments of various kinds --their organs for producing vocal or instrumental music--and their glands for emitting odors; most of the latter structures serving only to allure or excite the female. That these characters are the result of sexual and not ordinary selection is clear, as unarmed, unadorned or unattractive males would succeed equally well in the battle for life and in leaving numerous progeny, if better endowed males were present. We may infer that this would be the case, for the females, which are unarmed and unornamented are able to survive and procreate their kind....When we behold two males fighting for the possession of the female, or several male birds displaying their gorgeous plumage, and performing the strangest antics before and assembled body of females, we cannot doubt that, though led by instinct they know what they are about and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers." Darwin,1871.
The argument put simply is that rape and violence are male reproductive strategies that have evolved by sexual selection. The key question is whether violence is an adaptation or a by-product of sexual selection. The three books on violence set out to contend that violence *might* be an adaptation, though Ghiglieri and Wrangham/Peterson believe that violence and especially rape is an adaptation. Proving that something might be the case is easy because it is logically impossible to prove a negative. Descartes established that it might be the case that we are all being deceived by an evil demon into believing certain propositions. Thornhill and Palmer vacillate between the two positions and disagree amongst themselves. The lurking premise here is that all individuals are driven by the Darwinian imperative of individual reproductive success i.e the struggle to pass on ones genes. Ghiglieri asserts that "sexual selection favors the genes of males who sire more offspring no matter how it is done." p 11.
Since sexual selection is the major explanatory locus in all evolutionary psychology, it merits close attention. Sexual selection is the differential ability to acquire mates. It is the selection for traits that increase the quantity and quality of an individual's mates. Quality here referring to the reproductive ability or fertility of the person. There are two types of selection mechanisms in sexual selection; female choice of males (‘the power to charm females'--mislabeled intersexual selection) and male-male competition (‘the power to conquer other males in battle'--called intrasexual selection). Ghiglieri with typical crudity calls the former the pretty male strategy and the latter the macho male strategy. Thornhill/Palmer argue that there are two female adaptations associated with sexual selection. First, females prefer males with social status and resources which evolved because males possessing these provide material benefit to females and their offspring. Secondly, a preference for males with physical markers suggesting genetic benefits which evolved because they enhanced the survival of offspring.
Rape, violence and theft follow from the ‘macho male strategy'. Wrangham/Peterson put it thus:
"sexual selection is the process that produces sex differences has a lot to answer for...males who are better fighters can stop other males from mating and they mate more successfully themselves. Better fighters tend to have more babies. That's the simple stupid logic of sexual selection."p173
Ghiglieri: "sexual selection favors the genes of males who sire more offspring no matter how they have done it."p11 and "the facts [facts? What facts? He never gives us the facts.] on rape tell us that rape is one more natural product of macho sexual selection an extra ‘tool' or adaptation in many men to help them ‘win' natural selection's reproductive contest" p106 and "homicide is an instinct coded by sexual selection into the human male psyche in a design that prompts men to kill 1) to expand their personal gains leading to reproductive advantage and 2) to keep major gains they have already made"p154 and "murder is encoded into the human psyche. People who murder do so deliberately based on their own self-interest." p133
Rape and violence are used in situations when a male lacks the resources to attract and sire offspring. The possibility of rape increases with males who lack alternative reproductive options. A lack of reproductive options correlates with a male's failure to acquire resources, thus leaving him low in the hierarchy of males available for female choice. Thornhill/Palmer argue that females desire the traits of social status and ambition/industriousness. This theory is called the mate deprivation hypothesis and is argued most forcefully by Ghiglieri "men who rape women are typically the least successfully economically in their society--even the least successful among criminals--but the age cohort of women whom rapist choose as victims is the most desirable to the most affluent men in societies world wide." p86.
Thornhill/Palmer in more careful research draw different conclusions "rape is far from being an exclusive act among lowering males; there are many instances of rape by high status males with high access to females for consensual sex." p68.
The mate deprivation is false for many reasons. The highest fertility rates are among the poorest and lowest peoples both within and across world's societies. Poor and low status people most often marry and sire offspring together. Cross class marriage is rare though it is hard to tell with the cultural blurring of class boundaries in many first world societies.. There is no lack of reproductive opportunity for poor and low status males. It's just that their choices are usually narrower than rich and high status males.As women entered the labor force in increasing numbers during the 19th and 20th centuries to the point where male/female participation in the labor force is now nearly equal, women have become more economially independent and less depended ton males as providers both for themselves and their children. It is likely that females are less and less choosing their sexual and marriage partners based on males being providers.
A second argument is to emphasize that because rape and violence are so common and have long historical antecedents they must be genetic and biologically based. Ghiglieri:
"rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and has likely been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees and orangutans routinely rape females." p 105. and Wrangham/Peterson:
"Accepting that man has a vastly long history of violence implies that they have been temperamentally shaped to use violence effectively and that they will therefore find it hard to stop" p240.
The author as usual offer no empirical evidence for these empirical claims. Rape is not standard practice even if we assume that the majority of rapes go unreported. As for a reproductive strategy, the chances of impregnating a female _and_ her giving birth to the child and raising the child to reproductive age runs asymptotically towards zero. Humans have used birth control and abortion methods since the beginning of recorded history and probably before then. It would not be surprising to see an adaptation away from rape as a reproductive strategy. Indeed, given the costs and risks of rape to its perpetrators and given the benefits, the incidence should be low.