Miles mentions how some evolutionary psychologists interpret rape. There is a good section in the Leiter-Weisberg article on this issue.
Jerry
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=892881
Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law
BRIAN LEITER University of Texas at Austin - School of Law & Department of Philosophy MICHAEL WEISBERG University of Pennsylvania March 22, 2006
Abstract: Evolutionary biology - or, more precisely, two (purported) applications of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, namely, evolutionary psychology and what has been called "human behavioral biology" - is on the cusp of becoming the new rage among legal scholars looking for interdisciplinary insights into the law. We argue that as the actual science stands today, evolutionary biology offers nothing to help with questions about legal regulation of behavior. Only systematic misrepresentations or lack of understanding of the relevant biology, together with far-reaching analytical and philosophical confusions, have led anyone to think otherwise.
Evolutionary accounts are etiological accounts of how a trait evolved. We argue that an account of causal etiology could be relevant to law if (1) the account of causal etiology is scientifically well-confirmed, and (2) there is an explanation of how the well-confirmed etiology bears on questions of development (what we call the Environmental Gap Objection). We then show that the accounts of causal etiology that might be relevant are not remotely well-confirmed by scientific standards. We argue, in particular, that (a) evolutionary psychology is not entitled to assume selectionist accounts of human behaviors, (b) the assumptions necessary for the selectionist accounts to be true are not warranted by standard criteria for theory choice, , and (c) only confusions about levels of explanation of human behavior create the appearance that understanding the biology of behavior is important. We also note that no response to the Environmental Gap Objection has been proferred. In the concluding section of the article, we turn directly to the work of Professor Owen Jones, a leading proponent of the relevance of evolutionary biology to law, and show that he does not come to terms with any of the fundamental problems identified in this article.
Keywords: evolution, natural selection, law, biology
JEL Classifications: K00
Working Paper Series