[lbo-talk] Re: Is Sex Fun for Girls? --> Sociobiology, Sex, and History

Daniel Davies d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jan 24 05:46:33 PST 2007


Andie wrote:

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Me aside, the existence of "spandrels," which is what they call adaptationally pointless traits, does not mean that all traits are spandrels. If they were, the theory of evolution by natural selection would be _false._

Since the theory is true, the _presumption_ is that any given trait had an explanation saying that it originated because it was adaptive in some environment. The hypothesis that a trait is a spandrel is fallback of desperation, when no adaptationist explanation seems to be available.

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This isn't true, or at least it isn't what Gould said. Spandrels aren't necessarily "adaptationally pointless"; they are things which were produced as the byproduct of adaptations rather than as adaptations themselves, but they might quite possibly be highly adaptive - Gould thinks that the human capacity for language is a spandrel that arose out of selection for larger brain size, and language isn't adaptationally pointless.

They're not a last-ditch desperation measure either; the constraints placed on adaptation by what has happened in the past are always one of the main possibilities one should consider. This is because 1) in a highly path-dependent process, the effect of history is always very important compared to the most recent innovation, and 2) that the context for these discussions is in general a trait which is already unusual for the very reason that we are looking for an explanation for it (nobody is interested in telling "just so stories" about why we have teeth, for example).

The idea that we should assume adaptationist explanations in the absence of (or indeed in the face of) reasons to believe otherwise is exactly the kind of Darwinian fundamentalism that Gould was arguing about in the Dawkins controversy and his side won (or at least, by the conclusion, Gould had not changed his mind and the Dawkinsites had begun to say that properly understood, they never disagreed with him - it's a notable trait of Dawkinsites and Dennettites that they're really ungracious in giving ground).

And in any case, we need to remember that Ravi's story about nipples *is* a story about evolution by natural selection. Any introduction of sexual differentiation has a cost in biological terms because it introduces more steps into the gestation process, more coding into the DNA sequence and therefore more opportunities for things to go wrong. What the male nipple and the inconveniently located clitoris are telling us is that there were never enough advantages to having things arranged differently to justify the cost. Having the clitoris where it is is "adaptive" in the sense that it is adaptive to have an architecture for the development of foetuses in which males and females share as many broad-brush morphological characteristics as possible.

Finally, as I said, the "sensitive lovers" explanation is too weak to do the work. As Andie tells it, the story is that women with inconveniently located clitorises "differentially reproduced". But as I said before, look at the work that this story's got to do. There is much more variety in human beings' ability to digest commonly available foods than in the arrangement of their genitals. So if this story's going to explain the complete lack of variety here, then it needs there to be a hell of a lot of selective pressure on genital arrangements, making the inconveniently located clitoris much more important to reproductive survival than, say, the ability to digest cow's milk.

And we know for a fact that the clitoris can't support this level of selective pressure, because there are plenty of societies around that practice clitoridectomy, but which have still persisted. (I note in passing that there is an implicit assumption in the just so story of the clitoris that during the relevant developmental period, Stone Age women were free to pick and choose who they had sex with, which is exactly the sort of definite statement about hominid society that people correctly mock the evolutionary psychology crowd for).

Look at it this way. Andie's argument is that because evolution is correct, we ought to have as a prior assumption that any given trait conferred some adaptive advantage. But equivalently, we know that self-interest is a very good theory of human motivation, but "cui bono"? is a lousy way of getting your beliefs about specific human actions and institutions; it tends to lead you into every wild conspiracy theory going. This is exactly what Gould kept writing about.

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