Essay by PZ Myers at Pharyngula
based on an article titled “Darwin’s Rape Whistle: Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?“,
…..
The story is that women have evolved specific adaptive responses to the threat of rape. In support of this conclusion, the author cites various studies that claim to show that ovulating women show stronger handgrip strength (the better to fight off men who want to assault their eggs with sperm), that ovulating women are more suspicious of men, that ovulating women are more likely to avoid risky behaviors, and that ovulating white women become more fearful of black men. I’m unimpressed. All of the studies involve small numbers, typically of college students at American universities (and even more narrowly, of psychology students), and all involve responses to highly subjective stimuli. When you examine the literature cited in these papers, you discover that different investigators get different results — the handgrip study even admits up front that there are conflicting results, with other papers finding no differences in performance across the menstrual cycle. None test anything to do with inheritance, none try (or even can) look at the genetic basis of the behaviors they are studying. Yet somehow evolutionary psychologists conclude that “women may have been selected during human evolution to behave in ways that reduce the likelihood of conception as a consequence of rape.”
……….
Whenever I see this kind of tripe from evolutionary psychologists, I reflexively reach for a counter-example, and recommend that everyone read one excellent book: The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, by Elisabeth Lloyd. It’s a wonderful example of solid, rigorous, scientific thinking about an evolutionary phenomenon. Lloyd analyzes a score of adaptive just-so stories about the female orgasm, carefully scrutinizing the evidence for each, and discovers that the substance is wanting. Too often investigators start with the assumption that a feature absolutely must have been selected for, or it wouldn’t be there, and then contrive elaborate rationalizations for processes that could have favored its preservation in our ancestry…and the aura of plausibility is then sufficient to conclude that it must be so, even in the absence of any supporting evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contradictory evidence.
I should reread it now — if nothing else, to wash that nasty tincture of evolutionary psychology out of my brain.