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What Can Serial Killers Teach Us About "Evolutionary Psychology?" (Hint: Not Very Much But Then...)

Thu, 2009-11-12 11:54 — figleaf

Echidne of the Snakes (who’s blog, incidentally, just turned six this week — which is six years in Goddess years) nicely consolidates two of my perpetual bugaboos into one pithy paragraph. Talking about moron comments in response to the discovery of serial murders victims in Cleveland she said.

No, it is not good to read about such things. But the recent discussion in a comments thread here about how rape is about sex and about desperate men wanting to pass their genes on should ALWAYS be brought up when these cases come into the public eye. Always.

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, because what better way to “pass on your genes” than by strangling your “partners?”

A clue for EEPs about what might really be going on instead of a “spreading your seed” impulse in men comes in an aside by Bjørn Østman of Pleiotropy about an aside by Mary Roach at a TED Talk: “Week old human semen is of lower quality, so now men have an evolutionary excuse for masturbating.”

More specifically, in humans, anyway, male fertility increases with frequency of ejaculation. Which at the end of the day makes any assumptions about how men ejaculate almost irrelevant from an “evolutionary” perspective.

It has all the portent of saying we’re “conditioned” by our genes to scratch when we itch. All well and good and perfectly true… but you’d probably want to look somewhere beyond a “genetic imperative to scratch” to explain what we decide to scratch our itches with.

Thu, 2009-11-12 12:19 — Sa (not verified) #permalink

I follow a course of genetics and we had a debate about how much we are conditioned by evolutionary purposes, genes and education. Our teacher told us he always found that people who believed in “genes” and “survival of the fittest” over civilisation were always conservative politically, whereas liberals believe in education over instincts.

I’m always skeptical about arguments on that topic for that reason. Political agendas are never far away.

Thu, 2009-11-12 13:20 — Mike (not verified) #permalink

Ok…Mary Roach is very entertaining ….WHERE do people find this stuff – I need to spend more time surfing :D

Mike

Thu, 2009-11-12 14:46 — Red (not verified) #permalink
If you get annoyed at this, be glad you weren’t a biology student in the 90’s!! It was so much worse then. Another problem with rape from an evolutionary perspective is of course male on male rape, child rape, and such. Not to mention that a child conceived that way might not be treated well.

[No kidding, Red! I think you went to the University of Washington too, home of ur-pop-sociobiologist David Barash. Who in his first apologia for the status quo, “The Whispering Within,” tried to make some sort of rationalizing comparison between rape in humans, ducks, and microscopic parasitic flatworms. Total nuisance! —fl

Thu, 2009-11-12 21:03 — Holly Pervocracy (not verified) #permalink

If rape was a good way for men to pass on their genes, men would all be rapists by now. You mentioned duck-rape above—ducks don’t have mostly consensual mating and the occasional rape, they’ve made a system out of it. Every spring at any duck pond, it’s rape all over the place and the males make no secret of it. Rape may be an epidemic in humans but it’s not like that.

This is one of my biggest objections to evolutionary psychology overall, actually—why isn’t it obvious? If men are “really” programmed to sleep with any women who’ll let them, why don’t they just go ahead and do that? It seems unlikely that a species that was naturally inclined to promiscuity and rape would develop the concepts of monogamy and consent in the first place, let alone have a society that adheres to them.

In other words… if rape was normal for people, rape would be normal for people. If you know what I mean.

[And indeed I do know what you mean. As luck and/or coincidence would have it I’m up to my knees in a post about how what is normal (i.e. silence, embarrassment, denial, and general non-communication) creating an environment that really enables rape. But that’s not the same thing at all. Awesome how many lies we all tell each other about how we really work. Local sociobiologist David Barash has the gall to call his stuff “just so stories,” even though I’m pretty sure he believes they’re gospel truth. Thanks, Holly. —fl]

Mon, 2009-11-23 21:27 — The Beautiful Kind (not verified) #permalink

I heart evolutionary psychology. And loved the book BONK by Roach.

[I think Mary Roach is just the bee’s knees, TBK. —fl]

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