Echidne of Echidne of the Snakes raises two wonderful points about the research on Tanzanian women who marry multiple times that Natalie Angier wrote about in the New York Times the other day.

First, riffing off one of her commenter’s remarks…

Doug also jokingly wonders if this refers to some loose piece of feminist research, and of course it’s hard to know without reading the actual research. But if research consisting of following a tribe for fifteen years, recording the number of marriage-like relationships and recording the numbers of children which survive past the crucial age of five is loose research, what the fuck should we call all those ask-the-American-undergraduates-to-rank-pictures-of-desirable-women evo-psycho pieces? So loose that the universe and our brains fall through it?

Read the quote in context here.

I spend a lot of time questioning pop sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. And I do it not because I’m too anthropocentric to believe human behavior could be shaped by evolution — which would be kind of hard to imagine — but because most of the published research that gets reported as daring, dazzling truth wouldn’t pass peer review at the average lad magazine.

Borrowing basic research tools from the school cognitive-science lab down the hall, replacing their color patterns with soft porn, and graphing eye flicks is quick, easy, and it measures… something. But almost never measures anything strong enough to bear the weight of complex interpretations of human behavior that get piled on top of it. As opposed to years or decades spent measuring human activity in context and over time.

Which brings me to Echidne’s even cooler point: if you’re going to make claims about reproductive success you need to demonstrate reproductive success!

Let me calm down a bit there. Whatever the quality of this research might be (and I will check if I have time), at least it actually measures reproductive success. The importance of this cannot be overstressed. Practically all the studies I have seen speculate about the reproductive success of men who cast their seed around widely, while not offering actual evidence. Likewise, very few studies address the complaint I’ve made many times that getting a woman fertilized does not equal having produced a fertile adult offspring. Before that is possible the pregnancy must result in a live birth, the resulting baby must be fed and kept safe all through the next ten plus years. Only then can we measure the reproductive success in the sense of the genes being passed on.

Let’s go back to my nicked-from-the-cognitive-science-lab example above. If you’re going to call yourself an evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist, and if you’re going to claim that, say, the brain processes clothed vs. unclothed women, or men or women, or unclothed men vs. unclothed women at different rates (which is entirely plausible) then you’re sort of obliged not just to speculate but to demonstrate how that would confer reproductive advantage to the eye-flickeree.

And if as EPs and sociobiologists are way too fond of doing, you’re going to argue that eye flickers are all about sexual selection then you have an even tougher job. If you made that claim you’d have to demonstrate the eye-flickering wasn’t about, say, distinguishing friend from foe, or “soldier” from “civilian” where the advantage would be living long enough to find a partner and raise resulting children to adulthood, as opposed to ev-psych’s obsession which would be about assessing different prospective mates for their on-the-spot genetic suitability. That’s gonna be tough.

On the other hand, tracking reproducing many individuals through multiple relationships and multiple children through direct observation and recording of family history might be time consuming... and might be beyond the skill sets for the average eye-flicker measurer, but the results (reproductive success not just of individuals but their children and grandchildren) of that kind of research are pretty solid, three-dimensional, and interviewable.

As Echidne clearly says, fieldwork too can be rigorous or lax as can conclusions drawn from fieldwork. But in the long run if we’re going to learn about discrete, measurable, and significant selected-for human behavior (and someday, since we really have evolved) it’s much more likely to come from that sort of deep fieldwork, multi-generation data sets, and great, huge gouts of profound wariness of introduced bias.