As you’ve probably noticed I’ve got a bit of a bias against evolutionary theory as applied to human beings. It’s not that I don’t believe human behavior isn’t subject to evolutionary pressure, I’m just highly skeptical when someone says something like “well, evolutionary theory says this might happen, this seems to happen, therefore evolution’s responsible.” Particularly when the behavior has to be both highly sophisticated and highly gender-specific. Like I say, I’m biased because I happen to believe the signal to bias ration of evolutionary psychology is terribly high.
As luck would have it, a different blogger from (Oxfords?) Overcoming Bias, Norman Siebrasse, invokes evolutionary psychology in a discussion of efforts to reduce high-risk behavior.
A recent Australian campaign against reckless driving, aimed specifically at young men…
The traditional campaign, emphasizing the risks involved with speeding by showing graphic road crashes, was ineffective. This is as would be predicted by evolutionary psychology. Young males of many species engage in risky behaviour in order to signal their extraordinary prowess to women. A man who succeeds, mates, and one who fails might as well be dead anyway, in evolutionary terms. The traditional campaign assumes that young male speeders don’t realize their behaviour is risky, when in fact they speed because it’s risky…
The new campaign encourages women to signal a small penis by wiggling their pinky at speeders, a sign which apparently signals a small penis. This hits the mark, in evolutionary terms…
Ok, so here’s one of those things that bugs me about the whole sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology mindset. Notice how it’s always, and generally only, male animals that engage in risky behavior? Notice also that in those scenarios female animals merely stand by, ready to pick and choose the winners but never subject to risk-related and/or prowess-related selective pressure.
Yup, yup, in humans as in, say, elk or antelope, men compete by taking risks and women just sit on lawn chairs and go along with which ever man wins. Yup, yup, and if there are multiple women sitting about then the winning man just impregnates all of them and Bob’s everybody’s uncle. Yup, yup. And men, being so dumb women had to evolve big boobs to remind him of buttocks so they’d remember to mate face to face and all, are completely indiscriminate when it comes to partner selection.
Oh wait! That’s why women never worry about their looks, never invest in makeup and clothing, never get plastic surgery, never diet or stress out about their weight, never read the “Hot Issue” of Cosmopolitan for ways to drive “him” mad in bed, never get their pubic hair yanked out by relative strangers from Brazil, never pretend to make out with friends but only in front of…
...often allegedly passive contemporary young men!
DId I already say “oh wait?” Hmm. Instead I’ll just say that maybe, just maybe women aren’t the passive receptacles posited by the “no-sex” class paradigm and the evolutionary theory that paradigm biases. Maybe instead, and unlike a surprising number of the (domesticatable or easily hunted) animals humans are most likely to come in contact with, women are no less subject to pressure to actively take risks as men — somewhat different risks, perhaps, though perhaps also with equal risks of personal extinction (genetic or otherwise.)
Ok, look. I could see meeting the Evolutionary Psychology people half way. I might grudgingly admit that some human sexual behavior has selective pressure backing it up… if just once they tried to bypass the enormous biases imposed by our dominant paradigms and admit that if there’s selective pressure to distinguish one’s self from one’s peers both genders can end up in fairly fierce competition for sexual partners.
