Origin of the Specious

The Darwin Wars are perhaps the most bitterly fought of all current academic disputes, raging in both England and America and enrolling in their ranks such heavyweight popularizers as Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Robert Wright (The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are) and Stephen Pinker (How the Mind Works). Most prominent on the other side is Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life), whose view of Darwinism differs from that of the sociobiologists and who has lately come under vicious public and personal attack for it.

Elisabeth Lloyd, who teaches philosophy of science at the University of Indiana, questions the science in A Natural History of Rape. "These authors' claims vacillate between the trivial and the unconfirmable," she says. Their work "fails to meet nearly every requirement for a serious claim to evolutionary science."

Lloyd is particularly puzzled by what she calls a "tension" between two of the authors' statements: one that men possess rape genes because their raping ancestors were successful in reproducing, the second that women evolved to experience deep psychological pain as a defense against rape so that they will act efficiently to prevent future rapes. These women, too, must have been reproductively successful, she suggests.

"So how could male rape genes have evolved?" asks Lloyd. "Were they so successful against women's wariness? This seems unlikely given that one rape might possibly produce one infant, whose long-term chances of survival are limited, while a female may produce two to six children on average during her life, few or none of which were fathered by rapists."

Michelle Sauther has more questions. Although A Natural History of Rape cites the fact that rape occurs in most species -- and all human cultures -- to bolster its thesis, it also contains a paragraph asserting that the behavior of other primates does not provide relevant information about human nature. (The behavior of scorpionflies apparently does.)

According to Sauther, non-human primate studies don't bear out the authors' thesis regarding humans. In fact, she says, rape is rare in animals and far from ubiquitous in human societies. Most primate males live their entire lives without siring offspring, she points out, "so why don't we see more rape among non-human primates?

"The only two species where there is sexual coercion are orangutans and common chimpanzees," Sauther continues. "And then you have bonobos, which are closely related to chimpanzees, and there's nothing like that at all. They have more egalitarian relationships. In the chimps of Gombe, there's sexual coercion. But on another site called Tai, the female chimpanzees are more bonded to one another and there seems to be far less of it. So even among our closest relatives, there's a lot of variability. It makes me think that sexual coercion has a lot to do with the society. It's not just a simple biological switch that males have.

"I think what Palmer and Thornhill are trying to say is, if you strip culture completely away, you can finally see a light -- you can see the biological basis of everything," she adds. "This is not a new idea. Back when sociobiology first came to the forefront, people were going through their checklists: Okay, there's incest. Let's talk about the biological advantage to that. Or infanticide. It was like little kids with toys.

"I saw Thornhill on television in the mid-'80s, and it was almost like they were going to clarify everything for everybody. He said with a straight face that science is unemotional: 'We don't get bogged down in whether a scientific fact is moral or immoral. Sorry to be the purveyor of bad news, but it's science.' But that's crazy, because they themselves were talking about how the feminists were preventing people from understanding the real biological basis of things. So they were taking it from a sociopolitical perspective."

Asked if the book's characterizations of women aren't social myths, Palmer responds: "Calling them myths implies you've looked at them as scientific hypotheses and disproved them. They should be evaluated. If they're found to be wrong, then knowledge is advanced."

But even now, the book's unproved theories are filtering into society, and that worries Sauther. "I think there's a vast ignorance about just how genetics works, and it's been simplified to the point where people think, for example, that there are genes for gayness or genes for alcoholism, which is ludicrous," she says. "And sociobiologists would be the first to say that.

"But it's the same stuff that keeps coming around. Back at the turn of the century, people were saying immigrants had low IQs and we shouldn't let them into the United States. They should be put in prisons and not allowed to mate, because it's all genetically based. It's a sad statement that a lot of this stuff is being rehashed.

"It's irresponsible to make some of the statements Palmer and Thornhill are making. It reminds me of why people are suspicious of scientists. This makes us look bad and makes science look bad."