This collection of seventeen essays
comprises a thorough and balanced response to Randy Thornhill and Craig T.
Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT
2000). Thornhill and Palmer assert that rape or the propensity to rape is a
mating strategy created through the evolutionary pressures of natural
selection, either directly or as a by-product of other evolved behaviors. The
editor of the anthology, Cheryl Brown Travis, reminds readers that when
Thornhill and Palmer’s work appeared, it drew substantial and predictable media
attention. A few contributors to the volume mention this media scrutiny as one
motive that inspired them to challenge Thornhill and Palmer. Yet while some
writers engage directly with the social and political consequences of Thornhill
and Palmer’s position, the majority of this anthology criticizes the rape
hypothesis on theoretical and especially empirical grounds. The results are
generally solid and persuasive: the rape hypothesis is unsupported by any
direct evidence, and the indirect evidence is riddled with theoretical and
conceptual weaknesses. In this light, Thornhill and Palmer’s appeal to what
Elisabeth Lloyd calls the "Galileo Defense," (p. 235) that is, their
claim that their excellent science has been suppressed for ideological and
especially feminist reasons, rings very hollow indeed. It is worth noting that
the attention paid to the Thornhill and Palmer book may be a little exaggerated
— their work was not well received within the scientific community and the
book is already off the shelves, although still in print. But the tendency of
fringe researchers to affirm pernicious gender stereotypes through popular
culture is a potent force and deserves to be publicly contested. The Travis
anthology merits the widest possible readership, especially among those who may
lack the scientific acumen to perceive the flaws in Thornhill and Palmer’s
work, or to understand the general strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary
approaches to explanations of behavior. (Travis includes a short primer on
evolutionary theory in the introductory essay, and it is sufficient in outline,
but it is no substitute for careful study of the field.) One wonders, then, why
the Travis anthology has not aroused the same intense interest from the
mainstream media as the book to which it responds.

The anthology is divided into three
sections, each focusing on some aspect of evolutionary psychology and its
impact on theoretical explanations of rape. Readers familiar with any of the
fields where evolutionary theory touches on human origins and behavior will
recognize "evolutionary psychology" as a term of relatively recent
vintage, created to replace the older label "sociobiology," which has
fallen into disrepute. As each section of the book illustrates, however, this
linguistic trick has not fooled anyone. Bad evolutionary psychology is just as bad
as bad sociobiology, and in pretty much the same way — offering deterministic
just-so stories masquerading as evidence, and relying on widespread familiarity
with such myths to do the work that should be done by carefully generated and
tested hypotheses. And of course, this view is fully compatible with the belief
that evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are often done well and can offer
us genuine insight into human origins and behavior, a point on which all the
writers collected here insist. The first section of the book takes on the topic
of the methodology of evolutionary approaches directly. While all of the essays
in Part I are clear, challenging, and well grounded, the chapters by Patricia
Adair Gowaty, and A. Leah Vickers and Philip Kitcher, are especially
noteworthy.

Gowaty’s "Power Asymmetries
between the Sexes, Mate Preferences, and Components of Fitness," is
significant because it explicitly argues for a claim that much of the book implies:
feminism and evolutionary theory are not opposed. It may seem odd that
this view needs to be defended, but it does, for two reasons. The first is the
wholly false but apparently common conviction that feminists are against science.
I have studied and worked in the field of feminist science studies for nearly
fifteen years. I have never read or met a single feminist for whom this claim
is true, yet I sometimes find my discipline mysteriously lumped in with an
imaginary anti-science movement. Gowaty insists, on the contrary, that
"hypotheses sparked by feminist consciousness can be both completely
consistent with Darwinian explanations of behavior and testable,"
(p. 62, emphasis added) and proceeds to demonstrate the fruitful alliance
between feminism and evolutionary theory. This will be obvious to feminist
theorists, but other readers may find it enlightening, especially if their
knowledge of feminism is restricted to Thornhill and Palmer’s caricature of it.
Thornhill and Palmer’s animosity toward feminist work on the question of rape
is the second reason that an explicitly pro-evolution and pro-feminist
argument is a necessary part of this book. I’ll return to this point below.

Vickers and Kitcher, on the other
hand, are not bothered about which political stances may fit comfortably with
which scientific views. Their target, in "Pop Sociobiology Reborn: The
Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Violence," is the methodology and
evidence of evolutionary psychologists like Thornhill and Palmer. (They also
object to the work of David Buss on what makes members of the opposite sex
appealing to their partners.) Kitcher, of course, is already an established
figure in philosophy of science with a well-earned reputation for pointing out
that the emperors of sociobiology have no clothes. He and Vickers give a
concise description of the difference between the past excesses of inadequate
(or "pop") sociobiology and its new incarnation: "The principal
advance evolutionary psychologists take themselves to have made consists in
recognizing that natural selection doesn’t shape human behavior directly, but
rather shapes the psychological mechanisms underlying behavior." (p. 141) This
means that no evolutionary psychologist ought to make bald assertions that men
rape because, thanks to natural selection, they can (ironically a claim endorsed
by a small number of feminists). Rather, evolutionary psychology will aver one
of two possibilities. Either the minds of some men contain a
"special-purpose device" or module, selected for and refined through
millennia of reproductive and other pressures on the genetic basis for male
neurophysiology, which inclines them to rape. Or the minds of all men contain
similarly evolved modules for successful mate-seeking behaviors, but sometimes,
for reasons to be explored, these devices fail to do their job properly, and
rape may be the accidental result.

The Vickers and Kitcher essay is
significant, then, because Thornhill and Palmer do in fact aver both of these
possibilities. As most of the contributors to the volume point out, it is not
clear which hypothesis Thornhill and Palmer favor, and they seem to disagree
about it themselves. But what Vickers and Kitcher make clear is that whichever
hypothesis is pursued, evidence must support it and rule out alternative
explanations. Specifically, evidence must show that the modules in question
exist, work the way the hypothesis says they do, and are heritable, or there is
just no possibility of generating an evolutionary account. Even before we add
the complexities introduced by the indirect version of the hypothesis, to say
nothing of cultural factors, we are a long way from sufficient understanding of
neurology, genetics, and the relationship between the two to collect such
evidence, never mind explore alternative accounts. Thornhill and Palmer don’t
let this stop them, because they think that evidence about the anatomy of
scorpion flies and reports of women’s reactions to being raped somehow
constitute support for the heritability and selection of a rape module and/or a
sex module. Like many respondents, Vickers and Kitcher are happy at this
juncture to let their opponents hang themselves with their own rope:
"Science must always begin from ignorance, so to demand knowledge at the
beginning is anti-science," Thornhill said, writing with his then wife
Nancy in 1992. Well, really.

The second two sections of the book
examine empirical studies of rape and alternative explanations of rape,
respectively. Like Part I, these chapters are detailed and predominantly
empirical challenges to the errors of Thornhill and Palmer. The alleged logical
consequences of the rape hypothesis — e.g., that rape victims tend to be women
of reproductive age, that women of childbearing age suffer less distress
following rape, that more violent rape causes less distress, that rapists
rarely harm their victims — are explored in greater detail in these two
sections, and ultimately rejected as empirically unfounded. Even though the
contributors offer a wealth of counterexamples to the rape hypothesis and its
imaginative corollaries, even more counterexamples will occur to the astute
reader as the pages turn. As one reads on, one may even experience a sense of
amazement and dismay that such a weak piece of work as Natural History of
Rape ever made it into print. Elisabeth Lloyd’s "Violence against
Science: Rape and Evolution," no more accuses Thornhill and Palmer of
fraudulent misrepresentation than any of the other contributors, but it
probably comes closest. As I suggested above, Thornhill and Palmer do a grave
disservice to feminism by creating a straw woman opponent. They accomplish this
by condensing the variety of feminist opinions on the subject of rape into one
univocal position, and then attributing a distorted, anti-evolutionary version
of this position to one writer, Susan Brownmiller. Lloyd does an excellent job
of proving that Thornhill and Palmer mischaracterize Brownmiller’s specific
claims, and attribute to feminists in general a false hostility to evolution in
favor of socio-cultural explanations of rape.

Thornhill and Palmer suggest that,
instead of rape prevention programs, men should be educated about the
evolutionary origins of their sexual impulses, so that they can learn to
restrain them. It is awfully hard to figure out how this might help. Knowledge
of the evolutionary origins of our preference for fatty foods doesn’t do much
to restrain the impulse to stick one’s fork in a chocolate cake. Thornhill and
Palmer also recommend that women be encouraged to dress modestly and limit
their social interactions with men. Hmm, no one’s ever thought of that before.
In the end, empirical and feminist-inspired responses to the claims of
Thornhill and Palmer are vital and worth examining, but it is ordinary men who
should be most motivated to take issue with the rape hypothesis, for it is men
who emerge as hapless victims of their own overpowering sexuality. Michael
Kimmel makes this point in "An Unnatural History of Rape." It is the
least empirical and most polemical chapter in the book, at least in the sense
that he does not emphasize hard data nor include an extensive bibliography, as
most of the other chapters do. As Kimmel puts it, if Thornhill and Palmer were
right, "then the only sensible solution would be to lock all males up and
release them for sporadic, reproductive mating after being chosen by
females." (p. 231) Given their inability to generate and consider
plausible alternatives in their own work, it should come as no surprise that
Thornhill and Palmer didn’t hit on Kimmel’s suggestion themselves.

© 2004 Edrie Sobstyl

Edrie Sobstyl, Ph.D. was educated
in Edmonton, Canada, and teaches philosophy in the History of Ideas program at
the University of Texas, Dallas. She is the author of several articles on
feminism and science, and has been a research fellow for the Rockefeller
Foundation for the Humanities. Her current work is on ethics and regulations
for protection of human subjects in research, in conjunction with the
Responsible Conduct of Research Education Consortium at the University of California,
San Diego.

Categories: Genetics, Psychology, Ethics