That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.