August 5, 2012

• Evolutionary psychology: How good science gets abused

  JDN 2456145 EDT 13:54.

  Found an article about the evolutionary psychology of female sexual desire.
  Like much popular evolutionary psychology, it spins a convincing narrative. But where is the evidence?

  First of all, is male sexual arousal so closely tied to erection? That’s always assumed and really never proven. Consider nocturnal tumescence for example; often there’s no psychology there at all, and men wake up with an erection they don’t want and don’t know what to do with. Or consider men who have been raped by women; they will often report that their erections remained even after their arousal was replaced by fear and dread. Conversely, consider men with psychosomatic erectile dysfunction, the most common sexual dysfunction. They have the desire, they feel aroused, they want to have sex, and they can’t get erections, even though the physiology appears to be functioning properly. (The standard theory is that it’s a matter of anxiety.)

  This article makes passing reference to the beta male/alpha male distinction, which is really well defined in some species, and almost completely worthless in humans. Our most successful males (“alpha” behaviorally) are intelligent, charismatic, very gracile in their appearance (“beta” biologically). JFK and Richard Feynman would not last very long on the African savannah. (Nor would Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, but this is complicated by the fact that Jack Sparrow and Legolas seem pretty good at surviving in violent environments.)

  Ultimately, I think what happened is this: Humans are a beta-dominated species. Alpha is beta and beta is alpha. Otherwise, there’s simply no logical explanation for why we have such tiny canine teeth and such pathetic muscles. The only biologically alpha trait we still have is height. 

  Also, almost all these observations are based on using the mean, without considering the variance. This is how stereotypes are born: You ignore the variation within the population and treat entire groups as if they were defined by a single typical individual. “Men do X, women do Y”: no, actually the data says that in our sample men were 14% more likely to do X and women were 16% more likely to do Y. 

  And you get sentences like this: “Perhaps the paradoxical nature of women’s non-hormonal sexual desire is most pointedly exemplified by the authors’ observation that “many women are willing to pay money for celebrity biographies in order to read about the private life of Leonardo DiCaprio or Johnny Depp, but they won’t pay money to see photos of them nude.” Really? Seriously? Women never pay money ever to see nude photos of sexy celebrities? They have no interest whatsoever in how their bodies look, as long as their wallets are fat enough? Do you actually know any women?

  And here’s why it’s a problem: This kind of narrow-minded stereotyped thinking hurts people. It hurts men who see that their bodies are gracile and are told that this makes them inferior, undesirable, never able to be successful with women or in life. It hurts women who are told that they will always only be attracted to jerks and abusers and there is nothing they can do about it. They will never actually feel sexual desire for men who are caring and trustworthy, so they may as well just follow their impulses and go with someone aggressive and rich. (And then when they get abused, who do they turn to?)

  Serious evolutionary psychologists, like Cosmides, are actually looking carefully at the data and trying to understand where human traits come from. And when they find something unsettling—like the evolutionary advantages of rape—they don’t throw up their hands and say “boys will be boys”, they start looking for the proximal brain chemistry and trying to understand how we might use culture or medication or therapy (or surgery, or cybernetics!) to remake ourselves to be wiser and happier and better than we are. They don’t perpetuate stereotypes and they understand variation.

  And why don’t we hear about them? Because they don’t make for sexy narratives that reaffirm our preconceived notions.

  • 1:55 pm
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