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WHAT PROVOKES A RAPIST? By Erica Goode, N.Y. Times News Service Rape is primarily a crime of violence and power, not sex. Or so a generation of social scientists and feminist scholars have argued. But in a forthcoming book, two evolutionary scientists say this view is born of ideology, not science, and is "based on empirically erroneous, even mythological, ideas about human development, behavior and psychology." They assert in "A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion," that rape "is in its very essence a sexual act" and that the practice may have evolved because it confers an evolutionary advantage. All of which, given the current passion for pulling Darwin into the domain of human sexual affairs, is not particularly new. But the scientists go further: If rape prevention programs are to be successful, they contend, evolution must be taken into account. They recommend, among other things, advising women that "the way they dress can put them at risk." They also recommend instructing young men, before they are granted drivers' licenses, that "Darwinian selection" is the reason a man "may be tempted to demand sex even if he knows that his date truly doesn't want it" or "may mistake a woman's friendly comment or tight blouse as an invitation to sex." Although the book is not scheduled for publication by the MIT Press until April, manuscript galleys are circulating. An excerpt by the authors, Randy Thornhill, Regent's professor at the University of New Mexico, and Craig T. Palmer, an anthropology instructor at the University of Colorado, appears in a recent issue of The Sciences. As a result, the book's thesis is already provoking discussion -- and anger. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who has read the excerpt in the journal The Sciences, called it "the worst efflorescence of evolutionary psychology that I've ever seen." "It's irresponsible, it's tendentious, it's an advocacy article and the science is sloppy," he said. "There are some aspects of human behavior that are fairly clearly evolutionary. But that's a long way from saying that rape is adaptive in males." Mary P. Koss, an authority on rape and a professor of public health at the University of Arizona, says that evolution is a factor in rape. She cautioned, however, that "it is not proper to set up evolutionary and social causation as opposites," adding, "You have to think about how they work together." Koss dismissed the notion that young men should be educated about the evolutionary origins of rape. Thornhill and Palmer, she said, "have obviously never stood up before a group and given a rape prevention talk." "If you even imply to a male audience that all men are potential rapists, they go berserk," she said. She called the recommendation that women consider the risks of dressing attractively "absolutely, perfectly unacceptable." On the other hand, Donald Symons, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara who studies human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective, said it was important for researchers to challenge the view that rape had little to do with sexuality. Though he quibbled with some points in the book, he said, "This is an argument for a particular view of male sexuality and it's a view that I think is correct." The intensity of the debate may have been inevitable, given that rape is a volatile political issue. But evolutionary psychology, once called "sociobiology," is itself a field that as a whole has been subject to criticism. Darwinian theory is based on the observation that evolution selects for success: animals with traits that promote survival or reproduction pass on their genes; others die out. Scientists have found an evolutionary view of animal behavior to be a powerful tool. But evolutionary psychologists are now seeking to apply similar principles to all aspects of human behavior. In some cases, scientists say, these efforts have proven fruitful. But critics have argued that in wading into the complexities of modern human sexual relationships, scientists are on much shakier ground, often ignoring the powerful influences of culture. Some critics assert that the work of some evolutionary psychologists is tinged with a misogynistic bias. Susan Brownmiller, whose influential 1975 treatise, "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape," set the tone of the feminist argument and serves as a frequent punching bag for Thornhill and Palmer, said that the new book "gives sociobiology a bad name." "Feminists never said that rape had nothing to do with sex," Brownmiller said. "Obviously rape involves the sex organs, and I'm sure many men who do it think it's a supreme macho act of sex. But they're wrong." In an interview, Thornhill, an eminent evolutionary biologist who moved from work on insects to studies of human sexual behavior, said he and his co-author expected that their book would provoke debate. "The problem is basically a very limited understanding of how evolutionary biology applies to people," he said. "It takes people a long time to pull back from what is politically correct and do an analysis on it." The subject of rape and evolution has been so touchy, Thornhill and Palmer write in "A Natural History of Rape," that lectures on the topic have been picketed, scientific articles have been rejected by scholarly journals, and researchers who view rape through an evolutionary lens have been denied jobs at universities. At the core of the debate are assertions that are touchstones for evolutionary psychologists: that evolution favored promiscuity in men but choosiness in women and that the male of the species evolved to prefer young women because they are more likely to bear children. Sexual coercion, Thornhill and Palmer argue, may have evolved as an alternative reproductive strategy for males who, for whatever reason, were not lucky enough to persuade a female to copulate voluntarily. Or it may have developed as simply a byproduct of other adaptive traits, for example, a greater desire to engage multiple sex partners. Rape is inexcusable, they argue, but it must be viewed as a "natural biological phenomenon," as much a part of nature as other undesirable happenings like thunderstorms, epidemics and tornadoes. Thornhill and Palmer marshal an assortment of evidence. They note that young women at the peak of their childbearing years are greatly overrepresented among rape victims and that rape leads to murder in only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cases, a figure confirmed by other rape researchers. They also note that sexual coercion of females by males occurs in many other animals, including the scorpion fly, an insect Thornhill has studied extensively. Critics, however, some of whom have followed the researchers' writings on rape over the years and others who read the excerpt in The Sciences, said they do not find these arguments convincing. "The possibilities of bias in such work is enormous," said Patricia Adair Gowaty, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia. "And as sociobiologists we have become enamored of some ideas in the absence of credible and critical data." "These theories are intuitively attractive, and they fit many of the experiences we have," she said. "But it is when something is intuitive that you need to be most careful to have adequate scientific controls." Koss pointed out that although it is true that most rape victims are young women, most rapists are 18 to 25, and it is more than likely that they will find victims in their own age group. She and other experts noted that a surprisingly large number of rape victims are young children. She said that other work by evolutionary scientists supported the notion that male violence toward women may have evolved partly as a strategy for controlling access to reproductive partners, an interpretation consistent with Brownmiller's observations. "But there are also roles for many other influences at the societal level, the institutional level, the family level, the peer level and within the two individual people," Koss said. Some critics objected to the authors' use of nonhuman examples to buttress their case. Equally contentious are the authors' ideas about how women react to rape. On the basis of a study in the 1970s by Thornhill and his wife, Nancy W. Thornhill, they contend that young women suffer more distress after being raped than do children or older women past their reproductive years. This "makes evolutionary sense," they say, because it is young women who risk being impregnated by an undesirable mate. But Koss said that other studies indicated that the impact of rape was far worse for elderly women than for younger women. "They develop a much more pervasive fear of going out of their home," she said. Still, some scientists applaud the efforts of Thornhill and Palmer to refocus attention on rape as a sexual crime and to link it to other evolutionary work on male and female sexual behavior. Understood within the context of evolutionary theory, said Neil Malamuth, professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, the scientists' thesis "is not as preposterous as it might seem." While feminists like Brownmiller perform an important service by focusing on the violence and power components of rape, he said, "there are aspects of rape that really do have to do with sex." |
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