environments. One ofthe chronic mistakes made by would-be social Darwinists is to assume that evolution is a process by which human beings or societies become better.17 It is not.
Those organisms best able to survive in a challenging, shifting environment live to reproduce. As survivors, their genetic code likely contains information advantageous to their offspring in that particular environment. But the environment can change at any moment, thus neutralizing the advantage.
Charles Darwin was far from the first to propose that some sort of evolution was taking place in the natural world. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had noted the process of differentiation evident in both plants and animals. The big question was how it happened: What was the mechanism by which species differentiated from each other? Darwin was particularly struck by the subtle differences in the finches he’d seen on various islands in the Galapagos. This insight suggested that environment was crucial to the process, but until later, he had no way to explain how the environment shapes organisms over generations.
Evolutionary theory has been applied to the body pretty much since Darwin published On the Origin of Species. He’d been sitting on his theory for decades, fearing the controversy sure to follow its publication. If you want to know why human beings have ears on the sides of their heads and eyes up front, evolutionary theory can tell you, just as it can tell you why birds have their eyes on the sides oftheir heads and no visible ears at all. Evolutionary theory, in other words, offers explanations of how bodies came to be as they are.
In 1975, E. O. Wilson made a radical proposal. In a short, explosive book called Sociobiology, Wilson argued that evolutionary theory could be, indeed must be, applied to behavior—not just bodies. Later, to avoid rapidly accumulating negative connotations—some associated with eugenics (founded by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton)—the approach was renamed “evolutionary psychology” (EP). Wilson proposed to bring evolutionary theory to bear on a few “central questions . of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together, what is man’s ultimate nature?” He argued that evolutionary theory is “the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the human condition,” and that “without it the humanities and social sciences are the limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra.”18
Beginning with Sociobiology, and On Human Nature, a follow-up volume Wilson published three years later, evolutionary theorists began to shift their focus from eyes, ears, feathers, and fur to less tangible, far more contentious issues such as love, jealousy, mate choice, war, murder, rape, and altruism. Juicy subject matter lifted from epics and soap operas became fodder for study and debate in respectable American universities. Evolutionary psychology was born.
It was a difficult birth. Many resented the implication that our thoughts and feelings are as hard-wired in our genetic code as the shape of our heads or the length of our fingers—and thus presumably as inescapable and unchangeable. Research in EP quickly became focused on differences between men and women, shaped by their supposedly conflicting reproductive agendas. Critics heard overtones of racial determinism and the smug sexism that had justified centuries of conquest, slavery, and discrimination.
Although Wilson never argued that genetic inheritance alone creates psychological phenomena, merely that evolved tendencies influence cognition and behavior, his moderate insights were quickly obscured by the immoderate disputes they sparked. Many social scientists at the time believed humans to be nearly completeiy cultural creatures, blank slates to be marked by society.1 But Wilson’s perspective was highly attractive to other academics eager to introduce a more rigorous scientific methodology into fields they considered overly subjective and distorted by liberal political views and wishful thinking. Decades later, the two sides of the debate remain largely entrenched in their extreme positions: human behavior as genetically determined versus human behavior as socially determined. As you might expect,
the truth—and the most valuable science being done in the field—lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
Today, self-proclaimed EP “realists” argue that it’s ancient human nature that leads us to wage war on our neighbors, deceive our spouses, and abuse our stepchildren. They argue that rape is an unfortunate, but largely successful reproductive strategy and that marriage amounts to a no-win struggle of mutually assured disappointment. Romantic love is reduced to a chemical reaction luring us into reproductive entanglements parental love keeps us from escaping. Theirs is an all-encompassing narrative claiming to explain it all by reducing every human interaction to the reptilian pursuit of self-interest.2
Of course, there are many scientists working in evolutionary psychology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and other fields who don’t sign on to the narrative we’re critiquing in these pages, or whose paradigms overlap at some points but differ at others. We hope they’ll forgive us if it sometimes seems we oversimplify in order to more clearly illustrate the broad outlines ofthe various paradigms without getting lost in the weeds of subtle differences. (Readers seeking more detailed information are encouraged to consult the endnotes.)
Evolutionary psychology’s standard narrative contains several clanging contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves female libido. Females, we’re told again and again, are the choosy, reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women—flaunting expensive watches, packaging themselves in shiny new sports cars, clawing their way to positions of fame, status, and power—all to convince coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors. For
women, the narrative holds that sex is about the security—emotional and material—ofthe relationship, not the physical pleasure. Darwin agreed with this view. The “coy” female who “requires to be courted” is deeply embedded in his theory of sexual selection.
If women were as libidinous as men, we’re told, society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”
And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality . all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?
The Greek god Tiresias had a unique perspective on male and female sexual pleasure.
While still a young man, Tiresias came upon two snakes entwined in copulation. With his walking stick, he separated the amorous serpents and was suddenly transformed into a woman.
Seven years later, the female Tiresias was walking through the forest when she again interrupted two snakes in a private moment. Placing her staff between them, she completed the cycle and was transformed back into a man.