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Sociobiological theories of rape explore how evolutionary adaptation influences the psychology of rapists. Such theories are highly controversial, as traditional theories typically do not consider rape a behavioral adaptation. Some object to such theories on ethical, religious, political, or scientific grounds. Others argue correct knowledge of rape causes is necessary for effective preventive measures.
The idea that rape evolved under some circumstances as a genetically advantageous behavioral adaptation was popularized by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer in their book A Natural History of Rape (2000).
Behavior resembling rape in humans can be seen in the animal kingdom, including ducks and geese [ citation needed ], bottlenose dolphins, [1] and chimpanzees. [2] Indeed, in orangutans, close human relatives, such copulations constitute up to half of observed matings. [3] Such 'forced copulations' involve animals being approached and sexually penetrated while struggling or attempting to escape. Observations of forced sex in animals are uncontroversial; controversial are the interpretation of these observations and the extension of theories based on them to humans. "Thornhill introduces this theory by describing the sexual behavior of scorpionflies. In which the male may gain sex from the female either by presenting a gift of food during courtship or without a nuptial offering, in which case force is necessary to restrain her." [4] [ better source needed ]
Thornhill and Palmer write that "In short, a man can have many children, with little inconvenience to himself; a woman can have only a few, and with great effort." Females thus tend toward selectivity with sexual partners. Rape could be a reproductive strategy for males. They point to several other factors indicating that rape may be a reproductive strategy. Most rapes occur during prime childbearing years. Rapists usually use no more force than necessary to subdue, argued to be since physically injuring victims would harm reproduction. Moreover, "In many cultures rape is treated as a crime against the victim's husband." [5]
Anthropologist Edward H. Hagen states in his Evolutionary Psychology FAQ from 2002 that he believes there is no clear evidence for the hypothesis that rape is adaptive. He believes the adaptivity of rape is possible, but claims there is not enough evidence to be certain one way or the other. However, he encourages such evidence to be obtained: "Whether human males possess psychological adaptations for rape will only be answered by careful studies seeking evidence for such cognitive specializations. To not seek such evidence is like failing to search a suspect for a concealed weapon." He also describes some conditions in the ancestral environment during which the reproductive gains from rape may have outweighed the costs:
McKibbin et al. (2008) argue that there may be several different types of rapists or rape strategies. One is rape by disadvantaged men who cannot get sex otherwise. Another is "specialized rapists" who are more sexually aroused from rape than from consensual sex. A third type is opportunistic rapists who switch between forced and consensual sex depending on circumstances. A fourth type is psychopathic rapists. A fifth type is partner rape due to sperm competition when the male suspects or knows that the female has had sex with another male. There are varying degrees of empirical support for the existence of each of these types. More generally they mention research finding that at least one-third of males "admit they would rape under specific conditions" and that other surveys find that many men[ quantify ] state having coercive sexual fantasies. They, as have others, "propose that rape is a conditional strategy that may potentially be deployed by any man." [7]
Women may have developed several defenses against and strategies to avoid rape. One is a partner preference for men that are effective bodyguards against other men such as physically and socially dominant men (although there may also be other evolutionary reasons for such a preference). Another is great psychological pain which according to some research is greatest during the childbearing years. Other researchers[ who? ] have argued that the emotional pain may cause the women to focus on the social circumstances that enabled the rape with the aim to prevent future rapes.
Other research has found that during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle women perform fewer behaviors that may increase the risk of an assault. [8] Studies have also found that sensitivity for potential coercive behaviors in males as well as handgrip strength (but only in a simulated coercive situation) increase during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. [7] On the other hand, a 2003 study found that the frequency of pregnancy from rape is significantly higher than that of pregnancy in non-coercive intercourse, and advanced the hypothesis that male rapists disproportionately target women exhibiting biological indications of fertility. [9]
Thornhill and Palmer write that "Rape is viewed as a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage". They further state that by categorizing a behavior as "natural" and "biological" they do not in any way mean to imply that the behavior is justified or even inevitable. "Biological" means "of or pertaining to life," so the word applies to every human feature and behavior. But to infer from that, as many critics assert that Thornhill and Palmer do, that what is biological is somehow right or good, would be to fall into the so-called appeal to nature. They make a comparison to "natural disasters as epidemics, floods and tornadoes". This shows that what can be found in nature is not always good and that measures should be and are taken against natural phenomena. They further argue that a good knowledge of the causes of rape, including evolutionary ones, are necessary in order to develop effective preventive measures. [5]
Evolutionary psychologists McKibbin et al. argue that the claim that evolutionary theories are justifying rape is a fallacy in the same way that it would be a fallacy to accuse scientists doing research on the causes of cancer that they are justifying cancer. Instead, they say that understanding the causes of rape may help create preventive measures. [7]
Wilson et al. (2003) argue that evolutionary psychologists like Thornhill and Palmer use the naturalistic fallacy inappropriately to forestall legitimate discussion about the ethical implications of their theory. According to Thornhill and Palmer, a naturalistic fallacy is to infer ethical conclusions (e.g., rape is good) from (true or false) statements of fact (e.g., rape is natural). Wilson et al. point out that combining a factual statement with an ethical statement to derive an ethical conclusion is standard ethical reasoning, not a naturalistic fallacy, because the moral judgment is not deduced exclusively from the factual statement. They further argue that if one combines Thornhill and Palmer's factual premise that rape increases the fitness of a woman's offspring with the ethical premise that it is right to increase fitness of offspring, the resulting deductively valid conclusion is that rape has also positive effects and that its ethical status is ambiguous. Wilson et al. state that Thornhill and Palmer dismiss all ethical objections with the phrase 'naturalistic fallacy' although "it is Thornhill and Palmer who are thinking fallaciously by using the naturalistic fallacy in this way". [10]
Thornhill and Palmer (2000) suggest a number of possible strategies for preventing rape. One example is explaining to males that they may have predispositions to misread the female invitation of sex. They believe that viewing rape as being due to a desire for domination, and not related to sexual desire, is generally harmful. One example given is the claim that the way women dress will not affect the risk of rape. They argue that the much greater societal freedom of dating without supervision, and removal of many barriers between males and females, have created an environment that has also removed many earlier societal controls against rape. It is recommended that "men and women interact only in public places during the early stages of their relationships". [5]
Counseling of rape victims may also be improved by evolutionary considerations, according to Thornhill and Palmer, and they argue that the view that rape is due to a domination desire, cannot explain to the victim why the rapist seemed to be sexually motivated.
Evolutionary considerations can also help explain the emotional pain felt, as well as the form it takes. They may also help the rape victim understand why the rape victim's partner may see the rape as a form of infidelity. They also argued that the victim's partner may be helped by such understanding, and be more able to change his or her reaction. [5]
The 2003 book Evolution, Gender, and Rape, written in response to A Natural History of Rape, compiles the views of twenty-eight scholars in opposition to sociobiological theories of rape. One contributor, Michael Kimmel, criticizes Thornhill and Palmer's argument that female rape victims tend to be sexually attractive young women, rather than children or older women, contrary to what would be expected if rapists selected victims based on inability to resist. Kimmel argues that younger women are the least likely to be married and the most likely to be out on dates with men, and therefore are the most likely to be raped because of opportunity arising from social exposure and marital status. [11] Palmer and Thornhill responded to these critics in an article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology . [12]
Smith et al. (2001) criticized Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis that a predisposition to rape in certain circumstances is an evolved psychological adaptation. They developed a fitness cost/benefit mathematical model and populated it with estimates of certain parameters (some parameter estimates were based on studies of the Aché in Paraguay). Their model suggested that generally only men with a future reproductive value of one-tenth or less of a typical 25-year-old man would have a net positive cost/benefit fitness ratio from committing rape. On the basis of their model and parameter estimates, they suggested that this would make it unlikely that rape generally would have net fitness benefits for most men. [13] [14]
While defending the evolutionary psychology theory of rape against its more vehement critics, Vandermassen (2010) provides a critique of some aspects of the view. She characterises the view of Thornhill and Palmer as "extreme" (p. 736), as they fail to allow for the influence of any non-sexual motivations in the crime of rape. Vandermassen also notes two problems with the data cited by Thornhill and Palmer regarding the psychological trauma caused by the violence associated with rape: firstly, the data is inaccurately and confusingly presented in the book, often obscuring the fact that they do not support Thornhill and Palmer's "counterintuitive hypothesis" (p. 744) that more physical violence during rape is associated with less psychological pain. Secondly, more recent research has failed to support this hypothesis. A more moderate position, integrating the evolutionary psychology and feminist theories on rape, is presented by Vandermassen, based in part on the work of feminist evolutionary researcher Barbara Smuts. [15]
Hamilton (2008) has criticized Thornhill and Palmer's definition of rape as the coerced vaginal penetration of women of reproductive age. He has suggested that the exclusion of male rape, rape of women outside the reproductive age range, murderous rape, and non-vaginal forms of rape virtually guaranteed the confirmation of their hypothesis that rape is an evolved reproductive strategy and not a crime of violence. Hamilton has argued that evolutionary psychology fails to explain rape because, by evolutionary psychology's own criteria, an adaptation to rape children or men, or non-vaginal rape, would have been eliminated in the course of evolution because it did not confer reproductive advantage on our ancestors. [16]
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss states that clear-cut evidence for or against rape as an adaptation is lacking. He states that rape may instead be a non-adaptive by-product of other evolved mechanisms, such as desire for sexual variety and for sex without investment, sensitivity to sexual opportunities, and a general capacity for physical aggression. [17]
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
In sexuality, seduction means enticing someone into sexual intercourse or other sexual activity.
Concealed ovulation or hidden estrus in a species is the lack of any perceptible change in an adult female when she is fertile and near ovulation. Some examples of perceptible changes are swelling and redness of the vulva in baboons and bonobos, and pheromone release in the feline family. In contrast, the females of humans and a few other species that undergo hidden estrus have few external signs of fecundity, making it difficult for a mate to consciously deduce, by means of external signs only, whether or not a female is near ovulation.
Parental investment, in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, is any parental expenditure that benefits offspring. Parental investment may be performed by both males and females, females alone or males alone. Care can be provided at any stage of the offspring's life, from pre-natal to post-natal.
A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), however, EPMs refer to a less restricted set. Psychological adaptations include only the functional traits that increase the fitness of an organism, while EPMs refer to any psychological mechanism that developed through the processes of evolution. These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development, as well as the vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though they may no longer have adaptive functionality. For example, xenophobic attitudes and behaviors, some have claimed, appear to have certain EPM influences relating to disease aversion, however, in many environments these behaviors will have a detrimental effect on a person's fitness. The principles of psychological adaptation rely on Darwin's theory of evolution and are important to the fields of evolutionary psychology, biology, and cognitive science.
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.
Human male sexuality encompasses a wide variety of feelings and behaviors. Men's feelings of attraction may be caused by various physical and social traits of their potential partner. Men's sexual behavior can be affected by many factors, including evolved predispositions, individual personality, upbringing, and culture. While most men are heterosexual, there are minorities of homosexual men and varying degrees of bisexual men.
Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.
Sexual violence refers to a range of completed or attempted sexual acts in which the affected party does not or is unable to consent. Theories on the causes of sexual violence are numerous and have come out of many different disciplines, such as women's studies, public health, and criminal justice. Proposed causes include military conquest, socioeconomics, anger, power, sadism, traits, ethical standards, laws, and evolutionary pressures. Most of the research on the causes of sexual violence has focused on male offenders.
A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion is a 2000 book by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer, in which the authors argue that evolutionary psychology can account for rape among human beings, maintain that rape is either a behavioral adaptation or a byproduct of adaptive traits such as sexual desire and aggressiveness, and make proposals for preventing rape. They also criticize the assumption that there is a connection between what is naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong, which they refer to as the "naturalistic fallacy", and the idea, popularized by the feminist author Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975), that rape is an expression of male domination and is not sexually motivated.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as behavioral genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
Randy Thornhill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his evolutionary explanation of rape as well as his work on insect mating systems and the parasite-stress theory.
Sexual suggestiveness is visual, verbal, written or behavioral material or action with sexual undertones implying sexual intent in order to provoke sexual arousal.
The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1979 book about human sexuality by the anthropologist Donald Symons, in which the author discusses topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, attempting to show how evolutionary concepts can be applied to humans. Symons argues that the female orgasm is not an adaptive trait and that women have the capacity for it only because orgasm is adaptive for men, and that differences between the sexual behavior of male and female homosexuals help to show underlying differences between male and female sexuality. In his view, homosexual men tend to be sexually promiscuous because of the tendency of men in general to desire sex with a large number of partners, a tendency that in heterosexual men is usually restrained by women's typical lack of interest in promiscuous sex. Symons also argues that rape can be explained in evolutionary terms and feminist claims that it is not sexually motivated are incorrect.
Mate preferences in humans refers to why one human chooses or chooses not to mate with another human and their reasoning why. Men and women have been observed having different criteria as what makes a good or ideal mate. A potential mate's socioeconomic status has also been seen important, especially in developing areas where social status is more emphasized.
Pregnancy is a potential result of rape. It has been studied in the context of war, particularly as a tool for genocide, as well as in other unrelated contexts, such as rape by a stranger, statutory rape, incest, and underage pregnancy. The scientific consensus is that rape is at least as likely to lead to pregnancy as consensual sexual intercourse, with some studies suggesting rape may actually result in higher rates of pregnancy than consensual intercourse.
The male warrior hypothesis (MWH) is an evolutionary psychology hypothesis by Professor Mark van Vugt which argues that human psychology has been shaped by between-group competition and conflict. Specifically, the evolutionary history of coalitional aggression between groups of men may have resulted in sex-specific differences in the way outgroups are perceived, creating ingroup vs. outgroup tendencies that are still observable today.
Extended female sexuality is where the female of a species mates despite being infertile. In most species, the female only engages in copulation when she is fertile. However, extended sexuality has been documented in Old World primates, pair bonded birds and some insects. Extended sexuality is most prominent in human females who exhibit no change in copulation rate across the ovarian cycle.
Rape myths are prejudicial, stereotyped, and false beliefs about sexual assaults, rapists, and rape victims. They often serve to excuse sexual aggression, create hostility toward victims, and bias criminal prosecution.
In evolutionary psychology, sexual conflict in humans occurs as a result of men and women having diverging reproductive interests, creating tension and competition between the two sexes over mating strategies. Sexual conflict also arises in other species as a result of males and females having different optimal strategies for maximizing their reproductive success. In humans, as well as other species, males tend to seek strategies that increase their number of mating opportunities, while females tend to seek strategies that ensure high investment and quality from their mates.
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