This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 36, Winter 1997/98.
Biological determinism is making a comeback. More worrying still, it is not confined to cranks, crackpots and right-wing extremists; it is becoming dangerously fashionable in spheres of political influence, in the guise of evolutionary psychology. Debbie Cameron here presents us with some of the theories put forward in support of ‘human nature’ — from the merely ludicrous to the wholly objectionable.
Simone de Beauvoir said it in 1949: women are made, not born. Anatomy is not destiny, and sexism is not explained or justified by the facts of biology. This view is now orthodox liberal wisdom. Belief in biological determinism is confined to saloon bar bigots and the sort of crusty old judge who has never heard of the Beatles.
Or is it? Intellectual fashion is as fickle as any other kind, and there are signs that biologism is becoming respectable again. In the 1970s it was Marx trendy intellectuals talked about, in the 1980s it was Freud, and now it’s the turn of a third Bearded Victorian Patriarch, the evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin.
From theory to ‘world view’: the Darwin Seminar
I first got wind of this a couple of years ago, when a friend put me on the mailing list of something called ‘The Darwin Seminar’, which is based at the London School of Economics. She thought I might want to keep a feminist eye on its doings, since as she put it, ‘these people are sinister’.
The Seminar proceeded to bombard me with literature: papers, summaries of papers, briefing notes, announcements of meetings. Contributors seemed obsessed with things like the ideal female hip-to-waist measurement ratio and the statistics on step-parents killing their partners’ children. Whatever was being discussed, the theme was invariably that Darwin had all the answers. Writers were scathing about social scientists who treat standards of beauty or patterns of violent crime as social constructs.
The seminar’s outpourings were sometimes reminiscent of religious fundamentalist tracts —ironic, when you consider who Darwin’s main enemies were in his own time. The thought crossed my mind that it might be a front for the sort of right-wing crackpots who gave Darwin such a bad name in the heyday of the eugenics movement, and who still stir up controversy with their ravings about the ‘underclass’ or Black people’s IQs.
But the Darwin Seminar is much subtler than that, much closer to the liberal mainstream. And the mainstream is increasingly taking notice of what it has to say. Its conferences get coverage in the quality press, books by its participants are widely reviewed, and the fashionable think-tank Demos recently devoted a whole issue of its house magazine Demos Quarterly to the seminar’s ideas. The issue was called ‘Matters of Life and Death: The world view from evolutionary psychology’, and it ends with ‘Ten Big Challenges from the Evolutionary Agenda’, essentially a list of social policy proposals.
This does make me uneasy, since it suggests the new Darwinists are actively courting political influence. Think-tanks are an increasingly important part of British political culture: often loosely affiliated to (and sometimes partially funded by) political parties, their function is to carry out research on policy issues and also to ‘think the unthinkable’, floating ideas which may then be taken up by politicians and their advisors. The Centre for Policy Studies played this role for the Conservative party during the Thatcher era, and Demos is doing the same for Tony Blair’s new Labour administration (Blair himself is known to read Demos’s reports). If there’s a chance people with real power might take it seriously, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at ‘the world view from evolutionary psychology’.
Evolutionary psychology: back to (human) nature
Put in its simplest terms, evolutionary psychology (EP) is the application of Darwin’s ideas to the study of human behaviour — how we think, feel and act. The main thesis of EP is that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’: a universal set of mental/emotional/behavioural traits which do not vary across cultures or change over time. These traits have become established, through the mechanism of natural selection, because it was advantageous to ancestral humans to possess particular mental characteristics — just as it was advantageous to them to possess certain physical traits.
To understand what’s being claimed here, it’s useful to know that present-day evolutionary science has moved on from the Darwinian concepts most of us vaguely remember, such as ‘survival of the fittest’. Probably the most important innovation is the theory of the ‘selfish gene’, according to which it is genes, rather than whole organisms, which compete for survival. For genes, ‘survival’ means being passed on to offspring. So an ‘advantageous’ characteristic in evolutionary terms is not necessarily one that keeps me alive longer or makes my life easier, it is simply one that maximises my chances of having offspring that carry my genes.
Natural selection is the process whereby genes that produce ‘advantageous’ characteristics become more common in the population, and ultimately features of whole species. These characteristics originally emerge by chance, not design: they are genetic mutations affecting individuals, but if they prove advantageous they will spread.
Textbooks often illustrate this using the example of the peacock’s tail. It’s a useful example of the restricted nature of evolutionary advantage, because this tail has clear disadvantages for the survival of any individual peacock, such as making it obvious to predators and slowing it down when it tries to fly away. Why was it selected? The answer is, it’s good for reproduction and from a selfish gene perspective that’s all it needs to be good for.
From peacocks to people
Imagine a population of peacocks where some have a big, colourful tail and others a smaller drabber one. Now suppose that peahens are attracted to the big tail, and mate more often with peacocks who have one. The offspring of big tailed peacocks inherit the gene for the big tail. By statistical logic, therefore, over time the big tailed peacocks will outnumber the others and finally displace them. Despite its other drawbacks, the tail survives because at one time it made peacocks who had it better than those who didn’t at passing on their genes.
Evolutionary psychologists apply the same reasoning to human psychology. Humans reproduce sexually; Darwinists hypothesise that certain ways of thinking, feeling and acting enabled our ancestors to do this more successfully, and so by natural selection they became part of our ‘nature’. For example, it’s suggested that our capacity for language and for cultural production (art, literature, etc.) originally served the purpose of making individuals who had those abilities more attractive to the opposite sex. Like the peacock’s tail, these abilities were useful for sexual display, or in plainer language, showing off.
One of the more obviously barking contributions to Demos Quarterly applies this to politics, speculating that when students at Columbia University in New York protested against investment in South Africa in 1986, they were less interested in registering their disgust with apartheid than in advertising themselves to like-minded people who might want to mate with them. The protest functioned as a sort of giant dating agency (‘concerned caring liberal seeks similar for reproductive purposes’). Unconsciously, protesters would reason: ‘if s/he cares so much about people s/he’s never met in South Africa, s/he will obviously be highly committed to the children who carry our genes’.
The ‘unconsciously’ is important here, for no one is arguing that humans consciously reduce every aspect of their activities to the primeval quest to pass on their genes, that they go to political rallies with the intention of picking up a suitable mate and having their children (this would be a particularly poor explanation of women’s involvement in feminist politics!) The things we do now do not have to serve the same purpose in contemporary reality that they are said to have served for our distant ancestors (who did not of course go to political rallies at all). Once natural selection has made some psychological disposition the norm, we will go on expressing it in our behaviour regardless of whether it serves any purpose at all.
This argument is used to explain why we persist in doing things which in modern conditions are thoroughly unhelpful. For instance, there’s a theory humans are genetically programmed to like sweet and fatty foods. It was advantageous for our ancestors to be highly motivated to seek these foods out, since their nutritional value was high, and they were scarce. But many humans today live in conditions where they are overabundant. We eat too much of the foods we are programmed to like and as a result large numbers of us die of heart disease.
Demos makes a social policy point out of this argument: since we are ‘by nature’ vulnerable to the appeal of foods which can kill us, there’s a case for restricting the food industry’s right to exploit our ‘natural’ weakness for them. This illustrates that the new Darwinism is more politically ambiguous than old-style social Darwinism. You don’t have to be a nutter or a right-wing authoritarian to sympathise with the argument that it’s exploitative to peddle junk food. But the potential nuttiness of basing social policy on ideas about ‘human nature’ as a product of natural selection comes more sharply into focus when you turn to a subject of obsessive interest to Darwinists: sex.
Sex: all in the genes?
When it comes to sex differences (evolutionary psychologists do not believe in gender) the key point is that women and men play differing roles in reproduction, and this is not just a physiological matter. The social costs of reproduction are different for each sex, and during the evolution of humankind it would therefore have been an advantage for males and females to develop different ways of thinking, behaving and feeling. As Darwin Seminar convenor Helena Cronin, writing in the socialist magazine Red Pepper, summed this up: ‘Evolution made men’s and women’s minds as unalike as it made our bodies’.
In support of this argument Darwinists cite studies showing that in culture after culture, men seek ‘mates’ (scientist-speak for women/wives) who are younger than they are and meet certain standards of attractiveness, such as having symmetrical features and a waist to hip ratio of around 0.7. These desired qualities are supposedly shorthand indicators of female fertility. Men’s ancestors reproduced more successfully when their sexual preferences stopped them wasting time and genes on women who couldn’t have healthy babies; present-day men inherit the ‘advantageous’ preferences.
Women, for their part, must invest considerably more time and effort in reproduction — at a minimum, the nine months of pregnancy. They are therefore more interested in whether a prospective mate can provide for them and their offspring; if not, the investment is a risky one. That’s why studies find that women rate men on the size of their wallets as opposed to their waists. It’s also why women are (allegedly) more hurt by men’s emotional infidelities than their purely sexual ones. If a man has withdrawn emotionally he may decline to provide for his children. For men, it’s women’s sexual infidelity that poses the real threat. Women know the children they bear are carrying their genes; men have more reason to be anxious about this. In other words, given the unalterable facts of human sexual reproduction, natural selection would ‘logically’ favour men who felt sexual jealousy and women who prioritised emotional commitment.
Those of us who prefer sociological accounts are unlikely to be convinced by this reasoning. It is hardly surprising if women prefer men richer than themselves in a world where the vast majority of communities distribute wealth so unequally between the sexes. Women, by and large, are the poor: that in itself seems sufficient to explain why they so frequently marry men who are richer than they are.
Factual selection?
Darwinists are curiously selective about which culturally widespread behaviours they choose to focus on. For example, the abuse of children by their stepfathers crops up repeatedly: statistics suggesting that stepchildren are at greater risk than natural children are seized on eagerly, because selfish gene theory predicts that men have a motive for harming children who do not carry their genes. (This is extrapolated from the behaviour of certain animals which will kill another male’s children so their mothers stop lactating and become available to mate with the killer.) One of Demos’s ‘Ten Big Challenges’ proposes that social policy around fostering, adoption, child protection and so on should take account of the deep-rooted tendency to favour one’s own kin.
But this argument seems to miss out huge swathes of what feminists know to be reality. We know, for instance, that men’s abuse of their natural children is not rare, nor is abuse by men who have no involvement with their victims’ mothers (e.g. abuse in residential care). It is also evident that abortion and infanticide (by mothers or their close female kin) are culturally and historically widespread practices. In these cases women decide not to bear or nurture children who obviously do carry their genes. Strangely enough, none of the contributors to Demos Quarterly discuss the evolutionary advantages of this behaviour or call for the law to reflect its pervasiveness in human societies past and present.
Darwinists’ selectiveness on this subject looks suspiciously ideological. The statistics they cite about abused and murdered stepchildren are meant to show that the traditional nuclear family (two parents plus their joint offspring) poses least risk; since this does not follow from the facts about child abuse it must reflect a desire to endorse bourgeois patriarchal ‘family values’.
Another good example of ‘factual selection’ concerns the treatment of homosexuality. It’s obvious why this should pose something of a problem. In a universe where sex = heterosex and its ultimate purpose is the passing on of genes through reproduction, what evolutionary advantage could possibly be conferred by the tendency to prefer one’s own sex?
Edward O. Wilson, a pioneer of sociobiology, suggested in 1978 that homosexuality was a ‘beneficent behaviour that evolved as an important element of early human organisation’. (What he meant and whether it applied to lesbians is obscure.) But his successors seem strangely reluctant even to broach the subject. In a review of a recent Darwinist book titled Why is sex fun? (a question-begging title if ever there was one), the reviewer notes with astonishment that homosexuality is not mentioned once.
From romance to rape
The assumptions Darwinists make about sex and reproduction lead them to some particularly strange and objectionable conclusions about rape. Robert Wright, in a piece for Demos Quarterly titled ‘The dissent of woman’, argues that the ‘anguish’ a woman feels after rape is much the same thing as she feels when she has (consensual) sex with a man who then leaves her. Women have intercourse willingly, apparently, only when they believe the man is committed to any offspring the act may produce. If it turns out the man was only pretending commitment, the woman feels duped. In the case of rape, she knows from the beginning that he is not committed to her or their joint offspring, and that is what makes the act uniquely unbearable. In evolutionary terms, she has been wasting her eggs on a man who is not worthy of them, and the distinctive feature of rape is that she knows that throughout.
If this were not so offensive you would laugh at the sheer absurdity of it, remote as it is from any actual experience of rape. It overlooks the physical and verbal abuse which often accompanies forced sex; it also overlooks that rape has much in common with sexual assaults which do not involve intercourse and so cannot result in conception. The woman’s own body and sexuality are treated as being of no consequence; nor is there any recognition of the anger and outrage women justifiably feel when their wishes as well as their bodies are violated.
Robert Wright suggests that rape is what men resort to ‘when other forms of manipulation fail’ and there is thus no legitimate way to do what a man’s got to do, which is ensure the survival of his genes. The problem men face is that women — the sex which invests more time and energy in reproduction — are choosier than men about who they mate with. Robert Wright describes the ‘typical rapist’ as ‘lacking the material and personal resources to attract women’, i.e. too poor, ugly and/or socially unskilled to be chosen voluntarily as a mate.
This shows a typically cavalier attitude to the research literature in disciplines outside biology. That literature consistently stresses how similar rapists are to other men. As one of the women who participated in Sue Lees’s research on rape said about the man who attacked her, ‘My mother couldn’t believe how normal he looked…of course he’s a normal looking bloke’. Most profiles of ‘typical rapists’ apply only to the minority who get caught and convicted, while those who evade detection or get acquitted are presumably even more ‘normal’ in their appearance and demeanour. Plenty of rapists also have ‘legitimate’ sexual relations: several of Sue Lees’s informants described their attacker as ‘a family man’ and Sue Lees herself adds that ‘many of [the serial rapists in her sample] are married or have girlfriends’. It is depressing that a scientist like Robert Wright should recycle the myth of rape as the expression of some desperate unmet need to have sex, when all the evidence — 20 years’ worth of it — decisively contradicts this view.
The odd couple: Charles Darwin meets Andrea Dworkin
Repulsive and inaccurate though many of his comments are, Robert Wright’s overall argument in ‘The dissent of woman’ has some unexpected points of contact with radical feminist analysis. The feminists this author has real contempt for are liberal ‘equality’ feminists who vainly imagine that women and men can be held to a single, genderless standard of behaviour. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon make more sense to him — at least as he reads their arguments. Thus he quotes Andrea Dworkin’s statement about what men can do to get sex from women: ‘steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the US) or own it outright (marriage in most societies)’. And he adds: ‘this would strike some Darwinians as a fair thumbnail sketch of the situation’.
Robert Wright believes that the mindset produced in women by natural selection makes us ‘uniquely vulnerable’ in ways that ought to be recognised by the law. One of the ‘Ten big challenges from the evolutionary agenda’ is:
Male and female psychologies have evolved to be distinctly different in assessing the costs — indeed, the very notion — of anti-social behaviour. Our legal system should reflect these differences if it is to promote true equality before the law (p.48, original emphasis).
Darwinism and feminism: threat or promise?
Like the proposal to restrict the promotion of attractive but unhealthy foods, the suggestion that women’s distinctive ‘nature’ be reflected in law illustrates a difference between the new Darwinism and cruder forms of pop sociobiology. The latter often seemed to be saying: ‘this is how things are; they can’t be changed, so get used to it’ — where ‘it’ could be anything from war to sexual harassment to men spending all their time bonding with each other in the pub. New Darwinists not only suggest that we can make better social arrangements (since intelligence and altruism are also part of evolved ‘human nature’), some believe this is the most important use to which scientific knowledge about our ‘natures’ can be put.
Another difference between EP and earlier sociobiology is that the new Darwinists are smart enough to realise that overt displays of sexism and antifeminism will not help their case. Instead, their strategy is to insist that feminists have nothing to lose, and even something to gain, by taking Darwinist approaches on board: appealing to biological difference actually strengthens the feminist argument on issues like rape.
This is a bit like saying that because radical feminists and fundamentalist christians agree in opposing pornography, they are ‘really’ political allies. True, if Demos’s ‘big challenge’ quoted above were taken seriously, the outcome might not be a million miles from certain feminist ideas about reforming the criminal justice system. Many radical feminists agree that so-called gender-neutral justice works against women: in certain cases (such as the proposed self-preservation defence for battered women who kill their abusers) feminists do want women and men to be treated differently in law. But the reasoning behind the Demos proposal is light years away from radical feminism: what feminists criticise is not the law’s failure to recognise biological sex differences but its failure to recognise material differences of power.
Another strategy the Darwinists use to neutralise feminist criticism without appearing overtly antifeminist is to appeal to the truth and objectivity of science, branding critics as ignorant, superstitious ideologues. Helena Cronin’s piece in Red Pepper is a classic example:
Science simply tells it like it is; it doesn’t dictate goals. But how can we promote a fairer world—from social and legal policy to personal relationships — unless we understand differences, unless we let truth, not ignorance, be our guide?
Coming from the convenor of a group with overt social policymaking ambitions, this is highly disingenuous. It also glosses over the way scientific ‘truth’ is shaped by the power structures of the societies in which science is done. Even a cursory glance at the history of theorising about sex differences casts doubt on the claim that ‘science simply tells it like it is’. The experts who claimed that higher education would shrink women’s ovaries said the same things about scientific truth 100 years ago that Helena Cronin says now, and if we are sceptical about the motives behind the earlier claim (not to mention knowing for a fact that it was drivel), why should we take analogous claims at face value now? History tells us that the political costs invariably outweigh the benefits of locating women’s ‘nature’ in our reproductive organs.
Backward reasoning
Another question it is reasonable to ask is whether EP is actually good science. The trouble with Darwinist fundamentalism is that the same Big Idea (everything about us is the product of natural selection) must be used to explain all manner of things, some of which contradict each other. It is hard to see how many of the accounts EP proposes could ever be disproved from within the framework of Darwinist theory; yet the ability to be falsified is supposed to be the central requirement for a properly scientific hypothesis.
Evolutionary psychologists reason backwards. They start with a phenomenon which is cross-culturally widespread now, such as women marrying men of higher status/greater wealth, and assume that if it’s so pervasive it must be a product of natural selection. Then they set about constructing an account of why the characteristic in question was selected, which means identifying the reason it must have been advantageous to our ancestors. This way of proceeding merely projects current social patterns back into the remote past, with nothing to support this strategy except the very theory the researchers are meant to be testing.
It is not surprising if evolutionary psychologists find themselves stuck for hard evidence. When your subject is the evolution of ‘human nature’ as opposed to, say, walking upright, the reconstruction of pre-history is fraught with difficulty. We can look at skeletal remains and say whether their owners were equipped to walk on two legs, but we know virtually nothing for certain about the social life, still less the psychology, of our earliest ancestors. Feelings do not leave fossil traces. How can we know if early humans felt jealousy, or if the males were attracted to females with small waists? More than once, confronted with some unverifiable speculation about prehistoric lifestyles, I found myself singing under my breath: ‘Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they’re the modern stone-age family…’
Genes with everything
If you accept the basic principles of Darwin’s evolutionary theory (which I do), then it is true that whatever biological characteristics humans now possess must be the outcome of natural selection. But there is plenty of room for doubt about whether particular ways of feeling or behaving really are biological characteristics, encoded in our genes.
Obviously, our genetic endowment sets limits on what we can do. No social conditions or learning experiences will produce humans who can fly, or read minds. But it’s quite a leap from this common-sense observation to the notion that there’s a gene for everything, right down to such specific emotions/behaviours as ‘sexual jealousy’. If there isn’t a gene, however, then you can’t argue that the characteristic is a product of natural selection.
As a culture we have become alarmingly credulous about claims that this or that — homosexuality or criminality or whatever — is ‘in the genes’. Any finding that tends to support this notion will receive blanket media coverage, often not merely uncritical of the scientists but actually exaggerating their claims.
In June 1997, for instance, scientists at the Institute of Child Health announced they might have found a genetic basis for the superior social skills which are commonly glossed as ‘female intuition’. Girls with a condition called Turner’s syndrome, in which you only have one X chromosome instead of the two which are normal in females, scored lower than XX girls on tests of ‘social cognition’. Boys — who also have only one X chromosome — generally score lower than girls. The scientists thus speculated that there’s a gene for ‘social cognition’ on the X chromosome which XX girls inherit from their fathers. But no one has found the relevant piece of DNA. Until they do, and prove that its presence affects the social cognition scores of a large sample of individuals in a predictable way, we are entitled to consider it at least equally likely there is a sociological explanation of the test results. But most media reporting treated the gene’s existence as a fact.
A handful of salt
Even if we accept that some behavioural characteristic is a product of natural selection, we cannot so easily claim to know why it was selected. Stories about it helping our ancestors to pass on their genes more successfully must be taken with a handful of salt: they are easy to make up and difficult to prove or disprove. Even in the case of language — an extremely significant characteristic of our species which clearly does have a biological basis — experts argue about whether the capacity for it conferred some survival benefit in its own right, or whether it was just a spin-off from some other cognitive faculty that had survival benefits.
Darwinists tend to reason that if something survived, the benefits of having it must have been greater than the costs, and the point of their stories is to elucidate what those benefits were (e.g. the peacock’s otherwise stupid tail made it sexually attractive to peahens). At the same time, they stress that the raw material for natural selection is random mutation, and they castigate laypeople for the sin of ‘teleology’, which means supposing that evolution is automatically progress towards some pre-ordained ideal state. It seems to me they can’t have this both ways; but surely that’s exactly what they are doing when they explain every tendency we can observe in human behaviour by telling the same story, i.e. ‘it must have helped our ancestors pass on their genes’. This implies that present-day humans are perfect reproductive machines, in whose DNA nothing disadvantageous, pointless or simply random has survived.
The dangers of Darwinism
Gross abuses have been perpetrated in the name of Darwin, most notably where half-baked ideas about ‘survival of the fittest’ have been used to justify the sterilisation or, in Hitler’s case, the wholesale extermination of the so-called ‘unfit’. By comparison, the political pretentions of evolutionary psychology look benign; at least its agenda is not genocidal. It is, however, potentially oppressive and reactionary, for it rests on the idea that if some arrangement is ‘natural’, rooted in the fundamental needs and instincts of human beings, it is by that same token the arrangement most conducive to happiness and social justice. Women have heard this a thousand times before, and it has rarely if ever been a politically progressive argument.
The idea that our social and political arrangements should work with the grain of our ‘nature’ was not invented by Darwin or his latter day apostles. It runs through the whole tradition of western political thought, where it was well-established long before science arrived on the scene. But the tradition in question is a classically patriarchal one, centring on the nature, the needs and rights of ‘Man’, i.e. white European property-owning males. At different times, its concept of what is ‘natural’ (and thus politically desirable, or inevitable) has encompassed the enslavement of Africans, the wholesale destruction of indigenous populations by colonisers and the condemning of poor people in vast numbers to death from disease and starvation. In other words, definitions of the ‘natural’ have reflected the perceptions and interests of those doing the defining.
That is why I find it shocking when Helena Cronin — a woman and in her own estimation a feminist — affirms that ‘evolution made men’s and women’s minds as unalike as it made our bodies’. I cannot help hearing echoes in this statement of every misogynist thinker — Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche, the fascists of the early twentieth century — who ever proclaimed the same doctrine. Different minds, separate spheres, kinder, küche, kirche: even dressed up in new Darwinist clothes, how can such concepts be compatible with feminism?
The short answer is, they can’t: modern feminism was founded on an explicit rejection of the belief that women and men have naturally different minds. This is the central plank of Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written just over two centuries ago. Mary Wollstonecraft realised that ideas about ‘natural’ sex difference were a key ideological weapon in men’s struggle to maintain their unjust dominance over women. They still are.
Nature versus justice
In order to resist ‘the world view from evolutionary psychology’, we need not get bogged down in ‘nature versus nurture’ arguments about whether there really is a gene for female intuition, or ironing, or whatever the scientists have come up with this week. That is fighting on the enemy’s terms. The point we have to get across is that nature, or difference, is not the issue. What matters to feminists is not whether our social arrangements are ‘natural’ but whether they are just.
The point is made neatly if we turn once again to history. When the suffragettes were fighting for women’s right to vote, they used the slogan ‘justice demands it’. Their opponents by contrast said it was ‘going against nature’ to burden women with political responsibilities. Nature is the sexists’ trump card; justice is ours. And justice demands that we expose Darwinist ideas about men’s and women’s ‘natures’ for the half-baked and wholly ideological claptrap they are.
References
Helena Cronin, ‘It’s only natural’, Red Pepper 39, August 1997.
Demos Quarterly no. 10 : ‘Matters of life and death: The world view from evolutionary psychology’, 1996.
Sue Lees, Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial (Hamish Hamilton, 1996).
Nick Lezard, ‘Sex in your molecules: review of Jared Diamond, Why is sex fun?’, The Guardian, July 31 1997.
Hilary Rose, ‘Beyond biology’, Red Pepper 40, September 1997.
Helena Cronin’s Red Pepper article not surprisingly provoked some criticism from readers: the next issue included a direct reply from the feminist biologist Hilary Rose. (‘Beyond Biology’, Red Pepper, September 1997, p.23).
‘In fact, it is far commoner in absolute terms than abuse by stepfathers. Stepfathers are statistically overrepresented among abusers in the sense that a higher percentage of stepfathers than natural fathers are known to abuse; but this could reflect a number of factors, including the under-reporting of abuse by natural fathers compared to stepfathers and a tendency among child abusers to deliberately involve themselves with women who have children. Anyway, a ‘high’ percentage of abusive stepfathers still adds up to fewer men than a less high percentage of abusive natural fathers — stepfathers are a minority of men living with children.’