Evolutionary Biology of Rape

Why Men Rape
http://www.gonzaga.edu/
Why Men Rape
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES · JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000
FEATURE
Why Men Rape

Prevention efforts will founder until they are based on the understanding
that rape evolved as a form of male reproductive behavior
BY RANDY THORNHILL AND CRAIG T. PALMER
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Why Men Rape
Kiki Smith, Las Animas, 1997
INTRODUCTION
A friend of ours once told us about her rape. The details hardly matter, but in
outline her story is numbingly familiar. After a movie she returned with her date to his car,
which had been left in an isolated parking lot. She was expecting him to drive her home.
Instead, the man locked the car doors and physically forced her to have sex with him.
Our friend was emotionally scarred by her experience: she became anxious about
dating, and even about going out in public. She had trouble sleeping, eating and
concentrating on her work. Indeed, like some war veterans, rape victims often suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder, in which symptoms such as anxiety, memory loss,
obsessive thoughts and emotional numbness linger after a deeply disturbing experience.
Yet gruesome ordeals like that of our friend are all too common: in a 1992 survey of
American women aged eighteen and older, 13 percent of the respondents reported having
been the victim of at least one rape, where rape was defined as unwelcome oral, anal or
vaginal penetration achieved through the use or threat of force. Surely, eradicating sexual
violence is an issue that modern society should make a top priority. But first a perplexing
question must be confronted and answered: Why do men rape?
The quest for the answer to that question has occupied the two of us collectively for more
than forty years. As a purely scientific puzzle, the problem is hard enough. But it is further
roiled by strong ideological currents. Many social theorists view rape not only as an ugly
crime but as a symptom of an unhealthy society, in which men fear and disrespect women.
In 1975 the feminist writer Susan Brownmiller asserted that rape is motivated not by lust
but by the urge to control and dominate. In the twenty-five years since, Brownmiller. s
view has become mainstream. All men feel sexual desire, the theory goes, but not all men
rape. Rape is viewed as an unnatural behavior that has nothing to do with sex, and one that
has no corollary in the animal world.
Undoubtedly, individual rapists may have a variety of motivations. A man may rape
because, for instance, he wants to impress his friends by losing his virginity, or because he
wants to avenge himself against a woman who has spurned him. But social scientists have
not convincingly demonstrated that rapists are not at least partly motivated by sexual
desire as well. Indeed, how could a rape take place at all without sexual motivation on the
part of the rapist? Isn. t sexual arousal of the rapist the one common factor in all rapes,
including date rapes, rapes of children, rapes of women under anesthetic and even gang
rapes committed by soldiers during war?

Why Men Rape
CHALLENGING OLD IDEAS
We want to challenge the dearly held idea that rape is not about sex. We realize that
our approach and our frankness will rankle some social scientists, including some serious
and well-intentioned rape investigators. But many facts point to the conclusion that rape
is, in its very essence, a sexual act. Furthermore, we argue, rape has evolved over
millennia of human history, along with courtship, sexual attraction and other behaviors
related to the production of offspring.
Consider the following facts:
" Most rape victims are women of childbearing age.
" In many cultures rape is treated as a crime against the victim. s husband.
" Rape victims suffer less emotional distress when they are subjected to more violence.
" Rape takes place not only among human beings but also in a variety of other animal
species.
" Married women and women of childbearing age experience more psychological distress
after a rape than do girls, single women or women who are past menopause.
As bizarre as some of those facts may seem, they all make sense when rape is viewed as
a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage.
Here we must hasten to emphasize that by categorizing a behavior as "natural" and

"biological" we 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 of our critics assert that we do. that
what is biological is somehow right or good, would be to fall into the so-called naturalistic
fallacy. That mistake is obvious enough when one considers such natural disasters as
epidemics, floods and tornadoes. In those cases it is clear that what is natural is not always
desirable. And of course much can be, and is, done to protect people against natural
threats. from administering antibiotics to drawing up emergency evacuation plans. In other
words, the fact that rape is an ancient part of human nature in no way excuses the rapist
RAPE: NATURE VS. NATURE
Why, then, have the editors of scholarly journals refused to publish papers that treat
rape from a Darwinian perspective? Why have pickets and audience protesters caused
public lectures on the evolutionary basis of rape to be canceled or terminated? Why have
investigators working to discover the evolutionary causes of rape been denied positions at
universities?

Why Men Rape
The reason is the deep schism between many social scientists and investigators such as
ourselves who are proponents of what is variously called sociobiology or evolutionary
psychology. Social scientists regard culture. everything from eating habits to language. as
an entirely human invention, one that develops arbitrarily. According to that view, the
desires of men and women are learned behaviors. Rape takes place only when men learn
to rape, and it can be eradicated simply by substituting new lessons. Sociobiologists, by
contrast, emphasize that learned behavior, and indeed all culture, is the result of
psychological adaptations that have evolved over long periods of time. Those adaptations,
like all traits of individual human beings, have both genetic and environmental
components. We fervently believe that, just as the leopard. s spots and the giraffe. s
elongated neck are the result of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape.
That conclusion has profound and immediate practical consequences. The rape-
prevention measures that are being taught to police officers, lawyers, parents, college
students and potential rapists are based on the prevailing social-science view, and are
therefore doomed to fail. The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is the
most powerful scientific theory that applies to living things. As long as efforts to prevent
rape remain uninformed by that theory, they will continue to be handicapped by ideas
about human nature that are fundamentally inadequate. We believe that only by
acknowledging the evolutionary roots of rape can prevention tactics be devised that really
work.
GENDER DIFFERENCES
From a Darwinian perspective, every kind of animal. whether grasshopper or gorilla,

German or Ghanaian. has evolved to produce healthy children that will survive to pass
along their parents. genetic legacy. The mechanics of the phenomenon are simple: animals
born without traits that led to reproduction died out, whereas the ones that reproduced the
most succeeded in conveying their genes to posterity. Crudely speaking, sex feels good
because over evolutionary time the animals that liked having sex created more offspring
than the animals that didn. t.
As everyone knows all too well, however, sex and the social behaviors that go with it
are endlessly complicated. Their mysterious and tangled permutations have inspired
flights of literary genius throughout the ages, from Oedipus Rex to Portnoy. s Complaint.
And a quick perusal of the personal-growth section of any bookstore. past such titles as
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and You Just Don. t Understand. is enough
to show that one reason sex is so complicated is that men and women perceive it so
differently. Is that the case only because boys and girls receive different messages during
their upbringing? Or, as we believe, do those differences between the sexes go deeper?
Over vast periods of evolutionary time, men and women have confronted quite different
reproductive challenges. Whereas fathers can share the responsibilities of child rearing,
they do not have to. Like most of their male counterparts in the rest of the animal
kingdom, human males can reproduce successfully with a minimal expenditure of time

Why Men Rape
and energy; once the brief act of sexual intercourse is completed, their contribution can
cease. By contrast, the minimum effort required for a woman to reproduce successfully
includes nine months of pregnancy and a painful childbirth. Typically, ancestral females
also had to devote themselves to prolonged breast-feeding and many years of child care if
they were to ensure the survival of their genes. In short, a man can have many children,
with little inconvenience to himself; a woman can have only a few, and with great effort.
That difference is the key to understanding the origins of certain important adaptations.
features that persist because they were favored by natural selection in the past. Given the
low cost in time and energy that mating entails for the male, selection favored males who
mated frequently. By contrast, selection favored females who gave careful consideration
to their choice of a mate; that way, the high costs of mating for the female would be
undertaken under circumstances that were most likely to produce healthy offspring. The
result is that men show greater interest than women do in having a variety of sexual
partners and in having casual sex without investment or commitment. That commonplace
observation has been confirmed by many empirical studies. The evolutionary psychologist
David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, has found that women
around the world use wealth, status and earning potential as major criteria in selecting a
mate, and that they value those attributes in mates more than men do.
Remember, none of the foregoing behavioral manifestations of evolution need be

conscious. People do not necessarily have sex because they want children, and they
certainly do not conduct thorough cost-benefit analyses before taking a partner to bed. As
Darwin made clear, individual organisms merely serve as the instruments of evolution.
Men today find young women attractive because during human evolutionary history the
males who preferred prepubescent girls or women too old to conceive were outreproduced
by the males who were drawn to females of high reproductive potential. And women
today prefer successful men because the females who passed on the most genes, and
thereby became our ancestors, were the ones who carefully selected partners who could
best support their offspring. That is why, as the anthropologist Donald Symons of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, has observed, people everywhere understand sex
as "something females have that males want."
THE MATING GAME
A dozen roses, romantic dinners by candlelight, a Tiffany engagement ring: the

classic courtship ritual requires lots of time, energy and careful attention to detail. But
people are far from unique in that regard: the males of most animal species spend much of
their energies attracting, wooing and securing sexual partners. The male woodcock, for
instance, performs a dramatic display each spring at mating time, soaring high into the air
and then tumbling to the ground. Male fireflies are even flashier, blinking like neon signs.
The male bowerbird builds a veritable honeymoon cottage: an intricate, sculpted nest that
he decorates with flowers and other colorful bric-a-brac. Male deer and antelope lock
antlers in a display of brute strength to compete for females.

Why Men Rape
Once a female. s interest is piqued, the male behaves in various ways to make her more
sexually receptive. Depending on the species, he dances, fans his feathers or offers gifts of
food. In the nursery web spider, the food gift is an attempt to distract the female, who
otherwise might literally devour her partner during the sex act. The common thread that
binds nearly all animal species seems to be that males are willing to abandon all sense and
decorum, even to risk their lives, in the frantic quest for sex.
But though most male animals expend a great deal of time and energy enticing females,
forced copulation. rape. also occurs, at least occasionally, in a variety of insects, birds,
fishes, reptiles, amphibians, marine mammals and nonhuman primates. In some animal
species, moreover, rape is commonplace. In many scorpionfly species, for instance.
insects that one of us (Thornhill) has studied in depth. males have two well-formulated
strategies for mating. Either they offer the female a nuptial gift (a mass of hardened saliva
they have produced, or a dead insect) or they chase a female and take her by force.
A remarkable feature of these scorpionflies is an appendage that seems specially

designed for rape. Called the notal organ, it is a clamp on the top of the male. s abdomen
with which he can grab on to one of the female. s forewings during mating, to prevent her
escape. Besides rape, the notal organ does not appear to have any other function. For
example, when the notal organs of males are experimentally covered with beeswax, to
keep them from functioning, the males cannot rape. Such males still mate successfully,
however, when they are allowed to present nuptial gifts to females. And other experiments
have shown that the notal organ is not an adaptation for transferring sperm: in unforced
mating, the organ contributes nothing to insemination.
Not surprisingly, females prefer voluntary mating to mating by force: they will
approach a male bearing a nuptial gift and flee a male that does not have one. Intriguingly,
however, the males, too, seem to prefer a consensual arrangement: they rape only when
they cannot obtain a nuptial gift. Experiments have shown that when male scorpionflies
possessing nuptial gifts are removed from an area, giftless males. typically, the wimpier
ones that had failed in male-male competitions over prey. quickly shift from attempting
rape to guarding a gift that has been left untended. That preference for consensual sex
makes sense in evolutionary terms, because when females are willing, males are much
more likely to achieve penetration and sperm transfer.
Human males obviously have no external organ specifically designed for rape. One
must therefore look to the male psyche. to a potential mental rape organ. to discover any
special-purpose adaptation of the human male to rape.
RAPE AS REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGY
Since women are choosy, men have been selected for finding a way to be chosen. One
way to do that is to possess traits that women prefer: men with symmetrical body features
are attractive to women, presumably because such features are a sign of health. A second
way that men can gain access to women is by defeating other men in fights or other kinds

Why Men Rape
of competitions -- thereby gaining power, resources and social status, other qualities that
women find attractive.
Rape can be understood as a third kind of sexual strategy: one more way to gain access
to females. There are several mechanisms by which such a strategy could function. For
example, men might resort to rape when they are socially disenfranchised, and thus unable
to gain access to women through looks, wealth or status. Alternatively, men could have
evolved to practice rape when the costs seem low -- when, for instance, a woman is alone
and unprotected (and thus retaliation seems unlikely), or when they have physical control
over a woman (and so cannot be injured by her). Over evolutionary time, some men may
have succeeded in passing on their genes through rape, thus perpetuating the behavior. It
is also possible, however, that rape evolved not as a reproductive strategy in itself but
merely as a side effect of other adaptations, such as the strong male sex drive and the male
desire to mate with a variety of women.
Take, for instance, the fact that men are able to maintain sexual arousal and copulate
with unwilling women. That ability invites inquiry, according to the psychologist Margo
Wilson of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and her coworkers, because it is not
a trait that is common to the males of all animal species. Its existence in human males
could signal that they have evolved psychological mechanisms that specifically enable
them to engage in forced copulation -- in short, it could be a rape adaptation. But that is
not the only plausible explanation. The psychologist Neil M. Malamuth of the University
of California, Los Angeles, points out that the ability to copulate with unwilling women
may be simply a by-product of men's "greater capacity for impersonal sex."
IS RAPE AN ACT OF VIOLENCE?
More research is needed to decide the question of whether rape is an adaptation or

merely a by-product of other sexual adaptations. Both hypotheses are plausible: one of us
(Thornhill) supports the former, whereas the other (Palmer) endorses the latter. Regardless
of which hypothesis prevails, however, there is no doubt that rape has evolutionary -- and
thus genetic -- origins. All traits and behaviors stem from a complex interplay between
genes and the environment. If rape is an adaptation, men must possess genes that exist
specifically because rape increased reproductive success. If rape turns out to be merely a
side effect of other adaptations, then the genes involved exist for reasons that have nothing
to do with rape. Either way, however, the evolutionary perspective explains a number of
otherwise puzzling facts about the persistence of rape among human males.
For example, if rape is evolutionary in origin, it should be a threat mostly to women of

childbearing age. And, in fact, young adult women are vastly overrepresented among rape
victims in the female population as a whole, and female children and post-reproductive-
age women are greatly underrepresented.
By the same token, if rape has persisted in the human population through the action of
sexual selection, rapists should not seriously injure their victims -- the rapist's

Why Men Rape
reproductive success would be hampered, after all, if he killed his victim or inflicted so
much harm that the potential pregnancy was compromised. Once again, the evolutionary
logic seems to predict reality. Rapists seldom engage in gratuitous violence; instead, they
usually limit themselves to the force required to subdue or control their victims. A survey
by one of us (Palmer), of volunteers at rape crisis centers, found that only 15 percent of
the victims whom the volunteers had encountered reported having been beaten in excess
of what was needed to accomplish the rape. And in a 1979 study of 1,401 rape victims, a
team led by the sociologist Thomas W. McCahill found that most of the victims reported
being pushed or held, but that acts of gratuitous violence, such as beating, slapping or
choking, were reported in only a minority of the rapes -- 22 percent or less. A very small
number of rape victims are murdered: about .01 percent (that figure includes unreported as
well as reported rapes). Even in those few cases, it may be that the murder takes place not
because the rapist is motivated by a desire to kill, but because by removing the only
witness to the crime he greatly increases his chance of escaping punishment.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN
Rape is more distressing for women than are other violent crimes, and evolutionary
theory can help explain that as well. In recent years research on human unhappiness
informed by evolutionary theory has developed substantial evidence about the functional
role of psychological pain. Such pain is thought to be an adaptation that helps people
guard against circumstances that reduce their reproductive success; it does so by spurring
behavioral changes aimed at preventing future pain [see "What Good Is Feeling Bad?" by
Randolph M. Nesse, November/December 1991]. Thus one would expect the greatest
psychological pain to be associated with events that lower one's reproductive success, and,
indeed, emotionally traumatic events such as the death of a relative, the loss of social
status, desertion by one's mate and the trauma of being raped can all be interpreted as
having that effect.
Rape reduces female reproductive success in several ways. For one thing, the victim
may be injured. Moreover, if she becomes pregnant, she is deprived of her chance to
choose the best father for her children. A rape may also cause a woman to lose the
investment of her long-term partner, because it calls into question whether the child she
later bears is really his. A variety of studies have shown that both men and women care
more for their genetic offspring than for stepchildren.
One of us (Thornhill), in association with the anthropologist Nancy W. Thornhill, has

conducted a series of studies on the factors that contribute to the emotional pain that
women experience after a rape. Those studies confirmed that the more the rape interfered
with the women's reproductive interests, the more pain they felt. The data, obtained from
the Joseph J. Peters Institute in Philadelphia, came from interviews with 790 girls and
women who had reported a sexual assault and who were subsequently examined at
Philadelphia General Hospital between 1973 and 1975. The subjects, who ranged in age
from two months to eighty-eight years, were asked a variety of questions designed to
evaluate their psychological responses to the rape. Among other things, they were asked
about changes in their sleeping habits, in their feelings toward known and unknown men,

Why Men Rape
in their sexual relations with their partners (children were not asked about sexual matters),
and in their eating habits and social activities.
Analysis of the data showed that young women suffered greater distress after a rape
than did children or women who were past reproductive age. That finding makes
evolutionary sense, because it is young women who were at risk of being impregnated by
an undesirable mate. Married women, moreover, were more traumatized than unmarried
women, and they were more likely to feel that their future had been harmed by the rape.
That, too, makes evolutionary sense, because the doubt a rape sows about paternity can
lead a long-term mate to withdraw his support.
Among the women in the study, psychological pain rose inversely to the violence of the
attack. In other words, when the rapist exerted less force, the victim was more upset
afterward. Those findings, surprising at first, make sense in the evolutionary context: a
victim who exhibits physical evidence that sexual access was forced may have less
difficulty convincing her husband or boyfriend that what took place was rape rather than
consensual sex. In evolutionary terms, such evidence would be reassuring to a pair-bonded
male, because rape is a one-time event, whereas consensual sex with other partners is
likely to be frequent, and thus more threatening to paternity.
Finally, women of reproductive age reported more emotional distress when the assault
involved sexual intercourse than when it involved other kinds of sexual behavior. Among
young girls and older women, however, penile-vaginal intercourse was no more upsetting
than other kinds of assaults. Again, the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy may be a key
factor in the degree of trauma the victim experiences.
For all those reasons, the psychological pain that rape victims suffer appears to be an
evolved defense against rape. The human females who outreproduced others and thus
became our ancestors. were people who were highly distressed about rape. Their distress
presumably served their interests by motivating them to identify the circumstances that
resulted in the rape, assess the problems the rape caused, and act to avoid rapes in the
future.
IS RAPE AN ACT OF SEX?
If women today are to protect themselves from rape, and men are to desist from it,
people must be given advice that is based on knowledge. Insisting that rape is not about
sex misinforms both men and women about the motivations behind rape -- a dangerous
error that not only hinders prevention efforts but may actually increase the incidence of
rape.
What we envision is an evolutionarily informed program for young men that teaches
them to restrain their sexual behavior. Completion of such a course might be required, say,
before a young man is granted a driver. s license. The program might start by inducing the
young men to acknowledge the power of their sexual impulses, and then explaining why

Why Men Rape
human males have evolved in that way. The young men should learn that past Darwinian
selection is the reason that a man can get an erection just by looking at a photo of a naked
woman, why he may be tempted to demand sex even if he knows that his date truly doesn.
t want it, and why he may mistake a woman's friendly comment or tight blouse as an
invitation to sex. Most of all, the program should stress that a man. s evolved sexual
desires offer him no excuse whatsoever for raping a woman, and that if he understands
and resists those desires, he may be able to prevent their manifestation in sexually
coercive behavior. The criminal penalties for rape should also be discussed in detail.
Young women also need a new kind of education. For example, in today's rape-
prevention handbooks, women are often told that sexual attractiveness does not influence
rapists. That is emphatically not true. Because a woman is considered most attractive
when her fertility is at its peak, from her mid-teens through her twenties, tactics that focus
on protecting women in those age groups will be most effective in reducing the overall
frequency of rape.
Young women should be informed that, during the evolution of human sexuality, the
existence of female choice has favored men who are quickly aroused by signals of a
female. s willingness to grant sexual access. Furthermore, women need to realize that,
because selection favored males who had many mates, men tend to read signals of
acceptance into a woman. s actions even when no such signals are intended.
COMPROMISING POSITIONS
In spite of protestations to the contrary, women should also be advised that the way
they dress can put them at risk. In the past, most discussions of female appearance in the
context of rape have, entirely unfairly, asserted that a victim's dress and behavior should
affect the degree of punishment meted out to the rapist: thus if the victim was dressed
provocatively, she "had it coming to her" -- and the rapist would get off lightly. But
current attempts to avoid blaming the victim have led to false propaganda that dress and
behavior have little or no influence on a woman's chances of being raped. As a
consequence, important knowledge about how to avoid dangerous circumstances is often
suppressed. Sure-ly the point that no woman's behavior gives a man the right to rape her
can be made with-out encouraging women to overlook the role they themselves may be
playing in compromising their safety.
Until relatively recently in Europe and the United States, strict social taboos kept young
men and women from spending unsupervised time together, and in many other countries
young women are still kept cloistered away from men. Such physical barriers are
understandably abhorrent to many people, since they greatly limit the freedom of women.
But the toppling of those barriers in modern Western countries raises problems of its own.
The common practice of unsupervised dating in cars and private homes, which is often
accompanied by the consumption of alcohol, has placed young women in environments
that are conducive to rape to an extent that is probably unparalleled in history. After
studying the data on the risk factors for rape, the sex investigators Elizabeth R. Allgeier
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Why Men Rape
and Albert R. Allgeier, both of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, recommended
that men and women interact only in public places during the early stages of their
relationships -- or, at least, that women exert more control than they generally do over the
circumstances in which they consent to be alone with men.
EVOLUTIONARY COUNSELING
An evolutionary perspective on rape might not only help prevent rapes but also lead
to more effective counseling for rape victims. A therapy program explaining that men rape
because they collectively want to dominate women will not help a victim understand why
her attacker appeared to be sexually motivated, why she can no longer concentrate enough
to conduct her life effectively, or why her husband or boyfriend may view the attack as an
instance of infidelity. In addition, men who are made aware of the evolutionary reasons
for their suspicions about their wives' or girlfriends' claims of rape should be in a better
position to change their reactions to such claims.
Unlike many other contentious social issues, such as abortion and homosexual rights,
everyone has the same goal regarding rape: to end it. Evolutionary biology provides clear
information that society can use to achieve that goal. Social science, by contrast, promotes
erroneous solutions, because it fails to recognize that Darwinian selection has shaped not
only human bodies but human psychology, learning patterns and behavior as well. The
fact is that men, relative to women, are more aggressive, sexually assertive and eager to
copulate, and less discriminating about mates' traits that contribute to the existence of
rape. When social scientists mistakenly assert that socialization alone causes those gender
differences, they ignore the fact that the same differences also exist in all the other animal
species in which males offer less parental investment than females and compete for access
to females.
In addressing the question of rape, the choice between the politically constructed
answers of social science and the evidentiary answers of evolutionary biology is
essentially a choice between ideology and knowledge. As scientists who would like to see
rape eradicated from human life, we sincerely hope that truth will prevail. "
THE AUTHOR
Randy Thornhill is an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Craig T.
Palmer is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. This article
was adapted from their forthcoming book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual
Coercion, which is being published in April by MIT Press.
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A Natural History of Rape
CHAPTER ONE

Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion
By RANDY THORNHILL and CRAIG T. PALMER
The MIT Press
Read the Review
Rape and Evolutionary Theory
Not enough people understand what rape is, and, until they do ... , not enough
will be done to stop it.
—rape victim, quoted in Groth 1979 (p. 87)
By one intuitive and relevant definition, rape is copulation resisted to the best
of the victim's ability unless such resistance would probably result in death or
serious injury to the victim or in death or injury to individuals the victim
commonly protects. Other sexual assaults, including oral and anal penetration
of a man or a woman under the same conditions, also may be called rape
under some circumstances.
In one study, 13 percent of the surveyed American women of ages 18 and

older reported having been the victim of at least one completed rape—rape
having been defined as "an event that occurred without the woman's consent,
involved the use of force or threat of force, and involved sexual penetration of
the victim's vagina, mouth or rectum" (Kilpatrick et al. 1992, p. i). Other
surveys using slightly different definitions or different data-collection
procedures have found high rates too, especially when the survey procedures
have given researchers access to victims of alleged rapes not reported to the
police. Kilpatrick et al. (ibid., p. 6) estimate the percentage of rapes of women
not reported at between 66 and 84. Of women who had experienced a rape
involving penile-vaginal intercourse, from 37 to 57 percent experienced post-
traumatic stress syndrome afterward—a frequency higher than that associated
with any other crime against women, including aggravated assault, burglary,
and robbery (Kilpatrick et al. 1987; Resnick et al. 1993).
We suggest two answers to the question of why humans have not been able
to put an end to rape:
· Most people don't know much about why humans have the desires,
emotions, and values that they have, including those that cause rape. This is
because most people lack any understanding of the ultimate (that is,
evolutionary) causes of why humans are the way they are. This lack of
understanding has severely limited people's knowledge of the exact proximate
(immediate) causes of rape, thus limiting the ability of concerned people to
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change the behavior.
· For 25 years, attempts to prevent rape have not only failed to be informed by
an evolutionary approach; they have been based on explanations designed to
make ideological statements rather than to be consistent with scientific
knowledge of human behavior.
One cannot understand evolutionary explanations of rape, much less

evaluate them, without a solid grasp of evolutionary theory. Failure to
appreciate this point has caused much valuable time to be wasted on
misplaced attacks on evolutionary explanations.
Assuming that the main interest of most readers of this book is the subject
of rape rather than evolutionary theory per se, we now present some questions
about rape that an evolutionary approach can answer:
· Why are males the rapists and females (usually) the victims?
· Why is rape a horrendous experience for the victim?
· Why does the mental trauma of rape vary with the victim's age and marital
status?
· Why does the mental trauma of rape vary with the types of sex acts?
· Why does the mental trauma of rape vary with the degree of visible physical
injuries to the victim, but in a direction one might not expect?
· Why do young males rape more often than older males?
· Why are young women more often the victims of rape than older women or
girls (i.e., pre-pubertal females)?
· Why is rape more frequent in some situations, such as war, than in others?
· Why does rape occur in all known cultures?
· Why are some instances of rape punished in all known cultures?
· Why are people (especially husbands) often suspicious of an individual's

claim to have been raped?
· Why is rape often treated as a crime against the victim's husband?
· Why have attempts to reform rape laws met with only limited success?
· Why does rape exist in many, but not all, species?
· Why does rape still occur among humans?
· How can rape be prevented?
Evolutionary Theory
The question "What is man?" is probably the most profound that can be asked

by man. It has always been central to any system of philosophy or of

theology. We know that it has been asked by the most learned humans 2000
years ago, and it is just possible that it was being asked by the most brilliant
australopithecines 2 million years ago. The point I want to make now is that
all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will
be better off if we ignore them completely. —Simpson 1966, p. 472
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for
its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit Earth, the first
question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: "Have
they discovered evolution yet?" Living organisms had existed on Earth,
without ever knowing why, for more than three billion years before the truth
finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair,
others had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a
coherent and tenable account of why we exist.—Dawkins 1976, p. 1
Many social scientists (and others) have dismissed claims such as these as
evidence of a somehow non-scientific "messianic conviction" (Kacelnik 1997,
p. 65). Although these quotes indicate considerable enthusiasm, the important
question is whether they accurately describe the implications of the theory of
evolution by natural selection. Simpson's and Dawkins's enthusiasm is
warranted by the tremendous success of evolutionary theory in guiding the
scientific study of life in general and of humans in particular to fruitful ends
of deep knowledge.
Cause, Proximate and Ultimate
A friend of ours once told us that after a movie she returned with her date to
his car in an isolated parking lot. Then, instead of taking her home, the man
locked the doors and physically forced her to have sexual intercourse with
him. The question addressed in this book, and the question asked us by our
friend, is: What was the cause of this man's behavior?
In both the vernacular sense and the scientific sense, cause is defined as
that without which an effect or a phenomenon would not exist. Biologists
study two levels of causation: proximate and ultimate. Proximate causes of
behavior are those that operate over the short term—the immediate causes of
behavior. These are the types of causes with which most people, including
most social scientists, are exclusively concerned. For example, if, when
reading our friend's question concerning the cause of the man's behavior, you
said to yourself it was because he hated women, felt the need to dominate
someone, had been abused as a child, had drunk too much, had too much
testosterone circulating in his body, was compensating for feelings of
inadequacy, had been raised in a patriarchal culture, had watched too much
violence on television, was addicted to violent pornography, was sexually
aroused, hated his mother, hated his father, and/or had a rare violence-
inducing gene, you proposed a proximate cause of his behavior. You probably
didn't ask why your proposed proximate cause existed in the first place. That
is, you probably didn't concern yourself with the ultimate cause of the
behavior.
Because they refer to the immediate events that produce a behavior or some
other phenotypic (i.e., bodily) trait, proximate causes include genes,
hormones, physiological structures (including brain mechanisms), and
environmental stimuli (including environmental experiences that affect
learning). Proximate explanations have to do with how such developmental or
physiological mechanisms cause something to happen; ultimate explanations
have to do with why particular proximate mechanisms exist.
Proximate and ultimate explanations are complements, not alternatives. For

example, the claim that millions of years of selection caused the human eye to
have its current form (an ultimate explanation) is in no way contradictory to
the claim that a series of rods and cones enable the eye to relay visual

information to the brain (a proximate explanation). Similarly, the claim that

learning affects men's rape behavior (i.e., that it is a proximate cause) does not
contradict the view that the behavior has evolved.
Identifying ultimate causes, however, is important, because certain

proximate explanations may be incompatible with certain ultimate
explanations. This is because certain ultimate explanations specify the
existence of certain types of proximate mechanisms. For example, the
ultimate explanation that the human eye evolved by natural selection because
it increased our ancestors' ability to detect light requires the existence of
proximate light-detection mechanisms in the eye.
No aspect of life can be completely understood until both its proximate and
its ultimate causation are fully known. To understand how ultimate causes can
be known, one must understand how natural selection leads to adaptations.
Natural Selection and Adaptations
Adaptations are phenotypic features (morphological structures, physiological

mechanisms, and behaviors) that are present in individual organisms because
they were favored by natural selection in the past. Darwin sought to explain
the existence of adaptation in terms of evolution by selection. Initially, he
observed the action of selection on living things in nature—a fact of natural
history that is inescapable in view of the high rates of reproduction and
mortality in all organisms. Later, he realized just how creative selection could
be when extended over the long history of life on Earth. This retrospection is
evident in the following eloquent passage from On the Origin of Species:
Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every
variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and
adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working.... We see nothing
of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long
lapse of ages. (Ridley 1987, p. 87)
The biologist George Williams, in his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural
Selection, clarified what Darwin meant when he wrote of natural selection's
rejecting all that was "bad" and preserving all that was "good." First, Williams
noted, these words were not used in a moral sense; they referred only to the
effects of traits on an individual's ability to survive and reproduce. That is,
"good" traits are those that promote an individual's reproductive interests. We
evolutionists use the term reproductive success to refer to these reproductive
interests, by which we mean not the mere production of offspring but the
production of offspring that survive to produce offspring (Palmer and
Steadman 1997). A trait that increases this ability is "good" in terms of natural
selection even though one might consider it undesirable in moral terms. There
is no connection here between what is biological or naturally selected and
what is morally right or wrong. To assume a connection is to commit what is
called the naturalistic fallacy. In addition, Williams clarified that natural
selection favors traits that are "good" in the sense of increasing an individual's
reproductive success, not necessarily traits that are "good" in the sense of
increasing a group's ability to survive.
The idea that selection favors traits that increase group survival, known as
group selection, had become very popular before the publication of Williams's
book—especially after the publication of Animal Dispersion in Relation to
Social Behavior, an influential book by the ornithologist V. C. Wynne-
Edwards (1962). Williams's rebuttal of the concept of group selection
convinced almost every biologist who read it that Wynne-Edwards was
mistaken. However, the idea that selection favors traits that function for the

good of the group appears to have been too attractive for many non-scientists
to give up. Not only does it remain popular among the general public; it
continues to have a small following among evolutionary biologists (Wilson
and Sober 1994; Sober and Wilson 1998).
One cannot grasp the power of natural selection to "design" adaptations

until one abandons both the notion that natural selection favors traits that are
morally good and the notion that it favors traits that function for the good of
the group. Only then can one appreciate the power of natural selection to
design complex traits of individuals.
The human eye's many physiological structures exist because they

increased the reproductive success of individuals in tens of thousands of past
generations. Although there are four agents of evolution (that is, four natural
processes that are known to cause changes in gene frequencies of
populations), selection is the only evolutionary agent that can create
adaptations like the human eye. The other evolutionary agents (mutation,
drift, and gene flow)—cannot produce adaptations; they lack the necessary
creativity, because their action is always random with regard to environmental
challenges (e.g., predators) facing individuals. Selection, when it acts in a
directional, cumulative manner over long periods of time, creates complex
phenotypic designs out of the simple, random genetic variation generated by
the three other evolutionary agents. Selection is not a random process; it is
differential reproduction of individuals by consequence of their differences in
phenotypic design for environmental challenges. An adaptation, then, is a
phenotypic solution to a past environmental problem that persistently affected
individuals for long periods of evolutionary time and thereby caused
cumulative, directional selection. Evolution by selection is not a purposive
process; however, it produces, by means of gradual and persistent effects,
traits that serve certain functions—that is, adaptations.
Adaptations do not necessarily increase reproductive success in current

environments if those environments differ significantly from past
environments. The seeds of a tree that fall on a city sidewalk are complexly
designed adaptations, formed by selection over many generations in past
environments, yet they have essentially no chance of surviving or reproducing
in the current environment of the sidewalk. Similarly, the North American
pronghorn antelope shows certain social behaviors and certain locomotory
adaptations (e.g., short bursts of high speed) for avoiding species of large cats
and hyenas that are now extinct (Byers 1997).
The difference between current and evolutionary historical environments is

especially important to keep in mind when one is considering human
behavioral adaptations. Today most humans live in environments that have
evolutionarily novel components. (Modern contraception is one such
component that obviously influences the reproductive success of individuals
in an evolutionarily novel way.) Therefore, human behavior is sometimes
poorly adapted (in the evolutionary sense of the word) to current conditions.
Evolutionary functional explanations also differ from the nonevolutionary

functional explanations familiar to most social scientists. In fact, evolutionary
functional explanations overcome a problem that has plagued non-
evolutionary functional explanations. Non-evolutionary functional
explanations are unable to explain why a particular trait has come to serve a
certain function when alternative traits could also serve that function (Hempel
1959). For example, Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, tried
to explain religion by stating that it functioned to maintain the social group
(Durkheim 1912). That explanation, however, is unable to account for why
religion, instead of numerous alternative institutions (e.g., political
governments, non-religious social organizations and ideologies), fulfills this
particular function. The concept of evolution by natural selection helps
overcome this problem. Any gene that happens to arise by random mutation,
and happens to have the effect of increasing an organism's reproductive
success, will become more frequent in future generations. Eventually,
additional random mutations will also happen to occur in future generations

and will also be favored by natural selection. Over time, this process results in
functionally designed traits. Randomness (in the form of mutations) and the
non-random process of natural selection combine to answer the question of
why a particular trait has evolved instead of other imaginable traits that
conceivably could have served the same function.
There is also the important fact that selection works only in relation to what
has already evolved. The process does not start anew each time. Thus, there
are many features that seem poorly designed relative to what might be
imagined as a better solution. For example, the crossing of the respiratory and
digestive tracts in the human throat can cause death from choking on food. It
would be better design—much safer in terms of survival—if our air and food
passages were completely separate. However, all vertebrates (backboned
animals) from fishes to mammals on the phylogenetic tree (the tree
connecting all life to a common ancestor) have crossing respiratory and
digestive tracts. The human respiratory system evolved from portions of the
digestive system of a remote invertebrate ancestral species, and the food and
air passages have been linked in non-functional tandem ever since (Williams
1992). The crossing of passages is a historical legacy of selection's having
built respiratory adaptations from ancestral digestive system features. Not
itself an adaptation, it is a by-product of selection's having molded respiratory
adaptation from what came before.
Similarly, any new mutation, through its bodily effect, is assessed by

selection in relation to how well it performs in the evolved environment of
other individuals in the population as well as in the evolved environment of
the various body forms that characterize the developmental pathway of traits.
Thus, what has evolved (including the existing developmental adaptations)
may constrain what can evolve, or may establish certain evolutionary paths as
more likely than others.
Because selection is the most important cause of evolution, and because it

is the only evolutionary agent that can produce adaptations, the ultimate
approach seeks to provide explanations for these seemingly purposefully
designed biological traits of individuals in relation to the causal selective
forces that produced them. Thus, the adaptationist approach focuses on how
an adaptation contributed to successful reproduction of its bearers in the
environments of evolutionary history. The challenge in applying an ultimate
or evolutionary analysis is not to determine whether an adaptation is a product
of selection; it is to determine the nature of the selective pressure that is
responsible for the trait. That selective pressure will be apparent in the
functional design of the adaptation.
By-Products of Selection
Not all aspects of living organisms are adaptations. Indeed, Williams (1966,
pp. 4-5) emphasized that "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that
should be used only where it is really necessary," and the evolutionists that
Williams inspired have been well aware that a trait's mere existence does not
mean that it was directly favored by natural selection. Nor is a demonstration
that a trait or a character increases an individual's reproductive success
sufficient evidence that the trait is an adaptation.
Not only may an increase in reproductive success be due to some

evolutionarily novel aspect of the environment; an increase in reproductive
success in evolutionary environments may be only a beneficial effect rather
than an evolutionary function. To illustrate this point, Williams cited a fox
walking through deep snow to a henhouse to catch a chicken, then following
its own footprints on subsequent visits to the henhouse. This makes
subsequent trips to the henhouse more energy efficient for the fox, thus
potentially increasing its reproductive success. Following its own footprints
back may well involve adaptations in the brain of the fox, but there is no
known feature of the fox's feet that exhibits design by natural selection to

pack snow. The fox's feet are clearly designed for walking and running, but
they are not clearly designed for snow packing. Hence, even though snow
may have been part of the past environments of foxes, there is no evidence
that it acted as a sufficient selective pressure to design the feet of foxes for
efficient snow packing. Snow packing and any associated reproductive
success appear to be fortuitous effects of the structure of the fox's feet. That
is, snow packing is not a function of any known aspect of the fox's feet.
Symons (1979, p. 10) noted that "to say that a given beneficial effect of a
character is the function, or a function, of that character is to say that the
character was molded by natural selection to produce that effect." Williams
(1966, p. 209) stated that "the demonstration of a benefit is neither necessary
nor sufficient in the demonstration of function, although it may sometimes
provide insight not otherwise obtainable," and that "it is both necessary and
sufficient to show that the process [or trait] is designed to serve the function."
As Williams emphasized, the concept of adaptation should be used only

where really necessary; however, it is essential to consider the concept of
adaptation in all cases of possible phenotypic design, because only then can it
be determined if a trait has been designed by natural selection. Williams
(ibid., p. 10) proposed that plausibly demonstrating design by natural
selection requires showing that a trait accomplishes its alleged function with
"sufficient precision, economy, and efficiency, etc." Following Williams's
criteria, Symons (1979, p. 11) stated that "[a] function can be distinguished
from an incidental effect insofar as it is produced with sufficient precision,
economy, and efficiency to rule out chance as an adequate explanation of its
existence." Hence, according to the doctrine of parsimony, "if an effect can be
explained adequately as the result of physical laws or as the fortuitous
byproduct of an adaptation, it should not be called a function" (ibid.).
Similarly, drift and mutation can be ruled out as explanations of the

evolutionary history of a trait when the trait shows evidence of functional
design. Drift may apply only to traits that do not adversely affect reproductive
success: if there are such effects, then selection will determine a trait's fate.
Few traits meet the criterion of no cost to reproductive success; thus, as the
biologists Richard Alexander (1979) and Richard Dawkins (1986) have
explained, drift is a matter of interest primarily in the cases of phenotypic
traits that do not attract adaptationists' attention in the first place.
Most mutations are deleterious and thus are in a balance with selection
(selection lowering the frequency and mutation increasing it). Selection is
stronger because mutation rates are very low. Thus, mutation, as an
evolutionary cause for traits, may apply only to those traits that are only
slightly above zero frequency in the population. Because selection is the most
potent of the evolutionary agents, any explanation of the evolutionary history
of a trait based on mutation or on drift must be fully reconciled with the
potency of selection to bring about trait evolution.
Further evidence of adaptation may come from cross-species comparisons.

First, "if related species [i.e., those sharing a recent common ancestral
species] come to occupy different environments where they are subject to
different selection pressures, then they should evolve new traits as adaptive
mutations occur that confer a reproductive advantage under the new
conditions" (Alcock 1993, p. 222). Variation among the beaks of different
species of the finches Darwin found on the Galápagos Islands would be an
example of such "divergent evolution." The beak types are different
adaptations for eating different, species-typical foods (Weiner 1994). Second,
if two distantly related species "have been subjected to similar selection
pressures," they "should have independently evolved similar behavioral traits
through convergent evolution—if the trait truly is an adaptation to that
selection pressure" (Alcock 1993, p. 222). Convergent evolution is
responsible for the similar shapes of fishes and marine mammals that have
evolved by natural selection in the context of mobility in water.
Hence, the diversity of life has two major components: adaptations and the
effects of adaptations. The latter are known as by-products. Adaptations are

traits formed directly by selective pressures; by-products are traits formed

indirectly by selective pressures.
In addition to snow packing by fox feet, another example of a by-product is

the red color of human arterial blood (Symons 1987a,b). This trait did not
arise because of selection in the context of blood-color variation among
individuals. That is, redness of arterial blood did not cause individuals with
arterial blood of that color to become more frequent in succeeding
generations. Instead, selection acting in other contexts gave rise to the trait as
an epiphenomenon of adaptations. Human arterial blood is red for two
proximate reasons: the chemistry of oxygen and hemoglobin in blood, and
human color vision. Hence, the ultimate causation of the color of blood lies in
the selective pressures that produced the chemical composition of human
blood and human color vision.
Another example of a by-product is the higher death rate of males relative

to females among humans of all ages (Alexander 1979; Trivers 1985; Wilson
and Daly 1985; Geary 1998). The higher male mortality is not an adaptation;
it is an incidental effect of sex-specific adaptations. The adaptations are in
males' and females' bodies, including their brains. For example, various traits
motivate male humans, relative to female humans, to engage in riskier
activities. The ultimate cause of these male adaptations is a human
evolutionary history of stronger sexual selection acting on males than on
females.
When one is considering any feature of living things, whether evolution

applies is never a question. The only legitimate question is how to apply
evolutionary principles. This is the case for all human behaviors—even for
such by-products as cosmetic surgery, the content of movies, legal systems,
and fashion trends.
The crucial legitimate scientific debate about the evolutionary cause of

human rape concerns whether rape is a result of rape-specific adaptation or a
by-product of other adaptations. That is, does rape result from men's special-
purpose psychology, and perhaps from associated nonpsychological anatomy,
designed by selection for rape, or is rape an incidental effect of special-
purpose adaptation to circumstances other than rape? We two authors, having
debated this question for more than a decade (Palmer 1991, 1992a,b;
Thornhill and Thornhill 1992a,b), agree that it may eventually be answered by
determining whether or not rape is the result of special-purpose psychological
mechanisms that motivate and regulate men's pursuit of rape in itself. We also
agree that enough now is known about the ultimate evolutionary causes of
human rape that an evolutionary approach can contribute significantly to
prevention of the act.
But how can an ultimate explanation of why men rape help prevent future
rapes? The answer is that ultimate evolutionary explanations have unique
power in both a theoretical and a practical sense. In terms of theory, only
selection can account for the creation and the maintenance of adaptations.
Even complete identification of all proximate causes of an adaptation could
not explain the genesis and the persistence of that adaptation. However, an
ultimate explanation of a biological phenomenon can account for all
proximate causes influencing the phenomenon, whether the phenomenon is an
adaptation or an incidental effect of an adaptation. Thus, ultimate
explanations are more general in that they are more inclusive of causation. As
a result, ultimate explanations have enormous practical potential: if evolution
by individual selection is truly the general theory of life, it should lead to the
best insights about proximate causes, and identifying proximate causes is the
key to changing human behavior (e.g., eliminating rape).
That an ultimate evolutionary approach can serve as a guide for research

into proximate causes has been shown repeatedly in investigations of
nonhuman organisms. Indeed, this approach has revolutionized those
investigations (Krebs and Davies 1993; Alcock 1997). It is also
revolutionizing the study of human behavior (Alexander 1987; Wright 1994;

Pinker 1997; Geary 1998; Buss 1999).
Evolutionary theory contributes to the study of proximate causation in two

ways.
First, it leads to the discovery of new biological phenomena whose

proximate causes are unknown. For example, the evolutionary psychologists
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) have found that the human brain
contains a mechanism designed specifically to detect cheating in social
exchanges. The discovery of such a "cheater-detection" mechanism was the
result of an understanding of the evolutionary concept of reciprocal altruism
originally developed by the biologist Robert Trivers (1971). Similarly,
evolutionary theory has led to the discovery of specific patterns of nepotism.
This knowledge has resulted from studies directed by the fundamental
evolutionary concept of kin selection: individuals perpetuate their genes not
only by producing offspring but also by aiding relatives, including offspring
(Hamilton 1963, 1964; Alexander 1987; Chagnon and Irons 1979; Betzig et
al. 1988; Betzig 1997; Crawford and Krebs 1998). Relatives contain a high
proportion of identical genes, and the closer the kinship relationship the
higher the genetic similarity. What are the proximate cues by which
individuals identify their relatives and distinguish categories of relatives?
"Social learning" is the general answer (Alexander 1979; Palmer and
Steadman 1997). Children are taught who their relatives are by their parents
and their other relatives and through association with them during upbringing,
and are encouraged by their adult relatives to be altruistic toward them
(especially close kin). But what is the precise nature of the learning schedules
involved in the ontogeny (development) of an individual's nepotistic
behavior? This question would never have been asked had not evolutionists
first successfully predicted the patterns of nepotistic behavior. After the social-
learning aspects of nepotism are understood, the proximate physiological
mechanisms in the brain that cause humans to feel closer to and more
generous toward close relatives can be investigated. Also, we may someday
know the locations of human genes (another category of proximate causation),
which, in conjunction with the environment, construct proximate mechanisms
of kin recognition and discriminative nepotism.
The second way in which evolutionary theory interacts with the

identification of proximate causes is even more direct and important.
Evolutionary theory can tell investigators what proximate mechanisms are
most likely to be found, and therefore where any investigation of proximate
causation should begin. For example, evolutionary theory has provided unique
directions for investigations of child abuse, child neglect, and infanticide
(Daly and Wilson 1988). Evolutionary predictions regarding parental
investment have directed researchers to multiple proximate causes of child
maltreatment: resources available for successfully rearing offspring; paternity
certainty and genetic relatedness of parent to offspring generally; health, sex,
and status of offspring; age of parent; birth order.
The example of child abuse also demonstrates the ability of an evolutionary

approach to identify the proximate causes of both adaptations and by-
products. In this case, it is not child abuse or infanticide per se that was
favored by selection in human evolutionary history. The adaptations concern
what Daly and Wilson (1988) call "child-specific parental solicitude" or
"discriminative parental solicitude," which evolved because they increased the
number of surviving offspring in a parent's lifetime relative to parents who
invested indiscriminately in children generally. These are species-wide
psychological adaptations that cause some parents to show love to all their
children more or less equally, or to love some children and neglect (or even
abuse or kill) others. The power of an evolutionary approach in identifying
these factors is illustrated by Daly and Wilson's observation (1995, p. 22) that
"living with a stepparent has turned out to be the most powerful predictor of
severe child abuse risk yet discovered, but two decades of intensive child
abuse research conducted without the heuristic assistance of Darwinian
insights never discovered it." We suggest that the evolutionary approach can
make a similar contribution to the identification of the proximate causes of

rape. Specifically, we suggest that an understanding of the evolved

differences between male and female sexuality can lead to identification of
the proximate causes of rape. Indeed, the ability of an ultimate evolutionary
approach to direct research to the proximate causes of rape may be the key to
lowering the frequency of rape.
Adaptations Are Functionally Specific
An understanding of the ultimate cause of adaptations can provide specific

ways of preventing rape because adaptations are themselves specific.
In a paper titled "If we're all Darwinians, what's the fuss about?" Donald
Symons (1987a) pointed out that the difference of opinion between traditional
social scientists and the evolutionary anthropologists, biologists, and
psychologists who were inspired by Williams's book Adaptation and Natural
Selection does not concern whether or not the brain is designed by selection.
The idea of psychological (brain) adaptation is almost certainly compelling to
anyone who accepts that the rest of the human body has evolved by
Darwinian selection. Indeed, the notion that the rest of the body could have
been designed by selection without selection's simultaneously acting on the
brain and the nervous system that control the body is absurd. To those who
accept the notion of evolution, it is clear that the human brain must contain
evolved structures that process environmental information in a manner that
guides feelings and behavior toward ends that were adaptive in past human
environments. Similarly, a moment's reflection on the evolution of the human
opposable thumb—whose name implies both a structure and the movement
(behavior) of that structure—should resolve any remaining controversy as to
whether human physical behavior (muscle-induced motion) has evolved. All
this means that the explanations of human behavior put forth by the social
scientists who accept evolution (the vast majority) are implicitly evolutionary
explanations. Hence, according to Symons (p. 126), "perhaps the central issue
in psychology is whether the mechanisms of the mind are few, general, and
simple, on the one hand, or numerous, specific, and complex, on the other."
Symons goes on to say that "for all their differences, theories that purport to
explain human affairs in terms of learning, socialization, or culture, and so on
seem to have one thing in common: they assume that a few generalized
brain/mind mechanisms of association or symbol manipulation underpin
human action" (p. 139). We suggest that one reason that many social scientists
have not learned evolutionary theory is that they have mistakenly assumed
that adaptations are so general as to be of little significance.
Special-Purpose and General-Purpose Adaptations
Defined more precisely than above, adaptations are mechanisms that

Darwinian selection "designed" because they provided solutions to
environmental problems faced by ancestors (Williams 1966, 1992; Symons
1979; Thornhill 1990, 1997a). Providing these solutions is the "function" of
adaptations (Williams 1966).
Although most people consider physical traits to be distinct from

psychological (or mental) traits, this is a mistake. The brain, even if one calls
it the psyche, is a physiological component of the body. In fact, the brain is
the component of physiology and anatomy that controls the rest of physiology
and anatomy via environmental information processing. Hence, when
evolutionary psychologists speak of evolved "psychological mechanisms,"
they are actually postulating physiological mechanisms in the nervous system
that, at the present stage of scientific knowledge, can only be inferred from
patterns of behavior (Palmer 1991, 1992a,b).
Psychological mechanisms can be characterized as either special-purpose

or general-purpose on the basis of the kind of information they process to

accomplish their function. Information that is domain-specific (for example,

that will help an individual acquire a proper diet or a mate with high
reproductive potential) is, by definition, special-purpose. If the information
processed to accomplish a goal is ecologically general, the mechanism is, by
definition, general-purpose. Thus, we can imagine a general-purpose
mechanism that evaluates a broad range of items (food items, potential mates,
rocks) in terms of their quality.
Hypothetically, adaptations could range from very general to very specific.

For example, a mechanism that used the same information to obtain a good
diet and a mate with high reproductive potential would not be as general-
purpose as a mechanism that used the same information to solve those
problems and also the problem of finding safe places to sleep. On the other
hand, finding a mate with high reproductive potential might involve a number
of even more specific mechanisms. For example, among humans there seem
to be separate, specific psychological mechanisms that have evolved to
discriminate health, age-related cues, and parenting ability in a potential mate
(Symons 1979, 1995; Thornhill and Moller 1997; Townsend 1998).
Hence, what is at question is not whether psychological mechanisms are

general-purpose or special-purpose; it is their degree of specificity. Many
social scientists believe that humans possess only a few very general
psychological mechanisms; evolutionary psychologists posit many very
specific mechanisms. This evolutionary perspective is akin to many cognitive
scientists' long-standing assumption of the modularity of mind (Gazzaniga
1995).
There are three reasons why evolutionary psychologists argue that the
human brain must be composed of many specialized, domain-specific
adaptations.
The first is that the environmental problems our evolutionary ancestors

faced were quite specific. Since adaptations are solutions to these specific
environmental problems that impinged on ancestors during evolutionary
history, they should be equally specific. Selection should have led to special-
purpose adaptations because such adaptations can better solve specialized
problems.
Any environmental problem that is typically solved by organisms could be

used to illustrate the issue of specificity. Vision, for example, may at first
appear to present only the very general problem of viewing one's
environment. However, "vision" and "environment" are actually general
words for complex phenomena. "Vision" entails solving many specific
problems: color, black and white, depth, edges, distance, available light, and
so on. Which of these problems an organism solves, and in what manner, will
depend on very specific variables in the environment in which the organism's
ancestors lived. Hence, the eyes, brains, and nervous systems of various
species respond only to certain colors, shapes, and movements, and these vary
greatly among species in correspondence to the features of the environments
that impinged on the past reproductive success of individuals of the various
species. For example, some cells in the European toad's eye "respond most to
long, thin objects that move horizontally across the toad's visual field," and
this specific design "becomes clear if one imagines how they would respond
to a nearby moving worm" (Alcock 1993, pp. 134, 135). Furthermore, an
individual animal's environment often is specific not only to the species but
also to the individual's age and sex. Vision stems from many specialized
psychological adaptations, each designed to process specific environmental
information. An eye is a collection of many special-purpose psychological
adaptations. Evolutionary psychologists expect the same to be true of an
organism's other adaptations.
The second reason why human psychological adaptations are expected to

be special-purpose is that much of successful human behavior depends on
environmental circumstances that are variable (Symons 1987a).

The existence of environmentally dependent behavioral flexibility is often

mistakenly used by social scientists to argue against the existence of
specialized brain structures. "Many writers seem to believe that behavioral
flexibility somehow implies the existence of simple, amorphous mental
structures," Symons (1987a, p. 127) notes. He continues: "There is a litany in
the literature of anthropology that goes something like this: Human beings
have no nature because the essence of the human adaptation is plasticity,
which makes possible rapid behavioral adjustments to environmental
variations. This litany, however, has the matter backwards: Extreme
behavioral plasticity implies extreme mental complexity and stability; that is,
an elaborate human nature. Behavioral plasticity for its own sake would be
worse than useless, random variation suicide. During the course of
evolutionary history the more plastic hominid behavior became the more
complex the neural machinery must have become to channel this plasticity
into adaptive action."
A facultative response to the environment (that is, a conditional response

that depends on specific environmental variables) evolves when the
environment changes within the lifetime of an individual in a way that
significantly influences reproductive success. The capacity to learn is one
such response. The human social environment is one of change, and the
portion of human psychology that is involved with social learning is large.
This is probably an evolutionary outcome of selection in the context of
changing social conditions within the lifetimes of individuals, coupled with an
inability to solve a learning task by experimentation or trial-and-error
learning; under this scenario, social learning evolves (Humphrey 1980;
Alexander 1989). However, learning will generate maladaptive behaviors
(behaviors that decrease the reproductive success of the individual) unless
special-purpose mental mechanisms guide and bias learning and behavior
along paths that are adaptive.
We humans are social strategists par excellence (Wright 1994), and our
social behavior is apparently unique in the degree of its plasticity. This unique
behavioral plasticity requires not only that human psychology consists of
many specialized mechanisms but also that it be much more diverse and
complex in structure than the psychology of any other organism.
The third reason that human psychological adaptations are expected to be

special-purpose rather than general-purpose is that our knowledge of the
functional design of non-psychological adaptations indicates that they are
special-purpose. The human body, for example, is not a single general-
purpose adaptation; it is a bundle of innumerable specific adaptations
designed to solve specific challenges to reproduction in past environments.
Indeed, those who accept the reality of evolution realize that species-specific
non-psychological adaptations are what allow biologists to distinguish species
morphologically, physiologically, and developmentally. If adaptations were
general-purpose, differences among species (including differences in
behavior) would not exist, and thus the discipline of taxonomy (the
classification of organisms) would not exist. It is also sex-specific
adaptations, psychological and otherwise, that allow researchers to describe
sex differences, and it is age-specific adaptations, psychological and
otherwise, that make the field of developmental biology possible.
Many social scientists apparently fail to realize that it is species-specific

psychological adaptations that allow biologists to distinguish species
behaviorally. Not only is it unreasonable to think that the human psyche will
be an exception to the general pattern of specific adaptations; there is
increasing evidence from behavioral studies and from neuroscience that the
human psyche is composed of adaptations that process specialized
information.
In 1989 the cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga reviewed the

evidence that aspects of human cognition are structurally and functionally
organized into discrete units ("modules") that interact to produce mental
activity. Gazzaniga summarized his review as follows: "... when considering

the various observations reported here, it is important to keep in mind the

evolutionary history of our species. Over the course of this evolution efficient
systems have been selected for handling critical environmental challenges. In
this light, it is no wonder there are specialized systems (modules) that are
active in carrying out specific and important assignments." (1989, p. 951) As
is evident from this summary, Gazzaniga had been led by empirical evidence
to the conclusion that the human psyche is made up of many specialized
adaptations.
Of course, to demonstrate the implausibility of the assumption that there

are only a few very general psychological adaptations is not to demonstrate
the existence of very specialized adaptations. Similarly, the existence of
specialized adaptations in the frog brain is not evidence that similar
specialized adaptations exist in the human brain. But evidence of specialized
adaptations in the human brain is abundant. Symons (1987b, 1992), Cosmides
and Tooby (1987, 1989), Barkow et al. (1992), Buss (1994, 1999), Gazzaniga
(1995), Pinker (1997), and many others have amassed human behavioral
evidence that the specific nature of ecological problems applies to
environmental information-processing problems as much as it applies to other
related problems, and thus that human psychological mechanisms appear to be
domain-specific in function.
Although evolutionists debate the exact degree of specificity of the

psychological mechanisms of the human brain (Symons 1987b, 1992;
Alexander 1990; Turke 1990), essentially all of them are in agreement that the
brain is much more specialized than is implied by a certain class of social
scientists. As the evolutionary anthropologist Paul Turke (1990, p. 319) notes,
"with the exception of some outdated behaviorists, ... we all have been
working towards understanding the nature of the more or less specific
mechanisms that constitute the human psyche."
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-262-20125-9

Survival of the Rapist
April 2, 2000

Two scientists argue that plain old evolution explains why
men rape.
Related Link
● First Chapter: 'A Natural History of Rape'
By FRANS B. M. DE WAAL
hen the cook of a primatologist in

Indonesia was raped by an
orangutan, her husband said it
was nothing to be concerned about because
the perpetrator wasn't human. This peculiar
incident is one of the very few real-life
descriptions of rape in ''A Natural History
of Rape.'' Strikingly, it is the husband's
opinion rather than the victim's that is
cited. This is symptomatic: in this book, A NATURAL HISTORY OF
RAPE
female and feminist voices are dismissed as Biological Bases of Sexual
ideological; scientists -- like the authors -- Coercion.
engage in the objective search for the truth. By Randy Thornhill and Craig T.
Palmer.
Rape is sexual violence. There is no doubt 251 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press. $28.95.
in my mind that people who try to reduce
rape to either sex or violence miss its
complexity. By adopting one biased
position -- that rape is primarily sexual --
''A Natural History of Rape'' could be seen
as providing a necessary antidote to the other dogmatic position, that it's
principally about power. Rape (defined as forced copulation) is mechanically
impossible in the absence of male genital arousal. Hence the view of rape as a
hate crime pure and simple is silly. A penis is no fist. This doesn't imply,
however, that rape rests on natural urges, as Randy Thornhill and Craig T.
Palmer want us to believe. As sexually reproducing animals, people have
sexual urges. But to say that all men will rape under particular circumstances
is like saying that all people will eat human flesh when stranded in the Andes.
Even if true, does that make us born cannibals?
In the young tradition of evolutionary psychology, Thornhill, a biologist, and

Palmer, an anthropologist, depict rape as a product of Darwinian selection. As
a biologist myself, I am prepared to listen. After all, rape can lead directly to
gene transmission. But for natural selection to favor rape, rapists would have
to differ genetically from nonrapists and need to sow their seed more
successfully, so to speak, causing more pregnancies than nonrapists, or at
least more than they would without raping. Not a shred of data for these two
requirements is presented. The authors believe that information on modern
humans would be irrelevant because the only important effects are in our
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evolutionary past. With this period a firmly closed book, we are left with a
storytelling approach in which the usual rules of evidence are suspended.
The authors draw parallels with the scorpion flies studied by Thornhill, which
have a physical adaptation for rape. Male scorpion flies have a so-called notal
organ, a clamp that serves to keep unwilling females in a mating position. Of
course, human males have nothing like it, but perhaps they have other specific
''rape adaptations.'' The authors search for them in human psychology, which
unfortunately is not nearly as easy to pick apart as insect anatomy. That men
are good at detecting female vulnerability or that young men ejaculate without
much delay really doesn't prove much. Detecting vulnerability has to do with
judgment of people and situations, a multi-purpose capacity also present in
women. And premature ejaculation may simply rest on a combination of high
arousal and inexperience. None of the examples of human male psychology
comes even close to the scorpion fly's notal organ in proving that men evolved
to rape.
Lots of questions remain. Wouldn't one assume that among our ancestors,
who lived in small communities, rape was punished and so may have reduced
rather than enhanced a male's future reproduction? If rape is about
reproduction, why are about one-third of its victims young children and the
elderly, too young or old to reproduce? Why do men rape lovers and wives,
with whom they also have consensual sex? Perhaps some of these issues
could have been resolved if the authors had not lumped all kinds of rape. Are
date rapes on university campuses really comparable to the rapes by Serbian
soldiers in Kosovo? Isn't it likely that some rapes are mainly sexually
motivated and others mainly acts of hostility and misogyny?
Thornhill and Palmer write dryly and obtusely, spending less time on rape
itself than on explaining evolutionary biology and blasting feminist scholars
like Susan Brownmiller, the author of ''Against Our Will: Men, Women and
Rape'' (1975). But even though ''A Natural History of Rape'' is highly
polemical, it does review relevant information, and the authors, who admit
that they themselves disagree, are honest in exposing some of the problems
with their line of reasoning. They are also careful not to condone or excuse
rape in any way. They make the strongest possible case for their position; it
simply isn't strong enough.
The greatest flaw of ''A Natural History of Rape'' is that it quotes but then
blithely ignores the warning of the evolutionary biologist George Williams
that ''adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should be used only
when it is really necessary.'' Even common behavior, like smoking or
masturbation, isn't necessarily adaptive -- let alone uncommon behavior. If
child abuse by stepfathers is evolutionarily explained (an oft-cited example,
used again here), or if rape is such a smart reproductive strategy, why do so
many more stepfathers lovingly care for their children? And why are there so
many more men who don't rape? Let me call this the dilemma of the rarely
exercised option: a Darwinian account for an atypical behavioral choice is
incomplete without an equally good account for the typical choice.
If women feel offended by this book, let me say that I, and with me probably
most men, resent the foisting of the crimes of a minority onto us as something
that we would just as eagerly do if the opportunity arose. Why can't
evolutionary psychology put a little less evolution and a little more
psychology into its thinking? We evolved a complex mental life that makes us
act in all sorts of ways, the sum of which should enhance reproductive
success. But this strategy is by no means required for each and every
behavior. To focus on just one, isolated from the rest of the package, is like
seeking to understand why the kangaroo has such tiny front legs while
ignoring what happened to its hind legs and tail.
In the case of rape, I'd suggest looking less at flies and more at our fellow
primates for answers. In monkeys and apes there is a clear link between
power and sex. High-ranking males enjoy sexual privileges, and are more
attractive to the opposite sex. We need only look at recent events in the White

House (and at a television spectacular like ''Who Wants to Marry a

Multimillionaire?'') to see how much the link exists in us too. This age-old
connection may explain how power and sex get mixed up in the minds of
men, and occasionally spin out of control together -- not because men are
born to have coercive sex, but because power in general is a male aphrodisiac.
If all this makes rape prevention seem hopeless, Thornhill and Palmer have a
solution: give young men a crash course on how the urge to rape arose in our
species (thus implying that the urge has been demonstrated and that science
knows where it comes from!) and warn young women to watch how they
dress. In other words, if we can make boys see the Darwinian light and girls
wear baggy pants, we will rid the world of a lot of nasty male behavior. But
there are many societies lacking such measures in which rape is rare. I would
have preferred cross-cultural information, because even if rape statistics are
notoriously unreliable, the authors are wrong in assuming that the United
States is typical. This country is considered one of the most rape-prone among
industrialized nations. It is also arguably the most prudish, which raises some
interesting questions -- not biological questions but cultural ones.
These issues are glaringly absent from ''A Natural History of Rape.'' Instead of
belittling the social sciences, as the authors do for about 50 pages, it would
have been more productive to join forces and consider a wide range of
perspectives on an ugly behavior that has harmed so many.
Frans B. M. de Waal, the author of ''Chimpanzee Politics'' and ''Good

Natured,'' is the C. H. Candler professor of psychology and director of the
Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at
Emory University.
Return to the Books Home Page

Evolution - April 2000: Jerry Coyne on A Natural History of Ra
Jerry Coyne on A Natural History of

Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual
Coercion
From: John E. Rylander (rylander@prolexia.com)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 07:41:16 EDT
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Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion"
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Bases of Sexual Coercion"
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Interesting and somewhat critical ;^> article in The New Republic, a leading
center-left, neoliberal political-intellectual journal.
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/040300/coyne040300.html
The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology.

Of Vice and Men
By JERRY A. COYNE
Issue date: 04.03.00
Post date: 03.26.00
A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion

by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer
MIT Press, 272pp.
Minor excerpts:
I.
In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the

bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology
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is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We

evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly
what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually
cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to
tube B and noting the color of the mixture.
The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is "evolutionary

psychology," or the science formerly known as sociobiology, which studies
the evolutionary roots of human behavior. There is nothing inherently wrong
with this enterprise, and it has proposed some intriguing theories,
particularly about the evolution of language. The problem is that
evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of
megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human
action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and
consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection. In
this view, evolution becomes the key--the only key--that can unlock our
humanity.
Unfortunately, evolutionary psychologists routinely confuse theory and

speculation. Unlike bones, behavior does not fossilize, and understanding
its evolution often involves concocting stories that sound plausible but are
hard to test. Depression, for example, is seen as a trait favored by natural
selection to enable us to solve our problems by withdrawing, reflecting, and
hence enhancing our future reproduction. Plausible? Maybe. Scientifically
testable? Absolutely not. If evolutionary biology is a soft science, then
evolutionary psychology is its flabby underbelly.
But the public can be forgiven for thinking that evolutionary biology is
equivalent to evolutionary psychology. Books by Daniel Dennett, E.O. Wilson,
and Steven Pinker have sold briskly, and evolutionary psychology dominates
the media coverage of the science of evolution.
......
Thornhill and Palmer's attempts to gain control of rape counseling, laws,

and punishments, despite the weakness of their science, reveal their larger
goal: the engulfment of social science and social policy by the great whale
of evolutionary psychology. This attempted takeover is not new. It was first
suggested in 1978 in E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature, and more recently in his
Consilience, Wilson extended the program to nearly every area of human
thought, including aesthetics and ethics. We are witnessing a new campaign
for the Darwinization of Everything. Thornhill's and Palmer's theory of rape
is just the most recent attempt at the annexation of all human experience to
evolutionary psychology.

After all, if one can give a believable evolutionary explanation for the
difficult problem of rape, then no human behavior is immune to such
analysis, and the cause is significantly advanced. The apocalyptic tone that
pervades Thornhill and Palmer's book reveals the party to which they belong:
"The biophobia that has led to the rejection of Darwinian analyses of human
behavior is an intellectual disaster." And "in addressing the question of
rape, the choice between the politically constructed answers of social
science and the evidentiary answers of evolutionary biology is essentially a
choice between ideology and knowledge."
Let us be clear. It is not "biophobia" to reject the reduction of all human

feelings and actions to evolution. Quite the contrary. It is biophilia; or
at least a proper respect for science. The "choice between ideology and
knowledge" is a real choice; but it is Thornhill and Palmer and the
doctrinaire evolutionary psychologists who choose ideology over knowledge.
They enjoy the advantage that people seem to like scientific explanations
for their behavior, and the certainty that such explanations provide. It is
reassuring to impute our traumas and our misdeeds to our savanna-dwelling
ancestors. It lessens the moral pressure on our lives. And so the
disciplinary hubris of evolutionary psychology and the longing for certainty
of ordinary men and women have combined to create a kind of scientistic
cargo cult, with everyone waiting in vain for evolutionary psychology to
deliver the goods that it doesn't have.
Amid this debacle--for A Natural History of Rape is truly an embarrassment

to the field--I am somewhat consoled by the parallels between Freudianism
and evolutionary psychology. Freud's views lost credibility when people
realized that they were not at all based on science, but were really an
ideological edifice, a myth about human life, that was utterly resistant to
scientific refutation. By judicious manipulation, every possible observation
of human behavior could be (and was) fitted into the Freudian framework. The
same trick is now being perpetrated by the evolutionary psychologists. They,
too, deal in their own dogmas, and not in propositions of science.
Evolutionary psychology may have its day in the sun, but versions of the
faith such as Thornhill and Palmer's will disappear when people realize that
they are useless and unscientific.
JERRY A. COYNE teaches in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the

University of Chicago.
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THE EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY OF RAPE
THE EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY OF

german | english
RAPE
Introduction
For the last quarter of a century, attempts to prevent rape have

been guided by the social science explanation of rape (also
commonly referred to as the feminist theory of rape). This
explanation holds that the motivation to rape has little, if anything,
to do with sexual desire. Instead, it holds that rape is an attempt by
men to dominate and control women. It also contends that rape
only occurs when males are taught by their culture, directly or
indirectly, to rape. In our new book, *A Natural History of Rape*1,
we challenge this established social science explanation of rape.
We argue that although a given rapist may have numerous
motivations for committing a rape, social scientists have failed to
prove that sex is not one of these. Nor have social scientists
seriously and honestly considered the vast evidence showing that
rapists are sexually motivated. Although we agree that culture (=
social learning) plays a major role in the cause of rape, we
challenge the notion that rape only occurs when males are taught
by their cultures to rape. Rape not only appears to occur in all
known cultures, but in a wide variety of other species where there
is certainly no cultural encouragement of such behavior. We also
argue that the best way to obtain a better understanding of the role
of culture in the cause of human rape is to approach the subject
from the only generally accepted scientific explanation of the
behavior of living things: Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
Why have we chosen to make such an argument knowing full well

the criticisms that challenging such a widely held position would
cause to be rained down upon us? The answer is that inaccurate
knowledge about the causes of behavior hinder attempts to
change behavior, and we want very badly to eradicate rape from
human existence. Rape is a horrific act that violates a fundamental
civil right of its victims. Sexual autonomy-the right to choose who
will have sexual access to one, as well the timing of the access-
should be a freedom that is given highest priority in modern
society. This basic freedom depends upon knowledge of the
causes of sexual coercion.
What Our Book Really Says
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Given the great amount of media attention our book A Natural

History of Rape has received, we thought the best way to
summarize the book would be to contrast what you may have
heard in the media with what the book actually says.
You have probably heard that our book says that rape is good
because it is a part of the natural, biological world. If so, you might
be surprised to find the following statement at the book's outset:
"There is no connection here between what is biological or
naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong. To assume a
connection is to commit what is called the naturalistic fallacy" (p. 5-
6). This fallacy erroneously sees the facts of how nature is
organized as moral truths. This fallacy still remains too common
today, despite having been discarded in intellectual circles. The
pervasiveness of the naturalistic fallacy is seen, for example, in
Nancy Pearcey's comments at a recent U.S. Congressional
Hearing in which she claimed that *A Natural History of Rape*
threatens the moral fabric upon which America is founded2.
Modern thinkers emphasize that nature is as nature is, period;
right and wrong in the moral sense derive from humans pursuing
their interests, not from the facts of nature.
To say that rape is biological and natural is simply to state what

should be obvious. The word "biological" means of or pertaining to
life. Rape is part of the component of nature that is in the domain
of biologists' study, which is all of life. We use the term "natural" in
contrast to supernatural. As we explain in detail in our book, the
social science theory of rape rests on assumptions about the
causation of behavior that are supernatural because they are not
part of natural reality. For example, the view that learning is all
powerful in causing rape is based on ideological faith, not actual
knowledge of how traits come to be. Social learning appears to be
an immediate cause of rape, but it is just one of a multitude of
equally important immediate causes. Also, rape is the result of
ultimate or evolutionary causation.
You may have also heard that the book excuses rapists for their
hideous acts. You will recognize this as another version of the
naturalistic fallacy. What we really say is that: "Contrary to the
common view that an evolutionary explanation for human behavior
removes individuals' responsibility for their actions, . . . knowledge
of the self as having evolved by Darwinian selection provides an
individual with tremendous potential for free will. Moreover, refusal

to refrain from damaging behavior in the face of scientific

understanding could be seen as a ground for holding irresponsible
individuals more culpable, not less so." (p. 154, emphasis in
original). This is why, far from claiming that rapists should not be
punished, the reader of our book will find that "we have stressed
the value of punishment for changing human behavior." (p. 199).
Evolution allows the understanding of why certain experiences are

punishments and others rewards. We don't suggest particular
types of punishment for rape. We leave up to people the hard
decision of how much cost to impose for this crime. Knowledge
from evolutionary biology, then, cannot tell us that rape is morally
good or bad. People decide that distinction and have deemed rape
horrific. Our book is about how evolutionary knowledge may be
useful for achieving the desirable social goal of reducing rape.
Another frequent depiction of our book claims that we say rape is

inevitable because it is determined by genes. We are actually in
full agreement with the evolutionary biologist John Maynard
Smith's observation that genetic determinism is "an incorrect idea"
3. We further point out on page 111 that "Most evolutionary works
on humans [including ours-see Chapter 1] include an extended
discussion of the inseparable and equally important influences of
genes and environment . . . ." This is why we can state "[t]he
evolutionary approach holds that no behavior is inevitable" (p.
153), and that rape can best be prevented by addressing the
"environmental factors" that lead to rape (p. 154).
Recent research indicates that these environmental factors include

certain learning experiences during boys' upbringing such as the
conditions of poverty, limited enduring relationships and father
absence. The evolutionary approach focuses attention on specific
experiences that would have been correlated with limited social
and economic resources when boys achieved adulthood in human
evolutionary history. These limitations would have, in the deep-
time history of the human past, reduced or eliminated access to
consensual female sex partners because recent research has
shown that the female evolutionary ancestors of people preferred
mates with status and resources. This preference is demonstrated
by the vast evidence from evolutionary psychology that women
today have a psychological adaptation that functions to guide their
romantic interests toward such men. Rape bypasses this
preference and thereby circumvents a fundamental aspect of

female reproductive strategy.
The learning experiences that are suggested by recent research to

influence men's rape proneness offer promise for reducing rape.
The number of boys raised under conditions of poverty in industrial
societies could be greatly reduced by taxation policies that lower
wealth inequalities, coupled with more taxation revenues being
directed at socially disfranchised families. Father-absence rearing
environments would decline if fathers, following divorce, were
given tax credits when they resided near their sons and provided
sons with emotional and financial support4. These are only two of
many possibilities that come to mind for attacking the social
problem of rape from knowledge of its developmental causes.
The reader may also be surprised to find that, contrary to media

reports, we do not argue that rapists are driven by an urge to
reproduce. As is explained in detail in our book's Chapter 1, this
assertion confuses the motivations that form the immediate (what
evolutionists call "proximate") causes of a behavior, with the
evolutionary (what evolutionists call "ultimate") effects of a
behavior during countless past generations of evolutionary history.
Rapists may be motivated by many different immediate desires,
but a desire for reproduction is probably one of them in only the
rarest of instances. Sexual stimulation is a proximate cause of
raping and is the common denominator across human rapes of all
kinds. Men's strong libido is an ultimate product of selection
pressures in human evolutionary history that was favored because
it resulted in accessing many mates of fertile ages.
In addition to the false claim that we excuse rapists, you have

probably heard that we blame victims. This is also not true.
Instead, we emphasize that "educational programs aimed at
reducing the vulnerability of women to sexual coercion are
dependent on the acquisition of information concerning risk
factors." (p. 180) We also make a claim (which has been seen by
some people as both an insane idea and a mortal sin, but by most
others as too obvious to be worth debate) that a woman's
appearance and behavior might have some influence on these risk
factors. We stress, however, that it is completely "unjustified" to
argue that "a victim's dress and behavior should affect the degree
of punishment a rapist receives." (p. 182) The identification of risk
factors, and the encouragement of women to take these into
consideration during their daily activities, has long been an

established part of rape prevention programs without anyone

claiming that it constitutes blaming victims. Despite full awareness
of the misguided criticisms that would rain down upon us, we
chose to address this issue because "The failure to distinguish
between statements about causes and statements about
responsibility has the consequence of suppressing knowledge
about how to avoid dangerous situations" (p. 182).
That a woman's dress may affect risk of rape is eminently

reasonable from knowledge of certain of men's sexual adaptations.
The combination of men's eagerness to have sex with new sexual
partners and impulsiveness in pursuit of such partners, men's
sexual motivation upon viewing women's secondary sexual traits
(breasts, thighs and buttocks), and men's tendency to conclude
that a woman is signaling sexual interest when she is not is
expected to, lead some men to rape. This is not to say that all or
most rape victims will be wearing mini-skirts or blouses that reveal
their breasts. It is to say that dress is anticipated to be a risk factor,
especially when coupled with other risk factors that stimulate
men's sexual motivation such as youth and other features of
physical attractiveness in women.
The view that physical attractiveness influences risk factors is

consistent with women at the ages of peak attractiveness (late
teens and early twenties) being the most frequent victims of rape.
It is also consistent with descriptions of rape in other cultures,
made by people completely unaware of the political and
ideological issues that have come to dominate discussions of rape
in our society. For example, consider this statement made by
Ongka, a leader among the Kawelka people of Mount Hagen,
Papua New Guinea, while recalling the rapes that took place
during the tribal wars he lived through: "When we left our women
behind and went out to fight, they were in danger. Men came to
find them, chasing them down to the edges of streams till they
seized hold of them, *especially if their bodies were good to look
at*" (emphasis added).5
It has also been claimed that our book is not a "study", but only a
"theory" with no evidence to support it because we didn't talk to
rapists or rape victims. Those making this argument reveal their
scientific illiteracy because testing alternative hypotheses against
the data collected by others (there are about 600 references in our
bibliography) is a very common and valid method in science.

Further, we have an extended discussion on why the statements

made by rapists do not support the social science explanation of
rape (pp. 135 - 136), and an entire chapter devoted to the
reactions of victims to this horrible crime (Chapter 4).
Another common objection to our book is that it is based only on

evidence from insects. The reader who has heard such a depiction
will be disappointed to find how relatively few of our hundreds of
references concern that subject. We do discuss research on
insects called scorpionflies that has identified a clamp on the top of
the male's abdomen as an adaptation specifically for rape. This
illustrates what an adaptation for rape is, but it does not follow that
because scorpionfly males, and males of other non-human
species, have adaptation for rape, that, therefore, men do too. This
is an erroneous extrapolation that modern biologists don't engage
in. The existence of rape in many non-human species scientifically
falsifies the social science theory of rape, which claims that rape is
simply the result of human-specific learning experiences.
One hypothesis about how evolution and human rape may be

related is that men have rape-specific adaptation, but located in
the brain. We outline in the book how further research could test
for the existence of six potential rape psychological adaptations.
Scientific proof of the existence of a psychological adaptation for
rape would be conclusive evidence that men's brains contain an
information-processing mechanism(s) that is (are) specifically for
promoting adaptive rape in human evolutionary history. Just as the
human psychological adaptation for color vision is specifically for
assessing color, a rape psychological adaptation would give rise to
maximum motivation to rape specifically when evolutionary
historical benefits of rape (copulation with a female of fertile age)
exceed historical costs of rape (injury, ostracism and punishment
of the perpetrator).
Readers who have also heard that we assume every aspect of

human behavior, including rape, is an adaptation directly favored
by Darwinian selection will be surprised also to find an extended
discussion in the book of the alternative hypothesis that rape itself
is not an adaptation, but instead a by-product or incidental effect of
other adaptation such as men's psychological adaptations that
motivate their pursuit of partner variety without commitment. Under
the by-product hypothesis, Darwinian selection indirectly led to
rape as a result of directly favoring men's sexual adaptations that
give rise to rape as an incidental effect. The vast evidence that

rape arises out of evolved sexual psychologies of men and women

is discussed in the book. Women are evolved to choose mates
carefully and men to be less selective and pursue many partners,
including without commitment. Rape is one of the many behaviors
resulting from this evolved difference in male and female sexuality.
The two hypotheses for rape we have mentioned (the rape
adaptation hypothesis and the by-product hypothesis) are attempts
to specify how evolution and rape are related. In our book, we
discuss why these two hypotheses exhaust ultimate (=
evolutionary) explanations of rape. Also there, we examine the
copious data on rape, but conclude that more research is
necessary to determine which of the two hypotheses best
accounts for rape.
Jerry Coyne and Andrew Berry describe our consideration of

alternative hypotheses, not as the rigorous scientific procedure
that it is, but as a "rhetorical trick" 6. They have training in science
(biology) and therefore must understand the necessity of
alternative hypotheses in scientific investigation. This kind of
criticism is a desperate attempt to derogate scientific analysis of
rape in the eyes of the many people who lack any understanding
of the scientific method. It also indicates that these authors are
unaware that determining whether a trait is an adaptation or a by-
product has been a cornerstone of evolutionary theory since the
publication of George Williams' book *Adaptation and Natural
Selection* in 1966. It is unfortunate that scientists with such a
large gap in their own education should present themselves as
speaking for evolutionists in general.
Even more puzzling is Frans de Waal's criticism of our book for

supposedly not even considering any alternative to the rape-as-
adaptation hypothesis7. We have no explanation of how he could
have either overlooked, or consciously ignored, our discussions of
both the by-product and other alternative explanations of rape in
Chapter 3.
Under either evolutionary hypothesis for rape, increased

knowledge is the key to reducing rape. If rape is an incidental
effect of men's psychological adaptation for obtaining high mate
numbers without commitment, reducing the incidence of rape will
depend upon complete knowledge of the adaptations involved and
of the circumstances under which they give rise to rape as a by-
product. If rape is itself an adaptation, reducing rape will depend

upon full knowledge of the evolutionary historical cues that

stimulated adaptive rape by males during human evolutionary
history. Such knowledge, for example, could reduce the high
incidence of rape in war, where evolutionary historical benefits of
rape are high and corresponding costs are typically trivial.
A common media claim is that the evolutionary analysis of rape

cannot account for the rape of boys, men and non-reproductive-
age females. Although the majority of rapes involve pubescent and
young adult females, some rapes involve other victims. As we
clearly state on page 60, rape of these other victims is an
incidental effect of men's strong libido for obtaining many mates of
fertile ages. Every adaptation has incidental effects that are
maintained because the adaptation enhanced overall reproductive
success of its bearer, even when the adaptation's incidental effects
lowered reproductive success in some circumstances. The bone of
the human skeleton was directly selected because of its structural
strength (thereby increasing survival and offspring production).
Bone's by-products involve the maladaptive effects of osteoporosis
and certain other bone diseases. Males engaging in non-
reproductive rape is widespread across animal species8. Males
and infertile females that are of the same species as the rapist are
common rape victims across many species. In some species,
males rape females of other species. Male seals even copulate
with corpses, and living juveniles are also rape victims. Males of
every animal species have an evolved preference for fertile
females of the same species, but the libido that motivates the
dogged pursuit of that preference results in some maladaptive
matings.
The media often focus on the uninformed criticism that for

evolution to apply to human rape, there must be a significant rate
of pregnancy associated with rape in modern societies9. It is
important to realize that all features of life, including rape, are
ultimately the result of the evolutionary process. Even the
computer is ultimately a by-product of evolution because certain
psychological adaptations give rise to the behaviors and
mentations responsible for the computer. It is never a question of
whether evolution applies to a feature of living things, including
any given human activity. The only question is how to apply
evolution to fully understand the feature. The two ultimate
hypotheses mentioned are attempts to illuminate rape by
connecting it to a more specific evolutionary history.

Furthermore, some human adaptations are frequently maladaptive

now. For example, the consumption of large quantities of refined
sugar causes widespread health problems, but the sweet "tooth"
(actually a psychological adaptation for pursuing ripe fruit) evolved
because it resulted in nourishment in human evolutionary
environments.
Rape may or may not be currently adaptive, i.e., promote net

reproductive success despite its costs. And rape may be currently
adaptive in some societies (e.g., in pre-industrial societies without
contraceptives), but not others. In the U.S.A., pregnancy follows
from rape in about 2.5% of the cases. Rape-pregnancy, however,
is much higher during warfare10. The current adaptiveness of rape
is an entirely different issue than the evolutionary historical
adaptiveness of rape. The claim of the rape adaptation hypothesis
is that rape was adaptive in human evolutionary history, but now it
may or may not be adaptive. Historically adaptive rape is
demonstrated by the existence of an adaptation functionally
specialized for rape.
The media also have commonly been amazed that we claim in our
book that evolutionary biology includes procedures for knowing the
deep-time past of the human species. Many erroneously believe
that this past is unknowable. Darwin invented the method of
historical science and this rigorous method is routine practice in all
sciences that explore the past (biology, geology and astronomy).
Actual historical causes will have left consequences. Finding these
consequences provides the definitive evidence for past causes
that cannot be observed directly. This is why the existence of an
adaptation in men functionally specialized for rape demonstrates
direct selection for rape during human evolutionary history.
Our proposal that all men are potential rapists has been
interpreted by the media as meaning that all men will rape.
Actually, we mean that at conception essentially all human males
have genes which might lead to raping behavior if, and only if,
those genes interact with certain specific environmental factors
during the development of the individual. Hence, we emphasize
that "Many men don't rape and are not sexually aroused by
laboratory depictions of rape. This suggests that there are cues in
the developmental backgrounds of many men that prohibit raping
behavior" (p. 173). These cues, in part, may involve boys growing
up with adequate resources, father presence, and enduring social

relationships with others. That all boys are potential rapists is only
bad news from science if people continue to ignore the utility of
evolutionary biology for understanding rape's proximate causes.
The media has presented various inaccurate depictions of the

book's treatment of rape victims' psychological pain following rape.
This stems from, in part, the uncritical media picking upon a
comment in the paper by Coyne and Berry11. Coyne and Berry
state that they looked at a reference in our book and that it doesn't
contain the information that the book claims it does. They claim
(contrary to the book's claim) that the 1990 Thornhill co-authored
paper does not contain data showing that reproductive-age female
rape victims have more mental pain than post-reproductive-age
female victims. However, the data and analysis supporting this
pattern are in Table 4 and Appendix 3 of the paper12. We invite
readers to take a look for themselves at the data and its analysis
and the full discussion of this evidence. Again, Coyne and Berry
show their desperation.
Rape circumvents female mate choice and lowers the victim's pair-
bond mate's paternity confidence, which may result in his
reduction of investment or complete desertion. Thus, rape is an
experience that would have reduced female reproductive success
in human ancestral settings. Psychological pain is widely
recognized in evolutionary biology as an adaptation that functions
as a defense against social losses by aiding in solving the
problems involved and avoiding them in the future. As expected,
research on rape victims indicates that reproductive-age women
have greater mental pain than pre- and post-reproductive-age
victims as rape can lead to pregnancy only in reproductive-age
women. Also, married women seem to experience more
psychological pain than unmarried victims. Raped married women
may face a mate's divestment. Knowledge of the causes of rape
victims' mental pain could be useful in treating rape victims by
focusing therapy where it is needed. Also, given the likely function
of mental pain, treating rape victims with psychotrophic drugs to
alleviate the pain may have the undesirable effects of reducing
rape victims' ability to solve the social problems surrounding the
victimization and avoid future rape13.
Conclusion
Rape generates tremendous misery for all of its victims and their
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mates and families throughout the world. Only knowledge of rape's

causes holds promise for reducing rape's incidence. Solutions not
based on an understanding of causation can solve nothing. The
causes are biological and totally so. Evolutionary theory is the tool
for guiding the most productive research on life. Thus, the vigorous
study of the evolutionary biology of rape should be a high priority
in any truly humane society.
But humans have not come very far in understanding the scientific
and humanistic value of applying evolutionary analysis to human
behavior. This limited progress may reflect an adaptation not to
understand, because evolution applied to human behavior
threatens the use of ideology as a social strategy14. Cognizance
of ideological opposition to scientific study of rape could help in the
establishment of scientifically objective review committees to
evaluate and fund research dealing with the biology of rape. Until
then, such research is too risky, unpopular, and difficult for most
scholars' tastes.
It is our hope that people will increase their ability to look past
ideological considerations and make an objective re-evaluation of
the social science explanation of rape. If they do this, they will see
that it is not our alleged ideological leanings or our use of
evolutionary theory that falsify the social science explanation of
rape, it is the actual behavior of males who commit rape.
Biologists are in a pivotal position to inform people about evolution

as it applies to humans. We are very critical of the biologists who
advocate that evolution applies to all life except human behavior
and psychology. This pre-Darwinian view of human activity is not
scientifically legitimate. It is due to the evidentiary blindness that
arises from ideology and political correctness. We invite all
biologists to join the effort to create a science for humanity-a
science that sees knowledge of humans as its single goal for the
sake of helping people, including reducing rape. We also invite
educators to join this effort by establishing Darwinism applied to
human behavior as the most fundamental knowledge to be gained
by students at all levels.
Although the media's distortion of our book has been extreme, it is

understandable given the high emotions the horrible act of rape
produces in all people. This is why we don't begrudge our critics.
We only hope that as the initial emotions that have so colored their
responses subside, they will take the effort to read our book as it

is, not as they have feared it was. After all, we all share the same
goal of trying to end the immense pain caused by rape. This being
the case, let's all get on with the rational view of rape, which will
require that it be depoliticized from the master symbol of feminist
ideology to a behavior that needs to be prevented through the
identification of its causes. This change of attitude hinges upon
people understanding that one can't logically be against rape and
against the evolutionary approach to rape at the same time. Notes
1 Thornhill, Randy; Palmer, Craig T."A Natural History of Rape:

Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion." MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
2000.
2 Ms. Pearcey is with the Discovery Institute, which promotes the
teaching of divine creation mythology in U.S. schools as a
scientific alternative to Darwinism.
3 Genetic determinism means that genes play an all-important or
primary causal role in the development of a given trait of an
individual organism. This inaccurately depicts the process of
development (= ontogeny) of an individual's features, including its
behaviors. In reality, each trait of the individual is equally caused
by genes and environment. Thus, environmental determinism-that
an individual's features are solely or primarily influenced by
environmental causes such as learning-is as scientifically
erroneous as genetic determinism.
4 This tax credit could be modeled after the Australian tax credit
given to grandparents who reside near or with their grandchildren.
5 Strathern, Andrew; Stewart, Pamela J. "Collaboration and
Conflicts: A Leader Through Time," p. 41. Harcourt College
Publishers, Fort Worth, TX. 2000
6 Coyne, Jerry, A.; Berry, A.. "Rape as an Adaptation: Is this
Contentious Hypothesis Advocacy, Not Science?" *Nature*, Vol.
404, pp.121-122. 9 March 2000
7 de Waal, Frans B.M. "Survival of the Rapist", *N.Y. Times* Book
Review, pp. 1-2. 2 April, 2000,
8 Mesnick, Sarah L. "Sexual Alliances: Evidence and Evolutionary
Implications", in Gowatry, Patricia A. (ed.), pp. 207-257. N.Y.,
Chapman and Hall, NY
9 Thornhill, Randy; Palmer, Craig T. "Authors' Response: Just
Why do Men Rape?" *The Sciences*, pp. 6 and 46. May/June
2000. See also reference in Note 7.
10 See evidence in Note 1.
11 Reference Note 5 above.
12 Thornhill, Nancy; Thornhill, Randy. "An Evolutionary Analysis of

Psychological Pain Following Rape: I. The Effects of Victim's Age

and Martial Status", *Ethology and Sociobiology*, Vol. 11, pp.155-
176. 1990
13 See Note 1 above.
14 See Note 1 above; also Thornhill, Randy. "The Biology of
Human Rape", *Jurimetrics J.*, Vol. 39, pp.137-147. 1999

This document is a new preface to A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion,
by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. It can be downloaded from The MIT Press website at 1
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/thornhill-preface.html>. The book may be ordered from The MIT Press at
1-800-356-0343, at http://mitpress.mit.edu, or from your local bookseller.
Copyright (c) 2001 Randy Thornhill.
Rape and Evolution: A Reply to Our Critics
Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer
Rape generates tremendous misery for its victims and for their friends and
families throughout the world. Greater knowledge of rape’s causes could
reduce rape’s incidence. Evolutionary theory is an indispensable tool for
guiding productive research on the causes of human behavior. Thus,
vigorous study of the evolutionary biology of rape should be a priority in
any truly humane society.
For the last quarter of a century, attempts to prevent rape have been
guided by a widespread social-science explanation that holds that rape’s
causation has little, if anything, to do with sexual desire. Instead, it holds
that rape is motivated by men’s attempt to dominate and control women.
It also contends that rape occurs only when males are taught (by their
culture) to rape. In A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual
Coercion (MIT Press, 2000), we scientifically criticize this social-
constructionist view of rape. We argue that, although a given rapist may
have numerous motivations for committing a rape, social constructionists
have not seriously and honestly considered the vast evidence showing
that rapists are sexually motivated. Although we agree that culture (that
is, social learning, or learning resulting from experience with other
members of the same species) plays a significant role in causing rape, we
challenge the notion that rape occurs only when males are taught by their
2
culture to rape. The ethnographic record of anthropology indicates that
rape occurs in all known cultures. It also occurs in a wide variety of other
species in which there is certainly no cultural encouragement of such
behavior. We emphasize in our book that the best way to obtain a better
understanding of the role of culture in human rape is to approach the
subject from the only generally accepted scientific explanation of the
behavior of living things: evolution by natural selection. We then show
that rape is definitely caused by men’s evolved sexual psychology, and we
discuss why this knowledge may be important to society’s efforts to
reduce rape.
Why did we choose to challenge existing dogma and examine the
evolutionary bases of rape, knowing full well the criticisms that would be
rained down upon us? The answer is that fictional accounts about the
causes of behavior hinder attempts to change behavior, and we want very
badly to eradicate rape from human existence. The social constructionists
have fought the message of our book with continued fiction, and we want
to refocus the discussion onto the serious issues by correcting the major
misunderstandings found in media accounts and reviews of the book.
In view of the great amount of media attention A Natural History of
Rape has received, we think the best way to summarize the book and
respond to its many critics is to contrast what you may have heard about
it with what it actually says. It is disheartening that certain individuals
who talked to the media about the book, and certain reviewers, so
profoundly misrepresented its basic contents, thereby promoting

3
confusion about the connections between rape, biology, evolution,
morality, and determinism. We will start with some of the common
misrepresentations made in the media coverage of the book, then examine
some of the equally inaccurate portrayals of our book in supposedly
scholarly reviews.
Media Accounts
You have probably heard in the media that our book says that rape is
good because it is a part of the natural, biological world. If so, you may be
surprised to find that we state the following on pages 5 and 6:
There is no connection here between what is biological or naturally
selected and what is morally right or wrong. To assume a connection is to
commit what is called the naturalistic fallacy.
The naturalistic fallacy erroneously sees the facts of how nature is
organized as moral truths. Modern thinkers emphasize that nature is as
nature is period, and that right and wrong in the moral sense derive from
humans’ pursuing their interests, not from the facts of nature.
You may have also heard that our book excuses rapists for their
hideous acts. You will recognize this as a version of the naturalistic fallacy.
What we really say (p. 154) is this:

4
Contrary to the common view that an evolutionary explanation for human
behavior removes individuals’ responsibility for their actions, . . .
knowledge of the self as having evolved by Darwinian selection provides
an individual with tremendous potential for free will. Moreover, refusal to
refrain from damaging behavior in the face of scientific understanding
could be seen as a ground for holding irresponsible individuals more
culpable, not less so.
This is why, far from claiming that rapists should not be punished, “we
have stressed the value of punishment for changing human behavior” (p.
199). Evolution allows the understanding of why certain experiences are
punishments and others are rewards. We don’t suggest particular types of
punishment for rape. We leave up to voters the hard decision of how
much cost to impose on this heinous crime.
Knowledge from evolutionary biology, then, cannot tell us that rape
is morally good or bad. People, including us, have deemed rape to be
immoral. Our book helps explain why people have evolved to abhor rape.
Rape reduced female reproductive success throughout human
evolutionary history because it interfered with their ability to choose their
offspring’s father. Because women’s interests are thwarted by rape, so too
are the interests of their significant others—that is, of people in general.
More basically, our book is about how evolutionary knowledge may be
useful for achieving the desirable social goal of reducing rape.
The naturalistic fallacy remains too common today, despite having

5
been discarded in intellectual circles. The pervasiveness of the naturalistic
fallacy is evident, for example, in Nancy Pearcey’s suggestion in a recent
congressional hearing that A Natural History of Rape threatens the moral
fabric of the United States. (Ms. Pearcey is with the Discovery Institute,
which promotes the teaching of divine creation mythology in U.S. schools
as a scientific alternative to Darwinism.) On his radio show, the ultra-
conservative Rush Limbaugh implied that we wrote A Natural History of
Rape to morally justify President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Limbaugh suggested that the book was part of a Democratic effort to
improve Clinton’s reputation. (Clinton’s behavior should be excused
because his biology motivated it.) Henry Gee, an editor of the web site of
the journal Nature, committed the naturalistic fallacy in his comment (July
6, 2000) that “to propose that [rape] serves some evolutionary function is
distasteful.” Gee apparently doesn’t understand that the falsity of a
scientific hypothesis can be determined only by scientific methodology,
not by whether it is politically incorrect. This misunderstanding is seen
commonly in people with limited knowledge of science.
To say that rape is biological is to state the obvious. Rape involves
living beings. In biology and in English dictionaries, the word “biological”
means of, or pertaining to, life; all life. Human behavior is not an
exception. “Biological” is not synonymous with “genetic,” as is sometimes
assumed. Genetics is just one of many subdisciplines of biology. All
features of all living things are developmental products of complex
interaction between genes and environmental factors such as

6
nourishment; for many behavioral features, learning is a causal
environmental factor too.
It should be obvious that rape is an aspect of nature. Each of the three
natural sciences—biology, chemistry, and physics—uses the scientific
method in order to know a component of the natural world; biology’s
component is all life. In our book, we use the term “natural” in contrast to
supernatural. The social-constructionist theory of rape rests on
assumptions about the causation of behavior that are transcendental—that
is, are not part of empirically verified reality. For example, the view that
learning is all-powerful in causing rape is based on ideology, not actual
knowledge of how behavior comes to exist. Social learning appears to be
an immediate (proximate) cause of rape, but it is just one of a multitude of
equally important immediate causes. Also, in addition to the many
proximate causes, rape is the result of ultimate (= evolutionary) causation
as well.
Another frequent depiction of our book claims that we say rape is
inevitable because genes determine it. But in fact on page 110 we
emphasize modern evolutionary biology’s conclusion that genetic
determinism is, in the words of John Maynard Smith, “an incorrect idea.”
We go on to explain that genetic determinism means that genes play an
all-important or primary causal role in the development of the behaviors
of the individual, a grossly inaccurate depiction of the process of
biological development. In scientific reality, genes and environment
equally cause each and every trait of the individual. Thus, environmental
7
determinism—the idea that an individual’s features are solely or primarily
influenced by environmental causes such as learning—is as scientifically
erroneous as genetic determinism. Modern biology’s conclusion that the
influences of genes and environment are equally important in the
developmental creation of all of every human’s features, and therefore
that both are necessary and neither alone is sufficient, is why we can state
that “the evolutionary approach holds that no behavior is inevitable” (p.
153) and that rape can best be prevented by manipulating the
“environmental factors” that lead to it (p. 154). We emphasize two reasons
why manipulating the genetic underpinnings of rape is not an option: (1)
it is immoral to artificially select (selectively breed) people; and (2) such
breeding probably wouldn’t work at all, and if it could be made to work
the effort would take too long.
The media also have interpreted our proposal that all men are
potential rapists as meaning that all men will rape. Actually, we mean that
at conception essentially all human males have genes that might lead to
raping behavior if, and only if, those genes interact with certain specific
environmental factors during the development of the individual. On p.
173 we state: “Many men don’t rape and are not sexually aroused by
laboratory depictions of rape. This suggests that there are cues in the
developmental backgrounds of many men that prohibit raping behavior.”
Recent research by Neil Malamuth and his colleagues, detailed in our
book, suggests that these cues or environmental factors may include
growing up with adequate resources, father presence, and enduring social

8
relationships. At the same time, this research identifies “rape proneness”
in men as arising from developmental backgrounds that include poverty,
father absence, and limited enduring relationships.
The recent research on developmental factors in rape proneness in
men was inspired by evolutionary theory. The evolutionary approach
focuses on the specific environmental factors mentioned because they
would have correlated in human evolutionary history with limited social
status and economic resources at the time a boy reached adulthood. In the
deep-time history of the human past, these limitations would have
reduced access to consensual female sex partners. As other research has
shown, female evolutionary ancestors preferred high-status mates with
resources to low-status males without resources, everything else being
equal. The vast evidence from evolutionary psychology that women today
have psychological adaptation that functions to guide their romantic
interests toward men with resources and status demonstrates this ancient
preference.
Although we emphasize that additional scientific investigation is
needed to fully clarify how social learning during a boy’s development
affects a man’s rape proneness, current knowledge may offer promise for
reducing rape through new social policy. Though we are not policy
experts and cannot formulate concrete social programs, we can imagine
numerous avenues for the exploration of possible policy directions. For
example, to reduce the number of boys raised under conditions of poverty
in industrial societies, some people might advocate taxation policies that

9
lower wealth inequalities, coupled with more taxation revenues directed
at socially disfranchised families. Others might instead suggest that
divorced fathers be given tax credits when they reside near their sons and
provide the sons with support. These are just a few of many possibilities
that come to mind for using knowledge of rape’s developmental causes to
attacking the problem.
Contrary to numerous media reports, we do not argue that rapists
are driven by desire to reproduce. As we explain in detail in chapter 1, this
assertion confuses the motivations that form the immediate or proximate
causes of a behavior with the evolutionary or ultimate effects of a
behavior during countless past generations of evolutionary history.
Rapists may be motivated by many different proximate desires, but a
desire for reproduction is probably one of them in only the rarest of
instances. We argue that a desire for sexual stimulation, not a desire to
produce offspring, is a proximate cause of raping and is the common
denominator across human rapes of all kinds. Men’s sexual ardor is, in
ultimate terms, a product of past selection pressure that favored it because
it increased sexual access to many females of reproductive age.
In addition to the false claim that we excuse rapists, you have
probably heard that we blame victims. This is also not true. We emphasize
on page 180 that “educational programs aimed at reducing the
vulnerability of women to sexual coercion are dependent on the
acquisition of information concerning risk factors.” We also claim that a
woman’s appearance and behavior might have some influence on these

10
risk factors. Camille Paglia introduced this same reality into the discussion
of rape on page 50 of her book Sex, Art, and American Culture (Vintage,
1992): “Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same. It keeps telling
women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything.
No, they can’t. Women will always be in sexual danger . . . feminism, with
its pie-in-the-sky fantasies about the perfect world, keeps young women
from seeing life as it is.” On page 182 of our book, we characterize
assertions that “a victim’s dress and behavior should affect the degree of
punishment a rapist receives” as “unjustified.” We also feel that women
should be free to decide to dress in whatever way they wish. All we are
suggesting is that their decisions should include consideration of the
possible risk associated with certain manners of dress in certain situations.
Identifying risk factors and encouraging women to take these into
consideration during their daily activities have been elements of sex
education for some time and have not been subjected to accusations of
“blaming the victim.” Many popular textbooks on human sexuality
address this matter—see, for example, Elizabeth Allgeier and Albert
Allgeier, Sexual Interactions, third edition (Heath, 1991). Fully aware that
we would be condemned for it, we chose to address the risk factor
associated with appearance because, as we say on page 182, “the failure to
distinguish between statements about causes and statements about
responsibility has the consequence of suppressing knowledge about how
to avoid dangerous situations.”
That a woman’s manner of dress may affect her risk of rape is

11
eminently reasonable in view of what is known about certain sexual
adaptations of men. The following combination of sexual adaptations is
expected to lead some men to rape: eagerness to have sex with new
partners, impulsiveness in the pursuit of such partners, sexual motivation
upon viewing women’s secondary sexual traits, and tendency to conclude
that a woman is signaling sexual interest when she is not. This is not to
say that most rape victims will be wearing miniskirts, or blouses that
reveal their breasts. It is to say that dress is anticipated to be a risk factor
in some situations, especially when coupled with other risk factors that
stimulate men’s sexual motivation.
That physical attractiveness increases risk of rape victimization is
consistent with women at the ages of peak attractiveness (the teens and
the early twenties) being the most frequent victims of rape. It is also
consistent with descriptions of rape in other cultures—descriptions made
by people completely unaware of the political and ideological issues that
have come to dominate most discussions of rape in our society. An
illustrative example is the following statement made by Ongka, a leader
among the Kawelka people of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, while
recalling the rapes that took place during the tribal wars he lived through:
“When we left our women behind and went out to fight, they were in
danger. Men came to find them, chasing them down to the edges of
streams till they seized hold of them, especially if their bodies were good
to look at.” (Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, Collaboration and
Conflicts, Harcourt, 2000, p. 41) Because rape is motivated at least in part

12
by sexual attraction, our book summarizes the recent research that has
identified the body features that affect female attractiveness (bilateral
symmetry, sex-hormone markers, and age).
Although we sometimes have been portrayed as anti-feminist in the
media, we emphasize that there is nothing anti-feminist in our arguments.
We are only against inaccurate explanations of rape, such as the “not sex”
argument. Therefore, if our arguments must be cast in opposition to some
specific category, they can probably be most accurately described as anti-
gender-feminist. This is because the social-constructionist explanation of
rape is at the foundation of what Christina Hoff Sommers, in Who Stole
Feminism? (Simon and Schuster, 1994), calls “gender feminism”: feminism
that is based on inter-gender conflict, with virtually all that is male
denounced as domineering, evil, untrustworthy, out-group, and enemy.
Sommers demonstrates the philosophical and ideological schism between
gender feminism and liberal, traditional feminism (“equity feminism”).
“There are sexual differences that are based in biology,” Camille Paglia, an
outspoken critic of gender feminism, writes in Sex, Art, and American
Culture (p. 50). “Academic feminism,” Paglia continues, “is lost in a fog of
social constructionism. It believes we are totally the product of our
environment.” Of academic feminists, Paglia says (ibid., p. 51): “[Their]
view of sex is naive. . . . [They] have drilled their disciples to say, ‘Rape is
a crime of violence but not of sex.’ This . . . nonsense has exposed young
women to disaster.” Wendy McElroy’s book Sexual Correctness
(McFarland, 1996) documents that gender feminism began to strongly

13
influence the feminist movement in the 1970s and that it is the dominant
ideology among most of the movement’s leadership. Gender feminism’s
“sexual correctness” is an intolerant hostility, an almost religious bigotry,
that hears no criticism or alternative viewpoints. We ask all those who
have endorsed the “not sex” explanation of rape, regardless of what label
they apply to themselves, to reevaluate their position in the light of the
arguments we make in our book.
It has also been claimed that A Natural History of Rape is not a “study”
but only a “theory” with no evidence to support it, since we didn’t talk to
rapists or rape victims. Those making this argument reveal their limited
understanding of scientific procedure. Testing alternative hypotheses
against the data collected by others (there are about 600 references in our
bibliography) is a common, valid method in science. Further, A Natural
History of Rape contains an extended discussion of why the statements
made by rapists do not support the social-constructionist “not sex”
explanation of rape (pp. 135–136) and an entire chapter devoted to the
reactions of victims to this horrible crime (chapter 4, titled “The Pain and
Anguish of Rape”).
Another common objection to A Natural History of Rape is that it is
based only on evidence from insects. Readers who have heard this
objection and who are interested in insects will be disappointed at how
few of our hundreds of references concern insects. We do discuss research
on scorpionflies that has identified a clamp on the top of the male’s
abdomen as an adaptation specifically for rape. This illustrates what an

14
adaptation for rape is. It does not follow that, because scorpionfly males
(and males of other non-human species) have adaptation for rape, men do
too. This is erroneous extrapolation of the sort that modern biologists
don’t engage in. The significance of rape’s occurrence in many non-human
species is that it scientifically falsifies the social-constructionist theory of
rape, which claims that rape is solely the result of human-specific learning
experiences that are capricious.
Another common media claim is that the evolutionary analysis of
rape cannot account for the rape of boys, men, and non-reproductive-age
females. Although the majority of rapes involve pubescent and young
adult females, some rapes do involve other victims. As we clearly state on
page 60, rape of these other victims is a maladaptive incidental effect of
men’s strong libido for obtaining many mates of fertile ages. Every
adaptation has incidental effects, or by-products, that are maintained
because the adaptation enhanced the overall reproductive success of its
bearer, even when the adaptation’s incidental effects lowered
reproductive success in some circumstances. The bone of the human
skeleton was directly favored by natural selection because of its structural
strength, which increased survival and offspring production, despite
bone’s maladaptive by-products (osteoporosis and certain other bone
diseases). Non-reproductive rape is widespread across animal species—
see Sarah L. Mesnick, “Sexual Alliances: Evidence and Evolutionary
Implications,” in Feminism and Evolutionary Biology, ed. P. Gowaty
(Chapman and Hall, 1997). Across many species, males and infertile
15
females of the same species as the rapist are common rape victims. In
some species, males rape females of other species. Adult male seals rape
juvenile seals and even copulate with seal corpses. Males of every animal
species have an evolved preference for fertile females of the same species,
but the libido that motivates the dogged pursuit of this preference results
in some maladaptive matings.
Being aware of the limited evolutionary knowledge of media
personalities, we discussed all the above points in detail in our book. We
assumed that people in the media would read the book and consider these
points before pontificating. Obviously we were naive when we made that
assumption. For the most part, we were also wrong in our assumption
that the explanation of our book we provided to reporters would be
objectively considered and presented. Much more disreputable and
shameful than the statements of some media personalities, however, are
those made by some scholarly reviewers who are supposedly educated in
evolutionary theory.
Scholarly Reviews
Many of the scholarly reviews of A Natural History of Rape are astounding
in the way they ignore much of its content and distort its fundamental
argument. Indeed, much of the criticism of our book in scholarly reviews
is directly traceable to a single gross misrepresentation about its central
scientific goal.
16
Frans de Waal (“Survival of the Rapist,” New York Times Book Review,
April 2, 2000) and Craig Stanford (“Darwinians Look at Rape, Sex and
War,” American Scientist, July–August 2000) assert that the book is
exclusively an argument for the hypothesis that human rape is an
adaptation, then accuse us of forcing the data to fit this position. In doing
so, these reviewers, despite obviously having access to the book, evidently
failed to read, or chose to ignore, much of the book’s content. This failure
can be seen in de Waal’s claim that “the greatest flaw of A Natural History
of Rape is that it quotes, but then blithely ignores the warning of the
evolutionary biologist George Williams [in his 1966 book Adaptation and
Natural Selection] that ‘adaptation is a special and onerous concept that
should be used only when it is really necessary.’” This portrayal of our
book as arguing that human rape is an adaptation, and ignoring all other
possibilities, is a classic “straw man” argument. In fact, we consider no
fewer than ten distinct evolutionary hypotheses about rape. We then
describe why eight of these (rape as a phylogenetic holdover, rape as a
result of mutation-selection balance, rape as a result of genetic drift, rape
as a result of evolutionarily novel environments, rape as an unusual
pathology, rape as an adaptation for male dominance, rape as a product of
psychopathy, and rape as a female mate choice adaptation) can be rejected
on scientific grounds because they suffer from fatal logical flaws and/or
are clearly inconsistent with available data on rape. We then examine the
two remaining evolutionary hypotheses (rape as an adaptation for
reproduction through increasing the number of reproductive-age female

17
mates by force and rape as a by-product of various evolved differences in
men’s and women’s sexuality). Most important, we do not conclude that
human rape is an adaptation. Instead, we conclude “the question whether
rape is an adaptation or a by-product cannot yet be definitively
answered” (p. 84). This is a position perfectly in line with the approach
that George Williams endorsed in 1966, as is the fact that we then outline
how further research could test for the existence of six hypothetical
psychological adaptations for rape.
Scientific proof of the existence of a psychological adaptation for rape
would be conclusive evidence that men’s brains contain an information-
processing mechanism (or multiple mechanisms) that was (were)
specifically for promoting rape in human evolutionary history. Just as the
human psychological adaptation for color vision is specifically for
assessing color, a rape psychological adaptation would be functionally
specific for raping. To put this differently: The adaptation would give rise
to maximum motivation to rape when evolutionary historical benefits of
rape (copulation with a female of fertile age) exceed evolutionary
historical costs of rape (injury, punishment of the perpetrator). The failure
to find such evidence would scientifically falsify the adaptation
hypothesis.
Jerry Coyne (“Of Vice and Men,” New Republic, April 3, 2000, pp. 27–
34) dismisses evolutionary hypotheses about rape as “untestable,” but in
fact the deep-time past is scientifically knowable. It is well known to
biologists that Darwin invented the method of historical science, and this
18
powerful method is routinely practiced in all sciences that explore the
distant past, including biology, geology, and astronomy—see Michael
Ghiselin’s widely known book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method
(University of California Press, 1969). Actual historical causes will have
left consequences. Proof of these consequences provides the definitive
evidence for past causes that cannot be observed directly. This is why the
existence of a psychological adaptation in men functionally specified for
rape would demonstrate effective, direct selection for rape during human
evolutionary history.
We also stress that, whether or not evidence of a psychological rape
adaptation is found in the future, there is already vast evidence that rape
arises out of evolved sexual psychologies of men and women. Women are
evolved to choose mates carefully, men to be less selective and to pursue
many partners (including without commitment). Rape is one of the many
behaviors that result from this evolved difference in male and female
sexuality. The two reasonable hypotheses for rape (the “rape adaptation”
hypothesis and the “by-product hypothesis”) are attempts to specify how
evolution and rape are related. It is a given that rape is evolved. The same
can be said of every biological trait. The only question is “What was rape’s
specific evolutionary history?” Under either of these reasonable
evolutionary hypotheses for rape, increased knowledge may contribute to
reducing rape. If rape is an incidental effect of men’s psychological
adaptation for obtaining a high number of mates without commitment,
reducing the incidence of rape would depend upon complete knowledge

19
of the adaptations involved and of the circumstances under which they
give rise to rape as a by-product. If rape were itself an adaptation,
reducing rape would depend upon full knowledge of the evolutionary
historical cues that stimulated reproductively successful rape by males
during human evolutionary history. Such knowledge, for example, could
reduce the high incidence of rape in war, where the evolutionary
historical benefits of rape are high and the corresponding costs are
typically trivial; the policy implication is to increase costs (e.g., by
punishment).
Jerry Coyne, in his attacks on our book in media interviews, also
portrayed the book as an argument that rape is an adaptation. After we
pointed out the inaccuracy of Coyne’s assertion, he and Andrew Berry
acknowledged our consideration of the by-product hypothesis in their
review in the scientific journal Nature (“Is This Contentious Hypothesis
Advocacy, Not Science?” Nature 404, 2000: 121–122). Astonishingly, they
described our consideration of alternative hypotheses, not as the rigorous
scientific procedure that it is, but as a “rhetorical trick.” This indicates that
these authors may be unaware that determining whether a trait is an
adaptation or a by-product has been a cornerstone of evolutionary theory
since 1966, when Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection was
published. However, Coyne and Berry must surely be aware that Steven
Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, in their widely known paper “The
Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the
Adaptationist Program” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 205:

20
581–598) also emphasized the importance of considering by-product
hypotheses. “Rape is a spandrel” is the way Gould and Lewontin would
phrase the by-product hypothesis of rape. A spandrel is an architectural
by-product.
Other criticisms also suggest a disingenuous selectivity in the
reading, or at least in the acknowledging, of the rest of our book by
reviewers. Not only does Craig Stanford portray the book as an argument
that rape is an adaptation; he seems to be under the impression that this
question can be settled by determining whether rape is currently
biologically adaptive (i.e., whether it currently leads to net reproductive
success despite its costs to reproductive success). (Here we are using
“adaptive” in a technical biological sense, not in the vernacular sense of
“salubrious, healthy.”) Hence, in addition to skipping or ignoring our
consideration of alternative evolutionary explanations, Stanford evidently
missed our discussion on page 7 of why current reproductive success is
not a means of determining whether a trait is an evolved adaptation
(basically, because by-products are sometimes currently adaptive). That
current reproductive success is not the criterion for distinguishing
adaptation has been established for more than 30 years, beginning with
Williams’s 1966 book.
As we explain in detail in our book, rape may or may not be
currently biologically adaptive. Actually, rape may be currently adaptive
in some societies (e.g., in pre-industrial societies without modern
contraception) but not in others. In the United States, pregnancy follows

21
from rape in about 2.5 percent of cases. During warfare, however, the rate
of rape-induced pregnancy is much higher. The current adaptiveness of
rape is an entirely different issue than the evolutionary historical
adaptiveness of rape. The claim of the “rape adaptation” hypothesis is
that rape was adaptive in human evolutionary history but now may or
may not be adaptive. Adaptive rape during evolutionary history would be
demonstrated by the existence of an adaptation functionally specialized
for rape.
Stanford further claims in his review that rape may or may not have
“biological” causes. This suggests that he may have skipped our
discussion of the meaning of “biological” in chapter 1. Similarly, de
Waal’s claim that we dismiss the female perspective suggests that he may
have skipped chapter 4, which is based almost entirely on the reports of
female victims. De Waal’s claim that we failed to address the rape of a
spouse indicates he may have missed our section on marital rape (pp. 77–
78). His statement that he would have preferred “cross-cultural
information” may have been due to his failure to read our section titled
“cross-cultural evidence” (pp. 140–143).
An even more interesting example of selective reading is provided
by criticisms of our analysis of the psychological pain experienced by rape
victims. Coyne and Berry’s review asserts, in a statement that was
repeated frequently in the media, that they looked at a reference in our
book and that it doesn’t contain the information that the book claims it
does. They claim (contrary to the book’s claim) that the 1990 paper by
22
Nancy Thornhill and Randy Thornhill (“An Evolutionary Analysis of
Psychological Pain Following Rape. I. The Effects of Victim’s Age and
Marital Status,” Ethology and Sociobiology 11: 155–176) does not contain
data showing that reproductive-age female rape victims have more
mental pain than post-reproductive-age female victims. In fact, data and
an analysis supporting this pattern are to be found in table 4 and
appendix 3 of the paper. Evidently, Coyne and Berry didn’t read the
entire paper.
Conclusion
We have not yet mentioned the more reasonable, informed, and
productive discussions of our book in book reviews. For example,
Geoffrey Miller’s review (“Why Men Rape,” Evening Standard, March 6,
2000) agrees with our general evolutionary approach, and Miller finds the
widespread denial of the role of male sexuality in the etiology of rape
“incomprehensible.” He proposes, however, that essentially all rape is
committed by the small percentage of men (about 3 percent) who have
clinically definable psychopathic personality. We discuss this possibility in
the book, and we agree that psychopaths commit some rapes. However, as
we show in the book, rape is too widespread to be explained generally by
this hypothesis. In the context of war, across pre-industrial and modern
societies, many men adopt rape. Date rape is also widespread in modern
societies. The data support our view that rape is conditionally adopted by
23
many men when its unconsciously perceived benefits exceed its costs.
Still, we strongly support future research to find the exact extent of the
role that psychopathy may play in some rapes.
Other examples are the reasonable reviews by Todd Shackelford and
Gregory LeBlanc (to be published early in 2001 in Journal of Sex Research )
and Robin Dunbar (Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 15, p. 427, 2000 ).
We also respect the opinions of many generally positive reviewers
who have criticized us for being too dry in our writing style and too
harsh in our attacks on the currently dominant explanation of rape. Our
style is admittedly dry, and our criticisms are admittedly harsh. But, as we
explain in the book’s preface, this was intentional, and we were fully
aware that there would be a backlash. The reason we took the tone we did
is simple: Rape is no laughing matter, and sugar-coated arguments that
leave fiction as the basis of attempts to prevent rape may be diplomatic
but we do not find them ethical.
Though we are uncertain about how future research will answer the
question of whether human rape is an adaptation or a by-product, we
expect future historians of science to draw certain conclusions from the
response to our book. First, the response will stand as clear evidence of
the widespread misunderstanding of evolutionary principles. Second, it
will demonstrate the apparent inability of the academic system to
consistently produce individuals capable of objective, fair, thorough
critical analysis of controversial topics. The poor showing made in this
area by many reviewers of our book is tragic because the acceptance of

24
criticisms that are based on “straw man” arguments creates an
atmosphere in which research on important but controversial topics is too
risky, unpopular, and difficult for most scholars’ tastes.
It is our hope that people will increase their ability to look past
ideological considerations and make an objective reevaluation of the
social-constructionist explanation of rape. If they do this, they will see that
it is not our alleged ideological leanings or our use of evolutionary theory
that falsifies this explanation of rape; it is the actual behavior of males who
commit rape.
Biologists are in a pivotal position to inform people about evolution
as it applies to human behavior and associated social problems. We are
very critical of the biologists who advocate that evolution applies to all life
except certain aspects of human behavior and psychology, or except all
aspects of human behavior and psychology. This pre-Darwinian view of
human activity is due to the evidentiary blindness that arises from
ideology and to selfish political goals. We invite all biologists to join the
effort to create a science for all humanity—a science that sees knowledge
of humans as its single goal for the sake of helping people, including
reducing rape. We also invite educators to join this effort by establishing
Darwinism applied to human behavior as fundamental knowledge to be
gained by students at all levels.
People have the choice between ideology and knowledge. Perhaps
the only hope for knowledge to replace ideology in the study of human
behavior is for teachers of all types to stress critical, knowledge-based

25
thinking and how to avoid logical fallacies. In college, students could be
given the opportunity to consider situations likely to tempt them into
making the naturalistic fallacy. Starting in high school, students could be
informed about the difference between arguing to win and arguing so that
the evidence reveals the truth. Unless such an educational process takes
place on a large scale, no amount of explaining will work.
Although the distortion of our book in the media and in certain
published reviews has been extreme, it is understandable in view of the
intense emotions the horrible act of rape produces in all people. This is
why we don’t begrudge these critics. We only hope that, as the initial
emotions that so colored their responses subside, they will make an effort
to read our book as it is, not as they feared it was. After all, we all share
the same goal of trying to end the immense pain caused by rape. This
being the case, let’s all get on with the rational view of rape, which will
require that it be depoliticized from the master symbol of gender-feminist
ideology to a behavior that needs to be prevented through the
identification of its causes. This change of attitude hinges upon an
understanding that one can’t logically be against rape and against the
evolutionary approach to rape at the same time.

Evolutionary Biology of Rape

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Why Men Rape

Why Men Rape

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES · JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000

Why Men Rape

BY RANDY THORNHILL AND CRAIG T. PALMER

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Kiki Smith, Las Animas, 1997

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CHALLENGING OLD IDEAS

Consider the following facts:

" Most rape victims are women of childbearing age.

Here we must hasten to emphasize that by categorizing a behavior as "natural" and

RAPE: NATURE VS. NATURE

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From a Darwinian perspective, every kind of animal. whether grasshopper or gorilla,

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Remember, none of the foregoing behavioral manifestations of evolution need be

THE MATING GAME

A dozen roses, romantic dinners by candlelight, a Tiffany engagement ring: the

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A remarkable feature of these scorpionflies is an appendage that seems specially

RAPE AS REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGY

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IS RAPE AN ACT OF VIOLENCE?

More research is needed to decide the question of whether rape is an adaptation or

For example, if rape is evolutionary in origin, it should be a threat mostly to women of

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One of us (Thornhill), in association with the anthropologist Nancy W. Thornhill, has

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IS RAPE AN ACT OF SEX?

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A Natural History of Rape

Read the Review

Rape and Evolutionary Theory

In one study, 13 percent of the surveyed American women of ages 18 and

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change the behavior.

One cannot understand evolutionary explanations of rape, much less

· Why is rape a horrendous experience for the victim?

· Why do young males rape more often than older males?

· Why does rape occur in all known cultures?

· Why are some instances of rape punished in all known cultures?

· Why are people (especially husbands) often suspicious of an individual's

· Why is rape often treated as a crime against the victim's husband?

· Why does rape exist in many, but not all, species?

· Why does rape still occur among humans?

· How can rape be prevented?

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by man. It has always been central to any system of philosophy or of

Cause, Proximate and Ultimate

Proximate and ultimate explanations are complements, not alternatives. For

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information to the brain (a proximate explanation). Similarly, the claim that

Identifying ultimate causes, however, is important, because certain

Natural Selection and Adaptations

Adaptations are phenotypic features (morphological structures, physiological

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One cannot grasp the power of natural selection to "design" adaptations

The human eye's many physiological structures exist because they

Adaptations do not necessarily increase reproductive success in current

The difference between current and evolutionary historical environments is