The evolution of rape?

There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it’s so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It’s just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.

I’ve just finished reading an article titled “Darwin’s Rape Whistle: Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?“, and it’s everything I despise about evolutionary psychology. It’s nothing but sloppy thinking and poor science propped up by a conviction that plausibility is sufficient support for certainty.

I could fulminate for a few hours over this crap, but fortunately Jerry Coyne has calmly criticized the mess, so I’ll just make a few points.

The story is that women have evolved specific adaptive responses to the threat of rape. In support of this conclusion, the author cites various studies that claim to show that ovulating women show stronger handgrip strength (the better to fight off men who want to assault their eggs with sperm), that ovulating women are more suspicious of men, that ovulating women are more likely to avoid risky behaviors, and that ovulating white women become more fearful of black men. I’m unimpressed. All of the studies involve small numbers, typically of college students at American universities (and even more narrowly, of psychology students), and all involve responses to highly subjective stimuli. When you examine the literature cited in these papers, you discover that different investigators get different results — the handgrip study even admits up front that there are conflicting results, with other papers finding no differences in performance across the menstrual cycle. None test anything to do with inheritance, none try (or even can) look at the genetic basis of the behaviors they are studying. Yet somehow evolutionary psychologists conclude that “women may have been selected during human evolution to behave in ways that reduce the likelihood of conception as a consequence of rape.”

Another way to look at it is that they are hypothesizing that women are more likely to behave in ways that invite physical attack and brutal abuse when they aren’t ovulating. That is a remarkable assertion. It also carries the strange implication that the consequences of rape can be measured by the likelihood of immediate fertilization, rather than by the toll of physical injury and emotional trauma, a peculiar thing for psychologists to neglect. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a general hypothesis that people, men and women, who can avoid violence at any time in their life, are more likely to be reproductively successful and thereby pass on their genes to subsequent generations? That’s all they’re saying, essentially, and the straining to sex it up by tying globally useful behaviors to reproductive cycles is unconvincing.

And of course they’re looking at culturally conditioned behaviors and responses in a narrow subset of the modern human population. How likely is it that a close-knit tribe of 30 hunter-gatherers has a serious problem with rape? Wouldn’t the nature of the culture be of far greater effect in determining the frequency of pregnancy due to rape than variations in handgrip strength or variations in fearfulness in women?

Then many of the studies that are described with such enthusiastic certainty as having definitive results turn out to be subjective, pointless messes. For instance, Jesse Bering concludes that sperm competition had to have been a very significant factor in our profligately promiscuous ancestors, and that the shape of the human penis has been selected specifically for a function in extracting competitor’s sperm from the vaginal canal. Unfortunately, when you look at the actual research cited for this semen-scooping function, it’s underwhelming.

To test this hypothesis, Gallup, Burch, Zappieri, Parvez, Stockwell, and Davis (2003) simulated sexual encounters using artificial models and measured the magnitude of artificial semen displacement as a function of phallus configuration, depth of thrusting, and semen viscosity. The displacement of simulated semen was robust across different prosthetic phalluses, different artificial vaginas, different semen recipes, and different semen viscosities. The magnitude of semen displacement was directly proportional to the depth of thrusting and inversely proportional to semen viscosity. By manipulating different characteristics of artificial phalluses, the coronal ridge and frenulum were identified as key
morphological features involved in mediating the semen displacement effect.

Under conditions that raise the possibility of females engaging in extra-pair copulations (i.e., periods of separation from their partner, allegations of female infidelity), Gallup et al. (2003) also found that males appear to modify the use of their penis in ways that are consistent with the displacement hypothesis. Based on anonymous surveys of over 600 college students, many sexually active males and females reported deeper and more vigorous thrusting when in-pair sex occurred
under conditions related to an increased likelihood of female infidelity.

Got that? They have studies that show that a piston displaces fluids more effectively in proportion to the depth of movement, and that college students report that when they suspect their partner of infidelity, they screw harder. They don’t have any evidence that this behavior actually affects the fertilization rate of one partner’s sperm over another, they don’t have any indication of morphological differences in human populations that make some individuals better semen-scoopers, they don’t have any evidence that this behavior has had a differential effect in human history. It’s all a teetering pyramid of stacked “couldas” and guesses that it woulda had an influence on evolution, if there were any variation and heritable factors involved in this function.

Whenever I see this kind of tripe from evolutionary psychologists, I reflexively reach for a counter-example, and recommend that everyone read one excellent book: The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, by Elisabeth Lloyd. It’s a wonderful example of solid, rigorous, scientific thinking about an evolutionary phenomenon. Lloyd analyzes a score of adaptive just-so stories about the female orgasm, carefully scrutinizing the evidence for each, and discovers that the substance is wanting. Too often investigators start with the assumption that a feature absolutely must have been selected for, or it wouldn’t be there, and then contrive elaborate rationalizations for processes that could have favored its preservation in our ancestry…and the aura of plausibility is then sufficient to conclude that it must be so, even in the absence of any supporting evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contradictory evidence.

I should reread it now — if nothing else, to wash that nasty tincture of evolutionary psychology out of my brain.

Thank god for Ricky Gervais

It sounds like Ricky Gervais was wonderfully caustic in his turn hosting the Golden Globes awards last night — so brutally acerbic that I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t many celebrities lined up to complain about their treatment to the organizers. I wonder if he’ll ever host an award show ever again?

Among the amusements, though, was his closing thank yous. God finally gets the credit he deserves.

It’s so easy to make him mad!

Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is irate again. The Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article today (a print-only exclusive, so I haven’t been able to read it) in which they had independent experts review Ham’s claims about prospective attendance at his silly theme park. The headline is “Ark park attendance claims exaggerated, theme-park experts say”, so I can guess at the gist of the analysis.

Ham is complaining about how the newspapers dare to question his estimates.

Mark Looy, our CCO, has sent me a report on how the two state newspapers have been misrepresenting the project and are determined, apparently, to move it out of the state and take millions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs with it. How is that for responsible journalism when they not only horribly misrepresent the Ark Encounter, but do so in a time with a shaky economy and so many people unemployed?

And then he accuses the newspapers of being on a vendetta.

Today a terrible anti-Ark Encounter article (actually, a “non-story”) has appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, Kentucky’s largest-circulation paper. They just don’t let up in their anti-Christian agenda driven vendetta against this phenomenal project. We are preparing a response that will be our lead article on the www.AnswersInGenesis.org website. As we are composing the rebuttal now, we’ll take my blog item from Saturday and update and adapt it as our response to a newspaper that seems to want to have the Ark be built in another state — and apparently doesn’t care about the thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars that would end up elsewhere. Not very pro-Kentucky, is it, for a Kentucky paper?

He keeps insisting that the people who oppose his theme park are doing it because they’re anti-Kentucky. They aren’t. The writers at the Courier-Journal are pro-Kentucky. I’m pro-Kentucky. I’ll even agree that Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is probably pro-Kentucky. Where we differ is that we think ideas about economic improvement for the state ought to be based on sound, objective financial estimates rather than surveys of dubious value authored by a close friend of the benificiary and relying entirely on conflating pro-religion values with the likelihood of attending his folly, and that maybe a putative educational and entertainment attraction build around the disproven premise that the earth was destroyed by a god 4,000 years ago isn’t the best use of state money, even if it were profitable.

If anyone has read that newspaper today, a brief summary in the comments would be appreciated!

A logic puzzle for Martians

Don’t worry about what it means. It just came to me in a dream last night, so I wrote it down. I often have very odd dreams.

Al, Bill, Chuck, and Dave have a weekly Gourmand’s Club, and this week Al has baked a perfect and delicious cherry pie. However, Bill has invited a friend, Ed, to join them, creating a group of five and creating some difficulty in dividing the pie fairly. As their guest, they’ve given Ed the knife and asked him to do the honors. How should Ed handle the situation? Assume everyone is equally hungry and that the pie is perfectly circular with a uniform distribution of mass.

A.   As it turns out, Ed is a Libertarian. He uses the knife to hold the other four at bay, while he uses his left hand to stuff great gooey fistfuls of pie into his face until it is all gone.

B.   Ed is a Libertarian who eats the whole pie. Al, Bill, Chuck, and Dave let him finish, then smile wolfishly and pull out an array of handguns and knives and axes. “What Bill didn’t tell you, Ed,” says Chuck, “was that the club had a hankering for barbecue this week, and your sweet marbled flesh is on the menu.” Ed is quickly cleaned and jointed, and the meat is distributed fairly using a butcher’s scale, and a rack of ribs is soon sizzling on the grill for the afternoon’s repast.

C.   Ed eats the pie, and the remaining four cut Ed into equal parts for distribution and consumption. Sirens wail; there is a pounding on the door; a megaphone blares. “THIS IS THE POLICE. IT IS IN THE INTERESTS OF A SECURE AND STABLE STATE THAT CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE AND LIBERTY. GIVE YOURSELVES UP, CANNIBALS!” There is a brief flurry of violence, followed by trial, incarceration, and eventually, death. The right of 300 million Americans to bake and consume pie without fear of death and dismemberment by roving bands of cannibals is preserved.

D.   A concentrated mass of complex sugars and fats is rendered temporarily inhospitable by high temperatures. As it cools, new bacteria settle on it and begin to colonize it. They are interrupted briefly by the intrusion of a few metazoans who, in a brief flurry of activity the details of which are insignificant and inconsequential, assist in the breakdown of the nutrients by first distributing them to massive internal colonies residing in their guts, secondly sharing the remaining nutrients in the form of a fecal slurry to bacteria outside the organisms, and eventually by dying to deposit great rich lumps of protein for consumption. The bacteria win. The bacteria always win.

E.   The planet is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with respect to carbon, with complex cycles of release and sequestration.

Blogging isn’t the path to riches, I guess

I’m getting a lot of sad stories about bloggers struggling financially, and I just thought I’d mention a few of them.

There’s the perennially struggling Gary Farber, of course. He’s a blogger emeritus, having been around for several years longer than I have. Check out his left sidebar for options to help him out.

Gary has mentioned that the fierce and acerbic Roy Edroso of Alicublog is having a rough go of it, too.

Now I learn that Lance Mannion is deep in a hole and scrabbling to escape. He’s writing a book on raising a child with Asperger’s — somebody ought to snap it up, he’s a wonderful writer.

The annoying thing about these writers is that they’re all good, thoughtful, interesting people…and they ought to be writing for the big magazines or newspapers. But, unfortunately, when the NY Times goes looking for columnists, writing skills and cogent commentary aren’t among the qualifications, or plodders and hacks like Ross Douthat or Jonah Goldberg would be unemployed, rather than living well on wingnut welfare.

I’ll also mention a fourth example of low-budget blogging: me. Seed hasn’t managed to send me a paycheck for the last several months. I, at least, have a solid stable day job and a family that has grown up and moved out on me, so I’m not panicking. I’m definitely not asking for money for me…if you’re feeling like dropping a few dollars on someone for online content, look to Gary or Roy or Lance. Or if you can’t afford anything right now (I’m definitely sympathetic about that), at least go start reading their stuff regularly.

That answers nothing

Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.

The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:

A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.

That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.

I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.

The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.

But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.

And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.

I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.

Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.

Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.

I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.

Why we need separation of church and state: an example

Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.

What do you think her crime was?

According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.

“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.

Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”

It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.

I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.