Dr Rick

Sure, it could be just about anything.

That's why we need to look at the evidence instead of speculate about it.

Rick

Koyaanisqatsi

And all of the evidence presented in this thread alone, including and especially God Fearing's, proves the theory false.

The targets aren't "sometimes not in line" if God Fearing's evidence can be trusted; there is at least a full third of the female victims that are "not in line;" not to mention all of the men who have been raped and/or female-against-female rape.

That hardly constitutes "sometimes."

And no, rape is not about sex! It's about power and control and dominance; the extreme, violent degredation of another in order to show "who's boss." That's the whole point. If it were about sex, then it would be a legitimate argument to introduce a woman's past sexual history and/or what clothes she was wearing, etc., etc., standards that the legal community has fought tooth-and-nail to remove from the courtrooms (do a search for "rape shield laws").

The defense that "she was asking for it" was actually the dominant defense until the psychological community working in tandem with the legal community and many women's movements (does "Take Back The Night" ring any bells?) convinced legislatures that sex is not the motivation in rape, which is why those laws are in place (and still need to be championed), but poor, misleading "research" like the stuff God Fearing posted keeps rearing its tenuous head every now and again and erases (or attempts to, anyway) decades of positive advancements against such a misguided prejudice.

Tara

Aggression is a heritable trait. If rape is about violence, I wouldn't want to adopt a child fathered by a violent individual (a sex offender).

I have a hard time putting this in words, but....

Couldn't evolution have shaped humans to have the kind-of aggressive tendencies that lead to rape... for a reason(s)? One reason being reproductive; to participate in coercive procreation?

If rape were an only human behavior I'd easily dismiss the possibility of it being adaptive, but that not being the case, this seems a hypothesis at least worth exploring.


We can't deny that violent conflict is pretty abundant in nature. Predator-prey conflict, disputes between members of the same species- like males competing for females or prairie dog male's habit of eating their own kind's young (yikes). Some organisms clearly possess adaptations to engage in violent strategies, like claws and fangs... The male scorpion fly supposedly has a piece of anatomy specifically designed to grasp a female scorpion fly so that it can force copulation..

Ignore that we're talking about people and answer me this: Why don't coercive mating practices, like rape, have potential to be adaptive?

Tara

Also, I don't see why if rape were deemed reproductive that would make it any more okay.

In society we're asked to ignore all sorts of biological urges, as humans we're capable of that. If someone is willing to commit rape, something is wrong with them that they lack the empathy or sense of decency that society should have instilled in them...

I don't see where rape being a product of inherited aggression or inherited sexual desire really makes a whole lot of difference, it's still totally abhorrent by our moral code.

pz

It is? Do you have even a speck of evidence for that?Of course, they do have the potential to be adaptive. So do non-coercive mating practices. Being able to flap my moustache and fly might also be adaptive. Speculation about potentially adaptive traits just isn't very interesting without specific evidence that they are both heritable and more advantageous than the alternatives.

cricket

Koy,

I don't think so!

Oolon Colluphid

Coming a bit late here...

Erm, I was under the impression that although rape is sex, it is predominantly about dominance...? Ain’t none of you read The Naked Ape, ferinstance? There’s plenty of examples -- from primates and other mammals, iirc -- of a rear-end being offered to a dominant individual as a sign of submission, as a way of avoiding a fight.

Sex obviously serves only one ultimate evolutionary purpose: the passing on of genes. But it is used in a variety of social circumstances, not just for procreation. It can be a displacement activity (did you know that lions in zoos have been observed to masturbate? Our chinchilla regularly sucked himself off, till we passed him on to someone with space for a larger cage.) It can be used to cement social bonds, as with bonobos (and in marriages -- ‘pair-bonding sex’ and ‘pair-maintenance sex’, iirc).

And it can be a way to show submission... and specifically here, to assert dominance.

And don’t forget that rape is a sliding-scale thing. It ranges from a last-minute change of mind, through being taken advantage of while drunk, through increasing degrees of coercion (remember that most rape victims know their attackers), to stalkers where only one of the pair (sort of) knows the other, to the jumped-on-at-random version that is so (rightly) feared, so highly publicised, and so rare. These aren’t categories; they shade into each other. At one end of the scale, it’s (almost) normal sex; at the other, it’s pure domination. Along the way, the the intent to dominate increases, and thus blinds the rapist to the feelings of the victim.

I’ve carefully avoided mentioning sex, erm, genders. Remember (the admittedly fictitious) scene in Deliverance? That sure as hell wasn’t about sex! Then there’s language. ‘Don’t fuck with me’; ‘we fucked them over’, and so on.

Note: Just in case I’m taken for a rabid feminist , I’m not saying that all sex is about dominance / submission. Rather that many animals, ourselves included, also use it for reasons other than procreation.

Now, (pace, pz!) it seems far more likely to me that there could be a genetic component to a person’s desire for status, for fighting to the top of the pile, for exerting control over others, than that there is specifically an evolutionary predisposition to rape. That, of course, could have a range of evolutionary advantages -- not least of which being the access to more females which high status brings, and so the passing on of the heritable component! Thus rape would be a result of the drive to get females... but would not (always) be the motivating factor in the actual act.

But I’ll look through Barrett, Dunbar and Lycett tonight and report any variance from this.

Cheers, Oolon

Dr. Retard

This would mean that (i) the question of which legal standards we ought to have, dictates (ii) factual questions about the psychology and sociology of rape.

Surely (ii)-questions are to be investigated on their own merits.

Or perhaps you mean something special by "about sex" or "about domination"?

cricket

The quote I butchered in my post a couple days ago; here in its correct form:

(Pinker, Blank Slate p. 362)

Doubting Didymus

Excellent points. Oolon is reminding us that simply because there is good reason to be highly skeptical of framing a given trait as a heritable adaptation, there is no reason to suppose that it is not tied in to evolution in any way at all. I think it's probable that all but the most superficial socially derived traits have some sort of evolutionary link, or are influenced in some way by heritable factors, but this does not by any means give all such traits the status of 'adaptation'.