Debunking Evolutionary Psychology

Because the past 5 thousand years aren’t a template for all of human history

Consider the paragraph below, from a mainstream publication discussing evolutionary psychology. Then I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with it, and why it doesn’t remotely tell the story of human beings in the way that it purports to.

For instance, evolutionary psychologists claim that males are more aggressive than females because they can gain greater access to females by competing violently with other males. Males are thought to be more willing to engage in casual sex because they can greatly increase their reproductive output by doing so, whereas females benefit more from being choosy due to the demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding.

These generalized statements not only float assumptions as truths, they make the erroneous and unsupported claim that the way things are now is the way they have always been — for hundreds of thousands of years rather than just for the past few thousand. Let’s look at the second part of this paragraph first — the one that assumes that men are more willing to engage in casual sex because they can increase their reproductive output by doing so.

Aside from the fact that the way female sexuality is treated in a patriarchy is vastly different than in a Paleolithic tribe, the notion of randy males freely spreading their seed and coy, choosy females tells the story of Victorian sexual mores and research done on fruit flies that was inexplicably generalized to humans.

Women only became more choosy than men with the rise of patriarchy just a few thousand years ago. If you are not allowed to provide for yourself any longer and you only get one mate, then yeah, you’d better try to get the best one that you can. If you are constantly worried about your safety and how you are going to be judged around your sexuality in a culture that has different standards for men than for women, it’s not really surprising if you are going to be less willing to engage in casual sex. But even so, that’s still not always the case.

There’s quite a bit of research suggesting that if women are not concerned for their safety in some way and feel likely that they will have a pleasurable experience, they are just as open to casual sex as men are. A 2017 study showed that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age and that women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party, all of which pretty handily challenges the long-held assumption that men are the naturally more sexually adventurous ones. (Untrue, pg. 41)

Primatologist, Meredith Small has noted that “seeking novelty is the single most observable trait among all the sexual behaviors, preferences, and drivers of female primates. Female primates are actually the complete opposite of how we’ve been taught to imagine them — as reluctant breeders or seekers of “intimacy” with a single “best” mate or only seeking to mate with the alpha.” (Untrue, pg. 165) I’m not sure why we imagine that human primates are any different absent a culture that does not allow for that.

In reality, amongst all animals, “A female who mates with several different males will have more genetically diverse offspring, boosting the chances that at least some of them will thrive.” Source There is little true monogamy in nature, and even animals who nest together may have offspring sired by more than one male.

When Darwin observed that females of many species were naturally coy and choosy and reticent, sexually speaking, and males were naturally competitive and randy, he set us on a course by distorting the lens through which we view behavior. What we know today thanks to mostly female primatologists, anthropologists, and sex researchers is that when the context is right, female sexuality is assertive, adventurous, and what we call “promiscuous.”

The great anthropologist and comparativist Sarah Hrdy tells us that, across species, including among humans, the best mother for many eons was the one who was, under particular and far-from-rare ecological circumstances, promiscuous. By being so, she could hedge against male infertility, up her odds of a healthy pregnancy and robust offspring, and create a wider network of support by lining up two or three males who figured the offspring might be theirs. Source

The idea of a provider for a family is a pretty recent one, beginning with plowed agriculture and intensifying with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to agriculture, both men and women contributed to the food supplies and the wellbeing of the family because until that time humans lived in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands where the survival strategy was for the entire group of 20–50 to feed and look out for each other. In some current hunter-gatherer bands, it is actually the women who provide most of what the tribe eats and there’s no reason to think it was any different in the past. Hunting is a sporadically successful, although important contribution to feeding the tribe, but making it sound like men were providers for Paleolithic families in the way we think of that term today is just more wishful thinking.

Additionally, under this social dynamic where men and women may be pair-bonded but not necessarily sexually monogamous, the idea of men fighting over women makes little sense. The coronal ridge of the human penis is specifically shaped to displace semen left there by another man or men. It wouldn’t be necessary if that competition had already taken place prior to coitus during a fight. Humans are designed to engage in sperm competition, not mate competition prior to intercourse the way gorillas or elk are. The competition takes place inside the body.

For the human female cervix, like that of a promiscuous macaque who may breed with ten males or more in rapid succession, actually serves not so much to block sperm, as was previously believed, as to busily filter and assess it, ideally several different types of it from several different males, simultaneously. It evolved not as a simple barrier but to sort the weak and bad and incompatible sperm from the good, suggesting by its very presence that there was a need to do such a thing — i.e., that females were mating multiply.

Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (p. 145). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

It is really only with the social and sexual control of women that came with patriarchy that routine fighting over women makes any sense. Even today in more communally oriented cultures, such as in parts of rural Africa, no one cares all that much about who fathered a child because everyone in the community looks out for and helps each other. As Christopher Ryan notes in Sex at Dawn,

When seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune lectured a Montagnais Indian man about the dangers of the rampant infidelity he’d witnessed, Le Jeune received a lesson on proper parenthood in response. The missionary recalled, “I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’

Among the Mosuo of China, there is no real concept of fatherhood. Women sleep with who they want to when they want to and never marry or otherwise formalize relationships with male partners. Everyone lives in the home of their mother or grandmother and couples never cohabitate. Men help to care for the nieces and cousins who are growing up in the household they live in and there is no social construct for husbands or fathers.

Applying patriarchal norms, which have only been in effect for a few thousand years to all of human history and all cultures is both lazy and flat-out wrong. Were men always more aggressive than women? I’m not sure how we could really know that for sure, but in general, within egalitarian groups, routine gratuitous violence is not tolerated, in part because it is maladaptive. As primatologist Frans de Waal has pointed out, “Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation. When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.” (p. 401 War, Peace, and Human Nature)

In addition, the first archeological evidence of mass violence is from 13,000 years ago and most of what we find as far as bones or cave paintings depicting conflict are from 8,000 years ago or later, with the bulk of it from 5,000 years ago and beyond. Naturally, even peaceful societies have some conflict, some hot-blooded fights, and some execution of those who violate the norms of the group. But to just up and decide that the social dynamics that we see today around both sex and violence apply to all of human history is really kind of laughable.

Another paragraph from the same article on evolutionary psychology makes more of the same sorts of assumptions, essentially equating the dynamics of a relatively new dominance-based culture with all of human history.

Females are more likely to prefer a partner who is taller and of higher status, because such males are better protectors and providers. Males are more likely to prefer a physically attractive partner, where the features considered most attractive in females are signals of higher fertility, such as youth and physical health.

As for female attractiveness signaling fertility, what reads as attractive is so variable over time and in different cultures that I find this pretty suspect. The evolutionary psychology trope is that signs of youth and health are primarily found in the face, but recent research is challenging that assumption — both because body differences seem to be more important than facial ones and also because beauty doesn’t actually signal health unless there is a gross deformity. Symmetrical features do tend to be more pleasing to look at, but recent research indicates that this doesn’t actually signal health or fertility.

“Our results indicate that choosing a mate with a relatively symmetrical face would be a very inefficient method of selecting a relatively healthy or intelligent partner from the general population, especially with the availability of more obvious cues” to a person’s health, said David Lawson, an evolutionary anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and another researcher on the study. Source

As already noted above, for most of human history, people lived in highly cooperative enclaves that used alloparenting (communal child rearing), food-sharing, and leaderless group decision-making in order to survive. Notions of status, and being a better provider don’t matter or make any sense to people who don’t value that because their culture is built around cooperative food sharing and the belief that every individual holds as much value as the next. You can’t just generalize the priorities and social dynamics of the past couple thousand years to all the rest of human history because it doesn’t compute. And for this reason, any philosophy that tries to do so is really off base.

As far as I can tell, evolutionary psychology looks at the past 5 or 6 thousand years and one particular type of social organization and determines that it is a template for the rest of humanity. It’s essentially patriarchy — both the gender dynamics and the dominance hierarchy aspects — trying to justify itself by claiming to be timeless and inevitable. But it’s quite evidently not so if we look at the actual aspects of the rest of human history that have very different family, social, and sexual dynamics.

For too long, erroneous assumptions about human nature have been treated as truth and then passed along to the next generation. Bateman’s conclusions about fruit flies are one of the most glaring, but that’s a subject that deserves its own stand-alone story, so I won’t go into it further here. However, as one group of researchers noted after evaluating Bateman’s work, “We argue that human mating strategies are unlikely to conform to a single universal pattern.”

Evolutionary psychology offers a neat and tidy box, and that’s very appealing to many people, but it leaves out too much relevant information and current science to be of any actual use in understanding why humans do what they do.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022