In Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves., Sharon Begley (Newsweek) writes:
These have not been easy days for evolutionary psychology. For years the loudest critics have been social scientists, feminists and liberals offended by the argument that humans are preprogrammed to rape, to kill unfaithful girlfriends and the like. (This was a reprise of the bitter sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s. When Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that there exists a biologically based human nature, and that it included such traits as militarism and male domination of women, left-wing activists—including eminent biologists in his own department—assailed it as an attempt “to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex” analogous to the scientific justification for Nazi eugenics.) When Thornhill appeared on the Today show to talk about his rape book, for instance, he was paired with a sex-crimes prosecutor, leaving the impression that do-gooders might not like his thesis but offering no hint of how scientifically unsound it is.
(The theory of evolution by natural selection is not part of the set of faulty assumptions, of course. The faulty assumptions made by evolutionary psychologists concern humans’ evolutionary past, the human brain, and some basic facts about non-Anglo countries that some didn’t bother checking.)
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