Must dog eat dog?

After preaching that humans live by animal laws of aggression and selfishness, evolutionary psychologists are finding the animal kingdom is not as brutal as they imagined.

By Susan McCarthy

May 21, 1999 | Face facts: Men are nothing but horn-dogs, and women only want men for their money. Equations prove: No one ever does anyone a favor unless there's something in it for them. Accept the data: People are just bloodthirsty apes with a flair for spin. We're deluded puppets of our genes, and our genes like us deluded. We have met the enemy and it is our DNA.

Evolutionary psychologists revel in telling Uncomfortable Truths. So eager are many thinkers to face up to hard facts, that they may even face up to hard, fact-like objects that turn out not to be facts at all. But hey! We faced them bravely, and you should too.

Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, in books like "The Territorial Imperative" (1966) and "The Naked Ape" (1967) prepared the ground with their visions of killer apes with violent, lustful origins. But evolutionary psychology (an offshoot of sociobiology) really got rolling in the mid-1970s with E. O. Wilson's "Sociobiology" and Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene." In no time works of pop sociobiology made these already accessible works even more accessible. Theorists divided into hostile camps -- like killer apes, but not so naked. Attackers and supporters of Wilson, of Dawkins, of Richard Lewontin, of Stephen Jay Gould formed up in short order. Wilson announced that the social sciences would have to knuckle under and become fiefdoms of imperial sociobiology. Some social scientists, especially psychologists, leapt at the idea of becoming Real Scientists; others drew back in outrage. Since then, the controversies of evolutionary psychology have raged in both the journals and the popular press.

People seldom enjoy thinking of their own motivations as anything but impeccably reasoned and noble, so there are plenty of uncomfortable truths for all of us to face. One of them is that we are animals, which is awkward, considering the snide things we've been saying about the other animals all this while.

But one of the uncomfortable truths that evolutionary psychologists must face is that we are also humans, deeply enmeshed in cultures of unprecedented complexity. Not only has culture created science, but the worldviews of scientists as well. It will always be hard to map the intertidal zone where our cultural attitudes end and our genetic heritage takes over, but recognizing this, and distinguishing between waterlines at high and low tide is an intellectual effort worth making.

One of evolutionary psychology's weaknesses is the lack of human data. Unable to experiment on this intriguing species, or observe them in culturally uncontaminated environments, scientists fall back on population analysis, surveys of dubious significance, and, all too often, common sense intuition about The Way Folks Are. The initial common sense intuition of the 1960s and 1970s seems to have combined the gender sensibilities of 1950s clip art with the paranoid Machiavellian worldview of an assistant professor unfairly denied tenure.

Interestingly, much of the criticism of evolutionary psychology's original vision has come from primatologists like Frans de Waal, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Patricia Gowaty, Barbara Smuts and Meredith Small, who have access to data about how some primate populations really work. The widespread assumption that dominant males sire all the infants in groups of social primates, for example, has proven remarkably shaky. Recent studies of primates from rhesus monkeys to chimpanzees have found females lusting after nerdy low-status monkeys, sneaking off with low-status guys, and even refusing to have anything to do with sand-kicking bullies.

Challenges to evolutionary psychology's earlier thinking about gender were inevitable. A glance through "The Moral Animal," by Robert Wright, an award-winning science writer, not only displays widely annoying assumptions and pronouncements about how women are, but a stream of complaints about feminism (and vague, dishonest, disingenuous, intimidating feminists). Wright's gripes about feminism are only slightly more explicit than those of many theorists. He tops this with the ponderously playful suggestion that real feminism should favor polygamy because if some women were second, third (and so on) wives of tycoons, the remaining women would have more men to choose among, and there would be no single mothers. Curiously, America's women do not seem to have uttered a collective sigh of relief at having real feminism explained.

This socio-financial analysis is part of the gold-digger theory of femininity. It starts reasonably enough by pointing out that females put a larger physical investment into giving birth than males do. (In fact, the definition of femaleness isn't two X chromosomes: Biologists decide whether a bird or fish is female by determining which one produces the egg.) Sociobiological theory then explores the implications of that differing investment. At some point, however, theory often jumps tracks, and heads into downtown with whistles blowing. "You bitch!" screams the engineer. "All you ever wanted was my money!"

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