Human coercion: A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Human Coercion by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer

Abstract

MIT Press, 2000. £17.95 hbk (xvi+251 pages)ISBN 0 262 201259Despite the title, this is not a book of voyeuristic pop ‘science’. Indeed, if anything, the title is somewhat misleading. The book is less a natural history of rape than a natural history of an intellectually more serious problem, namely why the social sciences and humanities show such antipathy towards evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biologists should not underestimate the depth of resistance to what might seem to them to be fairly uncontroversial stuff. Here, the focus on rape merely serves to highlight this antipathy by attempting to treat a socially sensitive issue as biologically interesting, and, as a result, the book has attracted more than its fair share of flak on both sides of the Atlantic.Most of that flak displays all the usual hallmarks of having failed to read the book — or, if it has been read, of failing to understand its content. Perhaps one ought not to be too harsh in one’s condemnation. After all, several biologists (including some extremely eminent ones who ought to know better) continue to reject any attempt to apply evolutionary theory to humans, as though somehow humans are exempt from the laws of biology – the kind of nonsense we would normally only tolerate from Creationists. In some cases, such attitudes can be attributed to intellectual laziness and a reluctance to take the trouble to read the primary literature; in others, it reflects a basic ignorance of biology, the kind of view that supposes that biological equals genetic. It is this issue of ignorance that Thornhill and Palmer try to address.They begin by describing what the evolutionary approach is all about. This leads to the, perhaps inevitable, question of whether rape is a male reproductive tactic and whether this provides a better explanation of the phenomenon than the conventional feminist view (broadly accepted across the social sciences) that rape is merely a symptom of men’s aggression towards women. The essence of Thornhill and Palmer’s argument in favour of rape as a reproductive tactic hinges around the age distribution and the responses of rape victims. They argue that the largely incoherent conventional social science view is the product of politics, with little in the way of evidence to justify it. Indeed, one survey of 1610 rape studies published during the 1980s revealed that fewer than 10% were concerned with trying to understand the causes of rape, a mere 9% attempted to test a specific hypothesis, barely 9% made any attempt at quantification and in only 1.5% were any statistical tests used.These kinds of depressing statistics are reinforced by the sometimes extraordinary failure in the rape literature to distinguish between proximate and ultimate causes or between goals and tactics. Not only does rape have nothing to do with sex, asserts one writer, but ‘sex itself has little to do with sex’. Or the classic claim that the physical harm done to victims is evidence that rape is not motivated by sexual desire – a view that Thornhill and Palmer lampoon as the equivalent of claiming that giving money to a prostitute is evidence that the client’s behaviour must be motivated by altruism.Perhaps the most depressing point to emerge from this book is that young women are being ill-advised because most rape advice programme coordinators maliciously refuse to allow facts to encroach on their politically motivated views. Thornhill and Palmer’s measured analyses of these issues is not intended to oppose the social science view in its entirety. Rather, they make a plea for a more informed approach. Evolutionary biology, they argue, provides strong evidence for identifying particular cultural components as the points to attack in educating potential victims (of both sexes) and rapists alike.I suspect that behavioural ecologists reading this book will be disappointed in the lack of evidence cited to support many of the biological claims made by the authors. In many ways this is surprising, because there is a wealth of empirical data on this topic, much (but by no means all) of it collected by the authors. I have always harboured the belief that the best strategy is to overwhelm one’s opponents with hard empirical evidence. Perhaps Thornhill and Palmer are right in their assumption that data will mean nothing to the audience they are aiming at. Still, it makes for a disappointing and somewhat disjointed read for those of us more interested in the facts than the handwaving.