I think that commenters who are mystified about what this article is debunking may have not encountered much evolutionary psychology in the wild. There’s technically nothing wrong with the general idea of that field- but in reality it is heavily populated by academics who primarily seem hell-bent on finding ‘evidence’ that backs up the gender and sexuality status quo of today’s American society, and they sometimes extrapolate from relatively unrelated animal evidence, including the types of problematic observations that this article is explaining.
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There are many things that organisms are not. More than they are!
Yay, “where did I come from”, the OP image! Growing up that book totally taught me where I came from.
Right on.
Then there are the economic types who think that because lions are lone hunters (except they’re not), it justifies being an asshole in the halls of commerce. Somehow they always fail to factor in things like how it’s the lionesses who do the hunting… or that they and everyone they do business with are primates with very old ingrained behaviours around cooperation and community.
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I am a little skeptical of research performed and published by political activists, when their conclusions tend to confirm their long-held beliefs. I have to agree that Bateman’s fruit fly study is a pretty thin basis for conclusions across all species, but it might be better to conclude, not that everything we believe about the subject has now been disproved, but that more intense research is called for.( It might bear noting that polyandry is fairly rare in primates, except for tamarins.)
Plus, though the plural of anecdote is not data, anyone who grows up on a ranch or farm will have pretty conventional ideas about the nature of male promiscuity in mammals. We have bulls and stallions that would do nothing else, given the opportunity.
I think species that have been so heavily bred by humans are probably bad examples. I certainly have a male friend who would also do nothing else. But I also have male friends who aren’t even all that interested. To the extent there is a genetic component to that, the latter would all but disappear in just a few generations if cows started breeding us for meat.
I agree that it’s fair to be skeptical of the research, but I think the point we can take away from it is that we ought to be skeptical of the entire notion. In nature we’ll find some males who are very promiscuous, and some that are not, and we’ll find that there is plenty of variance within species, not just between them. If we were already aware of this, though, yeah, I doubt there’s a big new discovery here.
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Good point. I had not considered the human interference part.
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So pretty much like anthropology ;).
Well, if nobody else has posted it…
Alt text: She’s a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there’s no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.
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