Evolution and rape

By the way, as far as your "math" goes, i frankly find hilarious the implicit assumption that rape is necessarily an effective means of reproduction. If a woman who is nursing is raped, the probability of conception is extremely low.



Source

If a woman is raped during her menstrual cycle, the probability of conception is very low.



Source

While a woman is already pregnant, the probability of superfetation--conceiving a second child while already pregnant--is extremely low.

Raping a female who is not yet sexually fertile will not produce a pregnancy. Raping a woman who is menopausal (that is, fully menopausal, when menstruation has ceased) is highly unlikely to produce a pregnancy.

Quite apart from all of that, rape will only have an evolutionary advantage if there is a conception, the child is carried to term and said child then reaches sexual maturity and successfully reproduces. There are no evolutionary prizes for getting close--we're not talking about a game of horseshoes.

Inflicting severe injuries on a woman during rape will reduce the probability of a woman carrying the child to term, delivering the child and surviing to rear the child to sexual maturity. Killing the woman's mate, and especially killing the woman's companions will drastically reduce the probability of the woman carrying the child to term and then successfully raising the child to sexual maturity. These are important considerations in the question of evolutionary advantage in that even using Thomas' skewed math, the effect would have had to have occurred within the last 1400 years. Fourteen hundred years ago, if the woman's mate and companions were killed during the incident which culminated in the rape means there would be a low probability of the child being carried to term and raised to sexual maturity.

There have been a lot of snap answers here, such as your and Thomas' claims about the math, which appear to have entailed very little thought, very little reflection. Tediously, i will point out once again that i am not saying that there is no evolutionary advantage to rape. I'm pointing out that those who claim there is have not made their case.

that rape is evolutionarily conneted is a fact. That it conferred some "evolutionary advantage" is a dubious claim. Im not sure how this would be even measured since it would be a restrospective study with absolutely no control.

I don't see how it can be any more simple-minded. Thomas did not specify that there was an unwilling woman--his claim was a universal statement. Are you really so dense that you think a woman who does not want to be raped therefore does not want to engage in consensual, reproductive sex? Are you thinking at all before you post this drivel?

One of the things that amused me was that the outset of the text of the study they list four premises, all of which seem to state that their methodology entitled them to "measure retrospectively." Rather than saying that rape is evolutionarily connected, i think it would be more appropriate to point out that violence is evolutionarily connected, as well as asserting that there is an evolutionary advantage in opportunism. Whether a casual rape (i.e., one which occurs in a context outside of "warfare"--without wanting to open that can of worms about what constitutes warfare) or rape which is a concomitant of warfare, this is a case of taking advantage of an opportunity, and employing violence to do so.

Farmerman,

Sure... it is difficult to do a retrospective study. But a way that coerced sex may have an evolutionary advantage is clear.

In species where a physically powerful males coerce sex from females the males have access to more wombs. There are many species where coerced sex is part of normal reproduction.

Given the number of species that practice coerced sex, and the fact that coerced sex provides clear additional reproductive opportunities for males, the claim of "evolutionary advantage" is not as dubious as you claim.

Sex has an evolutionary advantage.

Ah-hahahahahahahahahahaha . . . you come out with some doozies . . .

Yeah, the evolutionary advantage of sex is that there is no evolution without it. You crack me up.

As we look further into the paper, the authors identify several types of males who are predictably associated with being rapists (again its all retrospective and subject to my comment above). These involve opportunistic rapists, low status males, etc. and these follow along the simian trail of sexual practices.
Its all surrounding an assertion that rapists view sexual attractiveness differently than do "normals"
Not a big finding but its adaptively planted in the psych makeup of such deviant behavior.

The paper spends much of its up front time "apologizing" for being involved in this type of study

Then, in order to assert an evolutionary advantage is , in fact present, we would have to find and see what the condition of ALL offspring are as compared to the "non rapist" males of that species.
Evolutionary advantage does not stop with a successful birth, it means that the ability to "pass on" that gene or genes has been accomplished. SO, the offspring of rapists would need to be traced into the next
generations to see how the gene persists. Sort of a backass Hardy Weinberg expansion where frequency proves success or not

I accept your point farmerman. It is certainly true that there can be evolutionary traits that don't themselves confer a direct evolutionary advantage.

I accept that it is not a proven fact that coerced sex confers an evolutionary advantage.

My assertion is that given that coerced sex is sex, and that coercing sex has the ability to provide more reproductive opportunities, it is logical to expect that coerced sex has an evolutionary advantage. And, given the number of species with the trait of coerced sex, it seems likely that coerced sex has an evolutionary advantage.

And it is absolutely true that males who are able to coerce sex from females have additional reproductive opportunity.

You are absolutely right that we haven't provided comprhensive proof (which we agree is awfully hard to do). But there is an awful lot of reason to believe that there is an evolutionary advantage to males who coerce females to have sex with them.

Good conclusion.

you mmean as opposed to those who do not? hmmmm. I love where we have these concepts that defy proof or evidence. Makes ya think of wjat wed need to scope it out.

Does rape confer more opportunity to reproduce (I d say divorce and re-marriage is a better working example-since it usually doesn't involve a felony)

Setanta: thoroughly disgusting turn of phrase.

Your problem is that you aren't approaching this in a neutral fashion. You're uncomfortable with the notion seen purely from a scientific viewpoint. You're such a little boy more than sometimes, Set.

All of a sudden you type perfectly. Then your next post is a mess. I think you really can't spell and when you don't have someone to help you we see your usual mess.

See what I mean?

Farmer: Does rape confer more opportunity to reproduce (I d say divorce and re-marriage is a better working example-since it usually doesn't involve a felony)

Yeah that was a big concern for Alley Opp.

If rape is defined as "coerced sex" than of course if confers more opportunity to reproduce. A male that coerces sex has opportunities to mate with both willing and unwilling partners. A male that doesn't coerce sex can only mate with willing partners.

The ability to coerce sex increases the number of accesible sexual partners. I don't see how this doesn't mean more opportunity to reproduce.

I am conceding the point that it is unproven that sexual coercion is an "evolutionary advantage".

But it is a fact that the ability for a male to coerce unwilling fertile females to have sex increases the number of opportuntities for sexual reproduction.

Do you deny that the set of willing and unwilling potential mates is bigger than the set of only willing partners?

Darwinian guide to dating and relations with the opposite sex:

http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Serial_Rapist

More opportunity than what? Natural selection acts on variation. The premise of rape is that the woman said "no". So the relevant variation, it seems to me, is between a man who takes her "no" for an answer and one who doesn't.

If he does take "no" for an answer, his opportunity to reproduce on this occasion is zero. If he doesn't, that constitutes rape, and leads to a greater-than-zero opportunity to reproduce on this occasion. To argue that rape confers less opportunity to reproduce than respecting her "no", you need a reason to believe in an overriding impediment to reproduce on other occasions. In our society, I guess the reason is that the rapist goes to jail. But widespread respect for a woman's "no" tends to be a feature of modern cultures. What would the impediment have been in the archaic societies of our cultural past? What would it have been in our even more-distant biological past, when 'societies' were family-sized hunter-gatherer tribes, and most acts we call crimes today would have been inter-societal conflicts?


Re-marrying one woman and raping another are not mutually exclusive. Sperm is abundant. So why would natural selection favor a "gentleman-gene", expressed in males who tend to respect a female's "no", over an opportunistic gene, expressed in males who tend to always have sex no matter if the female said "yes" or "no"?

I noticed that, too. It's an interesting sign that taking evolution seriously isn't just unpopular with the religious Right. It also has implications for animal behavior, including human behavior, that are quite uncomfortable to Left-leaning people --- especially social-science majors.

I agree that Setanta's objections are probably ideological in nature.

Rape fantasies are so common among men and women alike, that it's hard not to consider rape an innate tendency.

In fact, my objection is to a lack of any evidence, and no plausible argument. I'd say that the lack of a definition of rape, and the assumptions of the authors are a product of ideology.