The reason for writing Evolution, Gender and Rape was purely and simply to discredit another book (A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer), which seems a rather dubious enterprise. My spirits were further depressed when, as predicted, I encountered some of the mindless criticism that evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists have become so accustomed to: the accusations of sexism and racism, which are not worth wasting any more paper on, even to rebuke; plus a few more bizarre claims, such as ‘…natural selection, as described by Darwin, was ultimately accepted by his contemporaries because it was a paradigm laden with the values of nineteenth-century England’. No comment. And there was plenty of the usual confusion between genetic and cultural versus adaptive and nonadaptive behaviours. There was little understanding that whether a behaviour is cultural or genetic in origin (and most behaviours are a bit of both) is an entirely different question from whether that behaviour serves to enhance reproductive success.
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