Michael Weissman wrote:

> Joe Schwartz wrote:
>
>> : The
>
>> Biological Basis of Coercion, MIT Press 2000.  This argument
>> naturalises
>> male violence against women. Presumably Michael Weissman, judging
>> from his
>
>> remark about possible genetic differences in human male and female
>> sexual behaviour, might find this thesis congenial. I don't know.
>
>  Actually, Joe, strange as it may sound, I'm opposed to rape.

Michael Weissman earlier wrote that to be specific we should consider
evolved differences in male and female mate selection preferences, but
he offers no suggestion as to what these might be. Joe Schwartz points
to an example in the literature. Weissman indicates it's not what he
means, but says nothing about what he does mean. We are left in the
dark. MW, if you have something in mind, why not say what it is?
Otherwise, how are we to evaluate your assertion that such preferences
(whatever they may be) are evolutionarily determined? In this regard we
do know that communities of our nearest simian relatives, chimpanzees
and bonobos, apparently have quite different sexual patterns. We don't
know that these differences in themselves are genetic, since not enough
different chimpanzee and bonobo populations have been studied to rule
out cultural variations among groups. It is known, as well that mating
preferences of certain baboons (hamadryas or gelada, I don't offhand
recall which) do vary in different communities, males typically being
polygynous in some (if that human term is properly extendable to
baboons) and monogynous in others, if I recall correctly.  And of course
we do know that differnt human cultures apparently have quite different
mating patterns. So what does ev psych have to say that MW credits?

As to economic behavior, I agree with some of the previous questioning
of the lack of bias of the latest  Gintis Bowles research, but I also
consider that it sounds far better than the "sociobiological" piece of
theirs I referred to, and also far superior to much of the published
literature of this sort of stuff, which is usually based on the behavior
of American college students ---hardly a universal sample. But we
already knew Bowles and Gintis were capable of good studies.




Michael H. Goldhaber

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