Rape and Reason: Evolution, Gender and Rape edited by Cheryl Brown Travis. The MIT Press, 2003. £16.50, hbk (545 pages) ISBN 0 262 70090 5

• Autores: Ruth Mace
• Localización: Trends in ecology and evolution, ISSN 0169-5347, Vol. 18, Nº 7, 2003, pág. 324
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • 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.