If You Mention Evolutionary Psychology One More Time, I Will Punch You In The Neck.


About 4 times a week I get a letter from someone, usually a man, letting me know that I am in fact an idiot, or an asshole, for 'villianizing' women for what comes down to 'evolutionary psychology.'  There are the reasoners: 'you might want to look into evolutionary psychology, it explains a lot about behavior you seem to find so distasteful...', and there are the holier-than-thous: 'you obviously know nothing of genetics, douche bag..'  So, while I'm very proud of all of you who have read some popular biology (or had it summarized for you), we'll just outline here why this is a bullshit excuse for bullshit people, because while they like to sound high minded and objective, what these people are really talking about when they bring up 'evolutionary psychology' is a bullshit excuse to justify some behavior.  Let us examine the staggering wrongness of this position.  

Here's a sample of the type of crap people use to argue this point, "By insisting on a long engagement period, a female weeds out casual suitors, and only finally copulates with a male who has proved his qualities of fidelity and perseverance in advance. Feminine coyness is in fact very common among animals, and so are prolonged courtship or engagement periods."  -- from The Selfish Gene

The same experts often tend to miss what Dawkins wrote in Chapter 1..."This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. ... If you wish to extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do."


First the easiest -- the hypocrites.

If people were honest they would take evolutionary psychology to its natural conclusion.  The man, for instance, is evolutionarily advantaged to have as many children as possible, and invest less in his offspring than the female.  The female has to invest so much more in the offspring that it has always been to her advantage to look for a male provider.  It is by this theory that women's apparent money-grubbing is often justified.  Why, on the converse principle, do we not then excuse deadbeat dads from culpability in their actions?  After all, they are just doing what their genes were designed to do, right?  After a woman goes through menopause there is a sharp drop off in her immune system.  A post-menopausal woman is worthless to the genes, and it's not so important if she stays alive or not.  Now go explain to your grandma why she shouldn't get hormone balancing drugs -- it's nature's way, granny, and make sure to sign your will.  Unless you're willing to embrace every position that the genes would endorse you aren't being consistent.  You lose loser, now go home. 

Second, the freedom of the will.

If people are free to make decisions, and we all feel like we are, then people can be help accountable for those decisions.  If someone wants to stick to a line of strict genetic determinism, then they are going to have to show why people don't do everything their genes want them to -- why do people stay with their wives past their menopause, for example?  Surely their genes would rather they were out fathering more children.   Does anyone really want to say that we all do everything that's programmed into our genes for us to do?  No, you don't.  Not even you could think something so silly.

Next up comes the inevitable qualification -- 'well the genetics makes them disposed to do it, but people are a mixture of nature and nurture.  I knew you didn't know any biology, you dickweaver.'  But we still have a problem kids -- you don't have any control over your nurture either.  Nobody can control the formative experience in their early years.  So if it's nature and nurture, then we're still bound to a vision of robotic behavior.  Fine, if that's what you want, but then I don't want to hear any more words that imply judgment, because really, if a man fucks you, dumps you, fucks your mom, steals your cat and breaks your toilet, he had no choice right?

No, if there is to be responsibility there has to be a third thing, an ego, an 'I', some rational agent that is capable of decision making, and is a free agent.  If all is just nature and nurture it's a basic argument (literally) that we have no free will at all, and any kind of responsibility is impossible.       

If you want to say that evolution leads to certain general traits, fine.  Clearly the Ladder Theory is not incompatible with evolutionary psychology.  But keep evolution in its proper place.  Rationalizing your failure as a man to keep a woman happy or bang hot chicks by appealing to her evolutionarily-ingrained prerogatives doesn't make you enlightened.  It makes you a weak willed, bitchy little genetic failure.  If you want to use that as an excuse then you are a sub-human.  That's right, you are less than human.  You know what else blindly follows genetic instructions?  A yak's anus.  And I have a long history of not respecting the opinions of people who smell of yak shit.  

I realize that a culture devoid of personal responsibility makes the 'it's not us, it's our genes' excuse appealing, but I will quote a great man, and say-- 'Hey pal....your excuses are your own.' - Ricky Roma

In a nutshell -- if you think people are capable of making free, rational decisions, then shut the fuck up about how evolutionary psychology should somehow exonerate men or women.  If you don't think people are capable of making free, rational decisions, I'll be over shortly to fuck your mom, nut in her eye, and steal her purse, pausing only to punch you in the throat on the way out, since you have no right to complain about it after all.