When the Sunday New York Times ran a misleading headline followed by a superficial piece about evolutionary psychology, the Wall Street Journal responded by publishing a misleading headline followed by a superficial piece about evolutionary psychology.
The Times story ran under the headline, Darwin was Wrong About Dating and was the subject of an earlier Tracker post this week. The story, as I noted, wasn’t really about Darwin but was instead a poorly-supported, illogical attack on evolutionary psychology.
The WSJ headline, Grey Lady Dumps Darwin implies that the Times was supporting creationism. That’s just plain wrong. Some well-known evolutionary biologists have major gripes with certain claims coming from evolutionary psychology.
In my critique, I pointed out that the Times author used some of the tactics and logical errors common in creationist arguments, but of course he was not actually promoting creationism. It’s shocking if the author if the WSJ piece wasn’t perceptive enough to pick up the distinction. It’s even more shocking if he did.
The author, James Taranto, is a member of the WSJ editorial board. He offers a strange definition of evolutionary psychology:
“a subspecialty….which seeks to explain differences between men and women in terms of Darwin's theory of sexual selection."
That’s funny, especially since some of the most interesting books by evolutionary psychologists don’t dwell on sex differences at all. There’s Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite by Rob Kurzban, and the fascinating The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller. Another evolutionary psychology book that certain people would benefit from reading is The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers.
Taranto’s definition of sexual selection could use some work as well, as it muddles what Darwin actually said in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and what subsequent evolutionary psychologists have said.
The WSJ piece seems to make a good point in that the Times author, Dan Slater, fails to take down evolutionary psycholgoy with his harping on whether or not women have as many sexual partners as men. Taranto is right that this has little to do with the viability of the field of evolutionary psychology or the premise that evolution influences human behavior.
But then Taranto launches into a long-winded, pointless, tiresome explanation for the role of demographics in determining lifetime hookups.
Of course, evolutionary psychology studies may measure many kinds of sex differences besides number of partners people take to bed before they die. Some ask how many partners people aspire to have over a lifetime, others at how many they’ve racked up by the time they’re in their mid-20s.
Earlier this week I contacted psychologist Terri Fisher of OSU, who got unwittingly caught in the middle of the squabble. She is author of a study cited in the Times showing that when people thought they could be caught lying, sex differences in number of partners went away.
Despite being painted as a foe of evolutionary psychology, Fisher said she does indeed think evolution influences behavior. She wasn’t trying to take down evolutionary psychology but trying to deal with something that’s been a known problem since the time of Alfred Kinsey – it’s hard to get people to talk honestly about sex. She said some evolutionary psychologists do make faulty assumptions about sex difference but she would not attribute that error to the three major figures cited in the Times – David Buss, Robert Trivers and Steven Pinker.
After talking to her I got the sense that the Times author was creating a false dichotomy between culture and evolution and a false war between researchers such as Fisher, and well-known evolutionary psychologists. And Taranto was creating a false dichotomy between sound evolutionary science and feminism:
Why would the New York Times, which scoffs at creationism, publish such an intellectually slipshod attack on evolution? Because evolutionary psychology contradicts the feminist dogma that the sexes are created equal, that all differences between men and women (or at least those differences that represent male dominance or superiority) are pure products of cultural conditioning.
Feminism is the new creationism. The left loves to scoff at people who believe that Genesis is literally true, but these days feminist beliefs are a lot more influential.
To be kind, this could be seen as a very dumbed-down version of some of the ideas Steven Pinker presented in his book The Blank Slate, which discusses the way left-leaning ideology might be coming in conflict with some areas of behavioral science.
Neither piece touched on what I think is the real story on Darwin and dating, which is that research in psychology shows there’s enormous variability within the sexes. That’s why evolutionary psychology may never be able to help you develop a simple, blanket understanding of the opposite sex. If you try to use it as a guide for dating, you might be sorry.
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