Evolution's Rainbow Quotes

“One of the most accomplished experimental population geneticists today, Jerry Coyne, writes:
"Evolutionary psychologists routinely confuse theory with idle speculation. Evolutionary psychology is utterly lacking in sound scientific grounding. Its stories do not qualify as science and they do not deserve the ascent or even the respect of the public."
What provoked suck an unusual declaration? The recent publication of yet another theory of the "naturalness" of rape supposedly based on evolutionary biology. The idea is that men unable to find mates in the "usual way" can reproduce through rape; genes for rape then increase leading to the brain's acquisition of a "rape chip". All men are therefore potential rapists although they do not necessarily act on this potential depending on external circumstances. Coyne points out that this "I can't fight evolution" theory is falsified by the facts that 1/3rd of all rapes are of women too young or too old to reproduce, 20% do not involve vaginal penetration, 50% do not include ejaculation in the vagina, 22% involve violence in excess of that needed to force copulation, 10% of peace-time rapes are in gangs thus diluting each man's chance of reproducing, war-time rapes usually culminate in the murder and sexual mutilation of the victim, some rapists are wealthy giving them access to women without coercion, and many rapes are homosexual. So many rapes are non-reproductive that rape can't plausibly be viewed as a means of sperm transfer for disadvantaged men to achieve reproduction. Like all other mating acts, rape is about relationships; in this case domination. The assertion that all men are potential rapists is offensive enough to make men angry about the misuse of sexual selection theory as women and others outside of the sexual selection templates have been for years.

Coyne has been prompted to say publicly what many have already observed: that evolutionary psychology is not science but advocacy; that evolutionary psychologists are guilty of indifference to scientific standards. They buttress strong claims with weak reasoning, weak data, and finagled statistics, and choose ideology over knowledge. Coyne points out "Freud's views lost credibility when people realized that they were not based on science, but were actually an ideological ediface; a myth about human life that was utterly resistant to scientific refutation. Evolutionary psychologists are now building a similar ediface. They too deal in dogmas rather than propositions of science."

Worse even than being theorized as a latent rapist, the misuse of science offends Coyne. To a scientist, the scientific errors are far more inflammatory than its ideological implications.”
― Joan Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

“an interesting situation has occurred in the Dominican Republic, where enough intersexed people lived in several villages to have produced a special social category, the guevedoche.”
― Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

“Evolution's Rainbow
Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
Joan Roughgarden
UNIVERSITY”
― Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

“Meanwhile, in our society we face not only persecution of people with diverse expressions of gender and sexuality, but also the prospect of doing permanent harm to the integrity of the gene pool of our species, thereby damaging our species for posterity.”
― Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People