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Abstract
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A response to Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Edited by Cheryl Brown Travis. (2003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
As scientists, we find fascinating how much many people dislike the fact that rape is evolutionary and the extreme difficulty many people have in maintaining reasonable thinking or talking about rape in biological terms. By raising the topic of the biology of rape in a conversation with another, one can determine if the person has consistent scientific objectivity or not. It can be used as an acid test of whether a person has interest in knowing or may be blinded by ideological convictions.
We hypothesize that people have a psychological adaptation whose function is to disable the mind's reasoning and thereby prevent personal acceptance of ideas that are perceived contrary to the ideology of the perceiver's community. This hypothetical adaptation is the "knowledge destroyer." Its functional design is to prevent acceptance of an idea that is not consistent with one's ideology by garbling the logic and evidence that the idea entails. Thus, humans may be designed as a result of evolution by selection to think illogically and unreasonably about politically loaded topics such as rape in biological perspective. The existence of the knowledge destroyer would be supported by evidence that people with various ideologies that most oppose evolutionary ideas being applied to people's behavior would show significantly greater lapses of reason when evaluating a sequence of logic in an evolutionary vignette involving human behavior than when evaluating logic in other types of vignettes. It may be that the knowledge destroyer also is behind the great difficulty many people have understanding the fact that culture and biology are not a dichotomy and that in reality culture is biology. Culture is the behavior of people in a place and time and biology is the scientific study of all life, including all behavior. |