April 2, 2000

Survival of the Rapist

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Two scientists argue that plain old evolution explains why men rape.

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First Chapter: 'A Natural History of Rape'

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By FRANS B. M. DE WAAL

A NATURAL HISTORY OF RAPE Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. By Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. 251 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. $28.95.

hen the cook of a primatologist in Indonesia was raped by an orangutan, her husband said it was nothing to be concerned about because the perpetrator wasn't human. This peculiar incident is one of the very few real-life descriptions of rape in ''A Natural History of Rape.'' Strikingly, it is the husband's opinion rather than the victim's that is cited. This is symptomatic: in this book, female and feminist voices are dismissed as ideological; scientists -- like the authors -- engage in the objective search for the truth.

Rape is sexual violence. There is no doubt in my mind that people who try to reduce rape to either sex or violence miss its complexity. By adopting one biased position -- that rape is primarily sexual -- ''A Natural History of Rape'' could be seen as providing a necessary antidote to the other dogmatic position, that it's principally about power. Rape (defined as forced copulation) is mechanically impossible in the absence of male genital arousal. Hence the view of rape as a hate crime pure and simple is silly. A penis is no fist. This doesn't imply, however, that rape rests on natural urges, as Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer want us to believe. As sexually reproducing animals, people have sexual urges. But to say that all men will rape under particular circumstances is like saying that all people will eat human flesh when stranded in the Andes. Even if true, does that make us born cannibals?

In the young tradition of evolutionary psychology, Thornhill, a biologist, and Palmer, an anthropologist, depict rape as a product of Darwinian selection. As a biologist myself, I am prepared to listen. After all, rape can lead directly to gene transmission. But for natural selection to favor rape, rapists would have to differ genetically from nonrapists and need to sow their seed more successfully, so to speak, causing more pregnancies than nonrapists, or at least more than they would without raping. Not a shred of data for these two requirements is presented. The authors believe that information on modern humans would be irrelevant because the only important effects are in our evolutionary past. With this period a firmly closed book, we are left with a storytelling approach in which the usual rules of evidence are suspended.

The authors draw parallels with the scorpion flies studied by Thornhill, which have a physical adaptation for rape. Male scorpion flies have a so-called notal organ, a clamp that serves to keep unwilling females in a mating position. Of course, human males have nothing like it, but perhaps they have other specific ''rape adaptations.'' The authors search for them in human psychology, which unfortunately is not nearly as easy to pick apart as insect anatomy. That men are good at detecting female vulnerability or that young men ejaculate without much delay really doesn't prove much. Detecting vulnerability has to do with judgment of people and situations, a multi-purpose capacity also present in women. And premature ejaculation may simply rest on a combination of high arousal and inexperience. None of the examples of human male psychology comes even close to the scorpion fly's notal organ in proving that men evolved to rape.

Lots of questions remain. Wouldn't one assume that among our ancestors, who lived in small communities, rape was punished and so may have reduced rather than enhanced a male's future reproduction? If rape is about reproduction, why are about one-third of its victims young children and the elderly, too young or old to reproduce? Why do men rape lovers and wives, with whom they also have consensual sex? Perhaps some of these issues could have been resolved if the authors had not lumped all kinds of rape. Are date rapes on university campuses really comparable to the rapes by Serbian soldiers in Kosovo? Isn't it likely that some rapes are mainly sexually motivated and others mainly acts of hostility and misogyny?

Thornhill and Palmer write dryly and obtusely, spending less time on rape itself than on explaining evolutionary biology and blasting feminist scholars like Susan Brownmiller, the author of ''Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape'' (1975). But even though ''A Natural History of Rape'' is highly polemical, it does review relevant information, and the authors, who admit that they themselves disagree, are honest in exposing some of the problems with their line of reasoning. They are also careful not to condone or excuse rape in any way. They make the strongest possible case for their position; it simply isn't strong enough.

The greatest flaw of ''A Natural History of Rape'' is that it quotes but then blithely ignores the warning of the evolutionary biologist George Williams that ''adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should be used only when it is really necessary.'' Even common behavior, like smoking or masturbation, isn't necessarily adaptive -- let alone uncommon behavior. If child abuse by stepfathers is evolutionarily explained (an oft-cited example, used again here), or if rape is such a smart reproductive strategy, why do so many more stepfathers lovingly care for their children? And why are there so many more men who don't rape? Let me call this the dilemma of the rarely exercised option: a Darwinian account for an atypical behavioral choice is incomplete without an equally good account for the typical choice.

If women feel offended by this book, let me say that I, and with me probably most men, resent the foisting of the crimes of a minority onto us as something that we would just as eagerly do if the opportunity arose. Why can't evolutionary psychology put a little less evolution and a little more psychology into its thinking? We evolved a complex mental life that makes us act in all sorts of ways, the sum of which should enhance reproductive success. But this strategy is by no means required for each and every behavior. To focus on just one, isolated from the rest of the package, is like seeking to understand why the kangaroo has such tiny front legs while ignoring what happened to its hind legs and tail.

In the case of rape, I'd suggest looking less at flies and more at our fellow primates for answers. In monkeys and apes there is a clear link between power and sex. High-ranking males enjoy sexual privileges, and are more attractive to the opposite sex. We need only look at recent events in the White House (and at a television spectacular like ''Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?'') to see how much the link exists in us too. This age-old connection may explain how power and sex get mixed up in the minds of men, and occasionally spin out of control together -- not because men are born to have coercive sex, but because power in general is a male aphrodisiac.

If all this makes rape prevention seem hopeless, Thornhill and Palmer have a solution: give young men a crash course on how the urge to rape arose in our species (thus implying that the urge has been demonstrated and that science knows where it comes from!) and warn young women to watch how they dress. In other words, if we can make boys see the Darwinian light and girls wear baggy pants, we will rid the world of a lot of nasty male behavior. But there are many societies lacking such measures in which rape is rare. I would have preferred cross-cultural information, because even if rape statistics are notoriously unreliable, the authors are wrong in assuming that the United States is typical. This country is considered one of the most rape-prone among industrialized nations. It is also arguably the most prudish, which raises some interesting questions -- not biological questions but cultural ones.

These issues are glaringly absent from ''A Natural History of Rape.'' Instead of belittling the social sciences, as the authors do for about 50 pages, it would have been more productive to join forces and consider a wide range of perspectives on an ugly behavior that has harmed so many.

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Frans B. M. de Waal, the author of ''Chimpanzee Politics'' and ''Good Natured,'' is the C. H. Candler professor of psychology and director of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at Emory University.

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