Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Via Matthew Yglesias we learn that former Bush minion and permanent-war proponent John Bolton is also a follower of pull-it-out-of-your-ass evolutionary psychology. Quoth Bolton

You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

Yglesias’s reply refutes not only Bolton but the core assumption of every evolutionary psychologist who’s ever flunked a biology, statistics, history, psychology, or logic course.

For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence. Doing it as a primary means of subsistence, as opposed to a hobby, has become even more marginal. Doing it with stone tools is even more marginal, though it does of course still happen.

Read the quotes in context here.

Nicely put. If in just a generation or two we can transcend something that was so immediately, directly, and incontestably essential to human survival as the use of stone tools… something that dates back at least 1.5 million years no less… then we can probably also transcend impulses as marginally adaptive as 3-5% biases towards hip-waist ratios in mate selection. Assuming those ratios were ever selected to begin with.