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One Tiger Woods, His Eight or More Partners, One (More) Reason Evolutionary Psychology Still Needs Work

Tue, 2009-12-15 18:40 — figleaf

Intern Katy in a blog-roundup post at Jezebel says

Katynels posted an article titled “Why is there no female Tiger Woods?“ in which Richard Cohen writes: “women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother – to have a child and then raise that child.” Yup, he really breaks down the whole Tiger Woods-sex-scandal thing to Darwinian urges. Reductionist, but topical!

She spotted the logic flaw here.

Riiiggghht. See, there’s this one guy, this Tiger Woods guy, who’s biological imperative makes him do this stuff that…

...he’s embarrassed and ashamed of enough to hide… even though it’s some kind of genetic imperative, as pre-determined as growing fingers on the end of your hands during fetal development, right?

And (at last count anyway) there’s, like, eight or nine women who’ve come forward to admit they “coupled” with this toolbagishly dressed stranger.

So… One guy who sleeps around, eight women who sleep around, and this guy stands there with is bare face hanging out talking about evolutionary urges.

And yeah, yeah, the “evolutionary argument” is that, well, those women don’t count since they’re just opportunity maximizing [insert random gendered derogatory term here] instead of being proper women.

But…

But…

Look, point being this guy Cohen can’t just go around claiming men are going around doing stuff with individuals he’s claiming have no, zero, none “natural” interest in anything but “a stronger need to mother – to have a child and then raise that child” when… pretty clearly… for every man who’s promiscuous with multiple hetero partners there sort of by-definition have to be a corresponding umber of women to be hetero partners with!

At some point it stops being about morality, or “science” and starts being about arithmetic.

(Also, gee, maybe Tiger Woods is all ashamed and upset because despite his promiscuity he loves his wife and children and doesn’t want to be separated from them. Which ought to be its own post.)

Finally, I’ll stop ranting about Evolutionary Psychology as soon as they stop making the kind of errors in logic and rhetoric that would get, say, a anthropologist, chemist, or dental hygiene student flunked out their freshman year. Because stuff like this matters. It slurs actual men and snubs real women and creates expectations that serve no one.

#!#^)

Tue, 2009-12-15 19:38 — ChrisJ (not verified) #permalink

I did a post last week on an evolutionary psychologist’s take on shopping (appeared the day after there was another equally egregious article on motherhood). His wife and her friends wanted to shop when they arrived in Prague and the men couldn’t understand that, so it must arise from adaptions in hunter-gatherer societies – he initiated a study!Who knew those nuts and berries had the shopping cachet of Saks (or resulted in shopping frenzies like those at Filene’s).

It amazes me that anyone will listen to this stuff (and that its proponents get paid for it.) Are all evolutionary psychologists right wing nuts and berries.

[Oh yeah, I think that’s how I found your blog — following a link from Twitter. Also if only women “gather” then how would they explain, to name just one example, why most beachcombers and metal-detector guys are, well, guys? That’s pretty classic foraging/gathering behavior. Same with mushroom hunters. Same with gold prospectors. Same with… etc. I mean, yeah, you might be able to explain it, but not with these eternal small-sample, narrow-focus studies supplemented by memes about women like to shop so it must be genetic. Thanks, Chris. —fl]

Tue, 2009-12-15 20:10 — Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) #permalink

I’ve heard it said that Sarah Hrdy is an evolutionary psychologist who is not a “right wing nut or berry.” Haven’t read her stuff myself yet.

Wed, 2009-12-16 22:13 — Reader (not verified) #permalink

I would say that Sarah Hrdy is one of the few people who is actually working to try and make evolutionary psychology worthwhile. ‘Mother Nature’ is very worth one’s while to read. She enshews ‘just so’ stories entirely and is careful to note where not enough is known. One of the things that really comes through is that there has never been a ‘right’ way to raise a child, that doing so is to balance several competing interests and that it’s never been the case that a child’s biological mother is necessarily its only ‘mother’.

While she acknowledges that there are trends in what men and women prefer, she makes the case that the majority of difference seen is social and political. She is strongly pro-choice as having the ability to make (and effect) decisions on one’s life and reproductive choices is what is truly child and woman-friendly. Her chapter on motherhood as practiced by men nicely skewers the notion that men aren’t biologically primed to nurture, being a largely social construct.

She doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but she lets evidence speak louder than opinion and tries not to read too much into things. Do borrow a copy from the library.

[Yup. I haven’t read Hrdy either but I’ve heard good things about her. And, as I keep not saying enough, it’s not that there’s no such thing as evolved behavior. And it’s certainly not true that there’s no serious research in the field. It’s that you don’t hear about them because for the most part their research, while perfectly fascinating, can’t possibly be construed as a) slut-shaming, b) apologetics for male irresponsibility, or c) proving that women are aroused only by shoes. In other words it’s as if all work in physics was ignored except cold fusion and perpetual motion schemes. Thanks, Reader. —fl]

Tue, 2009-12-15 21:19 — Holly Pervocracy (not verified) #permalink

Wow, is Tiger Woods now the only promiscuous man (the only promiscuous person!) in the world, kinda the way Monica Lewinsky was the only woman to ever give a blowjob?

[Oh no, Holly, of course not! Tiger Woods is like every other man — why didn’t you hear, we have “Y” chromosomes because our male ancestors screwed around so much we wore an arm off it. :-p But yeah, you’d get that impression reading the newspapers. —fl]

Tue, 2009-12-15 21:47 — Eurosabra (not verified) #permalink

Actually most everybody in the evo-psych world is treating this as straightforward harem-building and wondering who the men are who lost out on having a mate because of these women’s sudden new interest in building an exclusive relationship with Tiger Woods. Five minutes of Alpha rather than five decades of Beta.

Tue, 2009-12-15 23:22 — Nightfall (not verified) #permalink

Nuh, durr. Unless he was dating 8-9 women all at the same time, then that’s “harem building” only in the sense that anyone who doesn’t commit to a lifetime marriage with their first love is harem building.

Wed, 2009-12-16 01:39 — Red (not verified) #permalink
Also I bet some of those women like to say that they had slept with Tiger Woods. Even in a non-sexual context contact with somebody famous is a bragging right. Such as the fact that I’ve had five chats with Ursula LeGuin in my life.
Wed, 2009-12-16 06:34 — fiveofnine (not verified) #permalink

It may not be built into the“y” chromosome, but polygamy is an evolutionary advantage, since women don’t normally have multiple births. It also didn’t wear out women having 20 children in their life time which reduced their chance of dying in childbirth. That being said; that has nothing to do with the individuals desire for multiple partners, for all we know in hunter gather societies, fidelity in females may not have been an issue. In some cultures the children added to the prestige and wealth of the husband, whether they were the biological fathers are not.

I think the problem is; psychologist are not scientist, they are not medical doctors and the modern world has given too much certainty of fact to those disciplines that call themselves social science.

Wed, 2009-12-16 09:21 — Holly Pervocracy (not verified) #permalink

Polygamy is not always an evolutionary advantage. Look at animals, which are pretty much always acting according to what gives them the advantage—some are polygamous, some form pair bonds. Effective fatherhood often consists of more than sperm donation, since a baby that’s born and then dies because Mom can’t feed 20 kids by herself does nothing to spread your genes in the long term.

I’m not saying the monogamy is necessarily natural for humans (although it’s worth nothing that a lot of cultures independently developed the concept of marriage), but polygamy isn’t always better. More babies doesn’t always lead to more fitness.

Wed, 2009-12-16 11:18 — Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) #permalink

I think polygamy is fantastic for my evolutionary fitness! It’s great having my guys around to help take care of Little Foot! Makes it possible to take care of the baby without going batshit insane, which means I might have more of them!

... but I see the root post of this comment tree appears to think that “polygamy” means “collecting women to maximise pregnancies”. Huh. Shame about that.

(Human evolutionary tendencies on reproduction appear to me to be towards massive adaptation potential. I presume this overlays “social monogamy with frequent cheating and a very slight polygynous tendency” suggested by my understanding of the biology. The ‘massive adaptation’ part is the most critical thing, as it means that the breeding patterns can adapt to situations on a cultural level, making humans capable of breeding sustainably in a wide variety of environmental situations. Like we, y’know, do.)

Wed, 2009-12-16 17:30 — fiveofnine (not verified) #permalink

“but I see the root post of this comment tree appears to think that “polygamy” means “collecting women to maximise pregnancies”. Huh. Shame about that.”

I did not not intend to even imply this. I was not speaking about the social interaction. Usually in a polygamous marriage the women have far fewer children. What is does do is extend the gene pool which did give humans an evolutionary advantage.

In some cultures the male did indeed want to maximize his off spring and the church’s attitude to “be fruitful and multiply”. Why do you think there was such strong opposition to birth control in the beginning of the 20th century.

Don’t put the shame on me!

Wed, 2009-12-16 22:23 — Reader (not verified) #permalink

Well, the thing is this: from a biological point of view, children are completely irrelevant. No extant species acts as if they are. Instead grandchildren are what counts — it means that at least one of one’s children has managed to grow to adulthood and have children of their own. That’s success. How that’s achieved, well that depends on far too much to make any hard and fast rules.

Maximising the number of children an individual has isn’t the point and in the natural world you notice many animals (presumably plants as well, but I’ve not read enough botany to know) seem to ‘miss’ perfectly good breeding opportunities at times or arrange things in odd or inefficient ways.

[tongue in cheek] It’s long seemed to me that if spreading one’s seed is an important human biological urge, then women have a much, much stronger ‘need’ to cheat than men do. Putting all your eggs in one basket by being faithful is a risky business. Women just don’t brag about it. [/tongue in cheek]

[“Instead grandchildren are what counts.” Right in one, Reader. Even in “seed spreading” scenarios it’s not who men idly impregnate that gets their genes propagated. It’s which of the resulting offspring survive to have their own offspring. And technicially it’s not even grand children — in species terms it’s great-great-great-great-plus grandchildren. And in evolutionary behavior terms, it’s great-great-great-plus grandchildren who consistently, reliably, and unambiguously express genes for your particular behavior that count. Otherwise, as they say of pop flies in baseball, it’s just a loud out. Thanks. —fl]

Wed, 2009-12-16 08:33 — chingona (not verified) #permalink

I think the problem is; psychologist are not scientist, they are not medical doctors and the modern world has given too much certainty of fact to those disciplines that call themselves social science.

Maybe a little bit of this, but I think the real problem is that far too many of the evolutionary psychologists look around at the world today (or more specifically, at modern American society, which is just one sliver of how people have lived over the last few million years) and then work backwards to justify how it is inevitable that we do x, y, or z (and of course, through a very gendered lens in which anything men do is absolutely not, say, gathering, no matter how few female stamp collectors there may be, and anything women do, even deliberately seeking out wealthy, high-status men to bed, is not hunting).

The problem isn’t that they’re “not scientists.” It’s that so few of them bother to actually employ the scientific method and do actual research. I suppose idle speculation is cheaper and easier.

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