Dad's not lost: but his steadfast refusal to ask for directions—despite the jokes—need not be explained as an evolutionary trait of the human male

Natural History, July-August, 2004 by Deborah M. Gordon

The credit for the organizing that gets done as a result of testosterone's organizing effects should go primarily to the target tissues.... Next in importance, if we are ranking the developmental actors with respect to the magnitude of their causal role, are the androgen receptors. Testosterone comes in a distant third.

The descriptions Francis offers of animals and their behavior are vivid. Naked mole rats, he writes, are "shaped like late-season yams that have begun to sprout.... They seem to have been plucked from the womb much too early and then freeze-dried." His sarcasm is usually lighthearted. In what Francis calls the "Fred and Barney" story--the names refer to characters in The Flintstones--he recasts the account of the behavior of our hunter-gatherer ancestors invoked by evolutionary psychologists: the men go out hunting while the women stay home cooking and cleaning. The story is supposed to explain why men don't ask for directions: the idea is that women back then strongly preferred sexual partners who didn't get lost on the hunt. If sons inherited the spatial abilities of their fathers, and women persisted in this preference, not getting lost would increase--until somehow, now, men prefer not to appear lost. Along with this far-fetched story, the imagined lives of Fred, Barney, and their friends have also been invoked to explain, Francis writes:

Why we are so prone to kill each other and why we die for each other, why we exhibit fidelity to our mates and why we are adulterous, why we court and why we rape, why we are doting parents and why we commit infanticide, why we are ethical creatures and why we are sociopaths, why we have rock stars, why we have art, why we have religion, why we have language, and why we wage war.

All this may seem a heavy burden to put on Fred and Barney.

Francis's emphasis on "how" rather than "why" questions points to the direction in which evolutionary biology will move. As more is learned about how organisms work, explanations based on physiological and ecological processes will replace hand-waving stories about how natural selection might have worked.

But I think Francis concedes too much when he accepts an adaptive explanation, if plausible, as probably correct. Empirical testing of evolutionary hypotheses is difficult, but not impossible. At least sometimes, it is already possible to do more than decide which explanation is more appealing. Research in evolutionary ecology can demonstrate how natural selection is acting now. The hope is that the more data available on the ways natural selection is currently working, the more realistic will be the stories of how it happened in the past.

Unfortunately, only the choir--people such as Gould, Lewontin, or Lloyd--seems to hear the preaching by critics of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It is hard to explain why--in spite of so much intellectual energy devoted to demonstrating the mistakes of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology--the scientific rebuttals have had so little effect. Simplistic evolutionary explanations seem to crop up like a pernicious fungus around every new discovery in behavioral science. Does the persistence of adaptive accounts of human behavior merely reflect a collective fondness for explanations that are easy to understand, and comfortable because they justify the status quo?