A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. - Review - book review

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2001 by Todd K. Shackelford, Gregory J. LeBlanc

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. By Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000, 251 pages. Cloth, $28.95.

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion is an intellectual masterpiece. Thornhill and Palmer present a courageous, compassionate, and scholarly analysis of rape and male sexual coercion, informed by an evolutionary perspective. There is much to commend and recommend about this book. First, we applaud Thornhill and Palmer for their courage in tackling an area of work that is riddled with ideology, misinformation, and untethered emotional upset.

Second, this book has a great deal to offer in the prevention of male sexual coercion and rape and in the treatment of the victims and perpetrators of these dreadful behaviors. Thornhill and Palmer convincingly demonstrate that, not only is an evolutionary perspective necessary to understand the psychology motivating these horrific behaviors, but an evolutionary perspective is necessary if we are to design effective treatments for the victims and perpetrators of these behaviors. The book includes several chapters addressing education, prevention, and treatment of rape and male sexual coercion. In addition, Thornhill and Palmer address the tremendous psychological pain and suffering endured by rape victims and their significant others. These chapters on treatment, education, prevention, and especially the chapter on psychological pain, reveal a sincere compassion and an urgent sense of care and concern for which Thornhill and Palmer have not been credited in the many misinformed reviews of this book.

In addition to being courageous and compassionate, A Natural History of Rape is a scholarly achievement based on references to and discussions of the most recent empirical and theoretical work. Thornhill and Palmer do not cite and discuss only work that was inspired by an evolutionary perspective. Thornhill and Palmer's apparent goal is to better understand the causes and consequences of rape and male sexual coercion. What causes rape? Which men are most likely to perpetrate rape? Which women are most vulnerable to rape? Which women will experience the greatest psychological pain following rape? How can we best help these victims? How can we treat and perhaps reform perpetrators of rape? And how can we prevent rape? These are the important questions that Thornhill and Palmer address. Some of these questions have never been asked before in a scholarly arena, and many of them have never been effectively answered.

Thornhill and Palmer begin with a superb introductory chapter in which they carefully explain the basic premises of evolution by natural selection. This chapter is clear, concise, and readily accessible to the layperson or to the social scientist not familiar with Darwin's theory. Thornhill and Palmer provide the reader with a basic understanding of the difference between proximate causes of behaviors (for example, genes, hormones, and learning episodes) and ultimate causes of behaviors (for example, the "adaptive problem" of paternity uncertainty selected for the evolution of psychological mechanisms designed to solve that problem, including mechanisms motivating male sexual jealousy).

Thornhill and Palmer also address the different products of natural selection, only one of which is an adaptation. Two other products of natural selection are byproducts of adaptations and "noise," or individual differences that are selectively neutral. Contrary to the misguided claims of Gould (see, for example, Gould, 1991), evolutionary scientists do not assume that every trait is an adaptation. Instead, adaptation is appropriately invoked only when certain, very strict criteria have been met (Williams, 1966; and see Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998). These criteria include evidence of special design--that the trait in question has features that are improbably well suited to solve a particular problem that was recurrently faced by ancestral members of the species.

In the second chapter, Thornhill and Palmer address the evolution of sex differences. Like the first, this chapter is clear, concise, and remarkably accessible to the layperson or social scientist uninformed by evolutionary theory. This chapter covers key ideas such as polygyny in humans and other animals, male and female mate preferences, sex differences in desires for sexual variety, female mate choice, and male efforts to circumvent female mate choice. The first two chapters prepare the reader for an evolutionarily informed, scholarly discussion of rape.

In the opening pages of the third chapter, "Why do men rape?," Thornhill and Palmer quote the eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote that, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Biology, in turn, is the study of life. Thus, nothing in life or about the functioning of living organisms can be fully understood without an appreciation of evolution by natural selection. This is not a controversial statement to any modern biologist. Many standard social scientists, however, seem to believe that humans are somehow less susceptible to or exempt from evolution by natural selection, because our "culture" mysteriously and magically over-powers evolution. Thornhill and Palmer dismantle this and many other misunderstandings regarding evolution by natural selection, and clarify for the reader that not only are humans not exempt from evolution by natural selection, but that humans and all forms of life on earth exist today because of evolution by natural selection.