"They think evolution explains everything"

This is a line from Friday's show.

Dennis said this with some sarcasm, indicating that it's a silly idea, or maybe a refutable idea, with which point I agree. But Dennis himself is among the sad, silly people who use evolution to explain men's fascination with pursuing a multiple number of women. Even looking at women other than the woman they're with is explained by evolution.

Dennis first brought this issue into his show when he read a book by some evolutionary psychologist whose name I can never remember. The book purported to explain every behavior we see in men today to some hypothetical gene that caused early man (I have never heard just how early the gene was supposed to have appeared, thus we have no idea what sort of technology or social system was in place at the time) caused early man to run around raping women, thus siring an enormous number of babies, thus increasing the likelihood of the rapist's genes being broadcast among the human population, moreso than genes from other men.

This theory doesn't tell us why so few men run around raping. Yes, there are plenty who do but compared to the general population, it is a small percentage. The theory is also stupid in its failure to take into account what happens to those babies after the mother is abandoned by her rapist.

If the rape occurred early enough in the evolution of human beings, early enough to have this behavior passed down to a significant portion of the population, we must be referring to a hunter-gatherer time in which one adult would have significant trouble feeding him or herself, and an even worse time supporting infants. That's why human beings paired up. That's why they formed social groups--to spread the labor out enough for the race to be able to add dependent, helpless organisms ("babies") that can be supported by the available labor. A man couldn't afford to take on and provide for multiple wives and their children, never mind the children of other men. So a man who raped and moved on, left a dead baby behind him.

By my thinking, evolutionary psychology goes a lot farther toward explaining monogamy than it does polygamy. It explains the roving eye not because men had so much ability to collect multiple women (again, long after there was technology to support cities and probably resulted from the excess number of women due to wars) but because first, men are the pursuers, and had to be able to see every woman as a potential mate, and second because the death in childbirth rate being pretty high, every man had to be prepared to take a new mate willing to rear the old children and add a couple of their own if necessary.

I don't have space nor energy to discuss this more fully. There is a wonderful article from Newsweek which I linked below. It doesn't mention my reasoned objections, but does spell out some of the statistical research that disproved this silly, earlier theory of evolutionary psychology a decade ago. Please read it, it's fascinating.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789