Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

I recently finished the latest book by Robert Trivers (2011), The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, which is an odd title considering how little of the book is devoted to the logic of the intended topic. A better title would probably have been Things Robert Trivers Finds Interesting. After straining to stay awake through most of the 337 tedious pages of the book, I can't say I came away with any new insights or information on the subject of deception, though I did get the sense Trivers enjoys flirting with undergrads.

                                                              And who wouldn't? It's just one of the many, many benefits of getting tenure

 As Matt Ridley notes, Robert Kurzban (2010) also released a book not too long ago called Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite - which I can't recommend highly enough - that made a solid case for why "self" based research is problematic in the first place. The mind isn't a singular entity, but is rather a collection of different mental organs, each a functionally specific information processing mechanism. Any real mention of modularity is absent from Trivers' book, much less an active appreciation of it. I'd hesitate to say Trivers takes any idea further (as Matt does); if anything, Trivers stalls and rolls slightly backwards. Another impression I got from reading the book is that I can expect an angry phone call from Trivers if he ever reads this.

                                                         I'd like to discuss the merits of your recent review of my book in a calm, academic fashion


How might this false conception of a self effect thinking in other domains? One good example could be in the domain of morality. In this area, I get the sense the concept of the self has been tied heavily to moral culpability, where consciousness is king. Influences that are seen as originating outside the realm of conscious awareness are often used as attempts to exculpate various behaviors.

As an example, I'd offer up a paper by Sumithran et al (2011), examining how overweight people on diets often relapse and gain weight back after initial success at dropping some pounds. The authors measured various hormone levels in subject's bodies that are known to influence hunger and related behaviors, like energy expenditure and food intake, finding that dieting leads to changes in these circulating hormone levels. This could be the reason, they argue, that many dieters don't show long-term maintenance of weight loss. Fine. However, the authors lose me when they write this:

"...[A]n important finding of this study is that many of these alterations persist for 12 months after weight loss, even after the onset of weight regain, suggesting that the high rate of relapse among obese people who have lost weight has a strong physiological basis and is not simply the result of the voluntary resumption of old habits." (p. 1602, emphasis mine) 

Apparently, the authors find it interesting that they found a physiological basis for people not keeping the weight off, contrasting it with "voluntary" actions. My question would be, "What else would you even expect to find; a non-physiological basis?" After all, we are physical beings, so any changes in our thoughts or behaviors need to be the result of other physical changes. The implication seems to be that truly voluntary actions are supposed to be uninfluenced by physiology, while somehow having an influence on the behavior of the physical body.

                                                                             "It's not my choice, as I happen to have hormones"

This doesn't seem to be a terribly uncommon thought process; while sometimes people actively deny any influences of biology on behavior out of fear of justifying it, or claim (correctly) that biological doesn't justify behavior, those same people can very quickly accept behavior as being biologically based in the hopes of making it acceptable by saying "it's not a choice". That's some interesting hypocrisy there. Did I mention there's a very interesting - and a not so interesting - book that deals with that topic?

References: Kurzban, R. (2010). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sumithran, P., Prendergast, L.A., Delbridge, E., Purcell, K., Shulks, A., Kriketos, A.K., & Proietto, J. (2011). Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss. The New England Journal of Medicine, 365, 1597-1604.

Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. New York, NY: Basic Books.     

Why Are Plumbers So Sexist?

By now, most people have surely heard of the dreaded wage gap between men and women. If I am to believe what I have heard around the internet, women in the US earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man does, and - here's the key part - this is because we live in a deeply sexist society that needs to be changed.

                                                                                  Oh yeah? Well my glass ceiling is still higher

I could point out that the wage gap only reflects gross earnings, not things like hours worked, education, or profession, but those factors alone don't explain the whole discrepancy. As for what percentage of the remaining is gap is due to sexism specifically, well, I can't say. What we could say, with a reasonable degree of certainty is that there is a gap in gross earnings which can be divided up into explained and unexplained variance. What we cannot say is that the unexplained variance equals sexist discrimination.

Now before you decide to label me a sexist for daring to consider an alternative hypothesis, let's consider some other gaps as presented by Susan Pinker (2008): In 1973, only 5% of lawyers in the US were women; in 2003 that number was 27%. That's a pretty impressive gain, and we see a similar one for Aerospace engineers; up from 1% to 11% over the same time period. But what about plumbers? In 1973, women represented approximately 0% of the plumbers in the US; by 2003, women represented a mighty 1%. Why were women able to make such vast inroads in the fields of law and engineering, but somehow couldn't break through the extremely sexist barriers put up by the field of plumbing?

                                                                  "I unclogged that drain for you. Also, women shouldn't be allowed to vote"

Perhaps plumbers and plumbing culture are just vastly more sexist against women compared to lawyers. Then again, perhaps that huge gap between male and female plumbers reflects something else, such as women not being particularly interested in the idea of becoming a plumber. Pinker - not to be confused with her brother, Steven - makes the case for underlying differences in male and female psychology being an important factor in some of these gaps we see, from choice of employment to the pay gap. I feel it can probably help account for a hefty portion of that variance. It's important to remember that when you see sex differences, like in the pay gap, you haven't found direct evidence of sexism. For instance, in Michigan women now outnumber men in terms of earning all types of degrees, but this doesn't mean colleges there are sexist against men.

So let's forget about plumbing and focus on comedy. Someone happens to think there's no difference between men and women in that area. Why, hello again Amanda. (I didn't even notice who the author was until I was well into writing, it's just a lucky coincidence that she's consistently bad at science)

                                                               My posts have pictures with hilarious captions; your posts do not. Point: Men.

The idea of innate sex differences can be a touchy subject for some, and is no doubt responsible for part of the opposition towards evolutionary psychology (Geher, 2010). Marcotte thinks men and women are identical in the humor department, it would seem. Why does she think this? She reports that a study found 16 men and 16 women (I presume, from some college) were rated about equally when it came to how funny captions they came up with for a cartoon were. Despite this, 90% of people rated men as funnier than women, to which Amanda can only conclude "sexism did it".

First of all, let me say that I'm happy to see Amanda has apparently gotten over her concerns about small, homogenous samples that she expressed about the hand grip research, at least temporarily; I suppose Amanda figures since the results sound nice, the work must be good enough to generalize to "men and women" everywhere.

Despite not knowing much about the research in the field of humor myself, the second point I'd like to make is that there's probably a ceiling effect here; there's only a certain range of possible captions to pre-drawn, pre-selected pictures that make sense and are funny. The claim was this helps "level the playing field", much like only having 10 pound weights available can make differences between men and women in muscle mass seem irrelevant when recording how much they can lift (which would clearly mean men only lift more weight outside the lab because of sexism). Most people would agree there's a lot more to humor than captioning pictures, but Amanda Marcotte is not most people. 

                                                               Who's got two thumbs and thinks captioning pictures is hilarious? This guy.

                                                             
Did sexism play any role? Well, it seemed to. It's reported that people tended to remember the funny captions as coming from men and unfunny ones coming from women, but since the current study appears to not be available to read, I can't comment much further about that. I'm going to go ahead an guess that the effect wasn't terribly large, let alone able to account for why 90% of people agreed that men were funnier, as there wasn't much said about it other than "it exists". Why it exists would be another question worth examining. Spoiler alert: Marcotte probably thinks it's due to baseless sexism.  

References: Geher, G. (2010). Evolution is not relevant to sex differences in humans because I want it that way! Evidence for the politicization of human evolutionary psychology. The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2, 32-47

Pinker, S. (2008). The sexual paradox: Extreme men, gifted women, and the real gender gap. Ontario, Canada: Random House Press

Some People Watch Too Much Law & Order

Having watched a good deal of  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, I get the sense that some viewers take away the message that just about every case of rape involves a stranger violently raping a woman, though this accounts for only a minority of rapes in the real world (Palmer, 1988). This may reflect the fact that women are themselves more fearful of being raped by a stranger than an acquaintance, as well as take more precautionary behaviors to guard against the former (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1997). It is something of a mantra in our culture that rape is not about sex, but about violence - which is wrong, for the record (Palmer, 1988) - that probably also has a heavy contribution to the depictions of rape on shows like SVU. What makes these shows annoying - in addition to that heavily biased depiction of what rape is like - is that they normally also include some smug psychologist that apparently never progressed much beyond an introduction to psychology course - not unlike the writers, I'm sure - that gets called in to help out.

                                           "Your killer was raping those women because of some deep-seated hatred towards his mother. Degree, please" 

One person who may (metaphorically or actually) have watched too much Law & Order is Amanda Marcotte. She's one of those "mad at evolutionary psychology without understanding what the hell she's talking about" kind of people, and it's my pleasure today to point out why she's wrong at some length.

Since Marcotte doesn't want to appear anti-science, she initially tries to co-opt the authority of two people only the "daringly stupid" would accuse of being anti-science: P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne. First, let me note that starting off with an explicit appeal to authority isn't the best course of action for any debate. That said, I certainly wouldn't accuse them of being anti-science, because that's a daringly stupid label. People are not opposed to science in general; in fact, most people seem to love the idea of science. What people don't seem like is when scientists reach an unpalatable conclusion.  

Beginning with the first point, Marcotte expresses skepticism about the results of a study that showed women generated a stronger grip strength in response to reading a rape scenario relative to a control story, but only when they were in the ovulatory phase of their cycle and not taking hormonal birth control (Petralia & Gallup, 2002): 

"Which is how I'm going to approach contesting this article by Jesse Bering at Slate about the supposed evidence that women evolved to fight back against rape ... if they're ovulating...Some of them failed to present the evidence that Bering suggests they have--the handgrip study was one where some researchers found no variation over a menstrual cycle."

Let's be clear: the hypothesis is not that women only evolved to fight back against rape if they're ovulating; the claim is that women may have been selected to be better able to fight back if they're ovulating, given the increased probability of conception and the resulting fitness costs. Fighting itself is generally not a costless act, and the conditions under which people are likely to fight should be expected to vary contingent on the potential costs and benefits. Women who do fight back are in fact more likely to stop a rape from being completed, but they also seem more likely to suffer physical injury (Ullman & Knight, 1993).

By "some researchers found no variation", it's not entirely clear what Marcotte is referring to (or rather, what Myers - whom she is parroting - is referring to), since she doesn't reference anything. I assume she's mentioning studies that found no variation across the menstrual cycle referenced by Petralia and Gallup that also didn't involve any rape scenario story - the very thing that was hypothesized to be causing the effect. Comparing a study completely lacking an experimental manipulation to one with an experimental manipulation as evidence compromising the effect of the manipulation seems like a strange thing to do, probably because it's a stupid thing to do.

                                        "Who's got time for actual replications? That sounds like work, and work isn't fun. This should be close enough"

Her next point is that one referenced in the very beginning: that rape is a violent crime, not a sexual one, even going so far as to say, "Rape, in this case, is just a certain kind of wife-beating.  It's best understood as throwing a punch with your penis." To quote Palmer quoting Hagen, "If violence is what the rapist is after, he's not very good at it." When it comes to the use of force in rape, the vast majority of times it's used instrumentally - not excessively - if physical force is even involved at all. In this view, violence is the means to the end (sex), not the other way around. An example might clear this up a bit:

"The act of prostitution includes both a person giving money to another person and a sexual act. Does this mean that a man who goes to a female prostitute is motivated by a desire to give money to a woman?" (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 132) 

                                                I heard it's not technically illegal if your motivation was to give her money and the sex was just instrumental

Marcotte's final point would appear to be a stubborn misunderstanding of the difference between proximate and ultimate causation, as evidenced here:

"There's also the weird side assumption that features prominently in many half-baked evolutionary theories, which is that sex is strictly about reproduction in a species that has homosexuality, contraception, and old people who get it on...that rapists get off not on the chance to plant their seed (some, after all, use condoms!)..."  

I'm pretty sure there's not a whole lot more to say about that, other than to point out it really does reinforce how little Marcotte knows about what she's attempting to criticize. At this point in the field's development, the only reason someone should make such a misguided mistake is near complete ignorance.

The only way this criticism could get any worse would be if Marcotte was foolish enough to imply evolutionary psychologists invoke genetic determinism and are attempting to give rapists a pass morally:

 "...Bering's article downplays the severity of rape. It suggests that there's not much to be done about rape and that men are just programmed to do it... "

                                                                                                    Nailed it!

One would think, given her initial concerns about not wanting to come off as anti-science, Marcotte would have included more actual science in her post, but there really isn't any to be found. There's skepticism, ignorance, assertions, and moral outrage, but very little science. Perhaps it's worth quoting Palmer and Thornhill (2003), quoting Coyne on the matter, since Coyne is an authority to Marcotte:

"It is true that in recent decades, the discussion of rape has been dominated by such notions [as rape is not about sex, but about violence and power], though one must remember that they originated not as scientific propositions, but as political slogans deemed necessary to reverse popular misconceptions about rape"

Would you look at that; Coyne seems to think Marcotte is wrong about the "not sex" thing too.

References: Hickman, S.E. & Muehlenhard, C.L. (1997). College women's fears and precautionary behaviors relating to acquaintance rape and stranger rape. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 527-547

Palmer, C.T. (1988). Twelve reasons why rape is not sexually motivated: A skeptical examination. The Journal of Sex Research, 25, 512-530

Palmer, C.T. & Thornhill, R. (2003) Straw men and fairy tales: Evaluating reactions to A Natural History of Rape. The Journal of Sex Research, 40, 249-255

Petralia, S.M. & Gallup Jr., G.G. (2002). Effects of a sexual assault scenario on handgrip strength across the menstrual cycle. Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 3-10

Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C.T. (2000). A natural history of rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ullman, S.E. & Knight, R.A. (1993). The efficacy of women's resistance strategies in rape situations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 17, 23-38.

A Scientific Visit to Palmdale

During my years as an undergraduate I made a couple of bad choices, one of which was deciding to minor in economics. None of the classes were particularly engaging - which might be the understatement of the century - and the assumptions made by economists were blatantly ill-suited for dealing with people, most notably the assumptions of perfect information and people being rational - whatever rational was supposed to mean. For a field that claims to dabble in human behavior and psychology, you'd think their assumptions about what people are like would be a touch more accurate, but since that would make the math messy, the idea was seemingly scrapped.


So imagine my surprise when I heard some economists had started to figure out that human psychology exists and should probably be taken seriously. Dan Ariely's books were a breath of fresh air, reinforcing in me the notion that I had wasted my time in all those economics classes when I could have been doing something more worth my while, like taking classes biology. Or masturbating.

                                                            "Those classes weren't interesting, so I had to take matters into my own hands"

Speaking of which, would you lie to a woman about whether you loved her in order to increase the chance that she'd have sex with you? If you're a man, chances are your answer to that question depends on whether or not you're currently masturbating (if you are, this blog must either be especially interesting or especially boring. Feel free to let me know which). In fact, your answers to a whole slew of sex related questions will probably depend on whether or not you're giving yourself the ol' down-low. Ariely and Loewenstein (2006) decided to examine how answers to these questions change by paying undergraduate males to answer a few questions while doing what they were going to be doing anyway.

                                                  Turns out the only thing more dismal than economics are the dating prospects of male math majors


The main purpose of the research was to examine the gap between answers to questions made in an unaroused state versus an aroused one across three categories: (1) how appealing sexual objects or activities were viewed, (2) willingness to engage in morally questionable behavior to have sex, and (3) willingness to engage in unsafe sex when aroused. What do the answers of those 35 male undergrads tell us? They tell us two things: the first is that - unsurprisingly - the answers change when people are horny, relative to when they are not; the second thing is that these answers tend to change substantially. 


For the first category of how appealing certain sexual activities and objects are, of the 20 questions asked about, only three failed to become significantly more appealing: sex with a man, sex with the lights on, and spanking a sexual partner (though spanking was rated fairly highly to begin with). In fact, the only question to not see any increase was the one about having sex with the lights on. The five questions that saw the greater overall point increase (out of a total of 100) between the unaroused and aroused states where, in order: Would you find it exciting to have anal sex? (+31), Is just kissing frustrating? (+28), Would it be fun to tie up your sexual partner? (+28), Can you imagine having sex with a 50-year old woman? (+27), and Would you have a threesome with another man? (+25). Other questions included sex with a 12-year old girl (relatively 100% more appealing), sex with a 60-year old woman (about 230% more appealing), and getting sexually excited by an animal (about 170% more appealing, though still quite unappealing overall. It was second from the bottom, right above having sex with another man). 


So what about questions of morally questionable behavior? There are only five, so I'll rank order these in terms of percentage increase from unaroused to aroused: taking a date to a fancy restaurant to make her more likely to have sex (27% more likely); encouraging a date to drink (37% more likely); telling a woman you loved her to make her more likely to have sex (70% more likely); keep trying to have sex after a date says "no" (125% more likely); slipping a woman a drug (420% more likely). Interestingly, that order holds if you rank the behaviors in terms of their overall rated probability in the first place; the more coercive actions are less probable, but see the largest percentage increase.

                                 "Well, the fancy dinner and drinks aren't working. Is it time to start thinking about outright lying, or just skip right to the drugs?"

Finally, turning to matters of protection, the four questions regarding condoms all fall in the predicted direction: as men get aroused, they rate condoms as interfering with pleasure and spontaneity more, and say they'll be less likely to use them with new partners or if they think the woman might change her mind when they went to get one.    


Of course there are limitations here: these were only a few undergrads jerking it while answering questions. Surely, the first limitation is that the questions were probably a real buzz-kill. A second possible issue is that it's not entirely clear how these stated preferences would actually translate to behavior in the more social world where men aren't walking around with erections (most of the time, anyway), behaviors can carry real consequences, and reality differs from fantasy. That said, I'd wager we have every reason to think sexual arousal certainly has an effect on decision making, especially about condom use (since at this point many men probably already have erections in hand) and that one could even expect these effects to increase, depending on the perceived probability of having sex and the attractiveness of the other person.

How the effects of sexual arousal might tend to differ between men and women is certainly a question worth thinking about. I highly doubt we'd observe anything like the same pattern of answers for the questions asked about in the current survey (perhaps excluding the questions about condoms, though I can't say at the moment). It's an open-ended question as to whether the same methodology could even be effectively used, and I'd guess that it probably couldn't be - or at least wouldn't be nearly as effective.    

References: Ariely, D. & Loewenstien G. (2006). The heat of the moment: The effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 87-98

Are We The 99 Percent?

Amidst the protests of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, the refrain of "we are the 99 percent" seems to be thrown around like "devil horns" at any metal concert; it's frequent, and it's annoying. Without getting too much into personal politics, I will say I don't appreciate a small group of people who presume to speak for much larger group of people, especially when the view points of that larger group are quite diverse. 

                                                                                    A notoriously diverse group of people


Which is why it particularly irks me whenever I read any variant of the following thought: 
According to Evolutionary Psychology... 


When I was last grading papers for an undergraduate evolutionary psychology course, I can't tell you how many times I saw that phrase in papers. Despite my frequent red-pen correctives, it was an error that persisted until the end of semester. Unfortunately, it's not an isolated thought; if you type "Evolutionary psychology is" into google, you'll notice one of the most frequent search results ends that phrase with "bullshit". Go ahead and read over each article on the first page of results and their comments sections and count how many times that error is made. You'll notice the error rate is somewhere between almost all the time to actually all the time. 

                                                           You'll also notice that almost every page refers to this man. Behold, the face of evil.


The very basic mistake that's being made whenever the phrase is uttered is that evolutionary psychology is not a theory, and as such it makes no specific predictions. Rather, evolutionary psychology is a research framework that uses evolutionary theory to help both derive predictions and understand results concerning human psychology and behavior. If you were hoping for something a bit more sinister about oppression and hatred of people who aren't white males, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. One of the downsides of this very basic mistake is that it leads some people to say - in a no doubt cocky tone - things like, "Is evolutionary psychology total utter and dangerous bullshit?" or, "Evolutionary Psychology is a load of fucking shit" all without actually discussing the underpinnings of the field (which is really a shame, as I'm sure these thoughtful and eloquent people would have a lot to add). As I mentioned last time, people don't seem to have a problem with the use of adaptationist logic so long as it comes to the conclusion they'd prefer to hear.

                                                                                   Just imagine how well this one went over

Much like Satoshi Kanazawa, the book pictured above generated a fierce amount of controversy for all the standard, muddle-headed reasons. Among other statements about why the book proved that evolutionary psychology is a bunch of misogynistic bullshit, one of the claims of the critics went something along the lines of "Thornhill and Palmer said rape was an adaptation". What almost all the critics forgot to mention (or didn't know) is that Palmer - one of the two authors - argued that rape was a byproduct. (Putting aside for minute the fact that the book was ended on the note that the case for adaptation or byproduct was left open...)


So Palmer's views got (basically) ignored and he got lumped in with Thornhill through some misguided guilt-by-association. Similarly, almost every site that turned up on the "evolutionary psychology is bullshit" search - on top of blatantly misunderstanding the issue - attempts to make Kanazawa (and sometimes Thornhill) the face of what evolutionary psychology "says". He is most definitely not the 99%, and evolutionary psychology as a framework is not the problem.


It can be hard to take critics seriously when they can't demonstrate they know what it is they're criticizing.      

The Case of the Female Orgasm - Bias in the Critiquing of Science

The last post dealt with the moralistic outrage that some people feel towards a trait being labeled an adaptation or a byproduct, but I only skimmed the surface of the issue. Since it's such an important point, I felt it would only be proper to expand it a bit further.

Because I crave pain and disappointment, I actually read every last comment on both articles. A reoccurring theme seen throughout the comments sections is that many people seem to feel female orgasm is obviously and adaptation and anyone who comes to the opposite conclusion is probably a sexist being mislead by a male-centered society that's out to demean women. It's at this point they'll generally state female orgasm clearly has the function of [making women have more sex, drawing sperm into the reproductive tract, making women lay down to retain more sperm, reinforcing the pair bond, even - are you ready for this one - feeling good. That's right, it evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with reproduction], and why haven't people figured that out? It's all because those silly evolutionary psychologists are blinded by current cultural trends and institutions, whereas their critics presumably feel they are not similarly influenced.

                                                                     "Orgasms feel good, therefore they evolved to feel good. Duh."


In case you're curious, those possible functions have already all been explored. The only one that seems like it might - and I do stress might - have some traction is the sperm transport hypothesis, though it rests on some questionable data.

These are some pretty strong intuitions people seem to have about whether female orgasm is adaptive based upon very little evidence, if evidence is involved at all. Ironically, people who are so fond of saying, "evolutionary psychologists spin just-so stories" appear completely willing to accept even a possible scenario as clearly true (say, female orgasm encouraged women to have more sex) if it matches their view of how the world should be; female orgasm should be socially important, therefore female orgasm is evolutionarily important (an adaptation).

                                                           "If this didn't have anything to do with reproduction, I'd probably have to stop doing it" 


What I feel we do have at this point is the knowledge that people are not overtly hostile to an adaptationist research paradigm in all cases, but will tend to be when it doesn't come to the right conclusions. For instance, it'd otherwise be odd that people calling the byproduct hypothesis "evolutionary psychology bullshit" are perfectly happy to advance their own evolutionary accounts for female orgasm. You see, where evolutionary psychologists are naive, their critics are informed and knowledgable, having cast off their cultural trappings and viewed the underlying essence of human nature. I'd point out that evolutionary psychologists also proposed many of those other possible functions in the first place, but that would just totally ruin the buzz the critics have going.

Perhaps this whole debate makes more sense were we to view it as people attempting to persuade each other about something, rather than attempting to discover some historical truth. In this case, it could be that female sexual satisfaction is important; in others it could be that rape is bad, that jealousy should be minimized, or that depression has some cognitive benefits, so depressed people should feel better about their depression, thus cheering up and losing that benefit (read respectively as: rape is not an adaptation, humans haven't evolved for pair-bonding, and depression is adaptive).

Viewing these debates as attempts at persuasion might help explain why the criticisms that come from the upper levels of academia do not seem substantially different than the ones that come from your everyday internet commenter; the foundation of these debates might not be academic in the first place. It may also help to explain why people who even just suggest certain hypotheses are painted as villains and the same tired straw men are pulled out again and again.

Pop Psychology: You Mad, Bro?

Moralistic outrage, while infuriating and occasionally dangerous, is often fertile grounds for comedy; not that pre-packaged, bland artificial comedy full of preservatives either, but the organic, flavorful comedy that's grown right in your own backyard and picked minutes before enjoying. It wasn't too long ago that a banner reading, "You Mad, Bro?" was displayed at a football game in order to taunt one of the teams. (Story here). It wasn't long before some people who didn't understand the connotations of the phrase took it upon themselves to get quite mad, falling right into the lap of the internet troll community.

                                                                          Could I interest you in a fresh glass of Schadenfreude? 


Let's now turn to an example of silly moralistic outrage as it applies to two things I hold dear: evolutionary theory and female orgasms.

Why do women have orgasms?

 I wrote my thesis about a female orgasm, so I happen to know a thing or two about them (I know a thing or two now, anyway; my initial title of Female Orgasm and Other Myths of the Hysterical Woman required a little touching up). There is an on-going debate as to whether or not female orgasm is an adaptation or a byproduct. That debate also happens to involve a fair share of vitriol, with words like "chauvinistic" being thrown around a lot. As you can see from the article and several of the comments, there appears to be a sizable group of people who equate "adaptation" with things like social importance and justification, and "byproduct" with unimportance. (My personal favorite is this one: "I think this whole article is BS! The writer only continues to denigrate women! Why would a woman be able to orgasm if there was no reason to?")    

                                                                                            "Stop Denigrating Yourself"


Why does Lloyd (and Dan Savage) seem to suggest that the knowledge that female orgasm isn't an adaptation might comfort women who experience frustration at an inability to do during sex - or at all - and have wider social implications (despite claiming she doesn't think people should be deriving social norms from biology - but look, it's natural that... so we should...)? Perhaps she hopes to make the point that society puts too much pressure on women to orgasm during sex, even though many of them probably won't - at least not without some manual help - and that pressure makes people feel bad.

As I mentioned previously, no arguments for or against legal rights for homosexuals should turn on the genetic nature of the trait. I don't think the gay community or their supporters would be comforted at the lack of rights afforded to homosexuals on the grounds that homosexuality isn't an adaptation, or entirely "in the genes", and they'd be less distressed if they stopped caring about having them. Similarly, in terms of the social or personal importance of female orgasm, nothing should turn on whether it's an adaptation or a byproduct.

Strangely, it seems that it does for many people. It might be the case that "adaptation" and "byproduct" have just become placeholders for "genes" and "environment" - that classic false dichotomy - or something similar. For those people, calling a trait an "adaptation" is akin to saying it's genetically determined and inflexible to environmental influences. This could be a byproduct of the same essentialist state of mind that tells us if we plant an apple seed in a field with pear seeds, it will still grow into an apple tree, not a pear one, or if we paint a lion so it looks like a leopard, it's still a lion.

That probably also means people are more inclined to think of behaviors they want to encourage - or avoid blame for - as adaptations, and behaviors they want to discourage - or blame others for - as byproducts above and beyond what evidence suggests. As people are generally blind to their own biases, and tend to disagree on matters of morality, the debate about adaptations and byproducts, genes and environment, will continue to thrive and be filled with colorful rhetoric, leaving us to ask "You mad, bro?"