A group of writers has been very successful in popularizing sociobiological concepts, and therefore promoting myths regarding human sexual behavior. Fox (1972) argued that the evolution of increased brain size in humans was linked to the ability of the son to control his sexual approaches to his father’s females. The evolution of the female neocortex was accorded to the serendipitous passing along of male intellectual prowess. This serves the interests of those who would view male superiority as justification for dominance in almost any cultural configuration, whether it be economic, political, or sexual.
Desmond Morris (1967), in his book The Naked Ape, proposed that man’s (sic) hunting past necessitated male group bonding and the eventual development of the male-female pair-bond in service of male-male cooperation. That is, males would not bond in a cooperative hunting unit unless the more powerful males were willing to assure junior, or less powerful, members of a female mate. The necessary male-female bond in turn developed into the intense emotional bond that we have come to know as love. Morris proposed that humans evolved in stages, from fruit-picking primates to hunting carnivore primates, and he believed that the desire for sex was situationally controlled in the small, close-knit, communal, treedwelling primates. With the evolution toward hunting, the absence of many of the males and the roaming of the male hunters became a factor. Social and cultural rules had to develop to maintain a pair-bond, which is presumed to have been necessary for survival of the fledgling species. The pair-bond also implies the strength of the sexual urge, as well as a necessary control of both sexes, and a particular benefit to marauding men in the control of the women.
To start with, he owes all his basic sexual qualities to his fruit-picking, forest-ape ancestors. These characteristics were then drastically modified to fit in with his open-country, hunting way of life. … The first of these changes, from a sexual fruit-picker to a sexual hunter, was achieved over a comparatively long period of time and with reasonable success. The second change [adapting to a culturally determined social structure] has been less successful. It has happened too quickly and has been forced to depend on intelligence and the application of learned restraint rather than on biological modifications based on natural selection. It could be said that the advance of civilization has not so much molded modem sexual behavior, as that sexual behavior has molded the shape of civilization. (Morris, 1967, p. 24)
Sociobiological concepts have been misapplied not only in the realm of the theoretical evolution of humans, but also in more observable aspects of human society (Barash, 1982; Buss, 1989; Dawkins, 1976). Complex human interactions, such as bride price, differential age of marriage, sexual double standards for behavior, and extramarital sexual activity are seen as being explained by sexual selection and parental investment (Buss, 1989; Daly & Wilson, 1978; Rushton & Bogaert, 1987; Wilson, 1978). Scholarly literature, and popular literature as well, has described marriage and kinship systems as primarily a contract among men regarding the rules of exchange of women (Daly &. Wilson, 1978).
One of the cardinal human rules in the exchange of women, a taboo against rape, was likely established by men to protect their investments. However, selective biological examples lend credence to rape as a naturally occurring phenomenon. For example, Barash (1982) observed that in mallard ducks, a paired female may be raped by unattached males, usually provoking another copulation by her mate, with the second copulation serving to decrease the likelihood that the mated male will invest in another male’s offspring. On the basis of this example, it may be inferred that humans rape as a reproductive strategy to increase the chances of passing on their genes, or that spousal rape is a naturally occurring strategy as well. The danger of such misguided assumptions is that they serve to explain rape in humans as a biological problem, a problem to be punished but still expected in certain unavoidable numbers of occurrences, rather than a social problem with the possibility of social remediation.
Finally, in a recent rendition of sexual selection theory and human marriage systems offered by Buss (1989), similarities in reported attitudes (not observed behavior) across 37 samples were taken as support for an evolutionary basis for human mate preferences, especially with respect to earning capacity and physical attractiveness. In 36 out of 37 samples, women were reported to value the financial prospects of potential mates to a significantly greater degree than men. One exception, that of the country of Spain, was not explained. In 92% of the samples women expressed a high value for industriousness, but in three sample cultures, Colombia, Spain, and Zulu, women showed the opposite effect. All samples reportedly showed a male preference for attractiveness. Economics, industriousness, and especially attractiveness all are culturally defined, yet the differences were seen as support for the “evolution-based hypothesis” (p. 12).