the very fact that you call the natural world primitive says quite a lot.

what exactly is the connection between intelligence/self-awareness and overcoming "primitive" biological urges? the first does not logically lead to the second.

just because most people are not capable of removing the cultural lenses that are foggying their vision of the world does not mean they are seeing clearly :)

I didn't really understand that last sentence. Humans are constantly developing though, whether it's right or wrong we make changes. I agree with the cultural lense idea though, everything is based on what we know from before. We still live in the past. It shows how imperfect we are.

All good hun :love:

This doesn't surprise me in the least. I never thought too much about rape before other than if it has happened to someone. If I'd thought about it a little more indepth, then I'd probably come up with this conclusion. Because at the end of the day, as Humans. We ARE animals. Maybe smarter than the rest, but still.. Animals.

In behaviour, we sometimes talk of proximate and ultimate reasons where proximate means the closest to and ultimate is the underlying reason with ties to our evolution. I think I mentioned an example before where we explain why a reindeer runs away from a bear. The proximate reason is that the bear scares the reindeer. The ultimate reason is that reindeers have evolved to avoid potential predators.

In arguments about behaviour, it's often useful to remember to not mix ultimates and proximates.

As for ultimate reasons for rape, from what I can remember, there are two leading schools of thought. One is that rape is a valid strategy. Noise has explained it quite well already and it does seem to make some sense. Sorry if this sounds awful, but for the sake of argument, the pros to raping someone is that you can potentially have a child with someone with very little expense - whatever effort you spend performing the rape. Also, you can have a child with someone who would not select you as their partner. Perhaps noone would, then rape could become the only valid strategy to ensuring the survival of your genes.

There are some obvious cons. Women may be able to protect themselves, a child growing up without a father (although perhaps a rapist could become a caring father) could have worse chances, the act may be avenged by the mother and her closest or even society etc. In a way, it is a gamble and it doesn't make sense if there are better ways of ensuring your genes survival. It should make sense that it's a losers strategy, one most often employed by people who are not able to find partners for sex by consent, for example because they are plain unattractive, society's losers, sick in the head - something which keeps them from getting laid. It makes sense that rapists should be a minority in a society, although this depends strongly on that society's structure. Some societies unfortunately take a lot of power away from women.


The other leading idea is that it's a byproduct of selection of other traits. Essential to evolution is variation. People are not the same. Many men have strong sex drives and a capacity for violence. This has, to some extent, been selected for in the past. However, you will find people with more of this and less. The idea is, then, that if it becomes too much, the chances of someone committing rape is much higher. This hypothesis differs in that rapists shouldn't necessarily be something which is done largely by society's losers (those who can't get sex by consent), but rather by people who have these personality traits .. whoever they are. Thus, men rape more often because of a general higher capacity for violence and a higher sex drive.

I don't think one hypotheses has to exclude the other. Possibly, if one knew something about the kind of person the average rapist is, one could use some simple stats to find support for one of these hypotheses. I believe most rapists are losers, but I'm in no way sure about it. Maybe if you differentiate between violent rape and raping someone who's passed out from alcohol, you'd find support that violent rape is a strategy employed by losers while the other kind could be done by more average sort of people.

By race, I assume you mean species?

I don't think evolutionary change should be about smarts. It has to do with who manages to perpetuate their genes and who doesn't. I don't think you can tell people who have a capacity for rape that they should be smart and stop having sex for the common good. Or, you can tell them, but they won't listen. They don't have sex for the human species, they do it for themselves .. and that goes for all of us, I think.

The only immediate "smart" way I could think of waging an evolutionary war on rape would be to enforce a policy where women who have gotten pregnant from rape get abortions. I'm sure the idea would make many here wince.

Don't forget that women too are capable of rape and sexual assault. It's a lot less common, obviously, but it does happen.

Also, homosexual rape doesn't serve a reproductive purpose, and in some species, the female gender gets complete and utter control of who she mates with, and when. Be careful not to make rash generalizations.

You're my new favorite poster here.

When you (generalized) argue, always make sure that what is mutually agreed upon by glossing over A to get to B is actually mutually agreed upon. I think a lot of us have agreed that "yes, this is biologically ingrained" and I'd like to challenge that idea.

I hope you don't take this as an attack on you, but this is horse****.

For one thing, its been researched. All social sciences are victims of their own sample size. And as someone (noise maybe) has already pointed out, Rape is a social construct. There's not really any biological basis for rape. When cavemen were "raping" people, that was just business as usual; Like it, don't like it - that's what it was.

Also, as far as the "spread your seed" argument - its got very little to do with breeding. I think a rapist 9 times out of 10 would prefer not to have a child. If it was kids he were after there would always be sperm donation, and with the internet out there now anyone who simply wanted to get married has far greater options.

But this assumes there's rational thought in a Rapist. First of all, I think the statistics coming back from rapes indicate that 90% are of known relation. That is to say that a solid majority aren't unknown strangers in dark alleyways. A child in this situation is verifiable proof that a rape has occurred. No rapist wants to be a rapist, they just want to ****/torture/get "close" with (in their own dementia) a particular person.

In fact almost every case of pedophilia is rape. There is little possibility that those children are of child bearing age, and furthermore they are children themselves. If you were searching for a link, and its a long shot, you'd have to conclude that this only had to do with breeding because the carrot in this carrot-and-stick operation is the driving force (i.e. sexual pleasure). But there isn't, in my estimation, a strong desire to carry on your breeding cycle.

Ehf, the argument has it's basis in modern biology, not social sciences. You seem to be confident in a different idea that explains what rape is and where the behaviour comes from, but there is sound biological consistent theory which can explain perfectly well why rape could be a strategy. Your post makes it painfully clear you don't know/understand any of the arguments based on that theory.

When, in biology, people write stuff like a want to reproduce, what they mean is usually not a conscious desire to make babies. Evolution doesn't necessarily work with a desire for offspring, a want to have sexual gratification may produce the same end result.

If you read my last post, you will see me mention at first proximate and ultimate reasons. Here you are referring to a proximate reason for rape, but the thread is really about ultimate reasons.

Carrot at the end of a stick motivation works just fine in evolution. Also, although not really relevant to the discussion, I think most sex between adults and minors is consensual in the way that the adult manipulates the minor to agree to have sex. Possibly, a definition of or differentiations between different kinds of "rape" would be useful to the discussion, f.ex "violent rape" or "date rape".

It's probably in our instincts, but society deems it to be wrong and rightfully so. I believe if there wasn't a law against it, so many people I know would be rapists.

I MAN

MAN WANT SEX

MAN GET SEX

That type of thing... but that's just a guess. It could be in our nature, and society makes sure it doesn't come out. But I'd like to think differently. I'd like to think human nature is a lot nicer than that.