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Evolutionary Psychology: Bad Science, Bad Journalism, or Both?

Our evolutionary psychology discussion has had me on the lookout for stories that seem particularly ridiculous. And on Fox News today, the morning hosts mentioned a study that purports to show that gentlemen preferred blondes as far back as the Ice Age. I started Googling, and the stories I found demonstrate a huge problem for this particular field of research: The media does a poor job reporting on the science.

For example, the Times of London writes that "north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." One thing I've learned from my casual reading on evolution is that adaptation doesn't work this way. Yes, if a trait is evolutionarily beneficial, it will get passed on and become more prevalent, while traits that are harmful or undesirable will be lost because the people who carry them don't breed successfully. But a brunette woman is not going to give birth to flaxen-haired tots just because her genes looked around, noticed how all the men were going for the blond hotties, and decided to mutate. (This piece from the Toronto Star explains it better.) Yet so many of the stories I see use this cause-and-effect structure to explain findings on evolution, and the ignorance is incredibly frustrating.  

Some of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are shaky enough without such bad reporting, which leaves me with a lot of questions. Do evolutionary psychologists even care that the reporting is bad, or do they enjoy the attention that misleading stories bring to them? And is too much to expect journalists to have a little bit of knowledge about the subjects they cover?

Why 9/11 Means More Daughters

If a woman's stressed during pregnancy will she not have a son? A piece in the new issue of the Economist suggests a connection between maternal stress and a baby's gender. Here's the theory: First World women are 5 percent more likely to have a male child than their counterparts in developing countries, but that gap's been closing lately. That could be because women under stress are more likely to give birth to girls. A few studies have shown that women are more likely to have girls when they conceive in war zones, right after natural disasters, or after the loss of a loved one. One tempting bit of association: Fewer baby boys were born to New York City mothers who got pregnant the week after the Sept. 11 attacks.    

I wonder how this fits into our discussion on evo pysch. A Danish scientist who's researched the effects of chronic stress on reduced male birth rates (as opposed to stress brought on by a catastrophic event), suggests that the reasons for stressed mothers having fewer boys "might be adaptive" because

the chances are that a daughter who reaches adulthood will find a mate and thus produce grandchildren. A son is a different matter. Healthy, strapping sons are likely to produce lots of grandchildren, by several women-or would have done in the hunter-gatherer societies in which most human evolution took place. Weak ones would be marginalised and maybe even killed in the cut and thrust of male competition. If a mother's stress adversely affects the development of her fetus (as it is likely to do) then selectively aborting boys, rather than wasting time and resources on bringing them to term, would make evolutionary sense.

The "cut and thrust of male competition?"  I hear echoes of Dana's monkey-men.

Hard-Wire This!

The truism that newborns tend to resemble their fathers more than their mothers so that the father will know the child is his, and thus protect it, has become a veritable item of dogma among parents in my circle. This claim, based on a 12-year-old study that has been amply refuted since, is a classic example of an ev-psych argument: While the first part of the theory (that babies look more like their dads than their moms) may or may not be true depending on whose research you trust, the second part (that this resemblance serves as a proof of paternity for the doubting father) is pure and unprovable speculation. But it certainly is handy that the imagined mating behavior of monkey-men happens to reinforce contemporary Western values about male breadwinning and the specter of female infidelity.

Evolutionary Strippers

Meghan, Anne,

Here's another recent study to add to the pile of questionable evolutionary psychology findings about women's sexual signaling—the evo psychs are obsessed with proving that women on their fertile days actually do experience estrus like other mammals. Sure, you may be sitting around a conference table discussing the last sale's quarter, but really you're just repressing the urge to lift your buttocks like a baboon in heat. Researchers at the University of New Mexico decided to actually look into fertile women's buttocks' movements, so they tracked the tips 18 lap dancers earned at various points during their menstrual cycle (and wouldn't you be pleased if your UNM tuition was helping pay for this study). Surprise! The lap dancers' tips dropped considerably during menstruation, even though, the male researchers point out, "menstruating dancers can wear tampons (with strings clipped short or tucked up) and change them often during heavy flow days, without revealing any visual signs of menstruation." The findings, say the researchers, are "the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females. ...These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics." Or, another way to look at it is that the results have no meaning beyond the fact that contemporary human female lap dancers know g-strings and tampons are not a good combination.

The Utter Phoniness of Evolutionary Psychology

It's taken a long time, but at last—thank you for contributing, Meghan!—evolutionary psychology is being revealed as the psuedoscience it usually is, at least by the time it reaches the newspaper columns and the conversations around the water cooler. My main objection has always been the way its lay adherents solemnly discuss research that confirms the existence of some utterly banal aspect of human behavior, usually sexual, and then go on to explain why our ape ancestors found it so useful. Usually, this involves self-satisfied explanations of the primal male "need" for multiple sexual partners—men "need" to spread their DNA around, you see—as opposed to the primal female "need" for a man to protect her children. But why, then, did the human race evolve the concept of monogamy? And who are these women with whom the naturally adulterous men are supposed to sleep? I know that evolutionary psychology has come up with various explanations for these phenomena, but really, one could argue the whole thing the other way around, too. It's like Marxism or Freudianism: a set of all-encompassing principles that can explain anything. And it, too, will pass.

Evolutionary Psychology Strikes Again

The trouble with evolutionary psychology is that there are no (or few) ways of testing its theorems. With enough ingenuity on the part of the researcher, nearly any finding about gender can be twisted to suit the evolutionary lens. Prime example, from Crooked Timber last week: the Times in London reported on a study in which men rated the "sexiness" of women's walks. The study found that men rated the women in the less fertile part of their cycle as sexier than the women in a more fertile part of their cycle, because the fertile women walked with "smaller hip movements." You might think that this finding would give evolutionary psychologists pause—might lead them to consider, for a moment, whether some other factor might be at work, such as culture (or tampons!). But no; instead, the Times goes on to say:

That makes evolutionary sense, because it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility only to those men she believes would make a suitable mate. In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman’s walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males whom she might not want to choose.

Dr Provost said: “If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile.”

But you can bet if the study had found that fertile women were seen to have the "sexiest" walks Dr. Provost would have thought that made evolutionary sense, too. There's just no control group here.

via Crooked Timber.