Dear All,
Stevan suggested that I should make my comments via Skywriting so here
goes.
In the lecture on Thursday I proposed that if, as Thornhill and
Thornhill maintain, all men are potentially rapists then concealed
estrus can be seen as having evolved as a way of protecting women from
being raped. What I mean is that if women signalled openly when they
are at their most fertile then they would be vulnerable to being raped,
as men just would not be able to help themselves. This in itself is not
evolutionarily advantageous for women because there is a good chance
that rapists are not going to stick around to help in rearing any
resulting children, who therefore are less likely to survive. By
concealing their estrus, or, as it is argued by displaying it all the
time, they diffuse the attention of the males and therefore stand a
better chance of choosing to have sex with someone who is more likely
to help looking after the children.
I realise that all this is extremely controversial. I do not really
believe that all men are rapists, although perhaps the drive might be
there, left over from another time. I feel that although our behaviour
can be explained to a large extent in evolutionary terms and in that
sense we are not that far from other animals, particularly creatures
like chimpazees, we do differ from them in a fundamental way: our
cognition. I do not know whether we are going to cover this in
lectures, but it seems to me that we can reason and analyse our
behaviour and make choices. We, women and men, choose who to have sex
with and how often; we can choose to have children or not (most of the
time anyway). I think Free Will is an issue which we have not really
covered. The evolution theory seems pretty deterministic. Perhaps Free
Will is an inherent characteristic which has itself evolved; I don't
really know. Please write and tell me what you think.
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