I’m in the process of putting together a list of my favorite 3 female authors and 3 female scientists over at Skepchick. In the process of doing this, I re-discovered some stuff that pissed me off all over again.

I’m a behavioral ecologist. When I was an undergraduate, I first got interested in entomology by reading the work of Randy Thornhill, who had done some extraordinarily elegant work on dance flies.

Unfortunately, when I got into graduate school, it became apparent my hero had major feet of clay. Not unlike E. O Wilson (who also did amazing ecological research) and sociobiology, Thornhill thought that insect behavior could explain human behavior.

In RT’s case, he thought that rape was an adaptive strategy.

Uh. No.

He’s been flogging that idea for years, which is the main reason why we did not choose his textbook (which is otherwise quite good). He recently published a book arguing that human rape is an inevitable and adaptive strategy, based on animal behavior studies of forced copulation (including insects and birds).

I know it’s totally unprofessional of me to say it, but what a wanker.

Sure, forced copulation happens in non-human animals. (And so does infanticide and cannibalism, BTW.) But does a female duck that’s been mobbed by a group of males experience the mental trauma that humans do?

I (and a whole lot of other biologists) think that “rape” is a special case, and special word, that should be used only for humans.

EDITED TO ADD:

Apparently I didn’t choose my words carefully enough–that’s what comes of blogging late at night!

My concern is with semantics more than the concept. I don’t think the word rape should be used to describe non-humans. Period.
And that is 99% of my beef with Thornhill and his ilk.

The other 1% is that I find the data that rape in humans is “adaptive” very unpersuasive. I suppose any offspring is an increase in fitness, but in nearly all societies one, or both, parties will pay a heavy price. I’d argue that far outweighs any small fitness increase.