Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

492 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
Sterling, and other feminists, say No—this is to misapply a term that also
properly applies only to human misdeeds. If there were a common term in
English that stood to "rape" as "kill" (or "homicide" or "manslaughter") stood
to "murder," then the use by sociobiologists of the term "rape" for nonhuman
forced copulation, instead of using the less loaded term, would be truly
outrageous. But there isn't any such term.
So is the use of the short, vivid term "rape" in place of "forced copulation"
(or other such term) a serious sin? It is at least insensitive. But do the critics
complain about the other terms drawn from human life in common use by
sociobiologists? There is sexual "cannibalism" in spiders (the females wait
till the males have finished impregnating them, and then kill and eat them),
there are "lesbian" gulls (female couples that stay paired over several
seasons, defending territory, building a nest, sharing the task of sitting on the
eggs). There are "homosexual" worms and bird "cuckolds." At least one
critic, Jane Lancaster (1975), does in fact object to the word "harem" used to
refer to the group of females guarded and mated by a single male— such as
an elephant seal; she recommends the term "one-male group," since these
females "are virtually self-sufficient, except for fertilization" (Fausto-Sterling
1985, p. 181n.). It seems to me that deliberate human cannibalism is much,
much more terrible than anything one spider could do to another, but I for
one don't object if an arachnologist wants to use the term. For that matter,
what about the benign terms (G. Williams 1988)? Do the critics also object to
"courtship ritual" and "alarm call"—or the use of the term "mother" to refer
to a female but nonhuman parent?
Fausto-Sterling does note that the sociobiologists she criticizes for using
the term "rape" were careful to assert that human rape was different from
rape in other species. She quotes (p. 193) from Shields and Shields 1983:
Ultimately men may rape because it increases their biological fitness and
thus rape may serve, at least in part, a reproductive function, but in an
immediate proximate sense it is as likely that they rape because they are
angry or hostile, as the feminists suggest.
Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil 493
sociobiologists as supporting authorities, or so much as knew of their existence.
With equal justice she could blame the tribe of Shakespeare scholars
for such miscarriages of justice (supposing that such they were), for these
scholars have no doubt been insufficiently condemnatory in their writings
over the years about Shakespeare's sometimes tolerant portrayal of rape in
his plays. This is surely not the way to foster enlightened consideration of the
issues. Tempers run high, and the issues are deadly serious, which is all the
more reason for scientists and philosophers to be careful not to abuse either
the truth or each other in the name of a worthy cause.
What, then, would a more positive approach to a "naturalized" ethics look
like? I have a few preliminary suggestions to offer in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 16: As Darwinian thinking gets closer and closer to home—where
we live—tempers run higher, and die rhetoric tends to swamp die analysis.
But sociobiologists, beginning with Hobbes and continuing through Nietzsche
to die present day, have seen that only an evolutionary analysis of the
origins—and transformations—of ethical norms could ever properly make
sense of them. Greedy reductionists have taken their usual first stumbling
steps into this new territory, and been duly chastened by the defenders of
complexity. We can learn from these errors without turning our backs on
them.
CHAPTER 17: What are the implications for ethics of the fact that we are
Unite, time-pressured, heuristic searchers for ethical truths? An examination
of the persistent pendulum swing between utilitarian and Kantian ethics
suggests some principles for redesigning ethics along more realistic, Darwinian
lines.
This passage is not the ringing denunciation of rape that Fausto-Sterling
requires—something that one might think would go without saying in the
context of a scientific article—but it does firmly dissociate human rape from
any biological "justification." That makes Fausto-Sterling's further charge
outrageous. She places responsibility on these sociobiologists for various
claims made by defense lawyers in rape cases who have got their clients off
relatively easily by noting their "unbearable physical urges" or by describing
a client's act: "as rapes go, a relatively mild rape." What do these claims have
to do with sociobiology in general, or the articles she discusses in particular?
She offers no reason at all to believe these lawyers cited the